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Thursday, July 3, 2025

Emic and etic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic

In anthropology, folkloristics, linguistics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic (/ˈmɪk/) and etic (/ˈɛtɪk/) refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained.

The emic approach is an insider's perspective, which looks at the beliefs, values, and practices of a particular culture from the perspective of the people who live within that culture. This approach aims to understand the cultural meaning and significance of a particular behavior or practice, as it is understood by the people who engage in it.

The etic approach, on the other hand, is an outsider's perspective, which looks at a culture from the perspective of an outside observer or researcher. This approach tends to focus on the observable behaviors and practices of a culture, and aims to understand them in terms of their functional or evolutionary significance. The etic approach often involves the use of standardized measures and frameworks to compare different cultures and may involve the use of concepts and theories from other disciplines, such as psychology or sociology.

The emic and etic approaches each have their own strengths and limitations, and each can be useful in understanding different aspects of culture and behavior. Some anthropologists argue that a combination of both approaches is necessary for a complete understanding of a culture, while others argue that one approach may be more appropriate depending on the specific research question being addressed.

Definitions

"The emic approach investigates how local people think...". How they perceive and categorize the world, their rules for behavior, what has meaning for them, and how they imagine and explain things. "The etic (scientist-oriented) approach shifts the focus from local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist. The etic approach realizes that members of a culture often are too involved in what they are doing... to interpret their cultures impartially. When using the etic approach, the ethnographer emphasizes what he or she considers important."

Although emics and etics are sometimes regarded as inherently in conflict and one can be preferred to the exclusion of the other, the complementarity of emic and etic approaches to anthropological research has been widely recognized, especially in the areas of interest concerning the characteristics of human nature as well as the form and function of human social systems.

...Emic knowledge and interpretations are those existing within a culture, that are 'determined by local custom, meaning, and belief' (Ager and Loughry, 2004: n.p.) and best described by a 'native' of the culture. Etic knowledge refers to generalizations about human behavior that are considered universally true, and commonly links cultural practices to factors of interest to the researcher, such as economic or ecological conditions, that cultural insiders may not consider very relevant (Morris et al., 1999).

Emic and etic approaches of understanding behavior and personality fall under the study of cultural anthropology, which states that people are shaped by their cultures and their subcultures, and we must account for this in the study of personality. One way is looking at things through an emic approach. This approach "is culture specific because it focuses on a single culture and it is understood on its own terms." As explained below, the term "emic" originated from the specific linguistic term "phonemic", from phoneme, which is a language-specific way of abstracting speech sounds.

  • An emic account is a description of behavior or a belief in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) to the actor; that is, an emic account comes from a person within the culture. Almost anything from within a culture can provide an emic account.
  • An etic account is a description of a behavior or belief by a social analyst or scientific observer (a student or scholar of anthropology or sociology, for example), in terms that can be applied across cultures; that is, an etic account attempts to be 'culturally neutral', limiting any ethnocentric, political or cultural bias or alienation by the observer.

When these two approaches are combined, the "richest" view of a culture or society can be understood. On its own, an emic approach would struggle with applying overarching values to a single culture. The etic approach is helpful in enabling researchers to see more than one aspect of one culture, and in applying observations to cultures around the world.

History

The terms were coined in 1954 by linguist Kenneth Pike, who argued that the tools developed for describing linguistic behaviors could be adapted to the description of any human social behavior. As Pike noted, social scientists have long debated whether their knowledge is objective or subjective. Pike's innovation was to turn away from an epistemological debate and turn instead to a methodological solution. Emic and etic are derived from the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic, respectively, where a phone is a distinct speech sound or gesture (such distinction being referred to as phonetic), regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words, whereas a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another. The possibility of a truly objective description was discounted by Pike himself in his original work; he proposed the emic–etic dichotomy in anthropology as a way around philosophic issues about the very nature of objectivity.

The terms were also championed by anthropologists Ward Goodenough and Marvin Harris with slightly different connotations from those used by Pike. Goodenough was primarily interested in understanding the culturally specific meaning of specific beliefs and practices; Harris was primarily interested in explaining human behavior.

Pike, Harris, and others have argued that cultural "insiders" and "outsiders" are equally capable of producing emic and etic accounts of their culture. Some researchers use "etic" to refer to outsider accounts, and "emic" to refer to insider accounts.

Margaret Mead was an anthropologist who studied the patterns of adolescence in Samoa. She discovered that the difficulties and the transitions that adolescents faced are culturally influenced. The hormones that are released during puberty can be defined using an etic framework, because adolescents globally have the same hormones being secreted. However, Mead concluded that how adolescents respond to these hormones is greatly influenced by their cultural norms. Through her studies, Mead found that simple classifications about behaviors and personality could not be used because peoples’ cultures influenced their behaviors in such a radical way. Her studies helped create an emic approach of understanding behaviors and personality. Her research deduced that culture has a significant impact in shaping an individual's personality.

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, is a researcher who took an emic approach in his studies. Jung studied mythology, religion, ancient rituals, and dreams, leading him to believe that there are archetypes that can be identified and used to categorize people's behaviors. Archetypes are universal structures of the collective unconscious that refer to the inherent way people are predisposed to perceive and process information. The main archetypes that Jung studied were the persona (how people choose to present themselves to the world), the anima and animus (part of people experiencing the world in viewing the opposite sex, that guides how they select their romantic partner), and the shadow (dark side of personalities because people have a concept of evil; well-adjusted people must integrate both good and bad parts of themselves). Jung looked at the role of the mother and deduced that all people have mothers and see their mothers in a similar way; they offer nurture and comfort. His studies also suggest that "infants have evolved to suck milk from the breast, it is also the case that all children have inborn tendencies to react in certain ways." This way of looking at the mother is an emic way of applying a concept cross-culturally and universally.

