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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

In so much of the conversation about privacy, people take the value and nature of privacy for granted. Of course, everyone wants privacy. Of course, privacy is fundamental to a well-functioning and just society. Indeed, the meaning of privacy appears so obvious that there often seems little need to define it. It is a simple term that we all use and understand. And yet, as is often the case with self-evident terms, the concept is trickier than it appears. The general definitions do not hold up terribly well. The standard dictionary definitions tend to emphasize being alone, being free from observation, or keeping personal information confidential. That sounds reasonable on its face, but upon reflection, there are far too many exceptions. One can certainly carve out a private moment even in a crowded or observed setting. Defining privacy in terms of personal information is still less useful, as it rests on a tautology. What constitutes personal information is that which we desire to keep private. Further complicating any definition is the fact that conceptions of privacy vary enormously from group to group, person to person, or even setting to setting.

The point here is not to undermine the idea of privacy so much as to demonstrate that the concept exists within social contexts rather than on an objective scale. Privacy is a shifting—not fixed—attribute. Under the right conditions, the public metamorphoses into the private and the private translates into the public. Beyond this, our very experience of privacy is itself cultural, and as such, privacy inhabits the socio-economic structure of our society. While some of the chapters in this book celebrate the liberatory power of privacy, privacy can also play a role in the oppression of marginalized groups. The anthropological examinations of privacy draw on the experiences of various groups of people in other times and places to question assumptions about the presumed nature, value, and ubiquity of privacy.

Public/Private Dichotomies of the Human Body

The starting point for this discussion must be the lack of any inherent quality of privateness found in any act or object. To lead with the cliched example, in the contemporary US, one’s body is a symbol of privacy. To intrude upon someone when they were clad only in their underwear would be a gross violation of their privacy, yet at beaches and pools that standard disappears. One can go further, and discuss World Naked Bike Ride Day, in which hundreds of naked cyclists ride en masse through the streets of major cities like London (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

“World Naked Bike Ride” Protestors Piccadilly Circus, London Athanasios Papadopoulos, Photographer Courtesy of Alamy

Here, the private transmutes into the public. The body is not inherently private, but the social and individual contexts make it so…except when they make it more public. Even this simplifies the issue, because it assumes that with regard to privacy, all bodies are the same. In reality, age, sex, race, size, and other factors all play a role in society’s view of whether a body should be made public or kept private. One could go further still along the contemporary scale of privacy and discuss bodily elimination. So privatized are urination and defecation that modern houses have specific, lockable rooms for these activities, yet here too, this standard can be flipped. Long troughs for men’s urination exist in a variety of large institutions and military barracks at various times have had communal toilets grouped together without any partitions (Hartzer et al., 2014).

To demonstrate that privacy is not an inherent objective quality is not to question its importance or power, but to begin to explore how societies create and use the idea of privacy. The fact that privacy is so malleable is part of its power. It can be a force of liberation and a force of oppression. To understand these dynamics, it is necessary to understand how the concept operates, or rather, how the private and public function. Privacy does not exist by itself; it is always in a comparative dichotomy with the concept of public. We use this distinction to categorize information, activities, and space itself. We cannot discuss privacy by itself, as the very nature of what is considered private depends upon a contrast with what is deemed public.

Beyond this malleable nature of privacy within a society, the underlying principles that guide the distinction between private and public are culturally determined. Even a superficial experience with cultures different from one's own yields different perspectives on privacy. Travel guides thrive on discussing these different expectations. Visitors are told that the French don’t like questions about their lives (Thyebaut, 2018), that taking photos of women in Jordan is an invasion of privacy (Rough Guide), and that Americans “appreciate their privacy, especially when it comes to matters of money” (Penn State Harrisburg) and “can be very protective of their privacy and safety” (immihelp). But while this relativization is important, its explanatory power is limited. To simply say that the sense of privacy is determined by culture is to put it into a black box and avoids looking at the specific history of privacy within a community, the socio-economic forces that played a role in its development, and its intersection with other ideological dichotomies in the community.

