Berdache

From Homolexis Glossary

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, travelers and anthropologists have employed the term berdache to denote a type of cross-dressing male frequently found maong the Amerindians of North America. The berdache often assumed the full female role by entering into marriage with a brave. Sometimes he was endowed with priestly or magical powers recalling those of the shamans of Northeastern Asia, the region whence the American Indians came. The Jesuit Joseph François Lafitau, who first analyzed the concept in 1724, though without using the word in its present restricted sense. Lafitau pointed out that one must be careful not to assume from the evidence of cross-dressing alone that homosexual behavior is necessarily present, as was so frequently done by the outraged Spanish conquistadores.

The origins of the term itself, properly bardache or bardashe (with an a in the first syllable), are complex. It began with the Persian bardağ, a young slave, in which sense it was borrowed by vulgar Arabic, making its way therefrom to Mediterranean Christian countries. In Renaissance Italian, with its forms bardassa and bardascia, the sexual sense of catamite became fixed. From Italian (with perhaps some collateral influence from Spanish bardaxe) it migrated into French in the middle of the sixteenth century in the form bardache (though Rabelais uses the variant bredache). In French texts the term bardache was often contrasted with the older bougre, as the pathic (or receptor) vs. the agent (or penetrator). The French term is the source of the older English bardache, or bardashe, a catamite. It is not certain how the currently dominant form berdache arose, but, but it is useful to retain the –e- form to distinguish it from bardache with the older meaning of catamite. In proto-Polynesian the equivalent of the berdache was the mahu, a term given to homosexuals in Hawaii and Tahiti today.

Anthropological research has documented male berdaches in some 155 tribes. In about a third of these groups, a formal status also existed for females who undertook a man’s lifestyle, becoming hunters, warriors, and chiefs. They were sometimes characterized with the same term for male berdaches and sometimes with a distinct term—making them, in effect, a fourth gender. This conceptual scheme employs “third gender” to designate male berdaches and sometimes male and female berdaches, reserving “fourth gender” for female berdaches.

Each tribe had its own terms for these roles, such as boté in Crow, nádleehí in Navajo, winkte in Lakota, and alyha: and hwame: in Mohave. Because so many native North American cultures were disrupted (or had disappeared) before they could be studied by anthropologists, there is no way of assessing the absolute frequency of these roles.

Washington Matthews first used the term berdache in an anthropological publication in 1877. In describing Hidatsa miáti he wrote, “[s]uch are called by the French Canadians ‘berdaches.’” The next anthropological use occurred in J. Owen Dorsey’s 1890 study of Siouan cults. Like Matthews, he characterized “berdache” as a French Canadian frontier term. Following Alfred Kroeber’s adoption of the word in his 1902 ethnography of the Arapaho, it became part of standard anthropological terminology.

In recent years, efforts have been made to replace berdache with “two-spirit.” In 1993, a group of anthropologists and natives issued guidelines that formalized these preferences. “Berdache,” they argued, is a term “that has its origins in Western thought and languages.” Scholars were urged to discard it, inserting “[sic]” following its appearance in quoted texts. In its place they were encouraged to use tribally specific terms for multiple genders or the term “two-spirit.” This attempt at rebranding recalls the shifts from homosexual to gay to queer to GLBT.

As the noted scholar Will Roscoe observed, “[u]nfortunately, these guidelines create as many problems as they solve, beginning with a mischaracterization of the history and meaning of the word ‘berdache.’ As a Persian term, its origins are Eastern not Western. Nor is it a derogatory term, except to the extent that all terms for nonmarital sexuality in European societies carried a measure of condemnation. It was rarely used with the force of ‘faggot,’ but more often as a euphemism with the sense of ‘lover’ or ‘boyfriend.’ Its history, in this regard, is akin to that of ‘gay,’ ‘black,’ and ‘Chicano’—terms that also lost negative connotations over time.”