Importance as regards personality

Emic and etic approaches are important to understanding personality because problems can arise "when concepts, measures, and methods are carelessly transferred to other cultures in attempts to make cross-cultural generalizations about personality." It is hard to apply certain generalizations of behavior to people who are so diverse and culturally different. One example of this is the F-scale (Macleod). The F-scale, which was created by Theodor Adorno, is used to measure authoritarian personality, which can, in turn, be used to predict prejudiced behaviors. This test, when applied to Americans, accurately depicts prejudices towards black individuals. However, when a study was conducted in South Africa using the F-Scale (Pettigrew and Friedman), results did not predict any prejudices towards black individuals. This study used emic approaches of study by conducting interviews with the locals and etic approaches by giving participants generalized personality tests.

Schrödinger's cat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source connected to a Geiger counter are placed in a sealed box. As illustrated, the quantum description uses a superposition of an alive cat and one that has died.

In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment concerning quantum superposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical cat in a closed box may be considered to be simultaneously both alive and dead while it is unobserved, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. This experiment, viewed this way, is described as a paradox. This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

In Schrödinger's original formulation, a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal radiation monitor such as a Geiger counter detects radioactivity (a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. If no decaying atom triggers the monitor, the cat remains alive. The Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat is therefore simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.

Although originally a critique on the Copenhagen interpretation, Schrödinger's seemingly paradoxical thought experiment became part of the foundation of quantum mechanics. It is often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of quantum mechanics, particularly in situations involving the measurement problem. As a result, Schrödinger's cat has had enduring appeal in popular culture. The experiment is not intended to be actually performed on a cat, but rather as an easily understandable illustration of the behavior of atoms. Experiments at the atomic scale have been carried out, showing that very small objects may exist as superpositions, but superposing an object as large as a cat would pose considerable technical difficulties.

Fundamentally, the Schrödinger's cat experiment asks how long quantum superpositions last and when (or whether) they collapse. Different interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been proposed that give different explanations for this process.

Origin and motivation

Unsolved problem in physics
 
How does the quantum description of reality, which includes elements such as the superposition of states and wavefunction collapse or quantum decoherence, give rise to the reality we perceive? Another way of stating this question regards the measurement problem: What constitutes a "measurement" that apparently causes the wave function to collapse into a definite state?
 

Schrödinger intended his thought experiment as a discussion of the EPR article—named after its authors Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen—in 1935. The EPR article highlighted the counterintuitive nature of quantum superpositions, in which a quantum system for two particles does not separate even when the particles are detected far from their last point of contact. The EPR paper concludes with a claim that this lack of separability meant that quantum mechanics as a theory of reality was incomplete.

Schrödinger and Einstein exchanged letters about Einstein's EPR article, in the course of which Einstein pointed out that the state of an unstable keg of gunpowder will, after a while, contain a superposition of both exploded and unexploded states.

To further illustrate, Schrödinger described how one could, in principle, create a superposition in a large-scale system by making it dependent on a quantum particle that was in a superposition. He proposed a scenario with a cat in a closed steel chamber, wherein the cat's life or death depended on the state of a radioactive atom, whether it had decayed and emitted radiation or not. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead until the state has been observed. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-live cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics, thus employing reductio ad absurdum.

Since Schrödinger's time, various interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been advanced by physicists, some of which regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real, others do not. Intended as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation (the prevailing orthodoxy in 1935), the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment remains a touchstone for modern interpretations of quantum mechanics and can be used to illustrate and compare their strengths and weaknesses.

Thought experiment

A life-size cat figure in the garden of Huttenstrasse 9, Zurich, where Erwin Schrödinger lived from 1921 to 1926. Depending on the light conditions, the figure appears to be either a live cat or a dead one.

Schrödinger wrote:

One can contrive even completely burlesque [farcical] cases. A cat is put in a steel chamber along with the following infernal device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny amount of radioactive substance, so tiny that in the course of an hour one of the atoms will perhaps decay, but also, with equal probability, that none of them will; if it does happen, the counter tube will discharge and through a relay release a hammer that will shatter a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would tell oneself that the cat is still alive if no atom has decayed in the meantime. Even a single atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or spread out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain turns into a sensually observable [macroscopic] indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. This prevents us from so naïvely accepting a "blurred model" as representative of reality. Per se, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

Schrödinger developed his famous thought experiment in correspondence with Einstein. He suggested this 'quite ridiculous case' to illustrate his conclusion that the wave function cannot represent reality. The wave function description of the complete cat system implies that the reality of the cat mixes the living and dead cat. Einstein was impressed by the ability of the thought experiment to highlight these issues. In a letter to Schrödinger dated 1950, he wrote:

You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.

Note that the charge of gunpowder is not mentioned in Schrödinger's setup, which uses a Geiger counter as an amplifier and hydrocyanic poison instead of gunpowder. The gunpowder had been mentioned in Einstein's original suggestion to Schrödinger 15 years before, and Einstein carried it forward to the present discussion.