Public/Private Dichotomies of Spaces

For example, the current particular character of the distinction between (private) home and (public) work in the US depends on the move from an agrarian society in which production was part of the home and both men and women were regarded as instrumental to economic production, to the physical separation of homes from wage earning workplaces and the association of men with work and women with home. This shift is itself linked to the rise of the suburbs and the creation of the home as a female space, a sanctuary of nature and serenity protected and buffered by a garden and a white picket fence. The workplace, by contrast, becomes masculine space, a constructed realm of rationality and competition. Clearly the conceptions of privacy stack with conceptions of gender, both of which are part of structural economic changes. Unsurprisingly, changes to understandings of gender roles have affected perceptions of privacy. The feminist slogan that “the personal is political” is based on the idea of making what had been considered private a subject of public debate. Domestic abuse had long been ignored because it was considered private, but increasing public outcry shifted that perspective (Kelly, 2003).

What these political struggles also illustrate is that while definitions of private versus public are socially determined, they are not universal within a society. Certainly, there is individual variation, but more importantly for social change, distinct groups within a society have different perspectives, which are in turn linked to their position within that society. The broad definitions of privacy support certain communities and hurt others. The suburban American dream of the house with a white picket fence is not just connected to gender, but also to class and race. The rise of the suburbs in the US was closely linked to the white flight of middle-class residents fleeing the cities (Jackson, 1987). The sanctuary and refuge of the suburban home was white and middle class, presuming the economic resources for a stay-at-home mother. We may experience private and public realms viscerally, but those emotions are rooted in the structures of our society.

Public/Private Dichotomies of Information

At the risk of over simplifying, in the US, the distinction between public and private is based on the individual. The connection is so self-evident that the linkage appears inevitable, even natural. As this chapter will go on to illustrate, this naturalness is an illusion. Societies can create separate realms of private and public that focus on units other than the individual. If that is the case, then one must ask what drives the US prioritization of the individual in privacy. It was not ever thus. One of the most cherished private acts, the individual’s right to cast a secret ballot, is of recent origin. Early attempts to move toward privacy in voting were condemned by an old guard who proclaimed that they would “make any nation a nation of scoundrels” (Lepore, 2012, p. 247). Not coincidentally the move to secret ballots grew in the mid-nineteenth century as the population expanded and industrial and economic development leapt forward. The values of the emerging populist democracy matched those of the emerging economy, privileging the sanctity of individual choice free from community interference. The free market depends on individual autonomy and selection as much as broad-based democracy does. One cannot separate US prioritization of free individual choice from the economic or political system. The specific forms that privacy takes are certainly cultural, but not random or arbitrary. They are connected to larger ideological and material forces.

Public/Private Dichotomies Provide Meaning to Symbolic Acts

Because the categories of private and public are flexible, they can be a powerful tool for constructing and defining relationships or giving weight to a symbolic act. To return to the example of bodily elimination, grouping toilets together without dividers in a military barracks is not merely about efficiency. By making that most private act (in the contemporary US) shared with others, it breaks down the boundaries with those others. As much as the private act becomes public, so too does the public group of individuals become private. It creates a bond among them. As to the other example, the symbolic power of World Naked Bike Ride Day stemmed directly from the shock of exposing the private body in the public space. The ideological and political focus of the event was on reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, not something that is inherently linked to public nudity. The disruptive power of the mass violation of social privacy norms becomes linked to the massive changes needed for environmental protection. As with the previous example, this group activity becomes simultaneously public and private. Because it is a large group of people doing something together (and in this case, on public streets) it is public. However, for those viewing this from afar, it is still the inappropriate display of the private in a public setting. This ability for an act to be definable as both public and private is an underlying component of the dichotomy.

