Growing Up Sexually

PREFACE

Index → Preface for Vol. 1, 0.2 edition

Welcome to the 0.2 edition of “Growing Up Sexually Volume I, World Reference Atlas”!

It contains thousands of footnoted references to practices and attitudes concerned with childhood and early adolescent sexualities worldwide. Approximately 150 countries and over 560 ethnographic communities are covered on separate web pages. The entire corpus is composed of over 900 fully cross-linked pages of ethnographic and historical information on indigenous sex education practices, sexual aspects of initiation rites, and local developmental sexologies. Together with the fulltext 4-volume International Encyclopaedia of Sexuality edited by Robert T. Francoeur (hosted elsewhere on this website), this makes the Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology an appealing point of departure for any student of the geographies of sexuality.

A short history of this Volume (roughly applying to Volume II as well):

New features of the current edition include an enhanced interface. It now features pages at the country and tribal level instead of continental level in the 0.0 edition. It is fully cross-linked, and interactive (though unilaterally) with the online "IES" (International Encyclopedia of Sexuality) Volumes I-IV of the AFS (Archiv für Sexualwissenschaft, Berlin) website (adding references and links to the entries for the recently web-released fourth Volume). It has been superimposed on the old structure, adding (a lot of) pages to the old ones, leaving the old continental pages intact as a viewing/printing/linking option. It has been upgraded only minimally with new references gathered over the 2003-2004 period (as posted at author’s listserv at Topica). It includes a new index page featuring direct links to countries and tribes (rather than continents). It an also be searched. Also featured are geographic and ethnographic indexes. Three minimally elaborated yet reasonable adequate regional bibliographies were extracted from the text and inserted (Aboriginal Australia, Indonesia, PNG).

In all I think the 2004 version (0.2) will add to the AFS website's accessibility and navigatability, and will (continue to) be a useful sidekick to the awe-inspiring IES. The differences between the IES and GUS 1 include the fact that the IES was composed by local sexological authorities (in fact “170 dedicated scholars on six continents”) in single-tempus efforts while GUS 1 was composed by a single non-sexologist in a longitudinal (and ongoing) effort. This includes the possibility for revisions and additions in terms of format (as the history above testifies) and coverage while in the IES the opportunities for addenda are limited. Another difference is that while the IES seems to have required of the authors a more or less standardised schema of coverage and presentation (thus potentially straight-jacketing and transfiguring local sexological “texts” or genres) GUS 1 proposes a less schematic preoccupation with form and content, being more archival, bibliographic, and passive (the volume is entitled a “world reference atlas” with the intention of being an annotated bibliography). Unlike the IES’ national approach, GUS 1 also produced more diluted tribal-level data with the obvious risk of being too fragmentary and particularistic. In GUS 1, also, data are reproduced with only preliminary attempts to organise or cross-analyse or historicise matters. For instance, since the project is thoroughly ethnohistorical, present tense statements need to be read as past tenses, and to be judged by publication date, among other criteria. Having been a one-man show, thematic, evaluative and coverage bias not only creeps in through the cracks but actually provides a backbone of the work. A developmentalist (or postdevelopmentalist[1]) bias,  of course, produces a different reading (a different text) than an “encyclopaedic” approach in which coverage of “the developmental” is precoded (it is still interesting to see the significant differences in which the Contributors to the IES have dealt with the “Children”, “Adolescents” and “Education” subparagraph requirements, or at least in Editors’ employment of the said “standard outline”). GUS 1 does not employ such an outline nor does it review “complete” local sexologies (or complete developmental sexologies, for that matter). That, in my opinion, it not possible. In my current understanding people may entertain considerably idiosyncratic and personal narratives about what it entails to grow up sexually, ranging from granite molecular stories to esoteric New Age scenarios, and to stories in which both such extremes are interbred. In GUS 2 I tried to face these sexologies, while for the IES there is no such digestion (or rather endless implicit or hidden counts of digestion). Both efforts, however, depart from the shaky and swampy Occidental ramification of an ‘Atlas’ as a surplus of its sum. Morale: aggregate truths only make sense in terms of the aggregation process, or, perhaps, the brave hope for critical disaggregation. 

My efforts to review and read matters of growing up sexually continue to be stored in my listserv (http://lists.topica.com/lists/growingupsexually/read, posts also linked from here), and the in remainder of the project (http://www.growingupsexually.tk), for which this web-publication continues to form the backbone.

In the context of Project “Growing Up Sexually”, I will continue to gather and cover new references in the project. Please consider contacting me here for any comments or if you feel like collaborating in a future edition.

As formerly, my sincerest thanks go out to Prof. Dr. Dr. Erwin J. Haeberle and Dr. Thomas Haase for their kind assistance and advise.

The Author, September 2004

Janssen, D. F., Growing Up Sexually. Volume I. World Reference Atlas. 0.2 ed. 2004. Berlin: Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology

Last revised: Dec 2004