The cultures where kissing doesn’t exist

MOST of us would assume that kissing is a universal trait, but there are some cultures that find the idea of a pash a total turn-off.

IT HAS been decades since anyone questioned the idea that romantic kissing is a universal human practice.

Yet sweeping new research from the University of Nevada’s anthropology department has revealed that many cultures find the thought of a pash extremely distasteful.

The Mehinaku of Brazil, for example, told one ethnographer that they thought kissing was “gross”, asking why anyone would want to “share their dinner”.

This isn’t really a surprising response, the experts say, when the primary purpose of mouth-to-mouth contact worldwide is for “kiss-feeding” from parent to child.

Researchers William Jankowiak, Shelly Volsche and Justin Garcia discovered that more than half of 168 diverse cultures did not use the romantic-sexual kiss.

“There is a marked absence of kissing in the equatorial and sub-Saharan hunter-gatherer societies such as the Hadza, the Turkana, the Maasai, and the Yanomamo,” Volsche told news.com.au after the publication of the eye-opening paper.

In fact, it looks as though kissing only evolves where humans develop a complex society, with time for and interest in erotic play.

The “ancestral state” of human sexuality, Volsche believes, is a basic mating practice focused on reproduction.

“The Aka pygmies talk about their ‘night’s work’,” she added. “This is the euphemism they use for sexual contact. They admit that it is enjoyable, but the main purpose is to conceive a child. Where we in the West may brag about the quality of foreplay or the length of an individual interaction, the Aka focus on how many times in a night they ‘worked’.”

… as Drake taught Madonna live on stage at Coachella. Pictures: Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Coachella

Not every person loves a pash as much as the next …

Many societies that do not have romantic kissing use other physical expressions of endearment, usually an exchange of breath or mutual sniffing of cheeks and necks.

Parents will often kiss children’s body parts, and people will use pecks on the cheek or lips as greetings, often ritualised to indicate who is the subordinate.

The Oceanic Kiss involves the passing of open mouths past each other, with no contact. It is usually a greeting, occasionally part of the sexual repertoire.

The anthropologists now claim that the conviction that romantic kissing is universal dates back to a large body of unverified and unchallenged researched dating from the 1950s and 1960s.

It was only when Volsch and her colleagues started questioning these received ideas that they realised “everyone was citing data that wasn’t really there”.

It appears that sexual and romantic kissing arrives hand in hand with social complexity. “Most Western and industrial/post-industrial cultures now have it, while most small-scale societies (hunter-gatherer, pastoral, small horticultures) do not,” Volsche said.

Ethnocentrism — where we assume other cultures are just like ours — is likely to have contributed to the confusion as well. The researchers observe that many Native American tribes did not adopt kissing until after having contact with European settlers.

Still, even a rational scientist like Volsche observes that kissing “feels good”.

“It provides for intimate exchange, a sign of trust, and many other hormonal bonding mechanisms take place,” she concluded.

That’s likely to have assisted its dissemination to the point where we’re convinced we must all have been doing it forever.