Private/Public Dichotomies: An Example from Egypt

In trying to understand privacy, however, one must examine the idea in other cultures. Because any individual’s experience of privacy is quite visceral, it is easy to presume that it is natural and inherent. Looking at other cultural practices can shatter that sense of universality. It can also provide examples that better help individuals understand their own experiences through the various contrasts and similarities they find when engaging with the practices of people of different places and times. While it can be tempting to hop from one exotic example to another, any attempt to understand the structures of privacy must be rooted in their specific contexts. The parts can only be understood in relation to other parts.

The extended example below is taken from Farha Ghannam’s (2002, 2013) ongoing research in a working-class neighborhood in Cairo, al-Zawiya al-Hamra. Its center is a series of large apartment blocks built in the late twentieth century as part of a modernization scheme by then President Anwar Sadat. The negotiation over private and public space and its shifting definition has been an ongoing theme for residents as they adapted to their new surroundings. Figure 3.2 shows an apartment complex in Cairo parallel to the one et al.-Zawiya.

Fig. 3.2

Apartment block, Cairo, Egypt Petr Svarc, Photographer Courtesy of Alamy

On the face of it, life in al-Zawiya has a clear and strongly enforced distinction between private and public and this pattern would seem to match patterns in the US. Apartments are private and the streets are public, with that private domestic space coded as female and the streets and institutions beyond coded as male. There are even explicit markers of this status. Women must wear hijab, covering their hair, when they go out into those public spaces and must behave in a very constrained fashion. In the domestic spaces, however, there is far more freedom of behavior and clothing.

And yet, on a closer look, this firm binary distinction becomes shifting and unstable, defying easy expectations. The family unit drives the categorization of space and the activities housed there. All the members of a family (mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins) are judged by the actions of any member, giving all family members both a license and obligation to intervene and participate in the lives of other family members. This intrusion includes economic resources (money and labor), social resources (matchmaking, conflict resolution, networking), and moral resources (correcting poor behavior and extolling good behavior). It is effectively impossible for any given individual, male or female, to get married and become a functioning adult member of society without the active support of all their family. While individual actions matter a great deal, any individual will always be judged, for better or worse, by the reputation of their family in addition to their own actions and every individual will require the aid of their family.

This strong focus on family plays out in constructions of privacy, or more specifically, who is or is not included in private space and what are the boundaries between public and private realms. The domesticity of the home is the most private space, and yet to a US eye, there is extremely little privacy. Children of all ages may enter their parents’ bedroom without knocking, unless of course, they are already there, as children typically sleep with their parents. The front door to the apartment is generally kept open, as to close it is an aggressively rude act to one’s neighbors. When relations are good, it is common for neighbors to casually walk into the main room of each other’s apartments unannounced. Indeed, with the constant possibility of visitors, whether next-door neighbors or more removed guests, women and men may observe the modest standards of dress when in their own main room.

To describe the home as inherently private clearly does not work, as it takes on both public and private qualities. This is not merely a question about the nature of space, but the relations of people. The realm of the private includes family and the realm of family has flexibility itself and can include close community members. If privacy centers around the individual in the US, in this community, the family is at the center. Anyone who must spend an extended period by themselves is to be pitied, and both men and women live with their parents until they move into a home with their spouse. The family is not simply an economic unit, but also an emotional one, and that status is woven into the standards of privacy in the home.

If the category of the home as private space is more complicated than it might first appear, so too is the category of the street as a public space. Buildings orient toward a central square, an open space that would seem to be the epitome of public, and yet the social norms regarding it and the immediately adjacent streets are more nuanced. Society generally frowns upon married women working outside the home, but many women may set up small stalls in these exterior spaces, selling small dry goods, prepared foods, and candies (Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3

Scarfed woman selling sweets at the edge of the street, Egypt, Maadi, Cairo Blickwinkel, Photographer Courtesy of Alamy

The rules of decorum for young women in public are quite strict, with modesty always demanded. But at the wedding celebrations held in these courtyards (there is no other space large enough to accommodate these big events), the norms are quite different. Young women must display their beauty in their clothing, makeup, and dancing. This seemingly public space can lose its association with masculine formal restraint. Because long work hours and commuting times to work keep men out of the home for long stretches, women interact with the local public institutions, such as the school and the police. The use of the central square for a wedding, particularly getting the electricity needed for all the lights, generally violates the formal regulations, and it is the women who build the relations with the local authorities and provide the small bribes to get them to look the other way. The police are a quintessential public masculine institution, but the relationships with individuals who are responsible for specific decisions could be seen as more private. Categorization is not merely unclear, it is shifting.

