BIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY: DISCIPLINARY FORMATION IN LONG PERSPECTIVE

It is common in the study of ancient sexuality to find statements of the following two classes: First, historians draw a clear line between culture and biology. “Sex is about penises and vulvas (or things in between), and gender is about what we do with them; sex is about biology, gender is about culture.…”Footnote ⁴ Second, historians of sexuality regularly identify themselves as anthropologists. The past is a foreign country, and historians are ethnographers whose informants are dead. One historian claimed to have written “an essay in symbolic anthropology by an unlicensed practitioner, proper fieldwork being impossible until the author gets to Hades.”Footnote ⁵ Another noted, “The methods of interpretive anthropology are applicable only up to a point, since no one can interview or observe living Romans, ask them about their ideas of masculinity and sexuality, or chart their behaviors.”Footnote ⁶ Yet another has compared herself to an ersatz Clifford Geertz, unable to watch the cockfight in person.Footnote ⁷ These are wry but self-conscious statements from some of the most outstanding practitioners in the field, and they are unexpectedly revealing. The history of sexuality, as a collective project, must be situated in a context where anthropology could be seen as an alternative to biology. In fact, “anthropology,” in this formulation, refers to one strand of a diverse field; likewise, “biology” refers to a visible but particular branch of evolutionary theory. In short, we must contextualize what “anthropology” and “biology” meant in the formative phase of the history of sexuality.

That is a long story. We must do here with a quick and partial genealogy of evolutionary and anthropological approaches to human behavior as they stood in the years when Foucault's landmark studies appeared. In The Origin of Species, published in 1859, Darwin was circumspect about the implications of natural selection for human origins, though he allowed himself the comment that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”Footnote ⁸ The genie was out of the bottle, however, and debate instantly raged about human evolution. Not until 1871 did Darwin lay out his views, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. In Descent Darwin pursues two goals. First, he elaborates on the importance of sexual selection as a distinct form of selection pressure. While natural selection focuses broadly on the fitness effects of various morphological or behavioral traits that allow an organism to survive and reproduce, sexual selection focuses on the fitness consequences of intraspecific competition. Second, Darwin patiently tried to narrow the gap between humans and “lower animals” by “comparison of the mental powers.” His object was to show that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties,” and that the observed distinctions were a matter of degree, not of kind.Footnote ⁹

The groundwork for serious evolutionary study of human behavior was laid in The Descent of Man, but over the next fifty years Darwin's insights were more abused than used.Footnote ¹⁰ Darwin, moreover, had no accurate concept of how traits were transmitted between generations. In the 1930s and 1940s, Darwinian processes were explained in terms of Mendelian genetics, revitalizing evolutionary theory and establishing the “new synthesis” on firm theoretical foundations. Darwin had already recognized that selection could act on behavioral traits just as much as physical ones, and the study of animal behavior within an evolutionary framework soon emerged as the field of “ethology.” Nikolaas Tinbergen's Study of Instinct marked ethology's coming of age as a major branch of evolutionary theory.Footnote ¹¹ Karl Lorenz's On Aggression proved that evolutionary analysis of human behavior was an inevitable adjunct to the study of animal instincts.Footnote ¹² The hostile response it—and a slew of popular and usually ill-formulated books (most famously, Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape)—evoked was an early salvo in the looming battle between sociobiologists and social scientists. Yet the major breakthroughs in the study of human behavior would not come from this corner of evolutionary science.

Instead, the evolutionary study of human behavior was to emerge out of a very specific trajectory that deeply influenced the forms that it would ultimately take, and the course of its collision with the social sciences. Sexual selection theory received striking empirical support in 1948 from a study of the mating strategies of fruit flies by Angus John Bateman.Footnote ¹³ And the 1960s saw important advances in the theoretical foundations of evolutionary thought. In 1966 George Williams demolished sloppy forms of “naïve group selection” and emphasized the gene as the dominant level of selection.Footnote ¹⁴ This advance served to thrust the problem of altruism to the fore. But a potential solution was emerging almost simultaneously from the work a graduate student, William Hamilton, who recognized that individuals could benefit from the reproductive success of their kin precisely because they shared genes; Hamilton labeled the extra fitness benefits an individual receives from helping kin “inclusive fitness.”Footnote ¹⁵ It was the heady brew of sexual selection theory, inclusive fitness, and gene-level selection that would give rise to a new science of human behavior in the 1970s. The first to capitalize was a Harvard graduate student, Robert Trivers, who wrote a series of brilliant papers between 1971 and 1974.Footnote ¹⁶ In the papers of Trivers, sociobiology was conceived; in 1975, with E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, it was born.Footnote ¹⁷

The appearance of Wilson's book was a defining moment. “Wilson's important contribution was to create and name the field of ‘sociobiology’ by showing its scattered practitioners that it existed.”Footnote ¹⁸ Only the book's last chapter is concerned with human behavior, but Wilson envisions the possibilities for explaining everything from altruism to aggression to homosexuality. The backlash was immediate, fierce, and unrelenting. The sociobiology controversy was a phenomenon quite without precedent, an academic firestorm in three dimensions.Footnote ¹⁹ First, some of the most trenchant critics of sociobiology came from within evolutionary biology.Footnote ²⁰ Sociobiology was criticized for its strict adaptationist paradigm—its strong emphasis on evolved traits as adaptations to specific selection pressures.Footnote ²¹ Second, sociobiology was tarred as a scientific disguise for politically reactionary ideologies: by “naturalizing” social ills—patriarchy, violence, chauvinism—sociobiology seemed ripe for misuse.Footnote ²² Third, sociobiology not only claimed the ability to explain elements of human behavior in genetic terms, it openly avowed its ambitions to absorb other approaches to mankind in the grand architecture of its synthesis.Footnote ²³ Social scientists mobilized and defended their sovereignty over human behavior. A very public turf war—with scientific, ideological, and disciplinary dimensions—had begun.

