2. Two Forms of Masculine Ritualized Rebirth
The Melanesian Body and the
Amazonian Cosmos
Pascale Bonnemère
Pascale Bonnemère contrasts men's cults in New Guinea and in the northwest Amazon. She notes the striking parallels, which include the myth of matriarchy, the exclusion of women, and the physical ordeals for boys. The focus of her discussion, however, is the symbolism of rebirth that marks initiation rites. In both Amazonia and Melanesia there is a similar emphasis on women's reproductive abilities and on recourse to female physiological processes as a model for making boys grow. But Bonnemère is also sensitive to the differences between the regions. Among the Anga of New Guinea in particular, the human body is the model for the ritual; female reproduction and the boys' maturation are merged. In Amazonia, however, the metaphor is more abstract and the metaphors linking reproduction and initiation are less corporeal.
Bonnemère's discussion is especially welcome in that it deals directly with the "pseudoprocreative" imagery of men's cults, in which the men's ritual activities acquire the generative, reproductive power of women. This is a theme also developed in different ways by Hugh-Jones (Chapter 11), Biersack (Chapter 4), Conklin (Chapter 7), and Gregor and Tuzin (Chapter 13) in this volume.
Comparative anthropological analyses are difficult to undertake and a fortiori to complete successfully, for they require discovering certain laws that could account for similar modes of thought and symbolic structures beyond the diversity of social practices, representations, and discourses encountered. Although there is a recent trend in anthropology, stronger in the United States than elsewhere, that emits doubts concerning the possibility of making comparisons, given that cultures are so different from one another, many scholars in the discipline still share the idea that comparative analysis is part of the anthropological endeavor and even, for some, one of its main objectives.
Now that many fine-grained ethnographic descriptions and analyses exist for most parts of the world, anthropological comparison becomes even more legitimate, mainly because it meets the conditions of control (given the amount of data available), of scale (given the number of neighboring groups being studied), and thus of comparability. But there is more to say about the comparability of Amazonia and Melanesia. As Descola and Taylor wrote in the introduction to an important volume on the Amazonian contemporary anthropology, the area is "un extraordinaire laboratoire, comparable à bien des égards à la Nouvelle-Guinée, et qui
For me as for many other social anthropologists, making a comparative analysis implies that what is going to be compared is comparable. In other words, we have to choose, as far as is possible, a scale of comparison that offers the possibility of controlling the information that is not dealt with, but which cannot be presumed as having no influence upon the cultural configurations of elements we are focusing on.
In this chapter, I compare male cults in a specific part of Papua New Guinea and in a limited region of Amazonia. The male cults in these two areas have much in common: the elements acted out, the goals assigned to them, and the discourse people have in respect to them are quite similar. But similarity in itself does not justify the comparative project. In effect, we cannot expect a comparative analysis to tell much about the principles of human mind and human life that transcend any one culture by observing that, in the male cults of two very distant regions, there is the playing of flutes—musical instruments having originally been owned by women—physical ordeals of the same kind for boys, exclusion of women, and so forth. Because such resemblances lie on too general a level to be sufficiently relevant, I prefer to undertake a comparison on a different basis, a choice that stems, perhaps, from the ethnographic situation to which I am accustomed.
The site of my fieldwork is three small valleys in the eastern part of Papua New Guinea, inhabited by the Ankave, a group numbering about one thousand persons. They are a fraction of some seventy thousand people collectively known as Angans, who are divided into some twenty groups spread over a territory of around 140 by 130 kilometers, and who speak twelve related languages and share many cultural characteristics. Angan groups stem from a common background—their languages are more like each other than like any other neighboring language (Lloyd 1973)—and genetic stock (Seger et al., 1988). In the oral traditions of most of these groups, a single region, located in the center of the present-day Anga territory, is said to be the point from which their members originated. The Ankave, as well as several other groups now living in the southern part of the Anga region, are refugees who arrived in the area several hundred years ago after conflicts broke out in the original place.
This specific ethnographic situation offers the possibility, when attempting comparative work between Anga groups, to control important parameters, ecological and historical ones in particular. Moreover, people who have worked in the area have pursued theoretical approaches that, though they differ from each other, are not incompatible, thus facilitating comparative study.
Familiarity with such an ethnographic situation did not really help me in choosing the Amazonian context for an attempt to draw parallels with the microscale
My discussion focuses on the rebirth dimension of men's cults, as they appear among two Anga groups and in two related societies of the Vaupés region. It will be seen that some differences in the representations underlying male maturation in the two areas may be linked to deep contrasts that exist between the representations of the origin of the world and the place of the human beings in the larger realm of all living species.
I proceed in two steps that correspond to two levels of comparative analysis. In the first place, I compare male initiation rituals in two closely related populations of Papua New Guinea: the Ankave, who inhabit the southwestern corner of the Anga territory, and the Sambia, who live more to the north and are well known from the writings of G. Herdt. This small-scale comparative analysis shows that behind different practices lies a similar emphasis on women's reproductive abilities and on recourse to female physiological processes as a model for making boys grow. In the second step, I move to a regional situation in Amazonia, which bears comparison to the Anga one, in other words, one that presents similarities in scale to the situation I am using as a departure point.
In the cultural area labelled northwest Amazon, two major sets of groups are present: the Tukanoans, living in the Vaupés region (Bara, Barasana, Cubeo, Desana, Makuna, Tatuyo, and so forth), and the Arawak-speaking peoples (Wakuénai and Curripaco) located further north, but with some groups located inside areas inhabited by Tukano groups, as is the case of the Kawillary, Tariana, and Yukuna (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 19–22). In both sets, a ritual complex known as Yurupari involves musical instruments and spiritual entities to which the same name has been given. One of its performances is connected with the initiation of boys, other rituals of the same kind being held every year in connection with fruit seasons. Both involve objects associated with fertility.
THE ANGA GROUPS OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Five days' walk apart, the Ankave and the Sambia follow principles of social organization that are common to all Anga groups: patrilineal descent, absence of large-scale ceremonial exchanges, paramount importance accorded to war, and the existence of Great Men (Godelier 1986). Male initiations enjoy pride of place
Despite similarities in these general features of social organization, notable differences can be found between certain Anga groups, and particularly between a northern Anga group, like the Sambia, and a southwestern Anga one, like the Ankave, among whom I have been doing fieldwork since 1987. For instance, sister-exchange is the predominant mode of marriage among the northern Angans, while the Ankave marriage system is governed by negative rules with payment of a small bridewealth. Among the Sambia and the Baruya, young girls are initiated, but Ankave girls are not. Special huts are built for menstruating women in northern Anga villages, while Ankave women are not secluded during their periods. And finally, Ankave male initiations have never involved ritualized homosexuality, and the village has no permanent men's house. As a corollary, and though here it is a matter of slight differences or of nuances, fine-grained observations reveal that, among the Ankave, relations between the sexes are less antagonistic: for example, there is no systematic devaluation of women,[4] domestic violence does not frequently occur, and women and men cooperate in many daily and ritual activities in order to assure their success (Bonnemère 1996).
Differences between Ankave, on the one hand, and Sambia/Baruya, on the other hand, can also be observed in the male rituals. Both societies have a strong male warrior ethos that, even today, permeates the system of male life-cycle rituals. In both cases, these sets of rituals can be called male initiations and have as their main purpose to make boys grow and become strong. However, they do not have the same number of stages, are not organized according to exactly the same sequence, and do not use the same objects and substances.
A Single Hypothesis for Two Different Anga Male Rituals
Interpreting initiation rites as a rebirth is nothing new, given the major insight Van Gennep had nearly a century ago and the number of subsequent
It is no surprise then that the Ankave sequence of male rituals is altogether in the vein of those which exist elsewhere. What is interesting in this particular case is that the previous analyses of initiations among the Angans did not emphasize the rebirth dimension of these ritual elements and, more generally, did not elaborate on the reproductive imagery and symbolism that pervades them. M. Godelier and G. Herdt have insisted more on the physical and psychological violence imposed on the novices, on the long separation of the young boys from their mothers and the female realm, and on the establishment and reproduction of male domination through the initiations. The Ankave situation is valuable because they are one of the few groups in the southern part of the Anga region where male rituals are still performed today. In these groups, ritualized homosexual practices never existed; the major ritual act is the absorption of red pandanus, in whatever form.
