Kink among Indigenous Peoples

Efforts to look at sexuality among indigenous peoples have hsitorically been fraught with the projected fantasies of Western observers. Even the boundaries of what is and is not erotic have often been confused, with European authors routinely overwriting their own sense of eroticism onto behaviors that had no erotic significance for the participants. When we approach deviant sexuality, this problem is redoubled, since deviance also has subtle gradations, and is necessarily veiled to outsiders.

Stoller (1991, p 44) suggests that there are no “consensual sadomasochistic rituals” among the Sambia, and generalizes this to all "primitive peoples."  He is, however, not an anthropologist.  

Ford and Beach (1951) comparing anthropological accounts, note a number of indigenous societies in which “there occurs a surprising amount of behavior that involves the infliction of pain in association with coital activities.” These included the Siriono, Choroti, and Apinaye peoples in South America, along with the Trukese and Trobriander Islanders in Oceania. (pp. 55-57). Many of the tropes among these peoples are quite recognizable to Western kink: biting and scratching (often to the point of drawing blood), pinching, hair pulling, spitting in faces, and eroticizing the marks of previous sadosexual acts. Other activities would be highly unusual in the West: eye-poking, ear-poking, and biting off eyebrows, for instance.

 These patterns differ in functional ways from what Westerners consider “kink:” they do not seem to involve fixed top/bottom roles, and it is not clear to what extent this behavior is deviant (i.e. queer) in the normatives of those cultures.  Moreover, this whole genre of anthropology is fraught with the potential for observer bias and oversights.  But this does establish that sadomasochism is a widespread feature of human sexuality, even in societies very unlike those in the industrial world.

 Perhaps most interestingly, Ford and Beach point out that these societies (which span a wide range of lifeways in most respects) all tend to have highly permissive child-rearing, and it would appear that they also tend to tolerate a wide range of sexual behavior. At least two of these societies (the Siriono and Trobriand) are notable for their very weak patriarchal structures. Both of these societies have a very high degree of sexual freedom for both genders. The Siriono are exceptional for their degree of remove from the modern patriarchal / state / capitalist order. At the time they were first studied, they had very weak chieftainships, almost no numeration, metrics, or technology, no trade, and no permanent dwellings. (Holmberg (1950), Stearman (c1987)) The Trobriand Islanders are a matrilineal and partially matrifocal society, whose description by Malinowski (1966 [1922]) ushered in widespread anthropological discussion about the role of women in indigenous societies. Later research (e.g. Weiner 1987)) found that Trobriand women enjoyed even more forms of power than Malinowski believed, and the Trobriand are often referenced as the closest real-life example to a matriarchal societiy. Finally, the Truk islanders seem to share many of these gender dynamics with the Trobriand islanders.

Such correlations are too fragile to make the basis for an argument. In particular, it seems likely that many other indigenous societies use sadoerotic sexual play, but are not mentioned as such in Ford and Beach. However, the fact that three of the five peoples in this list seem to be clustered at the low end of the patriarchal spectrum should give pause to the opposite argument: that BDSM is produced by patriarchy.

Updated 5/29/10