Sociobiology, despite its high visibility, was not a coherent movement, and almost as soon as it was born, it spread in a number of unpredicted ways. Particularly important for the study of human sexuality was the development of evolutionary psychology (EP); because EP is a social science, it quickly became the battleground over how to interpret human behavior.Footnote ²⁴ EP carries the mantle of gene-level explanation and adaptationist reasoning, and the critical armory developed against sociobiology would be, with little adjustment, redeployed against EP.Footnote ²⁵ In part, the opposition has been galvanized by the popular success of the EP industry. EP argues, uncontroversially, that the brain, its capacities, and its motivational systems have evolved under selection pressures. EP goes on to argue that specific psychological traits are adaptations. So, sexual jealousy evolved over evolutionary time as a motivation for behavior that promoted fitness.Footnote ²⁶ Some proponents of EP hold that the brain has evolved to develop a massive number of specific motivational programs, or “modules.”Footnote ²⁷ These modules, it is claimed, evolved over evolutionary time, so some human psychological traits may now be maladaptive.Footnote ²⁸ The human skull, in the evocative metaphor of the paradigm's ablest proponents, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, houses a Stone Age mind.

EP, predictably for any avant-garde discipline, has had a mixed record. Some of its findings are robust and significant.Footnote ²⁹ But EP makes claims about how the mind develops and functions that will prevent it from being the platform for reintegrating the natural and social sciences.Footnote ³⁰ It is more important to understand why EP became a perfect, ready-made foil for “cultural” approaches to sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s. First, EP predicts dimorphic sexual psychologies; consequently, much of its research program centered on the search for native psychological differences between men and women.Footnote ³¹ In just the same period when historians were “denaturalizing” our starting assumptions about gender, EP seemed to be asserting a “natural” basis for sex differences. Moreover, an important working assumption of EP is that evolved human psychologies are universal; this, too, has proven a ready field for testing, and it results in strong claims for nature over culture. Further, EP is a social science, and its exponents have been vociferous about the need to introduce evolutionary paradigms into the social sciences. The landmark essay of Tooby and Cosmides in their 1992 volume The Adapted Mind is a powerful, almost eschatological, manifesto for the promise of EP to save the social sciences from a century of misguided dualism.Footnote ³²

EP, in sum, came to maturity, and visibility, at the same moment that the history of sexuality was emerging; it was to provide a perfect counter-point for cultural approaches to human sexual behavior. Anthropologists would provide the most acute criticisms of sociobiology and EP, but to understand why this was so requires an equally long-range genealogy of cultural anthropology, which can only be offered here in abbreviated form. Anthropology formed into a discipline in the late nineteenth century, somewhere between biology and history. In the background was the discovery of geological time. Daniel Smail has evocatively shown how historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries closed ranks and settled on the idea, or pragmatic compromise, that history dealt with documents and thus “started” with writing.Footnote ³³ Implicit in this formulation was a sort of division of labor with anthropology, which would, using different methods, cover the story of Homo sapiens during its primitive phases.Footnote ³⁴ Anthropology “was thus to operate a bridge between the history of life up to the emergence of Homo sapiens, the subject matter of Zoology, and the history of mankind from the time of the invention of writing, by which point historians could take over.”Footnote ³⁵

The fathers of anthropology operated on universalist and evolutionary assumptions about the development of culture through primitive to advanced stages.Footnote ³⁶ To appreciate the bite of cultural constructionism, and the broader turn of cultural anthropology away from history in the twentieth century, it must be appreciated that the evolutionist paradigm was squarely centered on the cluster of problems around sex, marriage, and kinship. It could be said that anthropology, as a modern discipline, was born in the gap created by the discovery of deep time, which fostered a need to understand “primitive” cultures, defined by forms of social organization centered on kinship. Henry Maine's “Patriarchal Theory,” rooted in the study of Roman law, laid the intellectual foundations.Footnote ³⁷ What is remarkable, though, is how quickly Maine's most ambitious theories about early societies began to look obsolete in light of the time revolution. Ancient Law appeared in 1861, but Maine would spend his later years engaged in dispute with even more daring reconstructions of early human social order.

Though Maine declared distaste for speculative inquiries about the earliest human societies, which led into “mudbanks and fog,” the 1860s and 1870s were full of such efforts.Footnote ³⁸ Johann Jakob Bachofen's Mother Right, positing prehistorical stages of communism, polyamory, and matriarchy, was published in German in the same year as Ancient Law.Footnote ³⁹ In 1865, an even more formidable rival account of early society appeared in McLennan's Primitive Marriage.Footnote ⁴⁰ McLennan was the most vociferous early proponent of the thesis of primitive promiscuity; he argued that early human societies were universally organized around bride capture, and he argued that traces of such early strata of human society were still visible in marriage rituals. Promiscuity, by stages, gave way to the restraints of marriage. In the 1870s the two great works of Morgan appeared.Footnote ⁴¹ Like McLennan, though with differences of detail, Morgan posited an original condition of primitive promiscuity and various intermediate phases that societies might pass through on their way to monogamy.Footnote ⁴²

It is hard today to appreciate the extent to which the thesis of primitive promiscuity acted as a crucible of modern social theory. It spawned a giant literature, most of which is today forgotten, though it lurks behind much of the study of myth, religion, and ritual in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The thesis provoked one of the period's underrated intellectual achievements, Edvard Westermarck's History of Human Marriage.Footnote ⁴³ Westermarck would confess that he began “as an adherent of primitive promiscuity and set out to find its vestiges.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He soon became convinced that he was on the wrong track and in fact became a prominent critic of the paradigm, “one of the most unscientific ever set forth within the whole domain of sociological speculation.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He painstakingly dismantles the “evidence” for the theory.Footnote ⁴⁶ More interesting, however, are the positive arguments he makes against the likelihood of general promiscuity. Westermarck develops an argument, already adduced by Maine, that Darwinian sexual selection theory predicts masculine jealousy to be a biological rather than cultural trait. He argued that masculine jealousy, in turn, was incompatible with the promiscuity thesis.Footnote ⁴⁷

Westermarck was one of the early anthropologists who tried to use Darwinian theory to “understand the biological facts underlying psychical and social phenomena.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Today he is principally remembered for “the Westermarck effect,” which holds that physical proximity in childhood deactivates sexual attraction and activates sexual aversion. For Westermarck there was a biological substrate to the incest taboo. It is worth remembering that the early debates about incest took place against the background of wider discussions of primitive promiscuity. Incest, and its prohibition, was a crux in thinking about the “origins of culture” and transitions from “nature to culture.” It is a testament to Westermarck's intellectual horizons that in his fifth edition he battles against Frazer and Freud, both of whom held that if incest avoidance were natural, then it would not require prohibition. The logic is revealing. For Frazer and Freud alike, the necessity of the taboo implied a relationship between culture and nature that was one of repression. Westermarck offered a powerful and persuasive rebuttal that envisioned a far more complex relationship between biology and morality. Ultimately, though, this was a road not taken.

