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Abstract
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This brief essay offers a preface to "Toward an Anthropological Understanding of Masculinities, Maleness, and Violence," Supplement 23 in the Wenner-Gren Symposium Series with Current Anthropology.
Boys will be boys. And so will monkeys. At least that's the impression one gets from popular depictions of the relationship between masculinity and violence, which have spread like weeds in recent years. Cherry-picked findings from studies of nonhuman primates provide fodder for "biobabble," the marshaling of pseudoscientific explanations for behavior that equate gun-toting soldiers, say, with border-guarding chimpanzees (see Gutmann, Nelson, and Fuentes 2021). The relentless proliferation of research on testosterone, prehistory, and the supposed differences between men's and women's brains adds other ingredients to the mix. Biobabble has been given a respectable face in best sellers by elite scholars like Steven Pinker (2012) and Richard W. Wrangham (2019), who draw on archaeological events and primate studies to present people in simple societies, past and present, as in urgent need of domestication. But it has not stopped there. The naturalness of male violence justifies everything from the claims of men's rights defenders to modern policing; the powers that be are the only thing saving us from a life that is nasty, brutish, and short. In the age of Me Too, human nature once again has come to the rescue of the status quo.
As Matthew Gutmann, Robin G. Nelson, and AgustÃn Fuentes point out in their illuminating introduction to this special issue, when it comes to masculinity, maleness, and violence, we are facing an epidemic of errors. Anthropologists have for the most part been silent on the misleading...
Language: en |