Analysis

In modern terms Schrödinger's hypothetical cat experiment describes the measurement problem: quantum theory describes the cat system as a combination of two possible outcomes but only one outcome is ever observed. The experiment poses the question, "when does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states and become one or the other?" (More technically, when does the actual quantum state stop being a non-trivial linear combination of states, each of which resembles different classical states, and instead begin to have a unique classical description?) Standard microscopic quantum mechanics describes multiple possible outcomes of experiments but only one outcome is observed. The thought experiment illustrates this apparent paradox. Our intuition says that the cat cannot be in more than one state simultaneously—yet the quantum mechanical description of the thought experiment requires such a condition.

Interpretations

Since Schrödinger's time, other interpretations of quantum mechanics have been proposed that give different answers to the questions posed by Schrödinger's cat of how long superpositions last and when (or whether) they collapse.

Copenhagen interpretation

A commonly held interpretation of quantum mechanics is the Copenhagen interpretation. In the Copenhagen interpretation, a measurement results in only one state of a superposition. This thought experiment makes apparent the fact that this interpretation simply provides no explanation for the state of the cat while the box is closed. The wavefunction description of the system consists of a superposition of the states "decayed nucleus/dead cat" and "undecayed nucleus/living cat". Only when the box is opened and observed can we make a statement about the cat.

Role of consciousness

In 1932, John von Neumann described in his book Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics a pattern where the radioactive source is observed by a device, which itself is observed by another device and so on. It makes no difference in the predictions of quantum theory where along this chain of causal effects the superposition collapses. This potentially infinite chain could be broken if the last device is replaced by a conscious observer. This solved the problem because it was claimed that an individual's consciousness cannot be multiple. Eugene Wigner asserted that an observer is necessary for a collapse to one or the other (e.g., either a live cat or a dead cat) of the terms on the right-hand side of a wave function. Wigner discussed the interpretation in a thought experiment known as Wigner's friend.

Wigner supposed that a friend opened the box and observed the cat without telling anyone. From Wigner's conscious perspective, the friend is now part of the wave function and has seen a live cat and seen a dead cat. To a third person's conscious perspective, Wigner himself becomes part of the wave function once Wigner learns the outcome from the friend. This could be extended indefinitely.

A resolution of the paradox is that the triggering of the Geiger counter counts as a measurement of the state of the radioactive substance. Because a measurement has already occurred deciding the state of the cat, the subsequent observation by a human records only what has already occurred. Analysis of an actual experiment by Roger Carpenter and A. J. Anderson found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before any human knows of the result. The apparatus indicates one of two colors depending on the outcome. The human observer sees which color is indicated, but they don't consciously know which outcome the color represents. A second human, the one who set up the apparatus, is told of the color and becomes conscious of the outcome, and the box is opened to check if the outcome matches. However, it is disputed whether merely observing the color counts as a conscious observation of the outcome.

Bohr's interpretation

Analysis of the work of Niels Bohr, one of the main scientists associated with the Copenhagen interpretation, suggests he viewed the state of the cat before the box is opened as indeterminate. The superposition itself had no physical meaning to Bohr: Schrödinger's cat would be either dead or alive long before the box is opened but the cat and box form a inseparable combination. Bohr saw no role for a human observer. Bohr emphasized the classical nature of measurement results. An "irreversible" or effectively irreversible process imparts the classical behavior of "observation" or "measurement".

Many-worlds interpretation

The quantum-mechanical "Schrödinger's cat" paradox according to the many-worlds interpretation. In this interpretation, every event is a branch point. The cat is both alive and dead—regardless of whether the box is opened—but the "alive" and "dead" cats are in different branches of the universe that are equally real but cannot interact with each other.

In 1957, Hugh Everett formulated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which does not single out observation as a special process. In the many-worlds interpretation, both alive and dead states of the cat persist after the box is opened, but are decoherent from each other. In other words, when the box is opened, the observer and the possibly-dead cat split into an observer looking at a box with a dead cat and an observer looking at a box with a live cat. But since the dead and alive states are decoherent, there is no communication or interaction between them.

When opening the box, the observer becomes entangled with the cat, so "observer states" corresponding to the cat's being alive and dead are formed; each observer state is entangled, or linked, with the cat so that the observation of the cat's state and the cat's state correspond with each other. Quantum decoherence ensures that the different outcomes have no interaction with each other. Decoherence is generally considered to prevent simultaneous observation of multiple states.

A variant of the Schrödinger's cat experiment, known as the quantum suicide machine, has been proposed by cosmologist Max Tegmark. It examines the Schrödinger's cat experiment from the point of view of the cat, and argues that by using this approach, one may be able to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation and many-worlds.

Ensemble interpretation

The ensemble interpretation states that superpositions are nothing but subensembles of a larger statistical ensemble. The state vector would not apply to individual cat experiments, but only to the statistics of many similarly prepared cat experiments. Proponents of this interpretation state that this makes the Schrödinger's cat paradox a trivial matter, or a non-issue.

This interpretation serves to discard the idea that a single physical system in quantum mechanics has a mathematical description that corresponds to it in any way.

Relational interpretation

The relational interpretation makes no fundamental distinction between the human experimenter, the cat, and the apparatus or between animate and inanimate systems; all are quantum systems governed by the same rules of wavefunction evolution, and all may be considered "observers". But the relational interpretation allows that different observers can give different accounts of the same series of events, depending on the information they have about the system. The cat can be considered an observer of the apparatus; meanwhile, the experimenter can be considered another observer of the system in the box (the cat plus the apparatus). Before the box is opened, the cat, by nature of its being alive or dead, has information about the state of the apparatus (the atom has either decayed or not decayed); but the experimenter does not have information about the state of the box contents. In this way, the two observers simultaneously have different accounts of the situation: To the cat, the wavefunction of the apparatus has appeared to "collapse"; to the experimenter, the contents of the box appear to be in superposition. Not until the box is opened, and both observers have the same information about what happened, do both system states appear to "collapse" into the same definite result, a cat that is either alive or dead.

