Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Introduction
by all human and other populations), generalized (common to several groups), and the
particular (not shared at all) traits or expression of the behavior under study, in our case,
rape. Four anthropological subdisciplines describe and explain rape across time and space:
researchers have begun to address rape/sexual assault (Sanday 1981; Otterbein 1994;
Zimmer-Tamakoshi 1999). This approach has shifted the focus of the study of rape to
include variations across time and space. Two main issues have dominated the
anthropological study of rape during this era. The first concerns the etiology of rape. This
line of research aims to identify the causes or correlates of rape that contribute to its
variance within and among cultures/species. It poses such questions as why do humans
rape? What motivates some humans to rape but make others refrain from engaging in this
behavior? What causes diversity in rape incidences across human populations? Is rape
The second issue of concern for the anthropological study of rape at this period is
maintaining the precarious balance between preserving cultural autonomy /relativism and
protecting womens human rights. Although male violence against women is a concern of
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feminists in both developing and developed countries, leaders in many of the developing
countries have either been slow in recognizing the problem or resist it altogether. They
commonly argue that violence against women (including rape) is a problem of western
societies imposed on other cultures. Anthropologists studying rape are therefore cautious,
particularly in light of the lack of reliable empirical data on rape, to suggest that cross-
cultural descriptions and explanations of rape, as well as policies dealing with it, must
emerge from within the culture and from the voices of the victims themselves. This
of rape and places them on a continuum that distinguishes between two extreme poles:
rape is a result of the human males natural sexual urge. According to this school of
thought, best exemplified by the sociobiologists men and women have extraordinary
different natures with respect to sexuality. The divergence in the nature of human male and
female comes about during the early stages of evolution, and it constitutes an adaptation
has contributed to the evolution of different reproductive behaviors between males and
females. Due to sexual selection, the adaptive reproductive strategy for males is to spread
thereby producing as many descendants as possible. According to this view, rape among
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this view is the presumption that rape is an unrestrained act of sex by males. According to
this logic, to prevent rape is to eliminate the opportunity to commit it, or keep women out
of exposure. If women are raped, however, then the act may be judged as wrong, but
not harshly, as the male is doing what comes naturally (Johnathan 1995:226). Many
assumption that it is an outcome of male natural aggression. As such, rape was thought to
generalization and applicability unanswered, making the data more anecdotal than
Nevertheless, genetics is not likely to proximate the cause of rape, for rapists are
an exceedingly heterogeneous lot; as an ultimate cause, it fails to tell us anything
interesting about specific instances of the phenomenon. What little it tells us of the
phenomenon in general is not amenable to scientific test; so while it may not be
obviously false, the rape-as-reproduction hypothesis is framed in such a way that
truth and falsity have no meaning. The issue is not so much to deny that rape has
some sexual component or that sexuality is in some sense reproductive, but rather
to deny that this constitutes an adequate scientific explanation of the phenomenon,
or in more extravagant formulations, the scientific explanation. Like eugenics of
the 1920s, it looks and sounds scientific, but is simply a set of cultural values into
the theory of evolutionary biology.
B. Cultural-Environmental Adaptations
On the other extreme end of the continuum lies the explanation that rape is a
human behavior that is socially constructed, and determined by cultural and environmental
limits. The basic environmental assumption is that variation in human sexuality is strongly
influenced by cultural learning and it is not a shared basic biological instinct of the male
human species. According to proponents of this school, the causes of variation in rape
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across societies include the degrees of participation in the world economy, levels of
distribution of income, level of womens participation in the labor force, and the general
level of production. Margaret Meads (1935) ethnographic study, Sex and Temperament
human sexuality and sex roles. She found that among the three tribes she studied-- the
regard to sexuality varied. The Arapesh men and women acted like American women are
behaved like American men aggressively and roughly. The Tchambuli men, on the other
hand, behaved like women in the American culture- wore curls and nurtured children,
while the women were the decision makers and paid less attention to their outward
appearance.
organizational basis. The configuration of gender power, status, interpersonal values about
violence and womens participation in the labor force led them to be either rape-prone or
criminology and sociology. This perspective argues that socio-cultural, and economic
factors impact societal values and make them either rape-prone or rape free. Within this
perspective there are three major theoretical frameworks. They include: 1) patriarchy and
rape (or feminist); 2) cultural spillover of violence; and 3) hostility towards womens
equity status.