The analysis of male Ankave rituals led me to extend Van Gennep's hypothesis and to propose that other events of female reproductive life may also provide a powerful analogy for interpreting the rituals (Bonnemère 1996, 345–352). As already stated, a total of some one thousand Ankave live in three unevenly populated valleys separated by a one- or two-day walk. These valleys are located on the southern fringe of the central cordillera of Papua New Guinea, in the northern part of Gulf province, near the borders of the Morobe and the Eastern Highlands. The Ankave territory, whose altitude ranges from 800 to 1500 meters, is for the most part (99%) covered in forest. Gardens supply the main foods: taros, bananas, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane. Besides working in the gardens, the women raise a few pigs and gather forest greens, which are eaten almost daily with some kind of tuber. The fruits of two seasonal plants—red pandanus and Pangium edule—are consumed in large quantities as a sauce. In spite of the surrounding forest, little hunting is done (marsupials, cassowaries, wild pigs), and the bulk of the game captured is given in exchanges between affinal groups. Eels are caught on a regular, though infrequent, basis, mainly to be distributed among the relatives of the deceased at the ceremony marking the end of mourning.
The Ankave are split into 29 patrilineal clans of very different size: for example, one clan accounts for 50 percent of the population. Exogamy usually operates at the clan level except in this particular case, where people frequently intermarry, providing they do not come from the same lineages. In principle, the residential pattern is patrivirilocal, but in practice the rule is often broken, and cases of alternate residence are frequent. Each family has a house in one of the hamlets in the valley, but household members do not live there all year round. Scattered seasonal camps are set up for various reasons: beating bark capes, trapping eels, preparing Pangium edule, or gathering breadfruits.
Every eight years or so, the Ankave perform male initiation rituals, which are divided into three stages. The first two bear the name of the main rite performed: nosepiercing ceremony (between 9 and 12 years of age) and red-pandanus-rubbing (several months to one year later). The third stage is held when a man expects his first child, but here I will focus mainly on those rites concerning young boys. My analysis of the rituals held in 1994 shows that the substances involved, the acts performed, the persons present, the food prohibited, and several other ritual actions recall the human gestation and birth processes.[5] Everything happens as though men and women were working together, but in separate places, to reproduce some of the events that took place before the boys were born. In brief, the main ritual sequence is as follows.[6]
It should first be noted that the expression for "piercing the nose," which gives its name to the first-stage initiation rituals, literally means "killing the child." This symbolic death is a necessary preliminary to the transformation of the boys into adult men. The interpretation of the whole set of rites occurring around this nose piercing during the first-stage initiations is somewhat delicate, but they all involve several substances and objects associated with femininity, maternity, and procreation in general. For example, the kind of vegetal cane that is introduced into the septum of the initiates following the piercing operation is precisely the kind used for cutting the umbilical cord of the newborn child. Similarly, the particular sugar cane cultivars that the initiates are given to drink are also those which have to be eaten by the parents of a first child several days after the birth.
These are examples of objects used both in the context of birth and during male initiations. But there are also several substances (mainly salt, ginger, and sugar cane) that are given to the initiates in order to heat and afterward to cool their bodies, thus engendering effects that are those which people stress when contrasting femaleness and maleness (women being cold and men hot[7]) or when speaking of sexuality. Temperature is also a pervasive theme in myths where a community of primordial women encounter men for the first time.
Myths also provide information on several objects used during the firststage ceremonies. The awl employed to pierce the young boys' septum is made from a cassowary bone, and the initiates are beaten several times with cassowary quills. In many New Guinea societies, the cassowary is associated with women. An Ankave myth says that, once, a woman who was not a good spouse (she did not feed her husband, she defecated inside the house, and so forth) left the village to go into the forest, and there she turned into a cassowary. Simultaneously, a cassowary came from the forest and changed into a woman.
When commenting on the use of cassowary quills during the initiations, men mention this story and say that the bamboo knife the woman was holding became the quills. It is remarkable that, in this male ritual context, they
Throughout the period when the initiates' septums are healing, the boys' mothers are secluded in a large collective shelter and respect numerous behavioral constraints and food taboos, which, for the most part, are similar to those imposed on the initiates in the bush. Mothers and initiates alike must also soak their new bark capes in stream water every day at dawn before putting the capes on their shoulders. In the mother's case, many of the taboos are the same as those they had to obey when pregnant. Red pandanus juice is the principal food pregnant women eat to make the fetus grow and the one that makes its blood; but at initiation, it is the boys, not their mothers, who eat red pandanus juice during the first stage of the ceremonies. Moreover, when the boys eat this vegetal blood,[9] they do it in utmost secrecy.[10]
The main rite of the second stage of the initiations and the one that gives it its name (chemajine) is the violent rubbing of the boys with red pandanus seeds. The initiates are put into a tiny shelter and placed beside an intense fire. This shelter is built next to the entrance of a branchy corridor to both ends of which have been attached red leaves and beaten bark dyed with red pandanus juice. Pushed by their sponsors, who are preferably real or classificatory mother's brothers, the young boys advance into the corridor being beaten all the while by men posted on the outside. And just as they emerge, a man flings onto their face and shoulders cooked red pandanus seeds, which he rubs in together with a reddish ochre.
We suggest that these two adjoining frames of foliage are metaphors for the uterus and the vagina respectively. The difficult progression of the initiates through the narrow passage—which, because they are pushed, can literally be called an expulsion—can be interpreted as their rebirth to a new state. The red elements at the entrance and exit of the corridor are metaphors of the blood that fills the uterus and of which a small amount spills out at delivery. And like a newborn whose head is the first body part to emerge at delivery, only the head and shoulders of the initiates are rubbed with red pandanus seeds.
Moreover, immediately after the ordeal, each sponsor applies the blood that flowed out of the boy's wounds and the vegetal blood from the red pandanus seeds onto his own body as well as his nephew's. Because blood is inherited from mothers, they are then both covered with a vital fluid that they share, like a woman and her child.
When this rubbing is completed, the boys go back to the village and are treated like newborn babies, in that two women coat their bodies with the yellow mud (xwe'a' omexe') with which every infant is rubbed soon after birth. The
To sum up, I would say that the Ankave second-stage rituals are a reenactment of birth and the moments that follow.[11] The rites of the first stage are less clear, but the main one (piercing the nasal septum) is like a death, and the following rites bring together elements that are associated with fertility and procreation or that induce physical conditions specific to sexuality and maternity. As for the period between these two sets of ceremonies, during which it is theoretically forbidden for the initiates[12] and their kin to eat red pandanus juice, this is seen by the Ankave as a transitional phase that permits the boys to grow a bit before going through the red-pandanus-seeds rubbing. In effect, this second-stage ritual cannot be performed on boys who are too young. So, when for some reason the rituals of the two stages have to be performed in rapid succession, then only the older initiates are taken, the others waiting for the next ceremonies, which will be held several years later.
Thus, initiation can be seen as a rebirth; but, as I have tried to show, Ankave male rituals enact a gestation process as well. Since growth is the main concern and goal of these rituals, and since, for the Ankave, the main agent of growth is blood, which is provided by the mother, gestation is elected as the most relevant metaphor to draw upon for making boys grow.
I now turn to the Sambia to show that, though Ankave and Sambia male rituals are apparently very different, their ideas about how the growth of boys should be enacted are quite similar.
The Sambia number about 2,400 people, living in a rugged mountain area of the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea. Their small hamlets are built at an altitude ranging between 1,000 and 2,000 meters. They are subsistence horticulturalists, who cultivate sweet potato and taro as staple foods, and yam as a seasonal feast crop. Green vegetables are also planted, and mushrooms and palm hearts are gathered from the forest on an irregular basis. G. Herdt writes that "hunting is critical for two reasons: it provides most of the meat, and it is a source of masculine prestige." Pigs are few and "pork plays only a small role in gift-giving and feasts to mark ceremonies" (Herdt 1987, 20). As among the Ankave, marsupial meat is given for initiations and marriage exchanges.
