Intimate communications : erotics and the study of culture

G. Herdt, R. Stoller

Intimate Communications is the first systematic effort to explore and interpret erotic experience and gender identity in a cross-cultural perspective. This is a dialogioc work that emphasizes the need for exact descriptions of people's statements, feelings, and fantasies, presenting data from individual interviews with the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. Using the ethnographic methods of anthropology informed by the clinical techniques of psychoanalysis, Gilbert Herdt and Robert J. Stoller explore the culture and erotics of the Sambia and the role of subjectivity in ethnographic research.