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1) Patriarchy and Rape. Rape according to this theoretical framework is not a
sexual offense; rather it is a social expression of male power (patriarchy). Some suggest
that women are raped because of the historical asymmetry and gender related roles that
exist between the sexes in society. Social systems are characterized by a gender
stratification between men and women, which reflects the debased status of the latter. A
built-in opportunity and reward in the societal system guarantees the subjugation of
women and makes them disadvantaged in terms of gaining the resources on which power
depends. Brownmiller (1975) who first brought the idea of rape as an expression of
patriarchy (male power) to the forefront in criminology has pioneered this perspective,
1975) traced the variation of such asymmetry showing that womens status diminishes in
societies where the domestic and public spheres are sharply separated, where warfare and
interregional trade exist, when cultivation for food production intensifies, when resources
Sanday (1981), who examined 156 tribal societies from a cross-cultural sample,
found a relationship between rape and the powerlessness of women. Rape-free societies
were those with an appreciation for the contribution that women make in society, with
equal distribution of power, respect of the natural environment, and the belief that the two
sexes are complementary (e.g., the Tuareg of the Sahara; and the Mbuti and Ashanti of
Africa). On the other hand, Rape-prone societies were ones in which women were
excluded from power arenas (e.g., symbolic rituals, houses, etc.) due to food depletion,
migration, or other social or natural forces. As such females are perceived as objects to
Otterbein (1994) who examined seventeen primitive cultures from the Murdocks
Human Relations Area Files, found that cultures with inflexible sex-role systems exhibited
higher degree of violence, including rape. He further asserts the asymmetry between men
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and women in his use of fraternal interest group theory to predict rape. The existence of
fraternal interest groups - power groups related to males- has been used to explain why
some societies were internally peaceful or conflict ridden. Societies with fraternal interest
groups had higher incidences of interpersonal violence, feuding and internal war.
Otterbein argues that although rape is sometimes an individual act, it is the awareness of
available support of male kin that predicts the incidences of rape. Using 300 societies from
the Human Relations Files he finds that the presence of fraternal interest groups override
socially approved use of violence in the mass media, in sports, towards the environment, in
education, and in socialization patterns carry over to social contexts in which the use of
Le Vine (1959) data from Kenya supports the theory. In examining court records in
the mid 1950s, Le Vine observed high rape rates among the Gusii of Kenya . Male sexual
Gusii men are encouraged by community members to be sexually aggressive and to inflict
pain on their wives during intercourse as a sign of prowess. Premarital sex is taboo. Le
Vine (1959) suggests that the high rape rate among the Gusii is the aggressive contest in
the marital script carried over to the illegitimate arena or premarital sex.
The theory of cultural spillover of violence and its relationship to rape is also
reflected in warring contexts. Societies embroiled in internal and external wars (e.g., Higii
of Northeastern Nigeria; Yanamamo) carry over or diffuse from the context of war to the
abduction and rape of women. The cultural spillover of violence into rape is evident in
many recent ethnic wars . There were 40 armed conflicts in 34 states in 1996 and using
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womens bodies as a continuation of the battlefield was highly documented in Serbia,
effects of womens equality on rape, cross-cultural research is showing that the prospect
of obtaining equality for women is contributing to the increase in rape rates. Russell
(1975) argued based on data from the United States that some men rape because their
egos may be threatened. Hammoud (1997) observes that women in Egypt encounter
more sexual assault as their public visibility increases due to their participation in the labor
force. Lauren Zimmer-Tamakoshi (1999: 538) argues that in Papua New Guinea the
increase in the rates of reported rapes is motivated by a fear that women are gaining a
new kind of independence. However, she places this interpersonal violence within a
larger societal context of maldevelopment and economic dependency. Hence, she states
not only stemming from [their] insecurities about their wives potential
independence, but also their own uncertain situations and the effects of
urban lifestyles (including alcohol abuse and reduced social support
networks) on male-female relations (pp. 538-539).
