No 3 (2023)

This article is an introduction to the journal’s special theme on “Profession and Society: Love for Money” where contributors discuss the place of prostitution in modern culture and everyday life and attempt to examine the phenomenon as viewed locally, in emic perspectives, in various regions of Europe. The canonical model of providing (mostly by women) intimate services for a fee, which became generically known as “national” or “traditional” prostitution, took its distinctive shape in the late 19^th century and remained dominant in the market of sexual services up until the recent time. This model, oddly enough, has been understudied in the humanities and social sciences and has received less attention than, for example, some ancient (cult, patriarchal) or modern forms of prostitution (among the latter are “ethnic” forms, which emerged due to the intensification of migration processes, “gender-specific” - such as male or transgender - forms, or various “innovative” forms that have arisen due to the use of webcams, technologies, etc.). The contributors (S.A. Sidneva, A.A. Novik, A.N. Kozhanovsky, A. Maxia, and O.D. Fais-Leutskaia) present an array of viewpoints on the phenomenon of traditional prostitution, offering perspectives grounded in field studies, ethnographic reconstruction, and anthropological analysis of cases examined in a few European regions (Greece, Albania, Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily).

The article offers an anthropological analysis of the ups and downs of female prostitution in the western Balkans in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. The difficult fate of the region, which managed to change several sociopolitical formations, cultural codes, and centers of civilizational attraction over the course of only three generations, had a huge impact on the public perception of the phenomenon of selling oneself for sexual activities: from a positive assessment of commercial expediency and “good for men” to a sharp condemnation of “bourgeois exploitation” and hopelessness of the unfortunate “victims of feudal relations and predatory capitalism”, from total silence about the very fact of the existence of the phenomenon to secret admiration for the courage of priestesses of love and, as a result, numerous reflections in the media and the social establishment, caused by the need to change the country’s criminal code regarding prostitution under the pressure from the European Union in order to harmonize legislative acts. In Albania, with its numerous patriarchal vestiges still remaining in the outback and “highly advanced” relations between the sexes in the capital region, there are different approaches of representatives of different social strata to the assessment of “love for money”, which is the main focus of my research interest, reflecting the 30 years of my fieldwork in various regions of the Balkans.

The article makes a novel contribution to anthropological studies by exploring the phenomenon of prostitution in Sardinia which remains a poorly urbanized conservative rural region of Europe, which still retains a high degree of cultural traditionalism. Due to the lack of research on this issue, I draw primarily on my own field material obtained as a result of many years of surveys conducted in the region, mainly in mountainous areas, that is the pastoral zone which is a set of introverted and patriarchal village microcosms with unusually strict social control and a rigid system of moral taboos. The principal difficulty in conducting this type of fieldwork is the uncommunicativeness and “closedness” of informants in any kinds of conversations involving topics of sex. I argue that there was an organic social “acceptance” of the institution of prostitution in the traditional society as an element that provided a mechanism for its social functioning and the preservation of social balance.

The article aims to assess the method of individual visual typological definitions in biological anthropology and compare it with the results of multivariate statistical analysis based on the cranial materials coming mainly from the Yuezhi / Kushan period in Central Asia. The database contains information on 185 crania. We have established that sex has a highly significant effect on the variation of facial craniometric traits, while the effect of artificial deformation is less prominent but still statistically significant. The PCA has shown that variation between the cranial types of very distant ancestry is captured even though the samples are small and variables are limited to the traits of facial skeleton. The PCA has highlighted the craniometric distinctiveness of the crania labeled as having Asian ancestry. The PCА of the sample of European ancestry has not revealed either the distinctiveness of the mixed European-Asian ancestry individuals or the differences between the two large morphological types within the sample of European ancestry. The differences between individuals of different anthropological types could be due to the effects of random variation which have been consistently interpreted as non-random.

A wide range of issues related to attempts at nation-building in formerly colonial African and Asian countries is discussed in the interview with the corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, vice-director of the Institute for African Studies, Dmitri Bondarenko, around his new book “Postcolonial Nations in Historical and Cultural Context”. These issues are considered in a broader cultural, historical, and geographical context that covers countries of the Global North and the Global South from Antiquity to the present. The central topic is multiplicity of manifestations of phenomena such as nation, modernity, secularity, and democracy. The prospects of multiculturalism as the basis for emerging and transforming nations are assessed.

The article examines the ways in which embodiment is narrativized in biographical stories of non-heterosexual people based on interview and written autobiographies. When talking about their experiences, non-heterosexuals searched for signs in their bodies and endowed them with dimensions of meaning. To conceptualize this search procedure, I use Ginzburg’s evidence paradigm and Csordas’s somatic modes of attention. The participants interpreted clues found in the body experience of the past as proof of one's non-heterosexuality. The search for such evidence requires a specific mode of attention to one's body and knowledge about (homo)sexuality. The article analyzes the language of description of the body, such as figures of speech and terms used by the participants, and traces gender differences in strategies for narrativizing the body. Essentialization is the most popular strategy of narrativization of non-heterosexual body. The participants talked about their sexuality in terms of “naturalness” and “innateness”. Different levels of texts reflect this tendency. Essentialization is a way to normalize non-heterosexuality, permeate sexual identity, and make narratives coherent.