The paradigm of cultural evolution was not destined to last.Footnote ⁴⁹ Westermarck's work was a major blow, and his monumental History is not even, after all, a history, but a cross-cultural survey. From one side, anthropology turned away from evolutionism and towards an ahistorical functionalism. Footnote ⁵⁰ From another angle, the ambitions of a universal theory of culture were undercut by diffusionist models, in which the unfolding of culture over time is not subject to iron laws of development.Footnote ⁵¹ Undoubtedly the axial figure in this revolution was Franz Boas. His Mind of Primitive Man was an eloquent broadside on evolutionary models.Footnote ⁵² Boas showed that the phenomena of culture could not be considered the progressive development of the human mind in response to the same sequence of stimuli. Culture, instead, was presented as an autonomous domain, not reducible to mental or material stages in the development of civilization. Boas is described as “idiographic,” “historicist,” or “particularist.”Footnote ⁵³ He and his students evinced a sensitivity for variety, and they asserted the irreducible complexity of cultural phenomena.

Boas was immeasurably influential, and it would be simple enough to draw a line from his most outstanding students, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, straight to the cultural constructionism of the late twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁴ But there were important subplots in the middle of the century. One was a turn toward treating culture as a “symbolic system,”Footnote ⁵⁵ and the other was the advance of hermeneutics into social-scientific practice.

When historians of sexuality refer to themselves as anthropologists, they mean something rather particular—they mean Clifford Geertz. Geertz represented the fulfillment of Boasian cultural particularism, combined with a theoretically explicit commitment to interpretation as the activity of the anthropologist.Footnote ⁵⁶ Geertz occupies a complex place in late-twentieth-century intellectual history. In part, his brand of anthropology was an assertion of particularism against the nomothetic tendencies of Levi-Strauss's structuralism.Footnote ⁵⁷ In part, his hermeneutic stance draws from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology.Footnote ⁵⁸ Geertz's significance lies in the fact that he operationalized hermeneutics for social scientists.Footnote ⁵⁹ In his most famous methodological essay, Geertz distinguished between “setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found and, beyond that, about social life as such.”Footnote ⁶⁰ When articulating his methodological stance, Geertz imagined “thick description” as the first act in a series of outwardly radiating interpretive levels. “Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects' acts, the ‘said’ of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior.”Footnote ⁶¹ Yet, Geertz in his own work concentrated on the “said” of social discourse, and not on “social life as such” or the “other determinants” of behavior. Geertz compared culture to a computer program, a set of “plans, recipes, rules,” but there is little attention to the ways that the computer—the brain—might download or run the software.Footnote ⁶²

By the 1970s, there was a strong movement within anthropology that treated culture as something particular and irreducible, antinomian and extremely powerful.Footnote ⁶³ This fact alone placed anthropologists in position to act as the lead prosecutors against sociobiology and then, a decade later, EP. Anthropologists quickly took the front line against evolutionary encroachments on the social sciences.Footnote ⁶⁴ The critical stance would be sharpened by the spread of Marxism and second-wave feminism within the field.Footnote ⁶⁵ Almost immediately, sexuality became one of the most contested fields in the battle over the analysis of human behavior. Gayle Rubin's canonical essay, “The Traffic in Women,” appeared almost simultaneously with Sociobiology, and she would become an outspoken opponent of evolutionary paradigms.Footnote ⁶⁶ “The body, the brain, the genitalia and the capacity for language are necessary for human sexuality. But they do not determine its content, its experiences, or its institutional forms.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Here is a savvy rearguard maneuver, which would be repeated over and over. “Biology” is confined to anatomy, reducing “nature” to inert substance, mere potential that must be activated by “culture,” like res extensa waiting to be animated by res cogitans. And the language of “determinism” deliberately casts the explanation of human behavior in impossibly stark and deliberately high-stakes terms.

It was in that environment, one year after the appearance of Sociobiology, that Foucault's first volume on the history of sexuality appeared. To be sure, it drew upon and gave sharp expression to much contemporary scholarship.Footnote ⁶⁸ But Foucault's contribution was extraordinary, and it became the touchstone of cultural constructionism. Part of the book's achievement is that it speaks simultaneously to history, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. Foucault accomplished this, in part, by cultivating his own idiom—above all in the term sexuality itself. “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover.”Footnote ⁶⁹ With that claim, Foucault was breaking ranks from an entire tradition. In one of the most powerful passages of the book, Foucault argues that modernity could be characterized by the “deployment of sexuality,” which was superimposed on an older “deployment of alliance.” “Alliance” stood as shorthand for all that anthropology had sought from its earliest days to understand—the “system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the illicit.” “Sexuality” was concerned with “the sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of impressions.”Footnote ⁷⁰ By calling into question the very existence of sex as an object of knowledge, Foucault offered a valediction to anthropology and psychology as traditionally practiced. Only in hindsight can we see that Foucault's notion of sexuality was destined to be deployed against new, and in some ways even more ambitious, attempts to ground a knowledge of human sexuality and human sociality on nature.

ANCIENT SEXUALITY: THE RISE OF A SUBFIELD

The dualist metaphysics of nature and culture, and the rhetoric of determinism, were quickly absorbed by students of ancient sexuality, who found themselves, a little unexpectedly, posted in a highly visible and strategic redoubt. In a synthesis of the field and its principal discoveries, Ruth Mazo Karras described a consensus on two points: “the social construction of sexuality (that ‘sexuality’ is not a thing that can be found in all cultures but is created by the various discourses of particular societies), and the active/passive dichotomy (that the ancient world, both Greek and Roman, categorized sexual behaviors or identities not by the gender of the participants but by the sexual role each played).”Footnote ⁷¹ Of course, any talk of a collective project, or reference to historians in the plural, is not meant to elide the important and sometimes bitter differences that have existed among students of sexuality. But it is useful to identify the shared assumptions and aims, working practices and methods, which have been constitutive for the study of ancient sexuality. More importantly, it is imperative to query what “nature” and “culture” mean in both the dominant streams of research and the dissenting strands. Such an analysis is revealing, because even the principal critics of cultural constructionism have, in various ways, evaded explicit engagement with biology.