In short, just as the seemingly private nature of the home is much more complicated, so too is the public nature of the street. The flips and ambiguities are not arbitrary but stem from underlying social and economic structures. The central square simultaneously exists as a public space or an extension of the familial private space. A wedding celebration is a family event, regardless of its location, and therefore at least semi-private. The community itself takes on a nebulous quality. In this tightly packed urban environment where residents may have originally come from different neighborhoods, no one trusts all their neighbors, but at the same time, it is a community and is distinct from the more alien world beyond the boundaries of the neighborhood. Community can take on aspects of family, in which members support each other. This responsibility is most apparent in the norms for dealing with domestic conflicts. If a community member hears a fight or a similar disturbance in a neighbor’s home, they should intervene. Not only is intervention encouraged, but lack of getting involved is censured. A family will roundly condemn an individual who hears them fighting but does nothing. People are expected to be in each other’s affairs.

If the descriptions above show how the categorization of private and public can flip depending on context, the distinctions between public and private standards and behavior remain strong. While the specific nature of the distinctions and contexts may be different from western perspectives, the basic underlying structure is similar. It would be easy to assume then, that the emotional experiences and desires associated with the private and public would also be similar.

Privacy Cross-Culturally: The Notion of Solitude

In the US, there is a strong belief in the individual’s emotional need for privacy, that is, time spent alone. Indeed, it becomes hard to disentangle concepts of “private” and “privacy.” In the working-class Cairene example, however, there is no such conflation. There is no cultural idea of time spent alone as desirable or positive. On the contrary, being alone is actively seen as unpleasant and even threatening. No one speaks of a desire to be alone and one who experiences it is to be pitied. This anxiety about solitude plays out in multiple forms in daily life, whether it be in organization of living space, or what is the appropriate and comfortable distance for standing next to someone. In my own research with salesmen at tourist oriented stalls in the medina of Tunis, the salesmen worked hard to understand the different perspectives on bodily separation among their customers (Hawkins, 2010). Their income depended on making customers feel comfortable, and they quickly learned that Americans preferred a much wider sphere of bodily separation than did Tunisians, with various European nationalities on a continuum between them. What could be seen as an act of general and polite friendliness in one culture could be seen as invasive and threatening in another. (Popular US culture branded those who violated these norms as “close talkers” and the internet is replete with guidance on how to deal them).

Using generalizations about US culture and privacy is at least partially misleading, given the incredible diversity within the country. The point is not so much to typify US culture (or Arab culture, for that matter) as to illustrate again that while an individual’s emotional experiences may feel so deeply rooted as to be inherent in the experiences themselves, this sense is often misleading. As a discipline anthropology holds that what we take to be natural and universal may well not be, and this is certainly the case for a desire for privacy. An underlying goal of anthropology is to show how behaviors and patterns that may seem exotic or foreign can be experienced as “normal” and common sensical while contrastingly revealing how “natural” behaviors are contingent and constructed. The experience of needing privacy can feel so central and powerful that it seems as if it must be inherent, almost biological. When popular culture in the US recognizes different experiences of privacy, it attributes them to innate characteristics of the individual. Being an introvert or extrovert is part of one’s identity. Self-help books and personality quizzes present these as essential realities that vary from person to person in a quasi-genetic manner. Focusing on differences as arising within each individual obscures the role of larger socio-cultural forces that foster different relations to the experiences and expectations of privacy.