The Sambia population is divided into patrilineal clans, and the rate of patrilocal residence is very high. Hamlets are made up of nuclear family houses, where women and children live, and one or two men's houses, in which all initiated, unmarried males reside. Married men join them on special occasions such as the performing of initiations.
Semen as Maternal Milk.[13]
Among the Sambia, boys do not have their nasal septum pierced during initiation rituals; rather, the operation is performed in early childhood on boys and girls alike (Herdt 1987, 131). What happens during the first-stage ceremonies is the giving and inserting of a new nose plug. The main rite of this stage is the nose bleeding, done in great secrecy after the initiates have been "thrust into a green barricade and through a muddy, narrow, inner chamber that leads only one way into an even narrower cagelike … passageway" (p. 141). As with the similar corridor of Ankave rituals, pieces of red bark are tied into the branches of the green mass. Herdt adds that "approaching from the distance, it appears as if blood were dripping from the branches" (ibid.). Actually, the only difference in the two branchy structures is their moment of use. In Sambia rituals, the initiates are pushed into the structure by their ritual sponsors during the first stage, before any ritualized homosexual practices have begun, while in Ankave rituals, the ordeal occurs in the second stage, just before the violent rubbing with red pandanus seeds.
The nose bleeding itself takes place a moment after the corridor ordeal, near a river stream in order to let the blood flow into the water, so that "women cannot discover any signs of blood; and it also allows the boys to wash themselves off" (p. 143).
Two hours later comes the "stinging-nettles ritual," intended to "make way for the growth of a new masculine skin" and consisting of rubbing fresh nettles onto the boys' bodies (p. 144). The flute ceremony follows, which teaches about fellatio and about semen as a nourishing substance. It is also the occasion to teach the boys about the fatal consequences of breaking the secrecy of these practices.
Apart from the nose bleeding and the boy-inseminating practices, there are several other Sambia ritual events that do not occur among the Ankave. Most striking in this respect are the extreme dramatization of the separation of the boys from their mothers and the violence of the ritualized interactions between men and women, ending with the proclamation of the "mothers' harmful effects" on their sons, which engender the necessity for the male rituals. In short, women are held responsible for the painful events the boys have to endure and are therefore addressed and treated with considerable aggressivity (pp. 151–152).
The second-stage Sambia rituals are "the simplest of all collective ceremonies." Food taboos are less numerous than in the preceding stage and, in particular, red foods ("red pandanus fruit oil, red and blue yams, and many red-colored leaves") are now permitted (p. 126). Boys are told about the importance of continuing to take in male seminal substance: "The elders implore them to ingest as much semen as possible, to grow strong," writes Herdt (ibid.). The focus then is on the ingestion of semen and, although the rites
The gateway of branches with red objects attached to them, which is used during the first-stage rituals, can be interpreted, I think, the same way as for Ankave rituals: a difficult passage through a vagina and then a delivery. The flow of blood in collective nose bleeding, which immediately follows this painful progression, would consequently be similar to delivery blood, and the two events are actually considered equally dangerous (p. 140). Thereafter, the Sambia initiates are rubbed with nettles, possibly in the same way as their mothers were when they gave birth several years earlier.[14] Here we would therefore have a ritual act similar in meaning to the smearing of yellow mud on Ankave newborns and initiates.
The following lessons on semen and the necessity of fellatio taught by men during the flute ceremony become more intelligible. G. Herdt writes that the "tree sap [that the adult men must ingest to replace the semen lost in heterosexual intercourse] is symbolized as ‘milky mother's sap’" (p. 164). And it is not the only time semen is equated with the maternal nourishing substance since, in the teachings concerning fellatio, men say, "If you try it [semen], it is just like the milk of your mothers' breast. You can swallow it all the time and grow quickly" (Herdt, p. 150).
I would then propose that homosexual relations among the Sambia are modeled on breast-feeding,[15] in the same way that ingestion of red pandanus juice among the Ankave is modeled on pregnancy. That would explain why the symbolic rebirth occurs respectively before and after this growth process in these societies. For some reason, the Ankave "chose" the metaphor of intrauterine growth while the Sambia "prefer" the one based on postpartum growth to make boys mature. This difference may well be related to differences in ideas concerning procreation and babies' growth.
To summarize, we can say that, for the Sambia, the boys' maturation is constructed upon breast-feeding as the focal point of reference and, as D. Elliston rightly puts it in a paper concerned with ritualized homosexuality in Melanesia, "breastmilk is [for the Sambia] a key substance of nurturance on which semen is metaphorically predicated" (1995, 858). This metaphorical maternal nourishment enacted in fellatio starts during the first stage of the initiations, just after the rebirth scene and the collective nose bleeding, and goes on in the second-stage set of rituals. It lasts as long as real breast-feeding does, that is, for several years. In the next stage, the initiates will be the bachelors from whom boys will in turn take their vital substance.
To interpret ritualized homosexuality as metaphorical breast-feeding helps us to account for the odd fact that heterosexual relations are seen as depleting while homosexual ones are considered much less so. This statement implies that the process of making a human grow, either as a fetus or as a young boy, causes depletion in one case (during pregnancy), and not in the other (during initiation).
This situation becomes easier to understand if the perspective adopted here is kept in mind. In effect, just as lactating mothers do not need to replace the milk they give to their children, bachelors do not need to ingest tree sap to replace the semen they give to the boys.[16] Homosexuality is not considered to be depleting, because it is not a sexual activity but a nourishing process (see also Elliston 1995). That view may also explain why there is no homosexuality among adults. Making a fetus grow or making a boy grow does not entail the same consequences for the man, in other words for the agent of growth. It may also be that boys' physical maturation through ingestion of semen is equated to babies' growth through breast-feeding, while feeding a fetus in a woman's body is thought of in a different way.
Married men have to consume vegetal substitutes for the seminal substance in order not to lose their jerungdu, threatened by sexual intercourse with women. The fact that "heterosexual intercourse is, as men see it, more draining than homosexual fellatio" (Herdt 1981, 249; 1984, 192) implies that it is not so much the loss of semen by itself that is the cause of depletion but the kind of body it enters. As G. Herdt writes (1981, 50), "It seems to be feminine bodies that cause worry." If genital sex is particularly dangerous, it is that way because it implies contact with a woman's sexual parts. Women's bodies are characterized as "consuming" a great amount of semen, thus causing depletion in the men's bodies that interact with them.
I now return to the comparison between Sambia and Ankave by underlining the symmetry of semen and blood in these two groups. Semen for the Sambia and womb blood for the Ankave have the capacity both of coconceiving and of making the fetus grow. Both substances are also used in male rituals, directly in one case,[17] and through a substitute, red pandanus juice, in the other. What differs most is the relation that these bodily substances entertain with breast milk. Among the Sambia, ingesting semen triggers the production of milk in women, while sugarcane performs the same function for the Ankave. For the latter, breast milk makes blood in children of either sex, a role that will be played by red pandanus juice later in life. Finally, it appears that the Ankave acknowledge that the major nourishing substances are female, be it blood or milk, while Sambia make semen the source of maternal milk and impute polluting effects to female blood.
Collective and Individual Nose Bleeding.
Among the Sambia, nose bleeding is performed in two different contexts: collectively during the first and third stages of the male rituals and individually in adult life. My interpretation of the blood released during the first collective nose bleeding as a metaphor for the blood that flows at birth does not appear to hold for subsequent ritual bleedings, either collective or individual. Thus, we are here confronted with a ritual act that involves more than one meaning.[18] But, as I am going to try to show, these meanings are all related to the women's reproductive cycle.
The second collective nose bleeding is performed during the third stage of the male rituals, when the boys are between the ages of 15 and 18 (Herdt 1987, 107). These rituals are the last to be held collectively, and G. Herdt qualifies them as "puberty rites … which transform the pubescent initiates into bachelor youths" (Herdt 1981, 242).