Although Classics once tended to be a methodologically conservative discipline, it was not indifferent to the broader intellectual currents of the 1970s. Feminists struggled for a foothold in an unfriendly field, but behind the strength of works such as Sarah Pomeroy's 1975 Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, they made important initial advances.Footnote ⁷² The study of ancient sexuality was given extraordinary impetus by the publication of Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality in 1978.Footnote ⁷³ The frank and scholarly treatment of sexual themes by such an eminent figure opened a new era of inquiry into the sexual cultures of antiquity. The influences that undergird Dover's framework are significant.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the opening paragraph, Dover asserts that “Greek culture differed from ours in its readiness to recognize the alternation of homosexual and heterosexual preferences in the same individual.…”Footnote ⁷⁵ The streams of influence which led Dover to present his findings in this manner are apparent in the only passage where he cites theoretical literature. Dover refers the reader to D. J. West and George Devereux.Footnote ⁷⁶ From his collaboration manqué with Devereux, Dover took the fundamental distinction between sexual acts and sexual orientations.Footnote ⁷⁷ Equally interesting is the endorsement of West, whom Dover cites “on the power of culture and society to determine sexual behavior.”Footnote ⁷⁸ West was deeply influenced by constructionist currents in American anthropology, especially Mead.Footnote ⁷⁹ Despite the rigorous philology and the studious control of material evidence that give it the feel of a positivist work in the traditional mould of Classics, Dover's study was not written in a vacuum.

Dover's book appeared just two years after La volonté de savoir. The year 1978 also saw the publication of Paul Veyne's landmark article on sex and marriage in imperial Rome.Footnote ⁸⁰ Foucault's understanding of classical antiquity would be mediated by Dover and Veyne. Foucault did much more, though, than expand and publicize their insights, though it is true that the cozy world of classics was rocked by the simultaneous appearance of volumes 2 and 3 of Foucault's History of Sexuality.Footnote ⁸¹ Foucault assembled Greece and Rome as case studies pointing to much larger claims about the historical conditioning of the human subject. He made it clear in the opening pages of The Use of Pleasure that the object of his study was “sexuality” as such. The term, he noted, did not appear until the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸² He wished to break with the view that sexuality itself “was a constant,” and to do so he conceived of sexuality not as the sum of practices or interdictions, but as the “modes according to which individuals are given to recognize themselves as sexual subjects.”Footnote ⁸³ Foucault's readings of individual ancient texts remain brilliant and nourishing. In the case of classical Greece, Foucault traced the ways in which sexual pleasures were problematized around the terms of self-mastery. In the case of Rome, Foucault discovered a new anxiety about desire as such and a new concern with reciprocal modes of pleasure, especially within marriage.Footnote ⁸⁴ In neither Greek nor Roman culture was there such a thing as modern “sexuality,” a discursive or institutional category that strictly tied together an individual's subjectivity and sexual preferences.

Foucault forged his own idiosyncratic lexicon and situated his arguments as a historian's reckoning with the problem of subjectivity. But as Foucault's ideas were absorbed by historians, the influence of cultural anthropology became more pronounced. After a predictable sequence of seminars and conference panels, the payoff came in 1990, which saw the publication of a battery of works that still represent the Foucauldian synthesis in ancient studies. John Winkler's Constraints of Desire is revealingly subtitled “The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The book opens with a chapter on the ancient dream interpreter Artemidorus, who is said to be “like an anthropologist,” or even an “ancient Kinsey.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Winkler's commitments to anthropology define the scope and object of his investigation. “Sex is not, except in a trivial and uninteresting sense, a natural fact.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Winkler cites Geertz, arguing that the prepotency of the central nervous system in Homo sapiens has freed human sexuality from biological determinism. This is a clear indication that the history of sexuality does not, in fact, have a neutral stance towards biology; there is a neurology, we might say, embedded deep within the framework of the entire sub-field.Footnote ⁸⁸ Note the disciplinary implications: “Anthropologists, historians, and other students of culture (rather than of nature) are sharply aware that almost any imaginable configuration of pleasure can be institutionalized as conventional and perceived by its participants as natural.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Understanding culture is what we do, “our hermeneutic project.”Footnote ⁹⁰

David Halperin's influential One Hundred Years of Homosexuality likewise separates sexuality from nature and defines culture as the disciplinary object of the ancient historian. Halperin has been the most able and articulate defender of Foucault's paradigm in ancient studies. “Foucault detached ‘sexuality’ from the physical and biological sciences.… He divorced ‘sexuality’ from ‘nature’ and interpreted it, instead, as a cultural production.”Footnote ⁹¹ Halperin emphasizes that Foucault's work gave enormous impetus “to anthropological tendencies within the humanities.”Footnote ⁹² There is no way to explain cultural variation, he argues, without granting a “determining role in the constitution of individual desire to social or cultural factors.”Footnote ⁹³ Similarly, in the landmark collected volume which Halperin co-edited, Before Sexuality, we are immediately told that sex is a “natural fact; it is subject to study by the methods of natural, not social, science. As such sex lies outside history and culture, and it also lies beyond the range of the various disciplines of cultural study.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The dualism of nature and culture becomes a programmatic tenet for historians of sexuality.

If 1990 was the annus mirabilis for the study of ancient sexuality, the categories which frame these investigations have guided the research agenda of ancient historians ever since.Footnote ⁹⁵ The landmark volume Roman Sexualities reflects the absorption of the cultural paradigm into the study of western Mediterranean societies.Footnote ⁹⁶ The finest study of ancient sexual art claims that its “single most startling conclusion” is “that—at least in matters of sex—the Romans were not at all like us.”Footnote ⁹⁷ These same assumptions are apparent in the 2002 collection, The Sleep of Reason, the best treatment of sex in high philosophical culture.Footnote ⁹⁸ The most important study of Roman homosexuality, Craig Williams' Roman Homosexuality, exemplifies the powerful reach of the dualistic cultural model.Footnote ⁹⁹ Williams locates his project in the Geertzian tradition and identifies his approach as “semiotic.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The semiotic system, here labeled an “ideology,” simply exists, out there, to give meaning to acts.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By explicitly excluding “reality” from the investigation, the dynamics of nature and society are passed by.