Transactional interpretation

In the transactional interpretation the apparatus emits an advanced wave backward in time, which combined with the wave that the source emits forward in time, forms a standing wave. The waves are seen as physically real, and the apparatus is considered an "observer". In the transactional interpretation, the collapse of the wavefunction is "atemporal" and occurs along the whole transaction between the source and the apparatus. The cat is never in superposition. Rather the cat is only in one state at any particular time, regardless of when the human experimenter looks in the box. The transactional interpretation resolves this quantum paradox.

Objective collapse theories

According to objective collapse theories, superpositions are destroyed spontaneously (irrespective of external observation) when some objective physical threshold (of time, mass, temperature, irreversibility, etc.) is reached. Thus, the cat would be expected to have settled into a definite state long before the box is opened. This could loosely be phrased as "the cat observes itself" or "the environment observes the cat".

Objective collapse theories require a modification of standard quantum mechanics to allow superpositions to be destroyed by the process of time evolution. These theories could ideally be tested by creating mesoscopic superposition states in the experiment. For instance, energy cat states has been proposed as a precise detector of the quantum gravity related energy decoherence models.

Applications and tests

The experiment as described is a purely theoretical one, and the machine proposed is not known to have been constructed. However, successful experiments involving similar principles, e.g. superpositions of relatively large (by the standards of quantum physics) objects have been performed. These experiments do not show that a cat-sized object can be superposed, but the known upper limit on "cat states" has been pushed upwards by them. In many cases the state is short-lived, even when cooled to near absolute zero.

  • A "cat state" has been achieved with photons.
  • A beryllium ion has been trapped in a superposed state.
  • An experiment involving a superconducting quantum interference device ("SQUID") has been linked to the theme of the thought experiment: "The superposition state does not correspond to a billion electrons flowing one way and a billion others flowing the other way. Superconducting electrons move en masse. All the superconducting electrons in the SQUID flow both ways around the loop at once when they are in the Schrödinger's cat state."
  • A piezoelectric "tuning fork" has been constructed, which can be placed into a superposition of vibrating and non vibrating states. The resonator comprises about 10 trillion atoms.
  • An experiment involving a flu virus has been proposed.
  • An experiment involving a bacterium and an electromechanical oscillator has been proposed.

In quantum computing the phrase "cat state" sometimes refers to the GHZ state, wherein several qubits are in an equal superposition of all being 0 and all being 1; e.g.,

According to at least one proposal, it may be possible to determine the state of the cat before observing it.

Extensions

In August 2020, physicists presented studies involving interpretations of quantum mechanics that are related to the Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend paradoxes, resulting in conclusions that challenge seemingly established assumptions about reality.

Criminalization of homosexuality

"Love is not a crime" signs at Paris Pride 2019

Some or all sexual acts between men, and less frequently between women, have been classified as a criminal offense in various regions. Most of the time, such laws are unenforced with regard to consensual same-sex conduct, but they nevertheless contribute to police harassment, stigmatization, and violence against homosexual and bisexual people. Other effects include exacerbation of the HIV epidemic due to the criminalization of men who have sex with men, discouraging them from seeking preventative care or treatment for HIV infection.

The criminalization of homosexuality is often justified by the scientifically discredited idea that homosexuality can be acquired or by public revulsion towards homosexuality, in many cases founded on the condemnation of homosexuality by the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Arguments against the criminalization of homosexuality began to be expressed during the Enlightenment. Initial objections included the practical difficulty of enforcement, excessive state intrusion into private life, and the belief that criminalization was not an effective way of reducing the incidence of homosexuality. Later objections included the argument that homosexuality should be considered a disease rather than a crime, that criminalization violates the human rights of homosexuals, and that homosexuality is not morally wrong.

In many countries, criminalization of homosexuality is based on legal codes inherited from the British Empire. The French colonial empire did not lead to criminalization of homosexuality, as this was abolished in France during the French Revolution in order to remove religious influence from the criminal law. In other countries, the criminalization of homosexuality is based on sharia law. In the Western world, a major wave of decriminalization started after World War II. It diffused globally and peaked in the 1990s. In recent years, many African countries have increased enforcement of anti-homosexual laws due to politicization and a mistaken belief that homosexuality is a Western import. As of 2024, homosexuality is criminalized de jure in 61 UN member states and de facto in two others; at least seven of these have a death penalty for homosexuality.

History

Ancient through early modern world

The burning of the knight Richard Puller von Hohenburg with his servant before the walls of Zürich, for sodomy, 1482

The Assyrian Laws contain a passage punishing homosexual relations, but it is disputed if this refers to consensual relations or only non-consensual ones. The first known Roman law to mention same-sex relations was the Lex Scantinia. Although the actual text of this law is lost, it likely prohibited free Roman citizens from taking the passive role in same-sex acts. The Christianization of the Roman Empire made social attitudes increasingly disapproving of homosexuality. In the sixth century, Byzantine emperor Justinian introduced other laws against same-sex sexuality, referring to such acts as "contrary to nature". The Syro-Roman law book, which was influential in the Middle Eastern legal tradition and especially in Lebanon, prescribed the death penalty for homosexuality. Some Ottoman criminal codes called for fines for sodomy (liwat), but others did not mention the offense. In 15th-century central Mexico, homosexual acts between men could be punished by disembowelment and smothering in hot ashes.