Subsequent nose bleedings are done on an individual basis at specific moments: when the man's young wife menstruates for the first time (fifth-stage initiation), at the birth of his first child (sixth-stage initiation), and finally at each of his wife's periods. Thus, "the final three (egocentered) initiations carry the youth into full-blown manhood based on marriage, cohabitation with his wife, and fatherhood" (p. 242).
My interpretation of all these nose bleedings rests on the hypothesis that the growth and maturation of boys is conceived in terms of the main physiological events of menstruation and childbirth. More generally, since the Sambia consider women as "innately healthier and longer-lived than men" (p. 191), female bodily functioning is used by men as a model for the maintaining of their own good health.[19] This is not unusual in New Guinea: as Donald Tuzin wrote for the Arapesh living in the Sepik region, although a girl experiencing her first menses is secluded for a month, none of the rites performed on this occasion or for her second menstrual period are "thought to be essential to the maiden's procreative powers. Rather, they are meant to celebrate the manifestation, or unfolding, of powers that have been a part of her since birth" (1995, 299–300).
After having been reborn and having grown by ingesting semen, the initiate would then "menstruate" for the first time at puberty, during the thirdstage rituals. The subsequent ritual events depend on the maturation of the young wife who has been designated as a spouse for him and is "of similar or younger age" (Herdt 1981, 39). When she has her first period, the fifth-stage rituals, which end with a nose bleeding, are held for the young man. From then on, he will have to nose bleed himself each time his wife "disappears to the menstrual hut" (Herdt 1982a, 209). "Sambia men thus engage in private bleeding for many years, till they halt coitus, or their wives undergo menopause and stop having periods" (p. 210).
The birth of a man's first child is the occasion to organize the sixth and final stage of the initiation rituals, which comprise a nose bleeding performed voluntarily by the young father himself. Then, "following this initiation, most men do not nose bleed themselves again until … they resume coitus with their wives following the child's breast-weaning" (pp. 208–209).
What seems clear from all these statements is that in adult life men stop bleeding themselves when their wives do not bleed (during breast-feeding and at menopause), confirming that men seek maturation and good health through the imitation of female body functioning. The Sambia say that they perform nose-bleedings in order for boys "to rid them of female pollutants that block ‘male growth’" (p. 192) and for adult men to "remove female contaminants
For all these reasons, I propose the following alternative reading of Sambia nose bleedings: men ritually accomplish what occurs naturally in women (see also Herdt 1981, 190). The female body being "a body capable of reproducing itself" (p. 193), it constitutes an adequate model for thinking and operating the maturation of men's bodies, which lack this capacity. Perhaps it is thus, as P. Hage wrote fifteen years ago, "the relation between these [initiation] rites and female physiology is based not on envy but on analogy" (1981, 272).[20]
Making Together/Making Alone: The Ankave and Sambia Models
Ankave men, too, are concerned by the menarche of their future wives and by the birth of their first child. Again, blood is the focus of the restrictions that are imposed on them in these particular circumstances. But the kind of interaction between the sexes that underlies their behavior is of a totally different nature. An Ankave man stops eating red pandanus juice for several days when his wife has her first period. And, when a man's wife is expecting his first child, a great set of restrictions is imposed on him, among which the prohibition on eating red pandanus juice is the most important; it lasts from when the pregnancy is known until several days after the birth. At each subsequent pregnancy this particular taboo is imposed on him. The Ankave say that this is intended to prevent hemorrhage at birth.
We have here a system of representations in which the vegetal substitute for blood that someone, here a husband, eats can have an effect on the body of another person, here a wife, either menstruating or pregnant. More generally, the role of the expectant father, particularly in the case of the first child, is essential to the well-being of his pregnant wife. The whole set of food and other taboos imposed on him is intended to avoid any problem at birth, such as hemorrhage or the baby remaining stuck in the womb. The behaviors that husband and wife observe in this circumstance follow a complementary pattern. In effect, while the things the expectant father must refrain from doing are supposed to protect his pregnant wife from the hazards of birth, the restrictions that fall on her are all directed toward the child's welfare. Both parents play a role, then, in ensuring a safe delivery as well as the birth of a healthy baby. Note that this complementarity also operates for conception and formation of the child's body parts, since man and woman are considered to participate equally.
The contrast with the Sambia situation is striking, for there we do not find any complementary actions on the part of husband and wife in the process of reproduction of life. Rather, what Sambia men do is, on the one hand, to stress the role of semen in the conception and growth of the fetus and, on the
At first sight, Ankave and Sambia male initiations appear to be quite different: they are not divided into the same number of stages, they do not use the same substances to make boys grow, the mothers of the initiates are excluded in one case and participate in the other, and we could go on. But as soon as we look into the details of the ritual events, the differences fade, giving way to a similar overall structure.
In both cases, female physiology is used as a framework that shapes the ritual procedures used to make boys grow and mature. In the Ankave case, the metaphor is intrauterine growth, and red pandanus juice is secretly ingested by the initiates as a substitute for blood, which nourishes the fetus. Among the Sambia, the metaphor is postpartum growth, and the boys secretly absorb the semen of bachelors, as a substitute for breast milk, which nourishes babies.
Among all the rites performed, ingestion of red pandanus juice among the Ankave and fellatio among the Sambia are certainly the ones that are the most strictly concealed from women and children.[21] Boys are threatened with death if they reveal the secrets (Herdt 1982b, 61), and Ankave men are very careful to hide the red pandanus seeds left after the juice has been consumed.
Despite superficial differences, then, Ankave and Sambia initiations are both constructed upon imitation of female nourishing capacities. But in one case the substance comes from the male body, whereas in the other it is a vegetal substitute for a female-associated fluid. Does this really make a difference?
Red pandanus juice is equated by the Ankave with blood in general and women's blood in particular. That explains why blood needs during pregnancy or blood losses at menstruation and delivery are managed through the prohibition or the ingestion of this food. But in the origin myth of red pandanus trees, which is not told to women and uninitiated boys, this association between the red juice and women is denied, since the first red pandanus tree grew from the spilled blood of a male heroic figure who was killed because he had no name. So, in men's minds at least, the juice that the novices ingest during the rituals in order to grow ultimately comes from a male body. The myth illustrates the way men appropriate for themselves a female-associated substance that they use in order to grow during initiations in the same way as women make a fetus grow during pregnancy. Even if Sambia use a male substance whereas Ankave make their own, which is associated with femininity, there is in both societies an attempt to detach from women the substances that are locally considered as the most nourishing. In this case the difference between the two societies becomes even less clearcut.
More than in the substances used, the main contrast between Ankave and Sambia male rituals lies in the degree of involvement of the boys' mothers. From the beginning to the end of the first- and second-stage rituals, the mothers of the Ankave initiates are secluded in a large shelter in the village. As already mentioned, during this seclusion, a great number of taboos are imposed
By contrast, among the Sambia, the rituals attended by women always end with a demonstration of antagonism between the sexes and the victory of the men (Herdt 1987, 134). The rebirth and growth of the boys are effected without the help of their mothers.
THE REBIRTH OF THE COSMOS:
THE AMAZONIANS OF THE VAUPéS
The Vaupés region of Colombia is inhabited by several populations belonging to two or three linguistic families.[22] The most important are the Tukano, named after one particular social and linguistic group, and most of the languages spoken in the area belong to a so-called Eastern Tukano set. "The Barasana are one of some twenty Tukanoan-speaking Indian groups living in the southern part of the Colombian Comisaria del Vaupés" (S. Hugh-Jones 1995b, 50). The second main group comprises a few Arawak-speaking peoples, whose principal establishment is to the north of the Vaupés, toward the Orinoco and its affluents. The Kawillary are part of the group, but they live on the southwestern edge of the area inhabited by Tukanoan speakers.
Linguistic diversity and multilingualism characterize the area, with language functioning as "a badge of identity." Marriage rules specify that "a person should normally marry someone who speaks differently from themselves" (S. Hugh-Jones 1993, 96). Barasana individuals thus intermarry with their neighbors, some of them (regardless of their clan or sib membership) with Bara and Tatuyo, others with Makuna, Taiwano, and the Arawak-speaking Kabiyeri, or Kawillary.[23] That means that in one longhouse, or maloca, the residential unit, "the men and their unmarried sisters will all speak a common language, whilst their wives may speak up to three other languages" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 27).
