Lowie’s critique of unilinear evolutionary theory as promoted by Morgan is based on the replacement of erotic considerations by domestic and economic ones. Briefly, Lowie argues that polygyny should be understood in terms of economic and domestic advantage— men gain prestige and women gain household helpmates—and that anthropological analysis should not emphasize erotic considerations that polygynous natives themselves do not emphasize. Lowie’s approach attempts to abolish the erotic component of sexuality. That Lowie may be incorrect, at least in one case, is the impression one gets from the explicitly erotic advantage of polygyny, as expressed by a male Kgatla (an African group studied by Schapera):
I have laid down the rule that I shall sleep with each one for four days in succession, and then go to the other. I find them [my wives] both equally desirable, but when I have slept with one for three days, by the fourth day she has wearied me, and when I go to the other I find that I have greater passion, she seems more attractive than the first, but it is not really so, for when I return to the latter again there is the same renewed passion.
Lowie similarly treats Morgan’s hypostatized “group marriage” stage of evolution. By rephrasing “group marriage” as “sexual communism,” Lowie first demotes the stage from the social organizational to a sexual level and then shows that when it occurs it is temporary, sometimes existing simultaneously with marriage. Lowie’s demonstration is designed to show that the institution of “sexual communism” has nothing to do with unrestricted sexual license but is a native notion of reciprocal hospitality. Because some sexual partners overshadow others, Lowie concludes that the husband “enjoys an undisputed preemptive right over his wife”. Again, Lowie emphasizes considerations of reciprocity and obligations, while systematically denying the relevance of erotic dimensions in this so-called communism.
Morgan and Lowie reach similar conclusions about erotic sexuality, but for different reasons. Morgan assumed that sexuality had been transformed in all existent societies of his day, since societies are by definition social and not sexual, but Lowie completely disregarded sexual/erotic considerations in his criticism of Morgan’s unilinear evolutionary theory. In both cases, the study of the sexual/erotic is not relevant to larger theory. Followers of Morgan’s Ancient Society or of Lowie’s Primitive Society will equally disregard sexual matters in cultural analysis.
This side-stepping of the cultural study of sexuality, as it were, has at least two ramifications for contemporary studies. The first is a generally conservative approach to sexuality, treating it in the context of marriage, if at all. The second consequence is more subtle, as it stems from the decision to treat sexuality as a universal physiological phenomenon which everywhere is limited in certain ways by social constraints. Suggs and Marshall, for example, view the relationship between physiological sex drive and society as universal. Again, as in Morgan and Lowie, there is an implicit shift from sexuality to sociality. Should we follow Suggs and Marshall, we would attempt to compare societies as social controlling mechanisms, that is, we would ascertain the ways in which the same physiological drive was contained and cathected cross-societally. We would learn, for example, that adult male sexual drive is distributed differently in marriage in polygynous as opposed to serial monogamous societies, and we would seek the mechanisms which regulate men in these two societal types. These mechanisms, often called “institutions,” then become the focus of a comparative study. Although this general approach can be useful, the system of meanings attached to sexual symbolism is equally important; we should look at the symbolic dimensions of social action, not just the variation of constraints on behavior.
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