23. For the Baruya people, an important part of masculine initiation into maturity is for boys aroun
23. For the Baruya people, an important part of masculine initiation into maturity is for boys around ten years old to be taken away from their mothers for a time and live instead with older boys, who make them drink their semen in order to become men. How should “we” think about this today? What does it tell us, if anything, about the nature of masculinity, or of our received Western ideas about sexuality, or gender? Are the sociological or psychological theories we customarily use to understand our own societies and practices able to take proper account of the variety of practices so well known to anthropology?When we celebrate difference and diversity as the highest virtue, how broadly or how narrowly do we understand this virtue? And what, in fact, are the unquestionable assumptions that lie behind the ease with which we tell ourselves that we embrace the difference and diversity of human behaviour and human culture? What would it mean if our very idea of “difference” was itself constituted on the basis of unmentionable taboos? Does it simply mean that our embrace of difference is not yet broad enough? Or could it be that the very idea of difference, as an unproblematic virtue, falls apart when exposed to the true diversity of human experience? -- source link