Weaving Dichotomies Together

Given an essentializing dichotomy that portrays cultural categories as natural, it is unsurprising that much of the critiques of the assumed nature of private and public came from feminist scholars who were questioning essentialized visions of gender (Gavison, 2017; Landes, 2003; Pateman, 1989). That the dichotomous pair of public and private mapped so neatly onto the matching pair of male and female is no coincidence. Critics demonstrated the ideological nature of the construction of these categories and how they obscured understandings of cultural practices. Societal definitions of private and public affected how members of that society perceived activities within those areas. Because women were presumptively absent from public spaces, for example, the multiple instances of women who were present in these spaces were ignored or erased. To shift from Egypt to Lebanon, Joseph describes working-class women in Beirut forming complex visiting networks that established community norms, brokered access to social services and employment, and created a sense of community for men and women (1983). Such work would seem to be public, yet policy makers (and academics) have typically not seen them as such. The linked ideological pairs of gender and public/private supported each other, making them feel more natural. This sense of obviousness and ubiquity obscured the existence of individuals and groups that did not “fit,” the so-called normal order. Erasing deviations from the norm masked the real complexity of these categories and behavioral patterns.

If the categories of public and private are shifting and multifaceted, gender is famously equally complex, affected by multiple variables such as class, education, race, age, and the position of the body in space. Linking these pairs not only naturalizes them by drawing on seemingly inherent qualities, but linkage also homogenizes them, smoothing the complexity away. This means not only ignoring the presence of people in places where they theoretically should not be, but also activities that are not in keeping with the presumed nature of the sphere. The home is the epitome of the private space, separate from the world of work, and yet it is also a workplace for nannies and cleaning services. The division of private and public depends upon a timeless vision of society which ignores the specific history of contemporary practices. Hughes describes how an economic move in twentieth-century Jordan from subsistence agriculture to wage labor pulled men out of the “household economics” while increasingly limiting women to a domestic sphere that was not connected to economic production (2021, p. 42). Prior to the shift, there was no meaningful distinction between home and work. However, after the shift, society viewed this new distinction as not only one of long standing, but as essentially traditional.

Traditional/Modern Dichotomies

The invocation of “tradition” in this instance is not incidental, as its binary relationship with “modernity” also maps onto the public/private, male/female dichotomies. Constructing the public realm as one of rationality, economic production, and efficiency links it to conceptions of modernity and masculinity. Conversely, the private world’s emphasis on emotions and nurturing with no regard for efficiency places it in opposition to modernity and in the realm of the feminine and traditional. As one starts clustering these spheres, the moral judgments of, and the presumed value systems within, them become more apparent. To label a sphere as private, feminine, and traditional is not an act of neutral description. It may be viewed positively or negatively, but it is always a moral evaluation. Thus, modernizing reform efforts place a particular emphasis on women, who are understood to be the most traditional, the most restricted to the private realm, and the most in need of reform. This focus is a mainstay of western development projects (Abu‐Lughod, 2002), but is in no way limited to them. Deeb describes Hizbullah activists in Lebanon who wanted to modernize Shi’ia Islam and lead it away from tradition and ignorance. The activists placed particular importance on the role of women who were seen as the most traditional and the most backward, trapped in the private domestic world, “Especially for women, making piety visible has become an imperative, as public piety has become part of the normative model of morality” (Deeb, 2011, p. 36).

In this instance, public piety explicitly required using “rationality to understand the authenticated meanings of religious texts and practices” (Deeb, 2011, p. 35). The moral valance of tradition can just as easily be flipped, however. As Hodgson pointed out, women often “figure as repositories of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ in nationalist rhetoric,” invoking conflicts over women’s clothing in Afghanistan and the complicated debates over hijab in the Muslim world more generally (2001, p. 9). The same nation, indeed, the same person may both laud and condemn tradition. For example, the anti-colonial resistance leader Habib Bourguiba championed hijab as a symbol of Tunisian national identity, but when he became the first president of an independent Tunisia, he spoke out against hijab as one of the fetters of traditional religion that retarded modernization (Hawkins, 2011, p. 39). Viewed negatively, tradition and privacy can be an obstacle to progress, while viewed positively they preserve morals and purity.

