ABSTRACT
This book addresses two themes: "sex"—including sexual identities, erotic desires, carnal practices and affective intimacy. It influences the ethnographer's subject position during fieldwork as well as the ethnographer's interactions with strangers and friends at the field site. Thus, like fieldwork itself, "sex" is an integral part of anthropology's ethnographic project. Of particular interest are the various forms of intimacy that emerge from the intersubjective encounters. Merging the sexual with violations of secrecy acknowledges that there are political and social dimensions of sexuality within the ethnographic encounter. It is difficult to maintain the luxury of self-indulgence when efforts to understand the ethnographic significance of the sexual take an unexpected turn. It was pondered how a male sexual subject could enjoy homosex and still be erotically attracted to women. For them, enjoying multiple objects of desire was part of learning how to be a responsible adult male, and it was not their responsibility to translate this message to the seemingly naive outsider.
