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Every single picture or statue I have ever seen from Egyptian culture they are clothed. What explains that?
Greeks did not go around in public naked. They went to sport naked. Women were not allowed to go to sport at all if memory serves.
Tribes that "barely cover anything" are not the same as not covering anything at all, and a long list of them without any recourse to any authoritative study or even any mention of what their sexual taboos are and are not does little to help the point you seem to be trying to make. About the only one of your examples I was able to check out was Eskimo culture. They do indeed seem to be very open about sex, up to and including fondling their children from early childhood. So there's one. From the beginning, I have stated that some small minority of cultures do indeed practice open nudity and do not seem to treat sex as privately as most cultures do. You have now convincingly identified one of them. Pacific islanders are a notorious example that often works its way into these discussions as well. I am aware of them, as I said from the beginning. What percentage of the total human population do they make up? Is there any data?
Indian monks using nudity as a special sign of some religious significance seems to argue opposite your point, as does the habit of ancient Celts to go naked into battle. I would also like to point out the singular lack of utility of the last, as it is likely among the causes of their downfall in early conflicts with the budding culture of Rome. In any event, it would symbolize little if anything at all if there were no understanding of the vulnerability of nudity.
Most American indian tribes appear to have worn clothes. The larger civilized nations of mezzo and south America seem to have worn clothes.
If anthropologists are capable of ignoring the weight of all the many, many cultures - Japanese, Chinese, Western, Middle Eastern, African - cultures from every continent where mankind has made its home in any large number... all the weight of all these cutlures who do practice sexual discretion and clothe themselves, in favor of a long list of small tribes that actually appear to represent a tiny minority of people, and represent in themselves a relatively small number of truly distinct cultures, then that is a sad state of affairs. I am not convinced, however, that anthropologists are ignorant of the wide range of sexual taboos or the habit of wearing clothes that seems to pervade cultures all over the world, whether they be Christian or not.
This is to me the most baffling of all:
"It is irritating to see that a person considers Christian culture, coupled with a single Guinea tribe that wears gourds on their privates, as outweighing the validity of the countless cultures past and present that behave(d) completely differently; that supplying the example of one primitive tribe as proof of the naturalness of body-shame requires a full-fledged thesis list to refute. Of course it isn't really about that Guinea tribe, it's about the certainty one feels about social 'truths' when one is born and raised to them. Of course the many millions of people for thousands of years don't compare to personal conviction, do they?"
Do I have to, like you, go back and list all the nations, western and non western, where clothes are worn and where sex is private? No... because they are commonly known, whereas isolated tribes of people with no sexual inhibitions living in places where it is hard to maintain any contact with anyone else need to be enumerated just to be known. It's not as if I am speaking here out of the blue sky as you intimate, and it is this tendency to overexagerate a point that brings my mind back to one of my earlier statements, which is that most people who argue strenuously over these matters seem to do so without much regard to any sort of systematic philosophy, but do so with a sort of self-appointed zeal and seemingly feigned exepertise that says a lot more about their own personal beliefs than it does about all of anthropology or all cultures.
Two examples. First, if you think that by rattling off a list of isolated tribal cultures you have proven that the large bulk of humanity does not wear clothes or understand sex in terms of it being private, you are mistaken.
Further, you put words in my mouth. I have never tried to pass this off as a strictly Christian habit. You have, in your attempts to somehow single Christianity out. I am talking about the world in general, and have made that point more than a few times. To hear you, one would begin to think that Christians were the only people who historically wore clothes, whereas my point is of course that they are not, and that it is false to assert that clothes wearing or sexual taboos of any sort are strictly Christian in nature.
Looking over nudism on Wikipedia, I noted this woman at the bottom of the web page. "Question Authority".
Pretty much sums up my experience with people who insist that treating nudity or sex as somehow private is a Christian aberation.
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