The constructionist paradigm has by no means gone unchallenged in ancient studies. We can identify two major lines of argument that have sought to undermine the cultural paradigm of sexuality at a fundamental level: the feminist critique and the essentialist critique. Both of these challenges open up the possibility of a different understanding of the relation between nature and culture, but, in actuality, both lines of criticism avoid an open engagement with biology.

The intervention of Foucault in ancient history, ironically, met with mixed reactions from feminist historians.Footnote ¹⁰² While many feminists found his work inspiring, or salvageable, others claimed that he received credit for building on the (unacknowledged) work of the pioneers in the field.Footnote ¹⁰³ Some specialists found his peculiar concerns, and his reliance on a small set of elite male texts, a little baffling.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But some of the criticism was more fundamental. His most trenchant critic, Amy Richlin, argued that Foucault's constructionism trivializes the reality of patriarchy, and she has provocatively identified herself as a “materialist and an essentialist.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In this view, patriarchy is a trans-historical phenomenon, transcending time and space.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While Richlin is willing to compass the possibility that patriarchy is rooted in nature, she identifies reluctance among most feminist historians to acknowledge the role of biology.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This conciliatory overview never actually engages in any analysis of nature. Nature is a possible source of continuity and sameness, but it is never directly discussed. It is safely in the distance, in the realm of the natural scientist. But if nature is reduced to “continuity,” then it remains inscrutable.

Despite its caution, the work of Richlin has been portrayed as threatening. In an essay that marked a moment within the development of the field, Marilyn Skinner argued that Richlin's essentialist model of patriarchy was laudable, but “it must not be purchased at the price of affirming biological determinism as its inexorable corollary. Basing the legitimacy of such historical scholarship on appeals to women's unique biological experience ‘closes down inquiry into the ways in which female subjectivity is produced.…’”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But why is a history of patriarchy which acknowledges the role of biology doomed to “close down inquiry” into the role of culture and society?Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This unease is ultimately political, lodged in the reluctance to naturalize unpalatable political arrangements. “If patriarchy were ‘natural,’ that is, based on biological determinism, then to change it would mean to change nature.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Fortunately, over the last fifteen years, a rapprochement between feminism and biology has been underway that ought to neutralize the old assumptions that have painted evolutionary theories of human behavior, with a broad brush, as politically suspect.Footnote ¹¹¹

A second major challenge has questioned the constructionist view of homosexuality. This line of criticism is responsible for the terminology of “constructionism” and “essentialism.”Footnote ¹¹² Essentialists emphasize that men and women with stable same-sex preferences existed before modernity.Footnote ¹¹³ Constructionists emphasize the fundamental differences between ancient and modern categorization of sexual acts and desires.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The debate has been obscured by a failure to clarify exactly what questions are being asked.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Clearly, ancient cultures allowed for same-sex contact in a way that is irreducibly different from modern categories of sexuality.Footnote ¹¹⁶ And there is legitimate debate whether the ancient kinaidos/cinaedus was a “homosexual,” in the vernacular sense of a “person with an abiding preference for sexual partners of the same sex,” but he was a deviant figure with a sexual subjectivity that pervaded his whole being.Footnote ¹¹⁷ These claims leave us at the level of cultural and linguistic categories, however, and it remains an altogether separate question whether men and women with stable preferences for partners of the same sex existed in antiquity.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Virtually all observers allow that they did.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Yet the same answer can be presented in tellingly different ways. For constructionists, the question is deflected as less interesting than the culturally mediated categories of desire and the possibility that these different categories channeled and created forms of desire that differed from the modern experience.Footnote ¹²⁰ For essentialists these continuities open the possibility of a history of homosexuality as such.Footnote ¹²¹ But even the most prominent “essentialists” are skeptical about the biological grounds of continuity.Footnote ¹²² Though critics have tempered the excesses of the constructionist paradigm, none of them question the formation that left “nature” outside the realm of history. Continuity could be substituted for nature, because what matters is the existence of something that is the same across time and space, not the basis of that sameness in genes, hormones, and brains.Footnote ¹²³ But if the very architecture of the discipline places nature outside the bounds of historical inquiry, then serious study of the interaction of culture and nature over time is impossible.

It hardly needs saying that the history of sexuality marks one of the major achievements of the discipline over the last generation. We know vastly more than we did thirty years ago about the way that past cultures regulated genital acts. The pioneers of the field had to face down the encroachments of sociobiology, even as they legitimized the study of sexuality within their own discipline as serious rather than prurient or frivolous. Their achievements are nothing short of heroic. Clearly, a thick understanding of culture is an imperative for any study of human sexuality. And, a certain epistemological humility that allows historians to focus on culture, as a way of getting on with work in the face of unsettled and changing evolutionary science, clearly has advantages in its favor. But epistemological humility becomes dangerous when it reinforces the dualism that lays at the origins of the project and insulates historians from the natural sciences altogether. That dualism is less rhetorically powerful than it once was, but it is still there, quietly, as a conceptual frame. As the heat of the sociobiology controversy has faded, flamboyant claims of cultural primacy have lost their charge, and an inarticulate compromise has been left hanging over the field: soft constructionism.Footnote ¹²⁴ This conciliatory label is a strategy for having it both ways without really confronting the deeper issues. Obviously cultures and sexual discourses change and therefore have a history; obviously sex is biological, and nature is a necessary precondition.Footnote ¹²⁵ The principal merit of this position is that it is unobjectionable. But unobjectionable, muddled compromises usually indicate a conceptual impasse.

The emphasis on cultural difference has de-familiarized past sexual cultures and opened new avenues of critical inquiry. But the suppression of nature has been carried out with an excess of zeal, and now there is much to be gained from reconsidering the exclusions that lie at the foundations of the project. By evading a discussion of the real character and role of nature, by relegating nature to other disciplines while appropriating cultural hermeneutics as the object of the historian, nature is banished just as fully as ever. Thus the study of ancient sexuality has come up against the limits that it set for itself in the beginning. By construing differences as what we study, we block off not only nature, but also and more importantly the interdependence of nature and culture. As a methodological premise, the awareness of cultural difference is an invaluable critical tool, exposing silent assumptions about continuity.Footnote ¹²⁶ But as a conclusion, the thesis of cultural difference becomes trivial. (“Past sexual cultures were different from our own.…”) As a constitutive boundary of what historians study, the search for difference is simply deadening.