Hijab itself is a perfect example of how a cultural act can be either public or private, depending on the framing context. In its shielding of a woman from the public gaze, hijab can be seen as a form of privacy that the wearer takes with her into the world (Gilsenan, 1990). Conversely, as a symbol of religious observance worn when among non-intimates, the hijab can also function as a meaningful public act. Indeed, in 2004 the French parliament passed a law banning ostentatious religious symbols in public schools, with hijab as the chief focus. It would be misleading to argue about which is the correct interpretation, as there are no objective criteria inherent in any act or space that mark it as private or public. One might argue that the reading of something as private or public is in the eye of the beholder, and that groups in power will simply define practices according to their own interests. On its face this makes some sense, as western male analysts certainly did classify the wearing of hijab as removing women from the public sphere in accord with stereotypes about Muslim society (Gilsenan, 1990), and many would argue that the French government really was pushing to homogenize the Muslim population into French society. The shifting categorization of the hijab, however, was not simply made by outside observers. For differing female activists, both putting on hijab, or taking it off, were assertive public stances. Conversely, for hijab wearers, taking off the garment often marks a context as being private.

These flips and shifts abound. The focus on rationality and efficiency of modernity marks it as public and yet modernizing reformers often critique traditional cultural practices as lacking privacy. It is common to condemn the lack of defined spaces for specific activities, such as sleeping, cooking, and bathing. The construction of a modern public redefines what is private, prioritizing the privacy of the individual and separating activities into discrete (in both senses) spaces (Foucault, 1977). The reforms shift the basic unit of privacy from the family to the individual. The construction of a modern public sphere requires the construction of modernized private spaces where traditional values and practices can continue. The distinction between private and public is not a new one and changes over time. In western culture, the ancient Greeks focused a great deal of thought on the distinction between private and public realms, and while certain classical theories seem familiar today—the emphasis on the public realm being masculine and rational—others are less so. Toilets, for example, were communal, with no sense of elimination being a particularly private act. This is not simply to note again that diverse cultures have different understandings of private and public, although that is certainly true, but that these understandings point to larger structures of belief about the nature of society, the individual, and community and that the changing privacy standards reflect changes in those larger structures. A self-consciously modern focus on the distinction between private and public actively distinguishes itself from previous models. The “modern” Cairene apartments Ghannam describes were touted by the government as increasing physical and moral hygiene by creating separate areas for food preparation, sleeping, and washing, part of a long tradition of urban reformers throughout the world creating modern housing that would have proper privacy (2002, pp. 32–34). It is a standard strategy to demonstrate the inadequacy of housing by listing the large number of people sleeping together in a room.

The example of urban reform efforts also demonstrates how claims about privacy can be used to justify potentially oppressive practices. In the US, the push for more modern housing with proper privacy adopted the comparatively benign name Urban Renewal, but this practice was sometimes more accurately referred to as Slum Clearance (Vale, 2013). Eliminating the neighborhoods of substandard housing moved an undesirable population of marginalized people out of downtown urban areas that were highly desirable to developers (Pattillo, 2010). Thousands of people were displaced, and communities broken apart, all in the name of helping the residents, bringing them into the “modern” world. Insisting on proper forms of privacy delegitimates all other models. Those living in such conditions are portrayed as not merely suffering, but as less civilized. If one does not follow the appropriate standards for privacy, one is backward, traditional, not properly developed. This, in turn, is used to justify “reforming” them.

Invoking Privacy to Define Relationships

Heretofore the chapter has discussed privacy regarding spaces, events, and objects, but it is equally a categorizer of people and relationships. Who is included in the private realm and who is not? Certain relationships are socially structured, so that family are part of the private realm (although how family is defined may vary immensely) and strangers are not. Privacy is not limited to intimates, however. Because it is a sign of trust, aspects of it may appear in professional or therapeutic settings. Thus, a work conversation might well be private, as might a therapy session. While the nature of these interactions would be importantly different—mutual sharing for friends, one-way sharing in therapeutic settings—they both are predicated upon participants having a shared sense of trust. The sharing of private information indicates something about the nature of the relationship and the attendant rights and responsibilities. Acquaintances do not share confidential information, but close friends do.