During the late Middle Ages, many jurisdictions in Europe began to add prohibitions of sodomy to secular law. They also toughened enforcement, with vice squads appearing in some European cities. In some cases, sodomy was punished by investigation and denunciation, in others by fines, and in some cases by the burning of the participants or the location where the act had taken place. The death penalty for sodomy was common in early modern Europe. It is unclear how strictly sodomy laws were enforced; one theory is that enforcement was related to moral panics in which homosexuals were a scapegoat. English monarch Henry VIII codified the prohibition of homosexuality in England into secular law with the Buggery Act 1533, an attempt to gain the high ground in the religious struggle of the English Reformation. This law, based on the religious prohibition in Leviticus, prescribed the death penalty for buggery (anal sex).

Impact of colonialism and imperialism

Participant carrying a poster against Section 377 during Bhubaneswar Pride Parade, India

Many present-day jurisdictions criminalize homosexuality based on colonial criminal codes they adopted under British rule. The Indian Penal Code and its Section 377 criminalizing homosexuality were applied to several British colonies in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The Wright Penal Code was drafted for Jamaica and ultimately adopted in Honduras, Tobago, St. Lucia, and the Gold Coast. The Stephen Code was adopted in Canada (and in a modified form in New Zealand), expanding the criminalization of homosexuality to cover any same-sex activity. The Griffith Code was adopted in Australia and several other Commonwealth countries including Nauru, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, Zanzibar and Uganda, and in Israel. Once established, laws against homosexuality are often maintained by inertia and inclusion in postcolonial criminal codes. Some states adopted British-inspired laws criminalizing homosexuality on the basis of informal influence, while other former British colonies criminalize homosexuality under the influence of sharia law. Both China and Japan, which had not historically prosecuted homosexuality, criminalized it based on Western models in the nineteenth century.

During the French Revolution in 1791, the National Constituent Assembly abolished the law against homosexuality as part of its adoption of a new legal code without the influence of Christianity. Although the assembly never discussed homosexuality, it has been legal in France since then. Previously it could be punished by burning to death, although this was infrequently enforced. The abolition of criminality for sodomy was codified in the 1810 penal codeNapoleon's conquests and the adoption of civil law and penal codes on the French model led to abolition of criminality in many jurisdictions and replacement of death with imprisonment in others. Via military occupation or emulation of the French criminal code, the Scandinavian countries, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Japan, and their colonies and territories—including much of Latin America—decriminalized homosexuality. Former French colonies are less likely than British ones to criminalize homosexuality. The Ottoman Empire is often considered to have decriminalized homosexuality in 1858, when it adopted a French-inspired criminal code, but Elif Ceylan Özsoy argues that homosexuality had already been decriminalized. However, some Ottoman men were executed for sodomy including two boys in Damascus in 1807.

The unification of Germany reversed some of the gains of the Napoleonic conquests as the unified country adopted the Prussian penal code in 1871, re-criminalizing homosexuality in some areas. In Germany, the prohibition of homosexuality was not frequently enforced until 1933. In Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, an estimated 57,000 men were convicted of violating Paragraph 175. Never before or since have so many homosexuals been convicted in such a short period of time. Thousands of men were imprisoned and killed in Nazi concentration campsWest Germany convicted about the same number of men under the same law until 1969, when homosexuality was partially decriminalized.

In the Russian Empire, homosexuality was criminalized in 1835 and decriminalized in 1917 as a result of the Russian Revolution. The criminalization was reinstated in 1934, with a harsher penalty than before, for unknown reasons.

Post-World War II decriminalization trend

Proportion of the world population living in a country where homosexual acts are not criminalized, 1760–2020
Number of jurisdictions criminalizing homosexuality, 1990–2024

In the decades after World War II, anti-homosexuality laws saw increased enforcement in Western Europe and the United States. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was a tendency to legalize homosexuality with a higher age of consent than for heterosexual relationships; this model was recommended by various international organizations to prevent young men from becoming homosexual. Convergence occurred both through the partial decriminalization of homosexuality, as in the United Kingdom (1967), Canada (1969), and West Germany (1969), or through the partial criminalization of homosexuality, such as in Belgium, where the first law against same-sex activity came into effect in 1965.

There was a wave of decriminalization in the late twentieth century; ninety percent of changes to these laws between 1945 and 2005 involved liberalization or abolition. Eighty percent of repeals between 1972 and 2002 were done by a legislature, and the remainder by the laws being ruled unconstitutional by a court. Decriminalization began in Europe and the Americas and spread globally in the 1980s. The pace of decriminalization reached a peak in the 1990s. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many former Soviet republics decriminalized homosexuality, but others in Central Asia retained these laws. China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997. Following a protracted legal battle, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the criminalization of homosexuality violated the Constitution of India in the 2018 Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India judgement.

One explanation for these legal changes is increased regard for human rights and autonomy of the individual and the effects of the 1960s sexual revolution. The trend in increased attention to individual rights in laws around sexuality has been observed around the world, but progresses more slowly in some regions, such as the Middle East. Studies have found that modernization, as measured by the Human Development Index or GDP per capita, and globalization (KOF Index of Globalization) was negatively correlated with the criminalization of homosexuality.

