Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Géza Róheim’s mingling of psychoanalysis and ethnography contributed to the naturalization of Eastern Europe as a space of sexual Otherness to the Modern West. It argues that these scientificized assumptions continue to inform current reactions to postsocialist homophobia.

Paper long abstract:

A vast body of research has, following Foucault, shown the scientific study of sexuality to be central to the construction of Modernity and its Others. Similarly, much historical work has acknowledged the critical role of the Eastern European Other in imagining a Modern European West. Yet while ethnographic representations of sexuality were important in the "invention" of Eastern Europe, there has been surprisingly little scholarly concern with how such hierarchical symbolic and political relationships were not only constructed but reinforced through the historical intersections of ethnographic and sexual scientific practice - despite recent attention to an increasingly visible "neo-Orientalism" within Europe. This paper will examine the work of Hungarian folklorist, ethnographer, and psychoanalyst Géza Róheim (1891-1953). Reflecting larger patterns of conjunction, Róheim's scholarship brought together Eastern European folklore, the ethnography of indigenous peoples, and psychoanalytic principles, joining evolutionist understandings of culture to theories of universal psychic development in order to read Eastern Europe as a site of psycho-sexual and civilizational immaturity. Róheim's work, I argue, thus served to map the scientific study of sexuality onto the perverse geographies of ethnographic orientalism, strengthening both, and naturalizing Eastern Europe and its inhabitants as sexual Others of Modernity. Mappings such as these, I suggest, continue to inform current interpretations of postsocialist homophobia, which revive tropes of Eastern European "primitiveness" and "barbarity," in ways that also reinstantiate an imagined West as an idealized space of sexual freedom, masking its persistent inequalities, and legitimating its renewed efforts to discipline the East.