While there is an "external equality of status between groups … each group is sub-divided into a series of clans related as "brothers' and ranked according to the birth-order of their founding ancestors" (S. Hugh-Jones 1995b, 50). This agebased hierarchy also "determines status differences between brothers within the clan or longhouse" (p. 51).
What this author wrote about the Tukano set as a whole could be transposed intact to the Angans of Papua New Guinea: "Besides speaking languages or dialects of a common family, the Tukanoan Indians of the Vaupés share a large number of basic cultural features in common" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 22). These features relate to subsistence, residential patterns, kinship and social structure, rituals, and mythology. But "the structural features that unite
In the domains that concern us directly, these two groups (among others) perform Yurupari rituals, which involve ritual specialists of different kinds (shamans, dancers, chanters, and so forth). This ritual specialization follows the hierarchical ranking of men according to the seniority of their clans.[24] The chiefs, the chanters, and the dancers are all considered to be descendants of the Anaconda, or more precisely, as F. Bourgue writes (n.d.), as transformations of parts of the Anaconda's body, while the shamans are connected to the Jaguar. Shamans play an important role in ceremonial occasions as well as in daily life, for they must treat, by blowing spells, any food to be consumed by people for the first time; this is because "all foods are ranked into a graded series of relative danger" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 32) and because some categories of persons (children and novices for example) cannot eat them without caution. Shamans are also the organizers and main officiants of the Yurupari rituals. Rituals are the domain of adult men, who are the only persons allowed to consume hallucinogenic substances, implying that women and uninitiated boys have no access to visionary experiences.
Gender relations are marked by opposition and complementarity (Bourgue n.d.). As S. Hugh-Jones states, the He House (Yurupari initiation) of the Barasana "establishes and maintains a fundamental division between the sexes …; the division also expresses the complementarity between the sexes in production and reproduction" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 38). Among the Angans, "Though women are excluded from the rites, female attributes and values form a major element of the ritual symbolism" (ibid.).
These features constitute the grounds of my comparison between Amazonia and New Guinea. What form and content mark male initiation rituals in the two regional sets? To which reality (or realities) does "rebirth" refer? And is there some general conclusion that could be drawn from this comparison, limited in scale as well as in scope?
Reading the description and analysis of the Yurupari male initiation rituals given by the Hugh-Joneses for the Barasana and by F. Bourgue for the Kawillary, one is struck by the homogeneity of the diverse ritual acts performed during the three ceremonial days. Although some minor variations occur, there is not the kind of sharp contrasts we found between the two Anga groups (ritualized homosexuality on the one hand and ingestion of red pandanus juice on the other hand).[25] I choose not to discuss the two Yurupari ceremonies separately, as I did for the Ankave and the Sambia, but to present their common frame and to emphasize the few differences that I noticed.[26]
The fathers of several boys decide together that it is time for their sons to see the Yurupari. When a date for the ceremony has been fixed, things begin at dusk. First of all, it is necessary that the shaman who will perform the rituals address Yamatu (among the Kawillary), the ancestral shaman woman,[27] and ask her consent for the boys to give up their children's life.[28] She also has to decide on the identity of the ancestor to be reincarnated in each of the boys who is going to be reborn during the rituals. The secret name that is given to a boy depends on this assimilation between one of his ancestors and himself.
After having blown spells over tobacco, the shaman takes the boys and leads them toward the women who are going to cut their hair very short. Among the Barasana, the boys are also painted from head to toe with black paint by the women before being carried into the house on the shoulders of male elders. "They are placed standing in a line by the men's door with their little fingers linked together" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 77). Then, they eat kana berries (Sabicea amazonensis) to make them strong.
Among the Kawillary, once the boys have their hair cut, the shaman inserts tobacco snuff in their nostrils. The boys are drunk and sleepy; their bodies are lifeless. The shaman blows tobacco into their noses again and the boys begin "to see the world" (Bourgue n.d.). If they are not intoxicated, they will not see the world correctly. Then, in the afternoon, the hallucinogenic drink kaapi (called yagé among the Barasana) is made from the bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, and the boys are led into the house by a man who holds the first one by the hand, the others forming a chain. The boys begin to crawl before standing up very slowly and, finally, walking very carefully (ibid.). They are followed by men who play the Yurupari instruments, and everybody enters the maloca.
The young boys are then helped to sit, one by one, on wooden benches, "their bodies arranged in a fetal position with their knees drawn up to their chests and their arms clasped round them" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 77). At this time, the Barasana boys are served the ceremonial cigar and blown coca before drinking the yagé; Kawillary boys receive several sips of blown kaapi. The men playing the flutes and trumpets move slowly inside the house, each drinking kaapi from time to time. "They parade in front of the initiates showing them each instrument in turn and then circle slowly round and round the house. This is the first time that the initiates see the He"(p. 78). Under the effect of the hallucinogenic drink, the boys lose their balance and the man in charge of watching them has constantly to make them sit up. This lasts about four hours.
The Barasana then perform a ritual act that is not found as such among the Kawillary.[29] It is the burning of beeswax, which they consider to be the climax of the rite. It is said that if the women smelled the smoke, they would die. After the burning, "two elders put on the full complement of ritual ornament … and then go out to play the long flutes called Old Macaw.[30] These two are the He spirits, fierce spirits, the ancestors of the living, and are very frightening and dangerous" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 79).
The Kawillary boys listen to the man who talks with the long trumpets; they learn the story of the Yurupari. The trumpets are then piled up and the maloca is cleansed of all the world's illnesses. Specialist chanters then continue to give the stories of the origin of the world; they transmit their knowledge, while specialist dancers dance in front of the boys (Bourgue n.d.). Among the Barasana, too, the flutes are played, but S. Hugh-Jones attends more to the substances the boys are given, such as coca, which older women behind the screen receive as well, together with blown red paint they have to apply onto their bodies (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 80). Everybody is then whipped on the legs, thighs, abdomen, and chest, and a very long chanting follows. Afterward, "the initiates and younger men paint each other [with blown black paint] on the legs and body at the female end of the house" (ibid.). "Around midday, there is a parade of all the flutes and trumpets round and round the house" (p. 81). Then, everyone, women included, is given the snuff to prevent illness. Kawillary boys are also whipped on the waist, feet, and arms by the shaman, near the women's place (Bourgue n.d.). They spend the following night sleeping.
At dawn, the Kawillary shaman takes his gourd of blown tobacco, and the boys apply some of it to their bodies. Then, men go out with their Yurupari instruments and proceed to the river. It is also the case among the Barasana. "Once the instruments have been immersed, all, including the initiates and young men, get right into the water and bathe" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 82). People drink so much water that they vomit. They then go back to the maloca. The men play the trumpets for a final round. They represent the ancestors who are about to leave (Bourgue n.d.). The women have prepared food (ants, cassava, manioc, and so forth) that the maloca owner has brought back and that the shaman has to treat before everybody else eats. The trumpets are then wrapped in pachuva (chonta palm-tree) leaves and hidden until the next ceremony "in the mud under water," writes S. Hugh-Jones (1979, 83). The house is then swept out carefully. Everything used in the Yurupari ritual must be cleaned out. On this day, women are prohibited from entering the house, "and the initiates must be protected from their gaze" (p. 84). For five more days, says F. Bourgue (n.d.), people may consume only food that has been blown by the shaman (cassava, ants, and manioc starch). On the sixth day, after the game and fish brought back by the men, as well as chili pepper, have been treated, they can eat everything. Afterward, a small feast is held for which women have prepared beer and men have prepared coca (Bourgue n.d.).
