SAMBIA RESONANCES AND BEYOND
One of the more dramatic moments of the series of Sambia initiation rituals that Herdt delineates occurs at the very beginning, when the boy is wrenched away from his mother (1982b, 68, 1987, 133–138). The moment is filled with menace and misogyny.
For several minutes … the initiates are paraded around the decorated dance-ground. … This public display is the last occasion on which women can study the boys for years to come. …
The moment the boys are out of sight, dramatic events unfold. The bloodied fern leaves (collected from the nose-bleeding ritual) are retrieved by [one of the ritual elders] from his string bag. … [He] holds up a handful of the leaves, silently flaunting them. … He says the men had to "kill" the boys to make them into men. Suddenly, without warning, two men run over to a woman seated on the edge of
― 79 ―the danceground. She is one of the boys' mothers. They grab hold of her and violently force some of the bloodied leaves down her throat. She is cursed and castigated and pushed away. They frantically criticize the other women too for "saying bad things" to their sons, thus stunting their growth. … Another younger man hysterically charges into a group of women. He holds more bloody leaves, and with bow and arrows in hand he curses the women and chases them. (1987, 151–152)
This moment must not be read blandly and apolitically, as an instance of a "rite of separation" (Van Gennep 1960 [1909]), but against the backdrop of Sambia male fears of women (e.g., Herdt 1981, 174, 1987, 144) and Sambia gender asymmetries. Indeed, the pattern others have glimpsed in male initia-tion—of men refashioning women's children as their own—is unmistakable here. When Sambia initiates are undergoing certain ordeals, their mothers "are told sarcastically that their sons will be killed in order to be reborn as ‘men’" (Herdt 1987, 141), and it is the blood of their "slaughtered" sons that the mothers in the above scene are forced to eat. Notice that the boys are dead specifically as women's children and that they are reborn specifically (if the sarcasm is to be credited) as male-spawned men. These males, born of other males, are semen donors (initially homosexual but later heterosexual) and ultimately fathers as a result of the "ritualized masculinization" (Herdt 1982b, 74) that is Herdt's theme. Hence, the flutes displace the mother's breast, and same-sex relationships between older and younger boys displace the cross-sex relationship between mother and son, specifically within a project of the making of male offspring. The flutes, moreover, are likened to the babies that women bear (Herdt 1987, 153).
One could argue that the ritual evidences not so much male "envy" of women and their procreative capabilities, a theme most closely associated with Bruno Bettelheim's Symbolic Wounds (see Gregor 1985, Chapter 10), as it does male potency and reproductive leverage. Through this leverage, men subordinate women and the offspring of their bodies as their own creatures. During the fifth stage of the Sambia initiation sequence, the boy, now husband, is his wife's fellator; and the semen the boy obtains through male-male transfer eventually becomes the boy's wife's breast milk (Herdt 1981, 179). Hence, in the ritual symbolism there is a systematic conflation of semen and breast milk, the penis and the breast (Herdt 1981, 234–235; 1982b; 1987, 150), and "the act of feeding/in-seminating is equivalent to the verbal category monjapi'u, male nursing" (Herdt 1984, 184; see also Herdt 1981, 234–235). Similarly, while women are thought to begin to menstruate on their own (Herdt 1984, 179 ff.),[4] they remain infertile without coitus; it is the male rather than the female, by this reasoning, who is the cause of conception. Despite the role the mother plays in the growth of the child as nurturer, this role is ultimately derivative, for the fetus "occurs through semen accumulation in the mother's womb" (p. 181), and the mother's breast milk originates in the father's oral inseminations. For male children, moreover,
Of course, a Sambia male becomes a reproducer specifically as a pater, and to be a pater he must marry. Indeed, marriage is embedded within the ritual cycle, and the entire sequel of rituals has as its end product and apparent purpose the production of legitimately fertile adults. The first two stages of the ritual guarantee (through male insemination) the boy's fertility; the third stage enables him to pass this fertility on to a younger boy; the fourth involves a marriage ceremony; the fifth occurs after the bride's menarche, when she herself becomes fertile (Herdt 1987, 108); and the sixth occurs when the male has had his first child. Any gender politics of the initiation ritual are therefore inseparable from the gender politics of Sambia marriage and reproduction. The woman-born boy becomes the progeny of the bachelors who inseminate him. Despite the fact that heterosexual reproduction is one of the goals of these Sambia rituals, the rituals' ultimate achievement is the subordination of one mode of reproduction—heterosexual, coital, and patently wombal—to another mode of reproduction—homosocial (and, in the Sambia and other cases, homosexual) and phallic. This is accomplished by enclosing the one mode within a patriarchal circuit of semen and wombs, the other mode. Through this enclosure men are "made" specifically as the products of patriarchal power and themselves as patriarchs; they are reborn as the sons of patriarchs and themselves as patriarchs, within a lineage of hegemonic masculinity; and the status of husband and father is therefore inextricable from the gender politics that makes men as husbands and fathers superior to their female collaborators, the very sources of their own fecundity.
This is more generally the case. In societies practicing homosexuality in the form of male-male semen transfers, marriage and ritual appear to be phases
A most striking aspect of social organization in societies with ritualized male homosexuality concerns the overlap between marriage and homosexual relationships. … The pattern of marriage in most cases is that of sister exchange, with no payment of bride-price. …
Social relationships in these societies are characterized, then, by a kind of double affinity, by the return of a woman from a previously defined affinal group. This duplicated affinity is further heightened by semen transactions between actual or potential brothers-in-law. The rules of marriage and homosexuality thus combine in mutual support. (Lindenbaum 1984, 343–344; see also Lindenbaum 1987, 227–233)
In some cases—the Etoro and probably also the Sambia—"the ideal inseminator is a boy's sister's husband" (Lindenbaum 1984, 344). Thus, not only do the married sister and the boy have the same sexual partner, an observation first made by Kelly (1977, 181–183), but, since the sister's husband will presumably return a woman, the process of transforming a nonreproductive into a reproductive male first through male insemination and then through marriage is, if not in the hands of the same male, then in the hands of the same class of male—that is, of bride donor—a fact that produces an interweaving of heterosexual and homosexual rights (Lindenbaum 1984, 345). Over the course of this process, woman-born males become born of men and women's fertility is appropriated by men (Lindenbaum 1984, 1987).[5]
Lindenbaum draws a similar lesson with respect to certain eastern highlands societies, closer in type to Paiela society in being normatively heterosexual and in establishing conjugal relations with bridewealth rather than brideservice, among other similarities. However, even in these, as in the Paiela case, women's sons are ritually refashioned as the offspring of patriarchs. As in certain "homosexual" communities, "men lay ritual claim to the powers of female reproduction, a mystification of female ‘reproductive’ labor" (Lindenbaum 1987, 239).[6]