JOSEPH S. ALTER
Moral Materialism
Sex and Masculinity in Modern India
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
MORAL MATERIALISM
Joseph S. Alter is an anthropologist who earned his doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is professor and department chair. He was born in Landour, Uttara-khand and divides his time between Pittsburgh and the Allegheny mountains of western Pennsylvania and Mussoorie in the Himalayas.
For thirty years he has been conducting research on various aspects of society and culture in South Asia with a particular focus on physical fitness, sport, and the culture and history of medicine. He has written five books, including The Wrestlers Body (University of California Press, 1992), Knowing Dil Das (Penguin India 2010), Gandhis Body (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), Asian Medicine and Globalization (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and Yoga in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2004). He has also published extensively on a range of sports, including kabaddi and jori/mugdal , on the cultural history and philosophy of Ayurveda and Unani medicine, and on the impact of colonial and postcolonial development on the political economy of Mussoorie.
Guru and Chela, Akhara Ram Singh. Varanasi, 1988
Introduction
Sex, Substance and Embodied Identity
In spite of the fact that the words sex and masculinity invoke very general, common-sense meanings, this book is about a very specific articulation of sex and masculinity in modern India: an articulation that complicates a history of sexuality in which pleasure, morality and power are unquestioningly keyed to the social act of sexual intercourse. It is about the way in which sexual meanings are encoded in substances rather than acts, ideas and conceptions, and it is about the regulation, containment and embodied expression of substances. One might say that it is about the worlds of meaning that are created in relation to things that are implicated in sex, but that are not exclusively or directly involved in the act of sex, the acts that lead up to sex, or what follows as a direct consequence of the act as such.
Apart from whatever intrinsic interest this may hold as a topic, and despite problems to be addressed shortly, it is important to highlight the particularity of this perspective on contained embodiment simply because sex is almost always understood in terms of a range of meanings, feelings and emotions that emerge from, or devolve into, desire, erotics and pleasure on the one hand, and fertility and reproduction on the other. Beyond the domain of sexual meanings that spring from pleasure, sex as a social act with consequencesinvolving two or more individuals (and not necessarily of the same gender or species)entails obligations and expectations, even if one of the expectations is that there are no consequences. With reference to this, the kinetic physicality of sex manifests a very specific, and, I will argue, limited articulation of meanings, even though when thinking of sex one is most often left with the impression that intercourse engages the body in obviousif endlessly creative, experimental and novelways that involve, but are ultimately limited by, gross anatomy. When the Bard has Iago respond to Brabantio by saying, I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs, one knows, by way of suggestive analogical imagery, everything: but also really nothing at all beyond the obvious. In terms of sex and masculinity, functional anatomyas a hegemonic signifierwould appear to sharply circumscribe meaning. Apart from the red herring of incidental Moorish involvement sala betichod! is there, in fact, a way of talking about sex without suffering under the burden of the beast with two backs?
One might well ask, rhetorically, if the fact of an erection at stage two arousal, which appears to be the emergence of instinctual nature into the domain of culture, does not prefigure a whole world into which it fits as the point of ultimate and definitive contact between masculinity, meaning and feeling. Is not sexin its endless permutations, involving any combination of human genders and species and sexes of speciesheld in place by the instinctual physiology, neurology and biochemistry of the sexual response cycle?
To question this seemingly rhetorical question, to raise a finger in protest, involves taking a very different and subversiveif not by any means disconnectedperspective on the whole fucking category: the physiology of sex and the recursive logic of the five-stage sexual response cycle. Forcing the question involves taking a critical analytical attitude towards a trajectory of meaning, identification and categorization that does not follow the path of desire, excitement, plateau and orgasmic ejaculation: the pleasurable fulfilment of desire in final resolution, from where the cycle starts all over again, and again, having produced a whole spectrum of other thingsbabies, crimes, poetry, guilt, social bonds, shame, infection, affection, love, hate, murderous resentments, violence, valentines or what have you.
There is a different way in which the physiology of sex can be understood to be linked to the body, and in this conceptualization an erection is important, as a sign, but does not define the ways and means by which the body is implicated in sex. To be sure this alternative conceptualization of sex is a cultural construction, but this can also be said about the natural sexual response cycle. As such it defines the base point of a trajectory of meanings that are very different from those that spill forth from the entelechy of endless orgasms. This book is, simply, about the trajectory of these other meanings in modern India: the outward expressions of masculinitypersonal, political and medicalof an inward orientation concerning the essence of sex and sexual fluid. My goal is to explore the structural disjuncture of moral materialism: bodies that are animated by sexual fluids, but oriented away from the physiology of desire.
Over the course of the past ten or fifteen years there has been a spate of research and publishing on questions of sex and sexuality in southern Asia. Although this can in part be accounted for by the intensity and pervasiveness of academic interest in the topic of sex and sexuality on a larger, global scale (see Altmann 2001; Bhattacharya 2002; Bose and Bhattacharya 2007), and the obvious correlation between academic interest and changing social, political and medical investmentsconsider how the function and cultural meaning of condoms has changed since 1984it is important to place the development of the South Asian academic literature in the context of a more local intellectual history.
Realizing, of course, that there is no single, linear history of intellectual development, it is nevertheless fair to say that the general developmental trend in South Asian sexuality studies has been from an engagement with the exotic extrememythopoetic bestiality, androgynous onanism, sexually insatiable goddesses, erotic asceticism, tantric ritual, debilitating semen anxiety, and more-or-less sober examinations of Khajuraho temple art and interpretations of the Kama Sutra (see A Member of the Royal Asiatic Society 1952)to studied examinations of sex in all of its various normative, modern permutations.
