Sex and Spirit: The Prehistoric Sexuality Reader

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Introduction to the Project

Scholarly research focused on prehistoric sexuality became a popular topic during the 2000’s and the 2010’s, after the publication of several books presenting antagonistic interpretations of prehistoric data. Unfortunately, the pertinence of the research was eclipsed by the mainstream debate focused on the nature of monogamy among human beings, and all the rest of relevant inquiry dimensions became hastily overlooked. Yet, research on prehistoric sexuality still has a lot to reveal today about human vital issues as sexual orientation, gender expression, decentered subjectivities or subjectivity without identity, the interrelations between the body and the external world, intimate relationships, eroticism, ecstasy, and particularly, non-religious forms of spirituality.

The term ‘prehistoric’ not only makes reference to pre-agricultural and pre-literate societies, but also to the pre-governmental types of communities developed before chiefdoms and political states were established. Prehistoric societies data interpretation allows to describe and to analyze the history of human interrelationships and human interactions with nature long before governments, patriarchy and religion became hegemonic. Sexuality is not the exception: even when there was not a conscious and assumed experience of sexuality, all the fundamental human sexual affairs—including all its intrinsic basic power relationships—are already present in the earliest prehistoric cultures and in its millenary vestiges, just without the determining codes and values imposed by governments, religious authorities and patriarchal families. These conditions constitute a pivotal difference, worthy of being explored.

Considering the radically opposite possibilities of interpretation of prehistoric data, it might be useful to produce a compilation of texts expressing all the diversity of perspectives on prehistoric sexuality, to give an opportunity to the readers to compare their hypothesis and ideas, and then draw their own conclusions. The intent is to collect relevant case studies’ analysis of data as well as the interpretations of the experts on the matter, as anthropologists, biologists, sexologists, primatologists, evolutionary psychologists and philosophers, among others, through selected texts rigorously supported on updated archaeological evidence. A Prehistoric Sexuality Reader can be helpful today as an all-encompassing collection or a textbook designed by scholars but targeted to students and general audiences interested in expanding and deepening their knowledge about the history and the potencies of human sexuality, and its intersections with the parallel development of human spirituality.  


Objective        

The objective of the Sex and Spirit: The Prehistoric Sexuality Reader project is to produce an updated and comprehensive compilation of scholarly articles, monographs, and fragments or chapters of other books focused on prehistoric sexuality, to be published as an introductory collection or a textbook.

Purpose                      

The purpose of the project is to use the outcomes of the interdisciplinary book as a source of reviewed, verified and tested material for transdisciplinary activities designed for general audiences, going from uploading videos focused on prehistoric sexuality facts or podcasts of prehistoric sexuality overviews to streaming virtual conferences centered on specific prehistoric sexuality case studies, as strategies to generate knowledge of human history and human beings’ life possibilities among everyday people all around the globe.

Pertinence

Interdisciplinary research on prehistoric sexuality provides globalized communities of relevant data about human sexuality lived in a period of history significantly different than the last five thousand years of human history. Some of the hegemonic mega-narratives determining human societies in the past millenniums, like patriarchy, religion and race supremacy are losing their momentum in the 21st century, opening space for new human values, habits and practices. It is a fact that prehistoric societies constitute the richest evidence of human life actually lived outside of those declining mega-narratives. In this sense, the social relevance and the pertinence of this project lies in its potential use as a source of knowledge, and the use of the period of history researched as an historical reference for the design of new sexuality and society models, and moreover, the exploration of other kind of life’s possibilities for present-day, post-pandemic communities around the globe.

Call to Action                         

We invite scholars and researchers particularly interested or academically specialized in the study of prehistoric sexuality to join this project, share their research, receive multidisciplinary feedback, and engage in constructive forms of networking and teleworking between experts on the field. The central objective is to compile together a comprehensive collection of interdisciplinary prehistoric sexuality research outcomes and interpretation of data consistent enough to become a textbook, and from that primary output, create audio-visual inputs and virtual events directed to general audiences as the final outputs directed to general audiences. Among others explorers of the field, we are inviting:   


· Ancestral Teachings Explorers

· Anthropologists

· Archaeologists

· Biologists

· Evolutionary Psychologists

· Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies Scholars

· Historians

· Non-Fiction Writers

· Philosophers

· Primatologists

· Religious Studies Scholars

· Sexologists

Call for Papers

The project is seeking submissions of unpublished articles and unpublished research outputs coming from any discipline exploring any sexuality dimension founded in Paleolithic communities and early Neolithic societies, before 5.000 BCE. 

We are particularly interested in reviewing essays, scholarly articles and monographs exploring the intersections between sexuality and spirituality founded among prehistoric communities from diverse regions of the planet.

Submissions will be accepted all along 2021.


Submit your paper to the S&SRN email here: contact@sexualityandspirituality.org


If your paper is approved by the project members we will get in contact with you to share the particular guidelines to follow.

The proper format and the style guide for the eventual publication of the text will be supplied, and a peer-reviewer will be assigned to check the methodologies and the supporting data presented in your work, and finally decide if the manuscript meets the requirements of the publication.  

Key Questions            

· How were sexual attraction, sexual preference and sexual orientation experienced in prehistoric times?

· How were gender-related embodiments lived before the concept of gender was formed?

· Is there evidence that femininity and masculinity were perceived in prehistoric cultures?

· How was subjectivity shaped before identity became a value?

· How was the human life-cycle viewed within prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities?

· What kind of love and intimate relationships were experienced before the binary system of monogamy and promiscuity was established?

· How was sex and reproduction linked to spiritual inquiries as death, life renewal, or universe creation?

· Why and how sexual activity was associated with spiritual experiences in prehistoric cultures?

· How was possible for eroticism to develop during prehistory?

· What is the social function of eroticism in prehistoric times?

· Why and how was sexual activity related to power, strength, health, vigor, or fertility?

· How human sexuality was associated with animal sexuality and non-human forms of life?

· How was sex connected to an ecstatic, sublime or mystical embodiment in prehistoric cultures?

· Which was the social relevance of ecstasy in prehistoric societies?

· Why and how was sex associated with an experience of the ‘divine’ in a time when the status of the ‘sacred’ was still not instituted?

· How were the interactions between nature and culture in prehistoric times?

· What can be learned today from prehistoric societies’ views, values, habits, practices, modes of living and forms of social organization?

· What can be learned today from prehistoric societies’ non-religious forms of spirituality?

Keywords

Animality, animism, divinity, ecstasy, egalitarian, eroticism, fecundity, fertility, gender expression, history of sexuality, hunter-gatherer, immanence, intimate relationships, life-cycle, life renewal, monogamy, paleolithic, prehistory, promiscuity, sexual attraction, sexual instinct, sexual orientation, sexual reproduction, shamanism, spiritual but not religious, tribes.

                                                                       LINKS

Publications

References for scholars and annotated bibliography for NGO’s and practitioners.

Resources

Links for scholars, communities, NGO’s, and practitioners.