Resistance to decriminalization

Africa is the only continent where decriminalization of homosexuality has not been widespread since the mid-twentieth century. In Africa, one of the primary narratives cited in favor of the criminalization of homosexuality is "defending ordre public, morality, culture, religion, and children from the assumed imperial gay agenda" associated with the Global North. Such claims ignore the fact that many indigenous African cultures tolerated homosexuality, and historically the criminalization of homosexuality derives from British colonialism. In the Middle East, homosexuality has been seen as a tool of Western domination for the same reason.

The application of international pressure to decriminalize homosexuality has had mixed results in Africa. While it led to liberalization in some countries, it also prompted public opinion to be skeptical of these demands and encouraging countries to pass even more restrictive laws in resistance to what is seen as neocolonial pressure. Politicians may also target homosexuality to distract from other issues. Following decolonization, several former British colonies expanded laws that had only targeted men in order to include same-sex behavior by women. Others, especially Muslim-majority countries in Africa, passed new laws to criminalize homosexual behavior. In many African countries, anti-homosexuality laws were little-enforced for decades only to see increasing enforcement, politicization, and calls for harsher penalties beginning in the mid-1990s. The rise of Evangelical Christianity and especially Pentecostalism has increased the politicization of homosexuality as these churches have been engaged in anti-homosexual mobilizations as a form of nation building. While such calls often come from domestic religious institutions, the influence of US conservative Christian groups, who have provided networking, training and funding support, has been instrumental in advancing anti-homosexual discourse in Africa.

Current status

As of 2020, 21 percent of the world population lives in countries where homosexuality is criminalized. In its 2023 Database, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) found that homosexuality is criminalized in 62 of 193 UN member states, while two UN member states, Iraq and Egypt, criminalize it de facto but not in legislation. In at least seven UN member states—Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria (only northern Nigeria), Saudi Arabia, Uganda, and Yemenit is punishable by death. Two-thirds of countries that criminalize sexual activity between men also criminalize it between women. In 2007, five countries conducted executions as a penalty for homosexual acts. In 2020, the ILGA named Iran and Saudi Arabia as the only countries in which executions for same-sex activity have reportedly taken place. In other countries, such as Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya, extrajudicial executions are carried out by militias such as Al-Shabaab, the Islamic State, or Al-Qaeda. In 2021, Téa Braun of the Human Dignity Trust estimated that more than 71 million LGBT people live in countries where homosexuality is criminalized.

  Criminalized
  Decriminalized 1791–1850
  Decriminalized 1850–1945
  Decriminalized 1946–1989
  Decriminalized 1990–present
  Unknown date of legalization
  Never criminalized

Scope of laws

Laws against homosexuality make some or all sex acts between people of the same sex a crime. While some laws are specific about which acts are illegal, others use vague terminology such as "crimes against nature", "unnatural offenses", "indecency", or "immoral acts". Some laws exclusively criminalize anal sex while others include oral sex or manual sex. Some sodomy laws explicitly target same-sex couples, while others apply to sexual acts that might be performed by heterosexual couples but are usually enforced against same-sex couples only. It is more common for men who have sex with men to be criminalized than women who have sex with women, and there are no countries that only criminalize female same-sex activity. This has been due to a belief that eroticism between women is not really sex and that it will not tempt women away from heterosexuality. Unlike other laws, which criminalized specific sexual acts, the British Labouchère Amendment in 1885 and the 1935 revision of Germany's Paragraph 175 simply criminalized any sexual act between two men. Both laws made it much easier to convict men for homosexuality, leading to an increase in convictions.

Penalties vary widely, from fines or short terms of imprisonment to the death penalty. Some laws target both partners in the sex act equally, while in other cases the punishment is unequal. While homosexuality is criminalized country-wide in many cases, in other countries, specific jurisdictions pass their own criminal laws against homosexuality, such as in Aceh province. Most laws criminalizing homosexuality are codified in statutory law, but in some countries such as Saudi Arabia they are based on the direct application of Islamic criminal jurisprudence.

Even in countries where there are no specific laws against homosexuality, homosexuals may be disproportionately criminalized under other laws, such as those targeting indecency, debauchery, prostitution, pornography, homelessness, or HIV exposure. In some countries such as (historically) China and (currently) Egypt, such laws serve as de facto criminalization of homosexuality. One analysis of the United States found that, instead of being directly arrested under sodomy laws, "most arrests of homosexuals came from solicitation, disorderly conduct, and loitering laws, which were based on the assumption that homosexuals (unlike heterosexuals), by definition, were people who engaged in illicit activity". In 2014, Nigeria passed the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act 2013, criminalizing people who have a same-sex marriage ceremony with five years' imprisonment. Although homosexuality was already illegal, the law led to increasing persecution of Nigerian homosexuals.

Enforcement

Laws criminalizing homosexuality are inherently difficult to enforce, because they concern acts done by consenting individuals in private. Enforcement varies from active persecution to non-enforcement; more often than not, laws are nearly unenforced for private, consensual sex. In some countries, there are no prosecutions for decades or there is a formal moratorium.

In Nazi Germany, the site of the most severe persecution of homosexual men & women in history, only about 10% of the homosexual male & female population was ever convicted and imprisoned. In Iran, the 2013 penal code forbids authorities from proactively investigating same-sex acts unless kidnapping or assault are suspected. In some countries such as India (prior to 2018, when the sodomy law was declared unconstitutional) and Guyana, the laws are not commonly enforced but are used to harass LGBT people. Indian police have used the threat of prosecution to extort money or sexual favors. Arrests, even without conviction, can often lead to publicity causing the accused to lose their job. Those prosecuted under such laws tend to be disproportionately from working-class backgrounds, unmarried, and between twenty and forty years old.