The costs are not hypothetical. Treating bygone cultures as irreducibly distinct isolates is its own sort of myopia, and one prime example of the cost is that historians of classical antiquity have, despite all the interest in sexuality and private life, almost completely missed what truly made these cultures most peculiar: monogamy. Ironically, that which nineteenth-century evolutionists took for granted as the most civilized state of social organization proves, on a broad and deep view, to be exceptional and by no means predetermined. The spread of monogamy is precisely the sort of problem whose solution will defy any compartmentalization of history, anthropology, and biology. And it calls into question, in a particularly acute and challenging way, the relationship between nature and culture.

BEYOND DUALISM: BIOLOGY AND CULTURE REUNITED

Undeniably, sociobiology and some of its offspring belonged to an ambitious moment in the history of Darwinian thinking, and its key texts are imperious. But the image of sociobiology formed in the heat of battle was always something of a caricature, and its assumptions about genes, the brain, and human behavior were always only one strand of biological thought. If sociobiology is problematic, the solution is better biology, not a retreat to the Cartesian metaphysics that make culture a mental realm outside of nature. More to the point, while the history of sexuality has been built on a particular understanding of nature and culture, the plates have been shifting. Biologists of various stripes are becoming more interested in culture, while various movements within anthropology continuously strive to integrate the study of nature into their field. In this final section, I outline three frontiers of research where culture matters for biology. Each of these plainly defies the stereotypes of genetic determinism. Furthermore, each directly intersects with human mating behavior. After this brief overview, we can look at the phenomenon of monogamy, as the sort of problem that can only be understood with the input of biologists, anthropologists, and historians. Far from the manifest destiny of human social organization, monogamy represents a true puzzle.

Evolutionary approaches to human behavior encompass an array of work on proximate mechanisms and ultimate explanations. Human behavior can be explained at various levels, and one of the most exhilarating frontiers of research focuses directly on the mechanistic explanation of behavior. The interrelated fields of neuroscience, endocrinology, and genetics are only beginning to unlock some of the complexity of human behavior. The endocrine system, as the body's diffuse chemical signaling network, is a rich site for thinking about the physiological basis of behavior—and behavioral variety.Footnote ¹²⁷ Hormones and neurotransmitters mediate behavior in fundamental ways, along two temporal axes.Footnote ¹²⁸ Hormones have short-term, reversible effects on behavior (activational effects) by transmitting information about the body's present state or environment; in this way hormones can promote physiological processes like lactation or behavioral responses like aggression. Hormones also have long-term effects on development, known as organizational effects. Genes provide a blueprint for building the brain, but that blueprint is full of possibilities, and the motivational networks of the body and brain can be assembled in different ways, depending on environmental cues. Culture is part of that environment and thus can become fixed in the body.

Some of the most intriguing avenues for connecting culture and nature in the brain focus on developmental plasticity, in the burgeoning field of epigenetics.Footnote ¹²⁹ Developmental plasticity is already well documented in animals. In one of the best-known case studies, it has been shown that the behavior of adult rats is highly sensitive to early experience, specifically the amount of licking the rat received as a pup.Footnote ¹³⁰ The genetic and environmental interaction that accounts for adult behavioral patterns is being unraveled.Footnote ¹³¹ Maternal licking influences gene expression in a part of the brain that regulates response to stress hormones; in rats without maternal licking, a genetic switch for a crucial receptor gene was capped, blocking the production of receptors that set off signals in the hippocampus to shut down the production of stress hormones. An under-licked rat thus remains acutely vulnerable to the circulation of stress hormones throughout its life. Experience fundamentally influences gene expression; gene expression shapes the endocrine system; hormones deeply affect behavioral patterns.

Animal examples are more thoroughly known, but there is tantalizing evidence for developmental plasticity in the human behavioral system. For example, American Southerners and Northerners are popularly reputed to respond differently to perceived insults to individual honor; the stereotype has been elegantly documented under laboratory conditions.Footnote ¹³² “Culture,” as it turns out, measurably affects the circulation of cortisol and testosterone. “An insult that has trivial effects in a Northerner sets off a cascade of physiological changes in a southern male that prepare him to harm the insulter.…”Footnote ¹³³ Culture is not just information that shapes behavior at a first-order, conscious level; it participates in the construction of the brain's motivational architecture. Culture is not just “software”; it helps build the very “hardware” that runs the “plans, recipes, rules” transmitted from the environment. Far from disproving the power of “biology,” cultural constructionism might find that some of its central intuitions will be explained in terms of developmental plasticity.

Mechanistic approaches are only one way to consider the relationship between culture and behavior. At a higher-order level, evolutionary theorists and social scientists try to explain human behavior in terms of function and selection. Here historians will find a field of inquiry full of rich and productive disagreements. One of the most developed bodies of research and theory in evolutionary social science is human behavioral ecology. Human behavioral ecology brackets the mechanisms of human behavior to focus on the outcomes of human behavior as adaptive responses to environmental conditions.Footnote ¹³⁴ Behavioral ecologists assume that individuals modify their behavior under various constraints to maximize their fitness; the psychological processes underlying this behavior are not the province of behavioral ecology. In this sense, behavioral ecology can be seen as the alter ego of evolutionary psychology.Footnote ¹³⁵ Behavioral ecology defers discussion of traits and assumes that behavior is adaptive in present environments. The paradigm allows anthropologists to use optimization models under the assumption of an evolved agent trying to maximize fitness in the context of material tradeoffs. The rich body of literature demonstrates the value of behavioral ecology.Footnote ¹³⁶ As we will shortly see, one of the most productive applications of behavioral ecology has been the study of mating; behavioral ecologists treat monogamy and polygyny as the outcomes not of preset behavioral programs but of complex tradeoffs between mating and parental effort.