Beginning to include private details does not simply mark the transition from one phase to another, so much as it accomplishes it, or at least attempts to. If the offered private information is warmly accepted, it marks a change in the relationship, but not all such offers are taken up. Someone who too readily provides personal information is condemned as an “over-sharer.” Hearing these private details that symbolize intimacy can be extremely uncomfortable, leading the surprised recipient to complain that that is too much information, or just “TMI.” If an offer of private personal information is successful, it must be met with reciprocity, maybe not in the moment, but at some later point. The trust and accompanying vulnerability must be shared. The sharing, or not sharing, of the ability to control the dissemination of information constructs one as an independent individual in western society. Unlike an adult, a child has little privacy, and the process of becoming an adult requires claiming privacy, hence the social cliché of a teen’s insistence on privacy, with shut doors and sullen responses. It doesn’t merely mark the transition to existence as an independent subject in society, it is part of creating it.

If the social intimacy of friendship requires reciprocal private sharing, it is because non-reciprocal sharing marks an imbalance of power and is found in formal therapeutic relationships, such as with a doctor or social worker. In these, the private information flows in one direction and is driven by the questions of the participant with power and socially recognized authority. While some of these relationships may be voluntary, the power imbalance can be formally coercive, as when state powers require engagement with a licensed medical/mental health professional. The unequal power distribution is so fundamental to the relationship that to move into a relationship of mutual friendship violates professional ethical standards. If a close friend must share details of their private life a therapist must not. Reciprocity would flatten the hierarchy.

Separating worlds into neatly defined categories is an ideological action, asserting a purity that does not exist. It is not simply the case that there is some leakage between the categories of private and public, that there is some gray area around the edges, but that there is a constant flow between them and that any space that is categorized in one way can be flipped to be categorized in the opposite manner. That such discrepancies and flow are ignored and unreported is not random. As Irvine and Gal discuss, erasure is a key tool in ideological construction (2000). That which does not fit the model is unseen, allowing the continued belief in the ideological structure. It is akin to a societal level confirmation bias, with observers at all levels ignoring examples that do not fit the model or explaining them away with a tortuous rationalization as to why those examples did not count. We believe in a steady, clear distinction between private and public that is inherent in contexts or activities themselves. If the idea that these deeply held and personal perceptions are not only contingent, but driven by ideological forces, is disturbing, still more so is the realization that these same forces can shift our categorizations and even our experiences.

Labeling a context or behavior as private or public is not so much descriptive as making a claim about that behavior and context, linking it to larger social patterns accepted as private or public (or challenging those patterns). It is, as Gal puts it, “making an argument about and in the world” (2002, p. 79). If there is no inherent quality of private or public, then in using the terms we are constantly (re)establishing what they are and are not. As mutually constitutive concepts, establishing one defines the other in opposition. But the process goes farther than this. Any given thing that is defined as private or public can itself be subdivided into private and public components. The classic house with a white picket fence is an icon of the private, but within that space, the front yard is public while the house itself is private. Within the house, the entrance hall is public, but the rest is private. Within the rest, the dining and living rooms are public, but the bedrooms are private. This pattern of self-similar repetition, in which a distinction can separate a group into a set of sub-groups, and then any of those sub-groups can be divided in the same way, and then any of those can be divided, and so on is fractal recursivity, a pattern that Irvine and Gal (2000) present as a crucial building block of ideology. Specifically, Gal (2002) argues that this is central to understanding the use of the dichotomy of private and public. Because anything contains within it the possibility of being labeled as public or private, applying one label or the other points to the attributes that are held to be relevant in the moment. In theoretical terms, these are “indexical signs that are always relative” (Gal, 2002, p. 80). That is, they point to a particular attribute, highlighting it as the relevant component in that instance, rather than some other attribute or component. Privacy or publicness only ever exists in comparison to something else. Relative to the house, the yard is public. Relative to the street it is private. We all invoke the markers of privacy or publicness to indicate what aspects of a relationship or interaction are relevant in any given instance. An open-door policy in an office is a statement of public availability, but for discussion about certain topics, the door will be closed, marking a change in categorization. Indeed, one participant or another may ask “is this a closed-door meeting or open?” What frame is being invoked?