The period following the rite itself is more ritualized among the Barasana than among their Arawak-speaking Kawillary neighbors. Besides being subjected to rigid food restrictions, the Barasana boys are secluded during a period of about two months at the end of which the black paint applied at the beginning of the rituals by the women has worn off (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 84). Although they have to avoid certain foods as well, the Kawillary initiates are
The end of seclusion is marked by a ritual called the "blowing of pepper." In the evening, two shamans dress for the ceremony and "enter a trance-like state. They become He people." (p. 95). They chant the stories of the origin of all the different varieties of pepper. Afterward, the initiates chew a small amount of pepper together with hot boiled manioc juice. The next day, the initiates bathe before coming back to the house and painting "their legs with black paint, this time with the intricate designs used at dances" (p. 96). Then the women come to paint the men and the initiates' bodies with red paint. This is followed by gifts of basketry, which "are seen as payments by the initiates for the services of these people" (p. 97), and a dance. The next morning they bathe and vomit before dawn. The same day a dance is held that lasts all night and the next day, during which yagé is served together with coca and ceremonial cigars (p. 98). The following day, the shamans blow different kinds of food and distribute them to the men. The initiates must wait "until all food has been shamanized for them" (p. 99).
Both F. Bourgue and S. Hugh-Jones interpret Yurupari rituals in the groups they study as a rebirth. Many elements support this interpretation. S. Hugh-Jones writes that the black paint applied all over the initiates' bodies, as well as the low position they have to adopt, "the extinction of fire and the taboo on contact with sources of heat during and after He House," and the effects of yagé, indicate that the initiates are symbolically dead (1979, 215). As for the Kawillary boys, they are said to be lifeless after the shaman blows tobacco into their noses.
In both groups, then, the boys must die before being born again. It is clear that "once symbolically dead, the initiates become identified with unborn children" (ibid.). Inside the house, the Barasana boys sit "with their knees drawn up to their chests and their arms clasped round them—a fetal position" (ibid.). Moreover, the kana berries they have to eat connect them "to the ancestral source of life by an umbilical cord, the river" (ibid.). In effect, the Barasana say that the vine that bears the kana fruit is related to the place where the sun comes from, to the east, which is the source of all humanity. These fruits are also given to newborn babies after having been blown by a shaman (p. 216).[31]
Among the Kawillary, in order to enter the maloca, the boys form a chain by holding each other's hand and crawl before gradually standing up. Finally,
Among the Barasana, the rebirth takes place at the end of He House, and it is the vomiting that symbolizes it (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 217). Perhaps more than the act itself, it is what happens subsequently that permits us to characterize the vomiting as a rebirth. In effect, "soon after this [the bathing and vomiting at the port], the initiates are confined in a compartment, just as, soon after its birth, a baby is confined in a compartment together with its parents" (p. 218). And then, "at the end of the marginal period, comparable to the five-day period of confinement following birth, the initiates are taken back to the river to bathe. They then return to the house and are painted all over with red paint … just as a baby is painted red at the end of its period of confinement" (pp. 218–219). Although vomiting at the river also occurs among the Kawillary, it does not seem to connote a symbolic rebirth as clearly as among the Barasana, and F. Bourgue rather considers the vomiting as a purification act (personal communication). Nevertheless, the sequence in which the young Kawillary boys consume different foods after they have been blown by the shaman recalls the one that governs the diet of newborn babies and then of children. It is also true among the Barasana: "The order in which food is blown over for the initiates corresponds more or less exactly to the order in which it is blown over for a child, but whereas for initiates this blowing occurs within the space of a few months, for a child it takes place over a number of years" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 221). Moreover, the dialogue between Yamatu and the Jaguar Hejechu that takes place just before the ritual among the Kawillary occurs also when a child is born (F. Bourgue, personal communication).
In short, there is no doubt that the Yurupari initiation ritual in both societies operates a rebirth of the boys, which symbolically reenacts a real birth. But there is more among the Barasana because of the important role played by an object, the beeswax gourd, which, though also present in the Kawillary ritual, is not associated with female physiology. Rather, for the Kawillary, the beeswax is connected with the seminal substance of Hejechu, its vital principle, its pupuchu (F. Bourgue, personal communication).
S. Hugh-Jones spends a whole chapter trying to understand the meaning of this object. From the myths, we learn that "the gourd itself is the bottom half of Manioc-stick Anaconda's skull, created when he was burned to death. … The wax inside the gourd is [his] liver" (1979, 164–165). The author adds that "the wax is also likened to children inside a womb, the wax being the shadow of the children and the gourd itself being the womb" (p. 166). It is more precisely
This interpretation would imply that, "during initiation, an attempt is made to make the initiates menstruate in a symbolic sense and to make them periodic" (p. 184). Menstruation is sought because it is considered the reason why women live longer than men: "Through menstruation, they continually renew their bodies by an internal shedding of skin" (p. 250). It is associated both with immortality and periodicity, and "menstruation and cosmological periodicity are both compared to a process of changing skins" (p. 185). Skin changing is an important goal of the ritual, since "the application of black paint at the beginning of He House is designed to change the skins of the initiates, and its disappearance at the end of the marginal period signifies that this has been achieved and that the initiates are ready to receive pepper blown by the shamans" (pp. 182–183).
Although there is no emphasis on menstruation during the Yurupari initiation ritual among the Kawillary, the cyclical aspect is not absent. There, it is the everlasting cycle of life and death that is emphasized, as it appears clearly in a Yurupari ritual that is held each year, in connection or not in connection with the initiation of boys. It is said that, during this ritual, everyone's body is changed while at the same time the whole world is reborn. The ancestors, who are reincarnated in the Yurupari musical instruments, are directly involved in this generalized process of renewal. Among the Barasana, it is the Fruit House that is connected with the less frequently held He House. "The importance of Fruit House[34] comes partly from the fact that it is an attenuated version of He House and partly from the fact that it forms the preliminary stages of an extended process of initiation that culminates in He House" (p. 242). From reading the myths in which fruits used during the Fruit House are mentioned, he suggests that "caimo fruit is a male principle (sperm) and inga fruit a female principle and that the conjunction of these two fruits is an act of fertilization" (p. 223). In this view, the Fruit House ritual, which is held when inga and caimo fruits are ripe in preparation for He House, could be interpreted as "a symbolic conception of the initiates which is then followed by their birth at He House" (p. 224).
It is then more than a simple rebirth of the boys that the Barasana rituals accomplish. In effect, although there is no linear order—since a conception in the preliminary Fruit House is followed by a death, a rebirth, and menstruation during the He House—most events of a reproductive sequence are symbolically performed. This is less true of the Kawillary ritual. There too the procreative imagery is pervasive, but there seems to be no clear evidence of an enactment of conception and menstruation in the ritual acts performed.
As was the case for the two Anga groups discussed above, there exists a pattern of (minor) variations in the Yurupari rituals of these two neighboring Amazonian populations. In both regions, we have before us a system of structural transformations. In the conclusion to his book, S. Hugh-Jones speaks of the different sociolinguistic groups of northwest Amazonia as "an openended regional system that spreads across cultural and linguistic boundaries" and of their cultural differences as "variations on a common theme" (p. 241). Goldman made a similar statement more than 30 years ago regarding the Yurupari: "one of the striking characteristics of the entire Amazon drainage is the ready way in which form and content separate and recombine in new ways" (quoted in Reichel-Dolmatoff 1973, 202n).
Although the Yurupari ritual looks roughly the same in both groups, there are some differences which show that the Barasana have elaborated on menstruation and related themes like periodicity, skin changing, and immortality, while the Kawillary do not put much emphasis on this particular aspect of feminine physiology. The same kind of contrasts exist among the Angans: while Sambia men imitate women's periods by making their noses bleed regularly, it is to pregnancy that the Ankave refer during male initiations. Why this is so is impossible to say.