Behavioral ecology works from the assumption that individuals maximize their inclusive fitness—a productive working assumption, but one whose limits are a matter of enduring controversy. Indeed, the foundation of inclusive fitness theory has been a matter of intense dispute among population biologists, flaring recently because E. O. Wilson's defection to the multi-level selection camp has turned an abstract and mathematical disagreement into a stormy debate.Footnote ¹³⁷ These debates matter to evolutionary social scientists, for whom the foundations of human sociality are a central problem.Footnote ¹³⁸ There is intuitive and empirical evidence that human altruism exceeds what kin selection and reciprocal altruism can explain, and despite persistent attempts to reduce human altruism to gene-level explanations—“selfishness in disguise”—these efforts have so far fallen short.Footnote ¹³⁹ Yet, once again, the solution to the quandary of human altruism is not a retreat from biology into dualism. One of the most promising paradigms to account for culture within an evolutionary framework is gene-culture co-evolutionary theory, or dual-inheritance theory. The core insight of co-evolutionary theory is that culture should not be “lumped together” with other environmental influences.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Culture drives genetic evolution, and genetic evolution drives culture.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The gene-culture co-evolutionary paradigm allows that selection does not always operate at the level of the gene. Co-evolutionary theory accommodates multi-level selective processes.Footnote ¹⁴² Certain altruistic behaviors may be maladaptive at the level of the individual's genes but promote the success of the individual's group, and many aspects of human altruism may be artifacts of “social instincts” evolved through group selection.

This corner of evolutionary science is still an expanding area. It will continue to develop, but its merits are already considerable. Unlike behavioral ecology, co-evolutionary models do not have to operate on the assumption that behavioral outcomes are adaptive for the individual. Information can be costly to obtain, and the imperfect information-retrieving processes we have evolved sometimes motivate maladaptive behavior. Moreover, behavior with fitness costs can be explained by “population-level evolutionary trade-offs that are intrinsic to cultural adaptation.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Co-evolution allows the coexistence of primate social instincts, including kin selection and reciprocal altruism, with “‘tribal’ instincts that allow us to interact cooperatively with a larger, symbolically marked set of people, or tribe.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Culture, in all its variety and complexity, is being recognized as an essential part of nature. More than ever, anthropologists and biologists need each other. But they will also need historians, especially historians who have deep domain knowledge of past systems of sex and marriage. The truth, though, is that the concept of culture as something over and apart from nature still imposes powerful blinders on the ways that history is written, and the very organization of the past as a research field. As historians know better than anyone, the division of time is never an innocent act. The history of sexuality does not begin in medias res in classical Greece, where Foucault, without accounting, launches a narrative that has been so formative within the discipline. It is surpassingly valuable to have a clear idea of the sexual mores of the classical Greeks; it is surpassingly unclear why the “history” of sexuality should begin in an early Iron Age culture of southeastern Europe. Partly, this is expedience (documents—and what documents!). Partly, this is clever mimicry of the widespread origins story of “western civilization.” Not least, the Greeks and Romans present a culture before Christianity, the great watershed. It is possible that the whole edifice would have been more apparent if Foucault had lived. But, ultimately, has not the fundamental aim of the Foucauldian project been to find the non-existence of a transhistorical subject, by defining a field, “sexuality,” beyond nature? Yet if “nature” is not within the historian's remit, some of the most interesting and important questions are impossible to solve, and even threaten to disappear from view. Monogamy is a prime example. The history of monogamy should be a rich topic for historians in general; the history of monogamy should keep classical historians occupied, in particular. The Greeks and Romans did not invent the institution of monogamy, but by any reckoning the early Iron Age was one of the absolutely decisive chapters in the history of monogamy. That this development has aroused so little discussion—the bibliography runs to maybe two dozen articles—is an astonishing testament to the frame imposed by the conceptual foundations of the sub-discipline.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Monogamy has become a hot topic in recent years, because the spread of monogamy has profound implications for contemporary theoretical questions in evolutionary theory. The mechanisms that promote monogamy are both natural and cultural; the categories that must be used to study it are comparative and anthropological. As the primatologist Bernard Chapais has argued, pair-bonding is a deep structural element of hominid kinship systems. Although humans are not the only primates who form long-term breeding bonds, we are distinctive in the amount of variation exhibited within our species. Human pair-bonding is a “biological phenomenon,” with “remarkable flexibility.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ But this flexibility is analytically tractable, and not simply due to unaccountable cultural forces. In 1979, Richard Alexander introduced an influential distinction between “two kinds of monogamy in human societies” which can help us begin to understand the causes of variation: ecologically imposed monogamy (EIM) and socially imposed monogamy (SIM).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In EIM, monogamy is “universal or prevalent apparently because, owing to the ecological situation, individual men are typically unable to gain by attempting to provide for offspring of more than one wife.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ EIM emerges when the relative costs and benefits of mating effort and parental care make monogamy the optimal outcome for individuals.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ EIM refers to an actual condition in the mating system, an equilibrium between the countervailing pressures to spend energy on mating and to invest energy in child-rearing. The EIM model allows that human mating strategies are complex and pluralist, but under most conditions, a mildly polygynous mating system seems to emerge in human societies.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

SIM, in distinction to EIM, is said to be unique to humans, a “cultural phenomenon.” SIM refers to a marriage system; its existence is determined by the rules that prevail in a society, not necessarily the realities of mating. The crucial feature of SIM is that it imposes normative monogamy regardless of the fitness costs and benefits for individual actors. Although EIM and SIM represent different causal mechanisms, the distinction should not be allowed to reify an artificial divide between “natural” and “cultural” causes of monogamy. The capacity for social control is fully natural, too, and social controls function at least partly through the power of social norms to activate motivational systems in the human brain. It is a question, then, of which aspects of nature are at work. SIM is a simplifying assumption; it provides a catchall category of causes for monogamy that are “non-ecological,” that is, not arising from an equilibrium between mating effort and parental care. SIM has functioned through different control mechanisms, which intervene in the processes of sexual competition in different ways; it has taken different forms, historically, and has arisen for different reasons at different times.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In short, if SIM is to be more than “not EIM,” it must be a historical category and enriched by the work of historians. Historians, in turn, must recognize that just because SIM prevails in a society, the processes of mating competition and parental investment, with their underlying motivational systems, are still operative.

A historically rich comparative approach will eventually reveal how much diversity the category of SIM lumps together. The most powerful criticisms in this direction have already come from the ancient historian who has been most engaged with the problem of monogamy, Walter Scheidel. He has argued that the EIM/SIM distinction cannot account for the mating systems of the classical world, in which marriage was monogamous but mating was effectively polygynous.Footnote ¹⁵² Indeed, as Scheidel has started to show, the institution of slavery—a fundamental part of human history, almost never integrated into the anthropological categories of human mating—must be part of the analysis of mating systems. He argues that Greece and Rome combined SIM with effective polygyny through the institution of slavery.Footnote ¹⁵³ Chattel slavery masked the reality of continued reproductive inequality. Scheidel's powerful insights demonstrate the urgency of combining thick historical understanding with paradigms informed by evolutionary assumptions; his deep engagement with both the biological and anthropological literature produces a richer and more robust analysis of a historical problem.

