Burton, Richard F, Sir (University of Glasgow)

The Sotadic Zone: Social and Sexual Relations of the Mohammedan Empire Burton, Richard F, Sir (University of Glasgow)

Burton's scandalous, opinionated, amusing foray into a topography that he names the Sotadic Zone. It includes both shores of the Mediterranean, embraces Asia Minor, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir, Indo-China, China, Japan, the South Sea Islands, and much of the New World at the time of its discovery. He derived "Sotadic" from the name of the Greek poet Sotades, playfully offering "Satodism" as an esoteric substitute for "sexual inversion." He worked before there was a discipline called anthropology. But in this comparative essay he proposed a theory of same sex activity, supposedly more prevalent in areas of what he termed the Sotadic Zone, comprising many places where Burton himself traveled and lived. He defined these as primarily tropical, but areas such as Alaska were included, all "non Western." Many later writers would refer to his ideas and research, for example, John Addington Symonds in Problem in Greek Ethics.