THE MELANESIAN BODY AND THE AMAZONIAN COSMOS
Initiation rituals as performed among the Angans and in the Colombian Vaupés present striking similarities: they involve the playing of musical instruments that are hidden from women and that were owned by them in mythic times; they imply the consumption of substances that are symbolically associated with reproduction; they are interpreted in a similar way, as a rebirth of the young boys into the world of men; and myths offer keys for understanding the ritual.[35]
Several major differences also exist. The most remarkable for a Melanesianist would probably be the predominant role played by the shaman, whose function, among the Angans at least, is only to cure illness. He does not intervene during initiation rituals, nor does he blow spells on food. Also absent in this part of New Guinea is the consumption of hallucinogenic drugs, which in the Tukano area is done in order to experience the world of the origin, depicted in myth, which "persists as another aspect of everyday existence" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 139). In the Anga groups, there is no such emphasis on visions, on the learning of the stories of the origins, or on dances. Although young Ankave and Sambia boys are told some secret myths, most of the ritual acts performed are physical ordeals intended to make the boys grow and to impart vigor to their bodies. The substances used in Anga initiations are not intended to induce a state conducive to seeing the ancestors' world and learning about the mythic past but to feed the body (see also Biersack, Chapter 4). They have this capacity as substitutes for human bodily fluids. Most of them come from the dead body of some human figures whose adventures are
More generally, a sharp contrast exists between what these people of Amazonia and New Guinea think concerning the effects of the diverse substances on those who absorb them during the rituals. Among the Ankave, for example, red pandanus is taken in order to act upon the initiates' bodies; as a substitute for blood, it makes them grow. As for the hallucinogenic drugs and the tobacco taken by the Barasana and the Kawillary, they indeed have an effect upon the boys' bodies—people say the whole ritual purifies and transforms their bodies—but mainly through acting upon their minds. These substances produce a disjunction from the world in which they are physically, and they transport them into the world of the origin, which they can then see. As S. Hugh-Jones writes, coca "allows men in the present to enter into communion with these ancestors in the past" (1995b, 54). This is a fundamental difference that certainly has consequences on the form the enactment of the rebirth of the boys takes in both areas.
In the two Anga groups of Papua New Guinea that I have discussed here, ritual actions are more explicitly an expression of rebirth than in the Vaupés region of Amazonia, and many elements (such as the configuration of the corridor into which the novices are pushed, the red leaves attached to its ends, the red seeds applied on the boys' bodies when they go out of it) clearly evoke a realistic delivery. By contrast, among the Barasana and the Kawillary, rebirth is suggested more than enacted: the slow motions of the young boys, their posture while sitting in the house, and the vomiting are the main signs indicating that they are being reborn, but there is nothing like an attempt to simulate childbirth. Nor are the references to menstruation among the Barasana as bloody as they are among the Sambia. In brief, the main differences in the male initiations of these two regions of Amazonia and Melanesia seem to lie in the way people refer to the physiology of birth: more metaphorically for the first[36] and more literally for the second.
In addition, while there is a strong correlation in New Guinea between the representations of procreation and of fetal development and the contents of the male rituals, there seems to be no such link in the two groups of Amazonia discussed here. In effect, in both of them, it is believed that conception occurs when the male substance, semen, mixes with the female substance, blood (F. Bourgue, personal communication; C. Hugh-Jones 1979, 115).[37]
CONCLUSION
In concluding this comparative study, I would like to suggest that contrasted ways of evoking a similar event may be related to different ideas about the world of the origins and in particular about the place of human beings amid other living species.
In the Ankave origin myths, people are distinguished from plants and animals from the beginning. Nothing is said about how the cosmos or the different living species came into being. The first men emerge from the ground at one particular place located in the middle of the present-day Anga territory, followed by a pig and a dog. Moreover, it is the human body itself that is the source of the plants having a crucial role in rituals. The first red pandanus grew where the blood of a man who had been killed by enemies spilled out, whereas the first red cordylines originated from a clot. Where the corpse of an old woman had been buried, several plants used in life-cycle ceremonies grew. In other words, on one hand, human beings are thought of as being born by themselves; on the other hand, dead human bodies are the source of plants playing a major role in rituals.
In the region of Amazonia that I have focused on, things are quite different. Among the Kawillary, for example,[38] the primordial world is the sun; from its navel fell some water drops, which slowly created a river. Through this river flowing inside the world, life passes on. The world was not yet born. Like a womb, it was closed, and water accumulated inside. The place where the world took shape is called "the foundation of the water." There a spirit emerged: it was Yakamamukute, a spirit who had no anus but a navel through which he was connected to the flux of life, pupuchu. For the Kawillary, pupuchu is the vine of life, the liana which connects everything to the origin. In the vegetal realm, it is the sap; in the water world, it is the river of the origin as well as the anaconda; in human bodies, it is the blood, the semen, and the bone marrow. It is also the kaapi, the substance that opens the way to knowledge.
Hejechu the Jaguar[39] also lived in the primordial world. He was the only completed being in the primordial world, where everything else was yet to be born.[40] He was a manifestation of the pupuchu vine, its first offshoot. In order to punish Yakamamukute for having killed his children, Hejechu opened him up by thrusting a stick into his anus. Yakamamukute's body exploded, bringing the sky into existence. Hejechu carried his fragmented body to a hill where it produced clay. The other remains became the sons of Yakamamukute, the Munully. The jaguar Hejechu is thus the one who creates the present world by destroying the primordial unity.
Another major mythical character among the Kawillary is Yamatu, the Woman Shaman. Daughter of the Yurupari Anaconda, she was the one who regularly renewed the world by regulating the cycles of drought and rain, and establishing seasons. As for the first "real" woman, she is the transformation of a male Jaguar who became pregnant after having eaten fish fat and was castrated by a shaman called the woodpecker. She/he gave birth to Fruit Jaguar, who is the prominent figure of the Fruit Yurupari ritual.
There is no need to say more to realize that these representations of how the world came into being conceptualize the animal, vegetal, human, and cosmic world as closely interrelated (see also Hill, Chapter 3). The pupuchu vine is what all living kinds have in common. They are all considered to be segments of this liana and, contrary to what happens among the Angans, the human body is not
Finally, I would propose that the differences in the way the rebirth of the boys is represented during initiation rituals in the Anga and the Tukano areas may be related to differences in the ideas the respective populations have elaborated concerning the origin of the cosmos and of the living species. According to this hypothesis, if the Indians of the Vaupés make such an indirect and mild reference to a real birth in the Yurupari initiation rituals, it is because their representations of the creation of the world do not attribute to human beings an origin different from the other living beings, whether plants or animals. In other words, the primordial mode of reproduction is not sexual but vegetative, since every living being is born from a segment of the pupuchu vine.
By contrast, the Angans refer so explicitly to human gestation, birth, menstruation, and breast-feeding for making boys grow and come to a new life because, in their origin myths, human beings are not put on the same plane as the other living beings. They constitute an autonomous species with a mode of reproduction of its own, a sexual one, from which several fundamental plants originated. Consequently, the physiology of the human body provides a powerful model for making young boys into adult men. This is less true in Amazonia, where having the boys reborn cannot be done independently of reenacting the birth of the world, since human beings are considered to have originated from the same vine, or flux of life, as the other living species. In that sense, Yurupari rituals are not only male initiations intended to transform boys into adult men; their objective is also to renew the whole cosmos.
NOTES
I would like to thank all the participants to the Wenner-Gren Conference on "Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia" held in Mijas in September 1996, where I presented a preliminary version of this chapter. In writing this much revised version, I was greatly helped by the advice of B. Conklin, P. Descola, T. Gregor, and D. Tuzin, as well as by the enlightening comments of S. Hugh-Jones. I am very grateful to all of them. It goes without saying, however, that any shortcomings should be considered my own.
Though he did not collaborate on the writing of the paper itself, François Bourgue, who works among an Arawak-speaking group of the Colombian Vaupés and has published a paper connected to the theme dealt with here ("Los caninos de los hijos del cielo," Revista colombiana de antropología, Bogota, 1976), played a crucial role in the elaboration of the comparison between male initiations of the Angans of Papua New Guinea and Yurupari rituals of Amazonia. In effect, he allowed me to read his ordered fieldnotes, full of not-yet-published information on Yurupari, gender relations, and reproduction, as well as on the mythology of
Bourgue's contribution to my paper, through long discussions and careful readings, deserves more than a simple acknowledgment. Nevertheless, the interpretations and general conclusions I am making are mine, and I am the only one responsible for them.
