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The concept of humans as either “heterosexual” or “homosexual” is a culturally and historically specific invention that is increasingly being challenged in the United States and elsewhere. Similarly, human sexuality, rather than being simply natural is one of the most culturally significant, shaped, regulated, and symbolic of all human capacities. We struggle with the idea that the division of humans into two and only two categories, “male” and “female,” is not univer-sal, that “male” and “female” are cultural concepts that take different forms and have different meanings cross-culturally. We readily accept that clothing, language, and music are cultural-invented, created, and alterable-but often find it difficult to accept that gender and sexuality are not nat-ural but deeply embedded in and shaped by culture. Similarly, many of us live in culturally diverse settings and experience how varied human cultural inventions can be.

Living in the twenty-first century, we have witnessed how rapidly and dramatically culture can change, from ways of communicating to the emergence of same-sex marriage. INTRODUCTION: SEX AND GENDER ACCORDING TO ANTHROPOLOGISTSĪnthropologists are fond of pointing out that much of what we take for granted as “natural” in our lives is actually cultural-it is not grounded in the natural world or in biol-ogy but invented by humans.2 Because culture is invented, it takes different forms in different places and changes over time in those places.