What is a Sexual Act?

Abstract

The author analyses the meanings that sexual intercourses between sexes take for the Baruya, a population of inner New Guinea. There are two kinds of intercourses, homosexual before marriage, heterosexual after. The relation between these two kinds of sexualities refers to a set of representations, values, symbols and social practices which are to show the social and cosmic superiority of masculine over feminine, of man over woman and thus, in body practices, the superiority of one sex over the other. The author shows that imaginary representations of the role of body substances such as sperm, menstrual blood, milk, are a base to the superiority of men and inferiority of women: these representations participate in the constitution of individual identity and on the myths of the origin of cosmic and social order which enhance the primacy of woman on man. The author shows that these datas don't presuppose in any way the predominance of the symbolic on the imaginary, but rather on the contrary.