The changing frames occur not only in individual instances, but also at the larger scale over time. Gal gives the example of women in East Central Europe before the end of the Cold War (2002). During that era women were grouped in the public realm of the communist state, which, when communism was rejected, could have discredited them. Reality, however, was more complicated. Within the socialist state itself, women were associated with “redistributive and social support aspects” which were comparatively more private than some state functions, allowing them to distance themselves from the state. Men, by contrast, were linked not to all the private realm, but to the “anti-politics” that was occurring within the private realm (the more public aspect). The existing ideological frames could be used to change categorizations over time. Importantly, because the dichotomies themselves remain constant even as the referents change, they can create an illusion of continuity even through large social changes.

Paths Forward

As noted above anthropology teaches us that not all cultures have a need for privacy. This extends further than simply saying that the desire for privacy is a cultural construct, as it implies that what is being desired (or not) in various cultures is the same thing, which is not true. Indeed, it is inadequate to state that diverse cultures have different standards for privacy. As this chapter has shown, the statement is true, but obscures the fact that within a culture anything can be categorized as private or public depending on the context. Focusing on the differences among cultures masks the differences within a culture. More importantly, these differences within a culture are not inconsistencies or slippages within an otherwise stable system, but rather, are the ideological underpinnings of the system itself. Assertions of privacy are always ideological and as such can well be liberatory, but also oppressive, hiding information that could challenge existing power structures. Information about an individual’s salary, for example has long been held in the US as a very private matter, but marginalized groups have challenged this stance, arguing that it allows organizations to pay individuals from those groups less than those from the dominant group. Reformers have pushed for regulations that would make this previously private information public, leveling the negotiating playing field. The concept of privacy is inextricably bound up with power, as it affects not just what information is available and circulated, but whose information. As the French theorist, Foucault (1977) noted, the institutional surveillance on the individual increases the farther that individual differs from the established norms. Those on the margins, who encounter the police and social services the most, have far less control over their privacy than those comfortably in the center.

The point about privacy is not simply that it is malleable and changing. Change does not just happen on its own, but change is the result of social forces. Privacy is not an independent quality that changes on its own; people modify it, shift it, and flip it. In this regard, privacy is no different from other aspects of culture, or indeed, culture itself. Cultures may superficially appear static, but a core component of anthropology is that all cultures are always changing and that the changes do not follow a straightforward or inevitable path. The changes to privacy do not follow a mechanistic or predetermined pattern but are emergent, resulting from complex interactions of internal and external forces, some the result of deliberate pushing from concerned groups (the shift away from seeing domestic violence as a private affair), some the unintended consequence of other changes (the presence of social media leading to more individuals sharing previously private information in public settings). Privacy (or the lack thereof) is not an end in and of itself but is a tool for ordering and making sense of society and the world. While a society’s invocation of privacy is driven by values, there is not a specific correspondence between any value and privacy. One might argue that an emphasis on the value of individual freedom would link to privacy, but it can just as easily be flipped ideologically, so that for an individual to exercise their freedom, information must be publicly available. Rather, the forms that the distinctions between private and public take are driven by the sets of values within a society. In working to change definitions of private and public, activists are addressing those underlying values. Likewise, changing the values changes the understandings and experiences of privacy. Because of this linkage, examining privacy in any given context is a particularly useful path for illuminating underlying values and for making comparisons among different societies or groups within societies.