Ethno-Pornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge.

• Author: Ritt-Coulter, Edith

Sigal, Pete, Zeb Tortorici, and Neil L. Whitehead, eds. Ethno-Pornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 280 pages. Paperback, $26.95

When does the scholarly gaze of ethnographers become pornographic and exploitative of their subjects? Pete Sigal, Zeb Tortorici, and the late Neil L. Whitehead address this question in their edited collection Ethno-Pornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge. The editors define ethno-pornography as the production of eroticized material regarding people deemed different from the people expected to digest the material (p. 4). Pete Sigal is a Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University where his research focuses on constructions of gender and sexuality in colonial Latin America particularly among indigenous groups. Zeb Tortorici is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature at New York University. His research focuses on gender, sexuality, and religion in Colonial Latin America. The late Neil L. Whitehead was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he explored dark shamanism in the Amazon basin and the Caribbean. This collection of essays pays homage to the important work that Whitehead began over a decade ago, which asserted that ethnography can be understood as a form of pornography invested with institutional power (p. 2). This collective work argues that scholars must rethink their ethnographic gaze and acknowledge the legacy of colonial fetishization that shapes researcher's consumption and articulation of non-white sexuality.

The editors position this collection in direct conversation and opposition to Walter Roth's 1898 work Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines. In this narrative Roth first uses the term "Ethno-pornography" when describing his observation of the intimate behaviors if the Aborigines. The editors acknowledge Roth's contribution to the scholarship but also identify it as being problematic because it presented colonial subjects within a voyeuristic gaze, which promoted the fetishization of indigenous populations.

The first section, "visualizing race," explores the depiction of the exotic other in ethnographic research, particularly the constructions of Blackness and its relationship to the ethnographic gaze. What makes this section unique is the presence of self-reflexivity within each...