Body Imagery
Primary sexual characteristics and other portions of the human body are the major symbolic currency for the myth-cult and its associated beliefs. Male and female, rather than being different by nature, appear as permutations of one another. Genitalia, rather than being permanently rooted to bodies by nature, have a life of their own, independent of their owners. They may become detached, often violently, as occurs in myths of castration (see Gregor 1985) or in reality, as in the genital operations that are often associated with the cults in Melanesia. In myth, genitals have personalities and may actually separate themselves from their owners as a consequence of their own whims and voli-tion.[6] The detachability of genitals from their owners anticipates their mutability as male and female organs. Penises, clitorises, vaginas, anuses, breasts, mouths, noses, and tongues are symbolic permutations, one of the other. They condense, merge, and differentiate (see, for example, Lidz and Lidz 1989; Strathern, Chapter 10). Hence, in Amazonia, the mythical "Big Clitoris Women" of the Shipibo had greatly enlarged clitorises (perceived as "penises") with which they ruled men. Historically, in the Shipibo ana shreati puberty rite, newly menstruating girls would be clitoridectomized (and thereby feminized, that is, castrated) prior to marriage (Roe 1982, 93, 106).[7] In other Amazonian cultures, men, while living under the mythic matriarchy, menstruated, gave birth to children, and gave milk (Barasana [S. Hugh-Jones 1979, 266]; Shipibo [Roe 1982, 164]; Mehinaku [Gregor 1985]). The fantasy of male menstruation exists in Melanesia, as well, along with a welter of images suggestive of the mutability of both gender and sex (Hogbin 1970; Tuzin 1980; Lindenbaum 1984; Bonnemère, Chapter 2; Biersack, Chapter 4).[8]
As these examples suggest, genitals and secondary sexual characteristics are key symbols, cropping up in what for us are wholly unexpected areas of world view and explanation. Thus in New Guinea, Gimi fetuses are conceived of as phalluses, with the newborn's fontanel as the urethral aperture (Gillison 1993). Sex may become a template for the entire environment, which is genderized, thought of, and conceived in terms that are linked to masculinity, femininity, and human sexuality. For the Tukanoan peoples of the northwest Amazon, the entire cosmos is sexual: the Sun god's piercing rays are equated with semen and phallic male sexuality, while the earth and a uterine paradise below it are identified with femininity (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971).[9] The power-charged flutes
The mutability of both sex organs and gender suggested by these examples appears to be part of a more general feature of masculine selfhood in the cultures of both regions, in which defining physical attributes of the self are not fixed (for example, as in Western beliefs about sexual biology) but are moral and social achievements dependent on behavior and rituals such as initiation. Writing of Sambia initiation, for example, Herdt (1982b, 55) notes that "underlying men's communications is a conviction that maleness, unlike femaleness, is not a biological given. It must be artificially induced through secret ritual; and that is a personal achievement." (See Roe 1982 for a similar general statement in the context of Amazonia, and Gregor 1985 for specific examples among the Mehinaku.) By the same token, masculinity is unstable and must be actively maintained against an always encroaching feminine possibility.