The issues of cultural relativism, cultural imperialism and womens rights are
behaviors and beliefs within the social context they occur, rather than judge them.
Historically, however, anthropologists have made judgements that have served colonial
governments, often damaging the autonomy of indigenous cultures and their right to self-
western hegemony, anthropologists have branded as unethical those who are not
committed to radical cultural relativism. In the case of rape, the fear of imposing their
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(in most cases western or western influenced) normative values and definitions of justice,
authority, law or morality, has paralyzed the anthropological work on the subject. The
claim that the rights of women and others who are raped are not culturally-bound, and that
impossible for the anthropological perspective. For anthropologists, rape practices are
the particular culture, without importing external standards by which to judge them. For
example, cultural relativists view the homosexual activities between young boys and older
men(as warriors) among the Sudanese Azande, and the Kaluli of Papua-New Guinea
within the culturally meaningful parameters of the magical qualities of the semen that
promotes growth and knowledge and not as homosexual rape. Geertz (1984: 275) has
Anthropology has played, in our day, a vanguard role. We have been the
first to insist on a number of things: that the world does not divide into
pious and the superstitious; that there are sculptures in the jungles and
paintings in deserts; that political order is possible without centralized
power and principled justice without codified rules; that norms of reason
were not fixed in Greece, and that the evolution of morality not
consummated in England. Most important, we were the first to insist that
we see the lives of others through the lenses of our own grinding and that
they look back on ours through one of their own.
Entity, internally uniforms and shared by all. This may have been an appropriate view of
culture in small-size tribal societies where cultures were relatively isolated. Today,
religious, age, cast, ethnicity and gender. Furthermore, social change has created cultural
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boundaries on basis other than space and time. Hence, abstracting culture as esoteric,
static and simplistic and explaining rape by culturally bound interpretations leads to two
sociobiology, or one that does not establish a position but is used to refute other positions,
of rape without any distinction of its relative brutality creates moral nihilism. Afkhami
(1995:3) writing about the Islamic culture notes that such relativism only serves to justify
inequality. Mayer (1991) notes that such relativism becomes an integral part of the
human rights for women in their policies. Hence, the tolerance of destructive relativism in
the case of rape has direct policy implications-the maintenance of highly inegalitarian and
hegemony and moral nihilism as it applies to rape. To study culturally bound phenomena,
including rape, the anthropological perspective advocates two methods, emic (insider-
oriented) and etic (observer-oriented). The insider perspective is the method cultural
relativists have adopted. In research about rape, however, the insider perspective has
often been that of cultural interpreters of the ideal culture, rather than addressing actual
perspective seeks a deeper level of the emic, one in which those experiencing rape speak
in their own words. Only in this way will the depiction of rape be considered as anchored
in a culturally-bound perceptive.
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Afkhami, M. (1995) (ed.) Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim
World. London : I.B. Tauris.
Brownmiller, S. (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Friedl, E. (1975) Women and Men: An Anthropologists View. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
Le Vine R.A. (1959) Gussi Sex Offenses. A study in Social Control. American
Anthropologist, 61, 965-990.
Martin K, and B. Voorhies (1975) Female of the Species. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Mayer, A.E. (1991) Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics. Boulder, Co. :
Westview Press.
Russell, D. (1975). The Politics of Rape: The Victims Perspective. New York: Basic
Books.
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Human Rights Standards. In Human Rights and Anthropology, Downing, T. and
G. Kushner (eds.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cultural Survival, Inc., Pp. 91-106.
Zimmer-Tamakoshi, Laura. (1999) Wild Pigs and Dog Men: Rape and Domestic
Violence As Womens Issues in Papua New Guinea. In Brettel, C.B. and C.F.
Sargent (eds.), Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., Pp. 535-553.
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