ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some matters which would have been of intimate and personal concern to the affected people. It explores Walter Roth's accounts of introcision, and relates them to an episode in which Roth was accused of taking photographs of Aborigines having sexual intercourse. The scandal of Roth's photographs of 'the peculiar method of copulation' did not concern an isolated indiscretion but was related to the very core of his anthropological speculations. Roth considered his photography as a scientific exercise designed to uphold his conjecture about introcision in the Boulia area, and in turn, about ritual and customs over the entire Australian continent. Roth's speculations participated in the genre of ethno-pornography, and were not simply a meditation on the genre. In various international human rights documents concerned with the problem of female genital cutting, the practice of 'introcision' of women is noted as current practice among Australian Aborigines.
