Customer Reviews

De Los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality among Mexican Men

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Dr. Carrier pioneered long-term fieldwork among a subculture of males who have sex with males. This book presents some of his data from Guadalajara, extending back to his dissertation fieldwork in the early 1970s. Like most anthropologists, he has no tools for making sense out of changes. That he has data extending over decades does not mean he treats these data historically. The data _are_ important and interesting, but the author is at a loss about what to do with them. (Like Annick Prieur and Don Kulick, among others, he is not at all hesitant to overgeneralize from a relatively narrow, unrandom sample: taking the network the anthropologist happened to enter as a microcosmic epitome of a culture/society is something else anthropologists do all too readily!)

Because "gay research" was so stigmatized, Carrier has never had an academic job. He obviously has not followed developments in the field of research he helped create. Other than data (and ignoring the probale difficulty of publishing about homosexuality then!), this book could be from the 1970s. One might think that being outside academia might be an advantage for immediacy and freshness, but Carrier's ponderous writing is "academic" in the worst sense. Although his writing is not obscured by "queer theory," it is dry and often awkward. So much academic talking and writing about gender and homosexuality lacks systematic data that it is very unfortunate that someone who actually has lots of data that he has gathered over a long duration of time has not been able to do more to make sense of changes or continuities in how young Mexican males live their desires for other males or to use the data to address contemporary concerns.

This book provided a lot of good information pertaining to homosexuality among Mexican men. The nice part about it is that if presents many stories of real people and their interactions with homosexuality in Guadalajara. I would recommend this book with the understanding that it is very explicit sexually.

Dr. Carrier is a phenomenal ethnographer and writer. He's done a magnificent job in bringing anthropological methods to life in a very palatable form.

Fascinating book, based on author's research over two decades. Wonderful insight, on a topic not often written about.