Anthropology may be closer to history than to sociology when it comes to theorizing. There seems to be a greater willingness among anthropologists to accept as unproblematic the ability to make ontologically objective statements that reveal the truth about people and the culture in which they live. This is the central issue in this intriguing book. The epistemological foundations of the social and natural sciences are different. Making statements about culture is very different from making statements about the material world. Doing anthropology is always a case of one culture looking at and interpreting another. In this sense, according to Salazar, anthropology is always perspectionalist and intersubjective. The only way it can discover truth is through accepting that any rational scientific analysis of a lived-in culture in which people do not critically reflect about themselves or their culture will always be a second-level meaning structure laid on the original. Anthropologists need to be always conscious of this and also that they can only describe and reveal the original through an ongoing process of intersubjective engagement and surrender: a process of involvement with enough detachment to be able to do anthropology without going native.

In many respects, the problems with which Salazar is grappling are as old as the hills, but he brings a fresh, theoretically sophisticated and nuanced approach to them. Best of all, he grounds his theory in two good examples: Gilbert Herdt’s study of beliefs about semen in Sambia and sexual “repression” among the Irish. In particular, he argues that, when it comes to sexuality, beliefs and values are primary and not, as for many anthropologists, demographers, and sociologists, secondary or residual explanations.

The Irish continue to have sex appeal for anthropologists. Over the last hundred years, they have drawn the attention of a steady stream of scholars, particularly from the United States. Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball are probably the most renowned, but John C. Messenger, Alexander Humphries, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes have all left their mark. Although their arguments and evidence varied, they generally agreed that the Irish were quite repressed when it came to sex. This was evident in the rigorous way in which the Irish adapted the stem-family system (SFS), particularly after the famine (1845–48), and how they stuck with this system late into the 20th century. The result was a low level of marriage late in life, and sex was confined to marriage. The level of births outside marriage was very low, but the level of births inside marriage was very high. The Catholic Church became the means to implement the SFS, and the result was that the Irish developed a deeply devout, sexually repressive Catholic culture. The standard structural-functional (S-F) explanation was that this culture developed as a response to the social and economic conditions that emerged after the famine. Salazar sets out to pull this argument to pieces.

He argues that the S-F explanation does not account for why the Irish had so few births outside marriage and so many births within marriage. Once marriage was controlled and, with it, lineage, property rights, and an increase in the standard of living, there was no need for bachelors and spinsters not to have sex and for married people not to use contraceptives. The reason both did not was not structural-functional, but cultural. They were devoted to being Catholic. They lived in a culture with an idiosyncratic logic when it came to sex. But instead of anthropologists recognizing and accepting this, they read Catholic Irish beliefs and practices as repressed sexuality.

There are residual issues that Salazar might have dealt with in more depth. If, as he accepts, power and culture are interlinked, the question is why the Irish became so devoted to being Catholic. Was this devotion linked to other cultural interests, such as differentiating themselves from the Protestant English, their colonial masters? And even if being a good Catholic, not having sex outside marriage, and having large families constituted more of a cultural act, was it linked to attaining honor and respect? But then the question is to what extent can the pursuit of symbolic and cultural capital be sometimes detrimental rather than advantageous to attaining economic capital—that is, in Ireland, improving the standard of living. If it was not linked to more material interests, was this religious interest completely divorced from the fulfillment of other, particularly, material interests? I can accept that, as an anthropologist, Salazar is not interested in the causes of cultural patterns. Nevertheless, the question remains why have the cultural beliefs and values of the Irish changed so dramatically in recent decades? Why are the Irish becoming less devoted to being Catholic and, in terms of their sexual attitudes and behavior, more like the rest of the West?

This is an important, challenging, well-written book that manages to open up a proverbial can of theoretical and Irish worms and to examine them carefully without letting them wriggle away.
[notes, references, index.]