Customer Reviews

Pacific Homosexualities

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Pacific" in the title is an understatement. There is a very long series of accounts of Siberian sex-crossing shamans, a fascinating chapter on ardent Buddhist warriors in ancient Korea, and of pederastic relationships in Australian aboriginal societies, in addition to rich descriptions of different kinds of homosexual relations on islands in the Pacific, past and present. Japan and Tahiti are the islands with the most extensive discussion. Some of this material was in an earlier book by the author, but he has added discussion of contemprary Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Indonesia to the mostly anthropological literature synthesized in OCEANIC HOMOSEXUALITIES, an out-of-print 1992 book.

Stephen Murray is a historian of anthropology (coeditor of the book series "Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology") and a comparativist sociologist who has developed a typology of homosexualities with historical, literary, and ethnographic literature from around the world.

_Pacific Homosexualities_ includes extensive quotations from many sources that are not available except at major research university libraries, particularly on traditional Siberian cultures. Murray has also done fieldwork in at least four countries, including Taiwan (he is coauthor of two books about Taiwanese culture and society) and has a critical perspective on the process of ethnography and the generalization from ethnographies into ethnology.

His synthesis of evidence about the limited range of homosexual roles (and insistence that there are "homosexualities," not a singular "homosexuality") is most fully developed in his 2000 book _Homosexualities_.. His earlier book _Oceanic Homosexualities_ became unavailable almost immediately. _Pacific Homosexualities_ adds consideration of research done since the earlier book, drops the discussion of the (Polynesian-speaking) cultures of Madagascar and a chapter on Thailand, while adding much about contemporary Japan and Taiwan.

_Homosexualities_ is the place to look for Murray's modeling of correlations between homosexual roles and other sociocultural patterns, but _Pacific Homosexualities_ provides a great deal more detail about what has been reported about homosexual roles in societies that are located in the central and west Pacific-including the peninsulas of Korea and Kamchatka, though half the book is about Polynesia societies' roles for those engaging in sex with persons of the same biological (chromosomal) sex.

This book is a very trite, simplistic compilation of other people's work, plus some pieces by the editor (who seems to presents himself as the author), based on no first-hand acquaintance with the problems at hand.