On a very long view, both the ecological and social factors affecting human mating systems have changed, and it is presently disputed what the decisive historical moments truly were. In a series of articles, Laura Fortunato argues that monogamous marriage “emerged in Eurasia following the adoption of intensive agriculture, as ownership of land became critical to productive and reproductive success.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In the aftermath of the Neolithic revolution, monogamy became a strategy that promoted inclusive fitness. Certainly, this account must affect the way historians treat monogamy: it makes EIM appear a more robust force in the last ten thousand years. At the same time, it is not clear why polygyny remained prevalent in societies practicing agriculture, or why monogamy was socially imposed in some human groups but not others. Above all, the model rests on the assumption of intense scarcity in small-scale societies, whereas there is empirical evidence that differences in wealth and power—the sorts of stratification enabled by large-scale agricultural states—encourage polygyny.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ A deep history of monogamy will have to acknowledge that domestication reshuffled the ecological context of mating strategy, but probably not that it was the decisive turning point in the history of monogamy.

Another recent interpretation places more emphasis on cultural influences. In this model, monogamy is a form of social cooperation enabled by evolved human capacities to coordinate behavior in large groups. Historically, the emergence of SIM in the archaic Mediterranean appears as the crucial historical vector—carrying monogamy to Rome, to Christianity, to European societies, and eventually globally. Of particular interest is the argument that the spread of monogamy is a form of cultural group selection.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The hypothesis is that monogamy depresses sexual competition, which promotes social cohesion to the extent that monogamous societies are able to out-compete polygamous societies. The authors marshal evidence suggesting that polygamous societies experience high levels of interpersonal violence and other social maladies. They argue that testosterone, which, as they note, circulates differently in men in monogamous and polygamous societies, promotes aggressive behavior in ways that undermine communal cohesion. This model has its merits and its limits. Cultural group selection is not the only way to explain monogamy's spread by cultural influences; monogamy may simply have been attached—not unlike the way certain alleles tend to be inherited together in genetic linkages—to a package of social characteristics that prevailed for independent reasons. Certainly, at times, polygamous societies have “out-competed” monogamous ones—Islamic expansion comes to mind.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ But the idea that the cultural evolution of monogamy physiologically changed human beings is provocative and well worth further investigation.

Both ecological and social influences must be part of an overarching model of monogamy. But it should be apparent, even at this early stage, that history is an essential dimension for the study of monogamy. Historians must provide the rich domain knowledge that furnishes data about when and why monogamy prevailed. But more profoundly, historians will need to provide a historicized account of the mechanisms of culture. The Greco-Roman case bears out the importance of written law; religion, too, must be part of the answer. Here is an almost unexplored continent, at least in terms of human mating systems. In the Roman Empire, an epochal shift from monogamous marriage, combined with effective polygyny, to normative monogamous mating occurred, driven mostly by the rise of Christianity as a public ideology.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Christian sexual ideology, one of the most unlikely triumphs in the history of culture, fundamentally attacked an ancient social system that allowed untrammeled access to out-group women like slaves and prostitutes.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Historians have mostly treated this shift as the rise of a new conception of the body: a hermeneutic upheaval.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ It needs to be treated as a revolution that deeply reconfigured the cultural mediation of sexual competition. And historians will need to ask why, in advanced Iron Age societies, civil law and religious ideology allowed the diffusion of monogamous norms more broadly than ever before.

The grand temporal division, which allots the study of humanity before Homo sapiens to Science, the study of “early” humanity to Anthropology, and the study of “civilized” humanity to History, may only exist visibly in the organization of History Departments, but it remains a potent schema implicit in the research agendas and modes of hypothesis formation within the discipline. The human past is not a catalogue of discrete societies waiting to be coded and analyzed. The past is cumulative; the Neolithic revolution, the rise of formal institutions, the spread of religious ideology, industrialization, colonialism, and so on, are all folded in upon us in ways that require elucidation. Foucault's treatment of Greek and Roman sexuality was a form of parachute-drop ethnography, a thick description of specific texts without any external orientation or comparative framework. As much as his work has enriched the study of ancient texts, his approach—and the embedded assumptions about the role of nature in human life—do not now represent the way forward. In some sense, the present moment is not unlike the 1860s, when the boundaries of history, anthropology, and biology were dizzyingly uncertain. Historians have a greater opportunity than at any moment since the collapse of Victorian “cultural evolutionism” to rethink the place of nature in the study of the past.

TOWARDS THE REINTEGRATION OF BIOLOGY INTO HISTORY

History is a discipline that has always been enriched by the runoff of neighboring fields. But an invisible dam, erected in the academic struggles of the last generation, is blocking the inflow of nourishment from other disciplines. The relationship between “nature” and “culture” has changed drastically since the history of sexuality, as a collective project, took shape. Some historians are beginning to recognize the possibilities of a natural science of culture, extended in time. Daniel Smail's inspired call for a Deep History that breaks down the old divisions of disciplinary labor by ignoring the false boundary between “pre-history” and “history” is one way forward; Randolph Roth's biohistory, which integrates hormonally mediated behavioral plasticity into the study of past violence, is another.Footnote ¹⁶¹ These are pioneering forays, but reconnecting history and nature will not be easy. Yet if it is true that culture simply cannot be an immaterial entity, then we must begin to reckon with this fact, however hard it may be. Nothing—not language, not domestication, not writing, not even Greek philosophy—allowed humans to leap out of nature. Evolutionary theorists are recognizing that human nature cannot be studied apart from human culture and human history, and they admit that “the study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective is in far greater disarray than most outsiders realize.”Footnote ¹⁶² Evolutionary science, in other words, is not a settled body of knowledge that historians must apply. It is an unsettled but rapidly advancing body of theory whose most compelling exponents are affirming the need for culture and for history. It would be a lost opportunity if historians do not also come to accept, and embed in our working practices, the fact that no part of human culture or the human past is outside of nature.