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Dirt After Dark: Sir Richard Francis Burton and the Sotadic Zone

In what may be our horniest episode to date, Amber brings Anna along for a journey through the Sotadic Zone, a deep cut of a theory pulled from the Terminal Essay of Burton's translation of The Thousand and One Nights. Come for the glimpses into early anthropological thinking, stay for the thousand and one euphemisms for anal sex! 

Note that there will is brief reference to child sexual abuse, and very 19th century British homophobic and transphobic ideas throughout the passages from Burton, but mostly this is a fun one! 

To learn more:

The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton, The Story of Her Life (Internet Archive)

A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night (Burtoniana) 

When classicists need to speak up: antiquity and present day pedophilia - pederasty (Aeternitas antiquitatis: proceedings of the symposium held in Skopje, August 28, as part of the 2009 Annual Conference of Euroclassica, via Academia.edu) - CN extensive discussion of child sexual abuse in this one

Twitter thread from user @jaymichelle87 that begins: "A number of publications by both anthropologists and psychologists have, in collaboration with explicit child sexual abuse apologists, co-assembled an apparatus of subjectification with the explicit purpose of lowering both individual and social resistance to CSA." - CN extensive discussion of child sexual abuse)

Sir Richard Burton's Pederasty Essay: An Introduction (John Lauritsen - Pagan Press)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.