The forgotten passion sexuality and anthropology in the ages of Victoria and Bronislaw

British anthropology's mid-Victorian beginnings occurred amid widespread public interest in sexuality, domesticity, and the origins of the family. Scholarship on those topics, along with published traveller's tales and colonial expeditionary reports, contributed to the “sublimation of sensuality” that was characteristic of the era. Counter cultural movements of the fin de siècle ended the mid-century sexual repressions and sublimations. With the important exception of Polish-born Bronislaw Malinowski, however, British anthropologists in the ensuing generation were not systematic students of sexuality. By 1930, those of the “Rivers School,” led by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, embraced a theoretical discourse that denied phenomenal sex as an object of study, thus creating intellectual avoidances and sublimations analogous to those of mid Victorianism.