The Anthropology of Rape (original) (raw)
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The stories about how sexual violence comes to be constituted as an object of research offer complex commentaries about the operations of public secrecy in the realm of law, kinship, nation, and the state. Rape emerged as an anthropological object of research when anthropologists compared whole cultures to challenge the universalistic assumptions underlying a natural history of rape. Anthropological focus has now shifted to the situated nature of imagination, language, documents, and techniques that craft the silences and speech around rape. Recent anthropological research critiques the social, juridical, and political discourses complicit in the construction of rape as a public secret, offering an important route of engagement with ethnographies that recursively speak of rape as a situated category.
Human rape: An evolutionary analysis
Ethology and Sociobiology, 1983
Human evolutionary history was apparently one of polygyny. Polygyny favors the use of different reproductive options by human males with different competitive abilities. These options or alternatives collectively represent a single conditional strategy; which alternatives are employed depend on conditions encountered during a man's life history. It is hypothesized that human rape is an evolved facultative alternative that is primarily employed when men are unable to compete for resources and status necessary to attract and reproduce successfully with desirable mates. According to thii hypothesis males that cannot effectively compete may employ rape as the only behavioral alternative, or depending on circumstances of relative status and family composition, they may incorporate rape into a repertoire of other behavioral patterns, including low commital pairbonding with one or more females and/or investing available resources toward sister's offspring. The evolutionary view of rape we propose is completely testable. The view provides predictions about the rapist's and victim's behavior and about rape laws and taboos, several of which we attempt to test. This study indicates that an evolutionary view promises considerable understanding of rape and related phenomena.
2006
Like many other scientific explorations, the research into rape is viewed from a number of different perspectives and these perspectives are not always complimentary. In this paper, we shall be looking at the feminist and the evolutionary perspectives on why rape occurs in society and the social and cultural differences that affect the amount of rape reported in an attempt to see both the complimentary and the contradictory nature of research from the different perspectives.
Multiple Perspectives on Rape: A Theoretical Paper
The phenomenon of rape has been studied from a myriad of different scientific standpoints, in turn yielding numerous theoretical perspectives, interpretations, and findings. Evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Buss, 1989; Thornhill & Thornhill, 1990a) understand rape as a male adaptive sexual strategy, and view sexual desire as a central motivation, while feminist theorists (e.g., Brownmiller, 1975) conceptualize rape as a means to exert power and control by men over women in the broader sociocultural context of male supremacy and female oppression. Script theorists (e.g., Ryan, 1988; Simon & Gagnon, 1986), on the other hand, view rape as a social by-product resulting from the adherence to sexual, dating and rape scripts, all of which are culture specific. The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss rape-oriented research from the three different theoretical perspectives briefly outlines above.
Public Affairs Quarterly, 1991
Analysis of the four primary accounts of the nature of rape. Author argues that rape is properly understood as nonconsensual sex , an account preferable to those based on force or against the will. Main objections to such an account are addresses and implications of the account are explained.
Towards a cultural definition of rape
Women's Studies International Forum, 1999
Although rape is a cross-cultural crime stemming primarily from patriarchal ideologies and gender power, the analysis of its effect on victims from various cultural groups remains to be unveiled. This study analyzes dilemmas that face mental health workers when dealing with rape victims within a specific cultural context-namely, Palestinian society. It demonstrates the multidimensionality of the crime and the intricacy of social reactions to rape, the rape victim, and abuse of women, deriving from a sociocultural need to protect and/or control victims. The in-depth analysis suggests that sociocultural determinants, such as the need to silence the occurrence of the rape, preserve female virginity, and privatize the crime in order to safeguard family honor and reputation, revictimizes and weakens the victim. This article argues that there is no universal method of dealing with rape victims and that professionals who are assisting victims of rape need to anchor their efforts within the cultural context, while at the same time treating each victim as a world unto herself. This calls for rethinking at both the sociopolitical and individual levels.