States including Nazi Germany and Egypt commonly use torture to extract confessions from men suspected of being homosexual. In Egypt, possession of condoms or sexual lubricant or stereotypically feminine characteristics are cited as circumstantial evidence that the suspect has committed sodomy. Online dating apps have also been used to identify and target men for prosecution.

Physical examinations purporting to detect evidence of homosexual practices have been employed since at least 1857, when the French physician Auguste Ambroise Tardieu published a book claiming to identify several signs that a person had participated in receptive anal intercourse. As of 2018, at least nine states, including Tanzania, Egypt, and Tunisia, use medically discredited anal examinations in an effort to detect same-sex acts between men or transgender women. There is no evidence that such tests are effective at detecting whether the victim has taken part in homosexual activity. This practice is considered to constitute acts of torture under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

Effects

The criminalization of homosexuality is often seen as defining all gays and lesbians as criminals or outlaws. Even when not enforced, such laws express a symbolic threat of state violence and reinforce stigma and discrimination. Homosexuals may fear prosecution and are put at risk of blackmail, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, police beatings, and involuntary medical interventions. The criminalization of homosexuality in some cases pushes LGBT culture and socialization to the margins of society, exposing LGBT people to crimes such as assault, robbery, rape, or murder from other citizens. They may be afraid to report these crimes or may be ignored by the authorities. Such issues lead to severe psychological harm. The laws also justify discrimination against homosexuals—being cited to deny child custody, registration of associations, and other civil rights—and prevent LGBT people from exercising their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of association.

Reactions of homosexuals to the laws range from internalizing stigma to losing respect for the laws and civic community in general. Historian Robert Beachy argues that a confluence of factors including the criminalization of homosexuality meant that a sense of homosexual identity was first developed in Germany around 1900, ultimately catalyzing the first homosexual movementLGBT movements often developed after the repeal of criminal laws, but in some cases they contributed to repeal efforts. LGBT activism against criminalization can take multiple forms, including directly advocating the repeal of the laws, strategic litigation in the judicial system in order to reduce enforceability, seeking external allies from outside the country, and capacity building within the community. A 1986 study found that the decriminalization of homosexuality in South Australia did not lead to an increase in undesirable effects (such as child abuse, public solicitation, or disease transmission) as claimed in parliamentary debates.

The criminalization of homosexuality has been identified as an exacerbating feature of the HIV epidemic in Africa and Central Asia, because it dissuades many people at risk of HIV infection from disclosing their sexual behavior to healthcare providers or seeking preventative care, testing, or treatment. Criminalization both reinforces societal disapproval of homosexuality, which is another factor in decreasing the effectiveness of anti-HIV efforts and is independently associated with less access to HIV services.

Support and opposition

Religions

The Abrahamic religions all have traditionally held negative attitudes towards homosexuality. The Hebrew Bible prescribes the death penalty for "lying with another man as with a woman" (Leviticus 20:13) but does not directly address lesbianism. It is disputed if the biblical prohibition was originally intended to prohibit temple prostitution or particular sexual acts between multiple men, particularly those that are seen as compromising a man's masculinity. The total prohibition of homosexual behavior is considered to have evolved relatively late in the Jewish tradition. Some Christians cite various Bible passages in order to justify the criminalization of homosexuality. Although the Holy See officially opposes the criminalization of homosexuality, in 2014 Roman Catholic bishops from Malawi, Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania, Eritrea, Zambia, Uganda, and Ethiopia united to demand criminal punishment of homosexuals, calling homosexuality unnatural and un-African.

According to sharia law, liwat (anal intercourse) and sihaq or musahiqa (tribadism) are considered sins or criminal offenses. The Sunni Hanafi school, unlike other Islamic schools and branches, rejects analogy as a principle of jurisprudence. Since there is no explicit call for the punishment of homosexuals in the accepted statements of Muhammed, Hanafi jurists classified homosexuality as a sin rather than a crime according to religious law and a tazir offense, meaning the punishment is left to the discretion of secular rulers. According to the Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali (Sunni), and Ja'afari (Shia) schools, any penetrative sex outside of marriage or between a man and his female slave is zina, a more serious crime. Zina is punishable by lashes or death by stoning; whether the death penalty is allowed depends on the school, whether the man has been married, and whether he is the active or passive partner. However, the death penalty can only be applied upon a confession repeated four times by the accused or testimony by four witnesses. All Sunni schools, but not the Shia Ja'afari, consider non-anal sex between men to be a tazir offense. In recent times, some progressive Muslims have argued for a new interpretation of liwat (which is never defined in the Quran) to mean something other than consensual homosexual acts.

Adherence to Islam is a major predictor of maintaining laws criminalizing homosexuality and the death penalty for it. The majority of studies have found no association for Christianity. State interference in religious matters, for example religious courts having jurisdiction beyond family law or bans on interfaith marriage, is strongly correlated with maintaining the criminalization of homosexuality. In Africa, anti-homosexual campaigns promoted by conservative Christians, sometimes with support from U.S. conservative evangelical Christian groups, have seen increased law enforcement efforts and the introduction of harsher penalties against homosexual activity.

Under Buddhist religious law, there is no punishment for homosexuality among laypeople. Although harsh penalties are prescribed for penetrative sexual activity by male monks, novitiates suffer less punishment than for heterosexual activity.

