What’s So Special About Private Parts? How Anthropology Questions the Public–Private Dichotomy

Following the anthropological model, this chapter examines the concept of privacy from a cross-cultural perspective, showing how its meaning and experience varies enormously. Privacy is not an objective, consistent quality of an activity or situation, because privacy is always rooted in the specific socio-economic structures of each society. It is not a case of societies and groups being more private than others, but having contrasting views on what is private. The category of private is not independent, but always exists in comparison to what is public. Drawing on examples from western and middle eastern societies, this chapter illustrates how that ideological pair is in turn linked to other ideological pairs, such as male/female and modern/traditional. More than simply arguing that differing understandings of privacy are due to cultural relativism, this chapter shows that even within a society, shifting contexts drive categorization. Within a culture, any given setting may manifest as either private or public. When people define it as one or the other, they highlight elements of that setting, asserting that those are the most relevant.