In Celibacy, Culture and Society Sobo and Bell present essays that explore celibacy as an individual strategy, a domain of symbolic meanings, and a form of social regulation, suggesting that examining what people choose not to do sexually can lead to a richer understanding of sexuality itself. By saying that they will use celibacy as a lens through which to explore the “significance of the body and of desire as inherently social rather than as biological givens upon which social practices are inscribed” (p. 6), the editors imply a desire to push the envelope on what is meant by the construction of sexuality. The essays in the volume, however, fall somewhat short of this goal. Michael Duke, Peter Phillimore, and Peter Collins provide compelling accounts of the locally and historically specific reasons why celibacy may help individuals achieve status mobility and increased autonomy. Hector N. Qirko, Mario I. Aguilar, Peter Collins, and Mark S. Fleisher and John R. Shaw perceptively explore how institutions regulate sexuality via celibacy to achieve greater social cohesion or social control. None of the authors, however, explore celibacy as an embodied practice. This is a theoretical omission as well as a substantive one; what is missing is a more phenomenological approach to celibacy.

A strength of the volume is the inclusion of ethnographic, structural, historical, bioevolutionary, and legal perspectives. Qirko, for example, explores how the bioevolutionary concept of “manipulated altruism” (pp. 70-71) could explain how and why the Catholic Church manages to institutionalize celibacy among recruits. He also makes the inevitably controversial point, echoed in the essay by Paul Southgate, that the institutionalization of celibacy was shaped more by the centralization of church power and a desire to keep recruits from investing in relationships that could siphon resources away from the church than it was by theology. If true, this certainly provides a structural explanation for why priestly failures to remain abstinent have not been more aggressively prosecuted from within the church.

Two particularly compelling chapters use strong ethnography to make clear theoretical points. In one, Duke explores how the practice of ritual abstinence among the Mazatec in Mexico draws on beliefs about gender, reciprocity, social roles, and the body and allows the Mazatec to separate themselves symbolically from the “messiness and contingencies of everyday life” (p. 133). Duke’s sophisticated use of culture is noteworthy; rather than simply mapping out “the logic and internal consistencies” of abstinence as a cultural form, he includes “its contradictions and silences” (p. 134). In the other chapter, Aguilar discusses the local resonances and meanings of priestly ordination in Chile and Kenya. In both contexts, the ordination itself follows a standard liturgy, but in Kenya celibacy is viewed as a way of becoming more European, whereas in Chile, with its longer history of Catholicism, celibacy is seen as the fulfillment of a local tradition. Aguilar provides a compelling example of how useful it can be to explore local interpretations of an externally imposed global practice, and he highlights the importance of a comparative and historically grounded ethnographic approach.

The diverse theoretical approaches of the volume’s contributors, however, could have been more integrated; the more structural, sociological or historical chapters are ethnographically thin, and the more ethnographic chapters tend to lack a sense of social structure. Furthermore, the geographical and substantive range of the chapters misses some key issues. Three of the 13 chapters address celibacy in India, but none address extended postpartum abstinence in Francophone West Africa, which has been linked to the spread of HIV. Victor C. De Munck discusses the meanings of abstinence to college students in the northeastern United States but ignores social and political factors behind these meanings; given that social conservatives have been so successful in shaping sexual health policies requiring that all states receiving federal funds for sex education explicitly adopt a focus on abstinence, this is a significant omission. Negative examples might also have been usefully included in the book, focusing either on how individuals understand their own failures to be abstinent or on societies in which abstinence is not valued. Southgate, for example, writes that celibacy is “alien to Muslims, abnormal to Jews, ... impossible in Kikuyu ... and sinful among the Masai” (p. 249), suggesting that one could also learn about sexuality by comparing those who value abstinence and those who do not.

Finally, although the editors note that they explore the “political economy of female celibacy” (p. 19), nowhere is mention made of what is perhaps the most critical factor shaping long-term abstinence globally: labor migration. In central Mexico, for example, as around the world, widespread labor migration means that many married couples spend 11 out of 12 months a year apart from each other as involuntary (and sometimes noncompliant) celibates. Furthermore, exogamy among labor migrants means that many women who remain behind never marry; they are referred to as las quedadas, the leftover women. Exploring the experiences of these “leftover women” around the globe would have added a more explicitly political-economic approach to the focus on how the social organization of gender shapes celibacy.

In spite of its flaws, the book would be useful for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in sexuality or gender studies and, given the three articles on India, for area studies. Ultimately, the list of topics and theoretical perspectives enumerated in this review serves less to critique the volume than to suggest that celibacy is a potentially fertile area for further comparative research on sexuality; the omissions noted should be seen as challenges to other researchers from across anthropology to address the topic in a way that is widely descriptive, deeply ethnographic, and theoretically significant.