Arguments for

A prominent reason cited for criminalizing homosexuality is the claim, made without evidence, that it could be spread, and that laws against it would prevent homosexuals from recruiting children. This rationale was later proved wrong by scientific research showing that sexual orientation was fixed by a young age. Both Philo of Alexandria and Heinrich Himmler believed that if allowed to spread unchecked, homosexuality would lead to depopulation; therefore, they advocated harsh punishments. The belief that the West is conspiring to depopulate Africa using homosexuality is also a common argument for retaining the criminalization of homosexuality in Africa.

Supporters of paternalism argues that the state can interfere in citizens' private lives to secure a vision of the common good. A common argument is that criminalization of homosexuality is necessary to maintain public morality, traditional values, and cultural or social norms. Anxieties around public morality gained prominence in nineteenth-century Western Europe and North America. Before the medicalization of homosexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was commonly seen as a vice, similar to drunkenness, that occurred as a result of moral degradation rather than being an innate predisposition. Soviet officials argued that homosexuality was a social danger that contravened socialist morality, and that criminalization was an essential tool to lower its prevalence. Some countries have cited the perception that the criminalization of homosexuality would prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted infections, in particular HIV/AIDS, as a reason to keep their laws.

Another reason cited in favor of criminalizing homosexuality is public opinion. The rarity of prosecutions is also cited as a reason not to repeal the laws.

Arguments against

Criticism of the criminalization of homosexuality began to be expressed by Enlightenment thinkers such as legal philosopher Cesare Beccaria in his 1764 treatise On Crimes and Punishments. Early opponents argued that the laws were impractical to enforce, ineffective at deterring homosexuality, and overly intrusive into private life. For example, Napoleon believed that "The scandal of legal proceedings would only tend to multiply" homosexual acts. In 1898, socialist politician August Bebel highlighted the disproportionate enforcement of Paragraph 175 against working-class German men as a reason for repeal. One argument leading to the decriminalization of homosexuality in countries such as Canada, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Bulgaria was that homosexuality was a pathological disease and therefore inappropriate as an object of criminal sanctions.

Another argument cited for the decriminalization of homosexuality is that morality is distinct from law, which should concern itself only with the public good. Based on the work of John Stuart Mill, the harm principle posits that conduct should only be considered criminal if it harms people other than those performing the action. According to this principle, homosexuality should not be criminalized. The 1957 Wolfenden Report, which proposed the decriminalization of homosexuality in the United Kingdom, sparked a famous debate between Lord Devlin, H. L. A. Hart, and others about whether the law was a suitable instrument for the enforcement of morality when the interests of non-consenting parties are not affected. Many of these justifications are consistent with a strong moral condemnation of homosexuality and are disputes over how best to handle the perceived social problem of homosexuality, rather than being based on the inalienable rights of LGBT people.

Another line of reasoning argues that homosexuality is not morally wrong. Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote the first systematic defense of sexual freedom, arguing that homosexuality and other forms of consensual sex were morally acceptable as they were pleasurable to their participants and forbidding these acts destroyed a great deal of human happiness. In the 1860s and 1870s, German Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was the most prominent critic of the criminalization of homosexuality. His demand for equality before the law and in religion on the basis of an innate, biologically based sexual drive—beginning with the decriminalization of homosexuality and ending with same-sex marriage—are similar to those sought by LGBT rights organizations in the twenty-first century. As a result of social changes, in the twenty-first century, the majority of people in many Western countries view homosexuality as morally acceptable or not a moral issue.

Human rights

The criminalization of homosexuality is a violation of international human rights law. The European Court of Human Rights found that laws criminalizing homosexuality violated the right to private life guaranteed by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in Dudgeon v. United Kingdom (1981), Norris v. Ireland (1988), and Modinos v. Cyprus (1993). In the 1994 case Toonen v. Australia, the Human Rights Committee ruled that the criminalization of homosexuality in Tasmania violated the right to privacy and non-discrimination guaranteed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, even though the applicant was never arrested or charged with violating the law. While Tasmania argued that the law was necessary to protect traditional morals and prevent the transmission of HIV, the Human Rights Committee found that arguments about morals are not insulated from international human rights norms.

In 2014, the African Union's Commission on Human and People's Rights issued a landmark resolution calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality. In 2020, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found in Gareth Henry and Simone Carline Edwards v. Jamaica that Jamaica's laws criminalizing same-sex activities violated the applicants' right to privacy, right to humane treatment, freedom of movement, and principle of legality guaranteed by the American Convention on Human Rights. The commission recommended that Jamaica repeal the laws against same-sex activity in order to guarantee the non-repetition of similar human rights abuses in the future. Persecution on the grounds of sexual orientation is a reason to seek asylum in some countries, including Canada, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, although depending on the case the mere existence of criminal sanctions may not be sufficient for an applicant to be granted asylum.

Public opinion

According to a 2017 worldwide survey by ILGA, the criminalization of homosexuality is correlated with more negative opinions on LGBT people and LGBT rights. Overall, 28.5 percent of those surveyed supported the criminalization of homosexuality, while 49 percent disagreed. In states that criminalize homosexuality, 42 percent agree, and 36 percent disagree, compared with non-criminalizing states where 22 percent agree, and 55 percent disagree. Knowing someone who is gay, lesbian, or bisexual is correlated with less support for criminalization. The number of Americans who agree that homosexuality should be a criminal offense has dropped from 56 percent in 1986 to 18 percent in 2021. Public opinion surveys show that while 78 percent of Africans disapprove of homosexuality, only 45 percent support it being criminalized.

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