An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.
Some readers will know that I did an undergraduate degree in anthropology at SOAS, a school of the University of London, and that the three years I spent there probably go a long way towards explaining why I’m like this.
When I began my degree in 2013, ‘SOAS’ still stood for ‘The School of Oriental and African Studies’, a name dating back to the institution’s founding in the early twentieth century, when it functioned as a finishing school for colonial officers tasked with learning about the languages and cultures of the people they were soon to govern. Lord Curzon once described the school as part of the “necessary furniture of empire.”
But there has since been a changing of the guard. SOAS is now typically described in the media as the UK’s most left wing university and has abandoned its original name, adopting the acronym-only title ‘SOAS’ (I think it was the “oriental” bit that bothered them). This Portlandia-on-Thames operates pretty much exactly as you’d expect: the staff spend a lot of time on strike, the students spend a lot of time feeling angry about Israel, and – in the anthropology department, in particular – the mood is very woo.
Back in the “furniture of empire” days the anthropology department at SOAS was quite different. For one thing, it was packed to the gills with mildly to moderately autistic men, because anthropology is a discipline that offers great scope for the kind of systemising that is attractive to autists: kinship systems, languages, etc. can all be arranged into endless lists and diagrams – all very appealing to the systematising brain.
Contrast this with the expectation in anthropology now of lyrical prose, a skeptical attitude towards boundaries of all kinds, a preoccupation with fashionable political ideas, and the birth of subgenres like ‘autoethnography’ (otherwise known as writing about yourself). One way of understanding the culture shift in anthropology over the last century is that it has gone from being a very masculine discipline to a very feminine one.
One very masculine and (we must assume) also very autistic anthropologist who deserves to be better known is J.D. Unwin. Born in Suffolk in 1895, Unwin served in the First World War, spent several years conducting fieldwork in Abyssinia, returned to take up an academic position at Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his academic career to the study of sex. His magnum opus, Sex & Culture (1934), was published two years before Unwin’s death at the age of just 40. Described by Aldous Huxley as “monumental” and a “work of highest importance”, this long, dense, highly academic book was a big deal in its day, even if it has long since been removed from reading lists at SOAS.
Unwin hypothesised, contra pop Freudianism, that sexual frustration might be a very good thing – a well of creativity and dynamism, not of neurosis. At scale, he suggested, severe sexual repression might in fact be essential to the rise of civilizations, and sexual permissiveness might invite their fall.
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