Periods of fieldwork undertaken among the Ankave-Anga since 1987 have been supported by the Maison des sciences de l'homme, the CNRS, the National Geographic Society, and the Fondation Fyssen.
1. Here could be one translation: the area is like an extraordinary laboratory, which could be compared in many ways to New Guinea, and which combines a broad variety, but which one can conceptually control, of cultural expressions of a limited number of sociological configurations that we are beginning to perceive as systems.
2. My choice was largely guided by F. Bourgue, who has collected very rich ethnographic data on the Kawillary, which opened my eyes to the possibility of comparing them in great detail to the analyses published for the Barasana by Christine and Stephen Hugh-Jones.
3. "Yet in male-female interactions, one sees terrible signs of opposition and fear, such as in men's beliefs about women's bodies. This overall tendency has been called sexual antagonism in New Guinea societies. [Sambia] men and women are not only different, but opposed, and even hostile in some respects. The sexes are at war" (Herdt 1987, 35).
4. "Perhaps the one thing I saw on patrol that most surprised me was the affection openly demonstrated between men and their wives. In this society [the Ankave] man still fulfills his ancient role of protector of his family. When people were coming into camp for the first time the man would stride towards me chest out and carrying his bow and arrows, his wife would usually be holding onto his arm looking frightened but he would occasionally turn to her and speak softly and perhaps caress her face. These and similar gestures I have never observed either on the coast or in other mountainous areas" (Didlick 1968–1969, 2).
5. Pierre Lemonnier witnessed the exclusively male rituals held in the forest, while I stayed back in the village with the secluded mothers and sisters of the initiates. The present analysis also relies on several male informants' accounts of past rituals systematically gathered since 1982 by P. Lemonnier.
6. For more details, see Bonnemère (1996, Chapter 7).
7. This has not always been the case. Myths depict a time when women were hot and give details about how their bodies became cold forever.
8. At this stage, it is hard to decide whether these difficulties in interpreting this part of the rituals are due to a lack of information and/or analysis, or whether we are merely confronted with the fuzziness and polysemy that, according to Bourdieu (1990, 245), underlie the "logic of practice" in the ritual domain.
9. See Bonnemère (1994, 25–27).
10. If I choose to reveal some of the secret practices of the Ankave rather than conceal them, it is mainly because of the oldest persons' concern that their culture be described as precisely and exhaustively as possible in these times of great, and probably irreversible, changes. For them, running the risk of losing limited but crucial data is clearly more serious than revealing secrets to people from another culture than their own. That explains why hidden practices and discourses are disclosed here. However, I would like the reader to respect the secrecy that surrounds some of the ritual actions analyzed in the chapter and that prevents several categories of people from having access to it.
11. See also M. Jolly (Chapter 8), who mentioned ethnographical information collected among the Sa of Vanuatu showing that "there are clearly ritual parallels and symbolic resonances between birthing babies and making men."
12. In fact, as noted earlier, they must consume some in secret.
13. From within Gilbert Herdt's rich corpus on male rituals among the Sambia, I rely on the very precise description given in his 1987 book. Because homosexual relations in New Guinea rituals are concerned primarily with growth, in a later edition Herdt dropped the vocabulary of "homosexuality" in favor of "boy-inseminating practices" (Herdt 1993a, ix).
14. This information is to be taken with caution. G. Herdt tells me that the body of a woman who has just given birth is cleansed with leaves and herbs, among which are possibly common nettles. Among the Baruya, Sambia neighbors who in many respects are culturally similar to them, I saw women rubbed with nettles several hours after having given birth.
15. G. Herdt formulates the same idea but differently: "Fellatio is likened to maternal breast-feeding" (1981, 234). Similarly, B. Knauft observes that "the use of semen from the adult penis as a ‘life force’ to grow boys into adulthood is a strong analogue—often explicitly stated in … societies [practicing ritualized homosexuality]—to the growth of infants through the suckling of mother's breastmilk" (1987, 176).
16. G. Herdt writes: "So men are taught to ingest tree saps called iaamoonalyu,‘tree mothers' milk,’ which replaces the semen lost through heterosexual intercourse" (1987, 164).
17. Note that it may not be so direct, because the semen given to boys is called breast milk.
18. G. Herdt said the same thing when he contrasted collective and individual nose bleedings: "The meaning of nosebleeding thus changes with successive ritual initiations" (1982a, 192).
19. This statement should not be seen as contradictory to the Sambia beliefs on female pollution. A body can simultaneously have powerful self-growing capacities and produce substances inimical to someone else.
20. Male "envy" of feminine sexual physiology is a quite well-known expression since Hiatt's essay (1971); it was used by B. Bettelheim in his analysis of these widespread male rituals called "pseudo-procreation rites," which "enact a fantasy of male parthenogenesis" (Tuzin 1995, 295).
21. Tuzin writes that "ironically, the exclusion of women, for reasons given to them in the form of a veiled icon of the truth, is the surest sign, first, that the secret rite is procreative, secondly, that, unknowingly and at a mystical level, the women are being essentially in cluded" (1995, 299).
22. For more details, see S. Hugh-Jones (1979, 21–22).
23. Unlike the Hugh-Joneses, F. Bourgue, who works among them, calls them Kawillary, and I will follow his use. This scholar confirms that Kawillary sometimes intermarry with Barasana (personal communication).
24. To be exact, while it is true of three kinds of specialists, the chiefs, the dancers, and the chanters, it is not the case with the shamans.
25. Perhaps Barasana and Kawillary would correspond more closely to two Anga groups that have the same kind of ritual organization, such as the Baruya and the Sambia, or the Iqwaye and the Menye.
26. Here I am summarizing F. Bourgue's unpublished account of the Yurupari initiation as performed among the Kawillary and S. Hugh-Jones's description of the He House of the Barasana (1979, 72–84).
27. Among the Barasana, the ancestral Woman Shaman is called Romi Kumu. As among the Kawillary, she is also called upon at the beginning of the He House.
28. It would be more appropriate to say that this dialogue takes place between Yamatu and the jaguar Hejechu (see below), to whom the shaman is assimilated.
29. The burning of the beeswax also takes place among the Kawillary, but at the beginning and the end of the ritual, as a protection.
30. "Old Macaw is Manioc-Stick Anaconda's brother. … He is the lead dancer and he dances in the middle of the house" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 144).
31. This is also the case among the Kawillary, who consider kana berries as children's kaapi, but they are not given during the Yurupari ritual (F. Bourgue, personal communication).
32. Although we cannot extrapolate without caution from Barasana to the Kawillary, it would be difficult not to remark that, in the first group, "the yagé[= the Kawillary's kaapi] given to the initiates is compared to mother's milk which suckles the new-born initiates" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 216).
33. Remember that the wax inside the gourd is Manioc-stick Anaconda's liver.
34. Fruit House rituals are regularly held to "mark the seasons of the different wild and cultivated fruits which give their names to the major calendrical divisions of the Barasana year" (S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 35).
35. As S. Hugh-Jones writes for the Barasana, unless myth is systematically related to rite, many features of the rites remain inexplicable (1979, 6). Further, "it appears to be through ritual that the elaborate mythological systems of these people acquire their meaning as an active force and organizing principle in daily life" (p. 3).
36. As J. Jackson notes in a recent paper, there are "many forms used in the [Vaupés] region to describe giving, or reengendering, life that have no immediately visible connection to female reproduction" (1996, 112, emphasis added).
37. Among the Barasana, "there is actually a sense in which blood and semen as reproductive potentialities are passed on in same-sex lines: this is expressed in the theory of conception which states that girls are made from blood and boys from semen" (C. Hugh-Jones 1979, 163). This does not imply that the two substances are not necessary to conceive a child.
38. The following information on Kawillary mythology was communicated to me by F. Bourgue. I thank him again.
39. Hejechu can in fact take many appearances: although he is most often a jaguar, he can also be the Yurupari anaconda (Bourgue n.d.). Among the Barasana, anacondas and jaguars are ultimately transformations of one another (S. Hugh-Jones, personal communciation).
40. As an autonomous being, Hejechu resembles the sisters of the Ankave myths who live in a world without men and carry out every task, even those now characterized as male.