A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

7. Menstruation and Childbirth as Ritual and Religious Experience among Native Australians

Menstruation and Childbirth as Ritual and Religious Experience among Native Australians The subjects of this chapter are menstruation and childbirth as they figure in the religious lives of both Australian Aboriginal women and men. In the religious lives of women, these biological experiences are the occasion of significant rituals. In the religious lives of men, who of course cannot experience them directly, they are often ritually imitated. The significance of menstruation and childbirth in both women’s and men’s religious lives has not been especially noted or studied by most scholars of Aboriginal traditions. I believe that this oversight is a result of the fact that Aboriginal religions have usually been studied by male anthropologists from a strictly male point of view. A few comments on Australian Aboriginal culture and on scholarship about it are crucial preliminaries to our discussion. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia are a hunting-and-gathering society whose material culture is exceedingly simple. Yet their social organization and worldview are so complex that they have long fascinated anthropologists and historians of religion. Two noticeable features of Aboriginal religion have been the basis of all theories about the role of women in it. The first is the extreme sexual differentiation that characterizes religious life in Aboriginal Australia. Women are almost completely excluded from the men’s rituals ; and—although this aspect has been much less noticed—men are also completely excluded from women’s rituals. Second, the most obvious , elaborate, and time-consuming dimension of Aboriginal religion 131 chapter 7 Gross_Ch07 10/17/08 17:12 Page 131 is represented by those men’s rituals from which women are so rigidly excluded. These rituals alone are also the basis of most theories about Aboriginal religion, because male anthropologists found them more interesting and easier to study than the women’s rites. This situation led to the classic interpretation of sexual dichotomy in Aboriginal religion: “Masculinity is inextricably interwoven with ritual cleanness and femininity is equally intertwined with the concept of uncleanness, the former being the sacred principle and the latter the profane. This sexual dichotomy and its correlation with the Murngin beliefs of what are the sacred and profane elements of the group, are again connected with a further principle of human relations, namely, that of super-ordination and subordination.”1 This idea of women’s “profaneness” led many scholars to downplay the religious significance of women’s rituals. It has been argued that women’s religious life is so different from men’s as to be unworthy of the label “religious” and that menstrual taboos and childbirth seclusions are imposed on women by men who abhor and fear these physiological events. Women’s ceremonies are said to be uninteresting and insignificant in comparison to men’s rituals: “Aboriginal women have ceremonies of their own, some commemorating their ‘femaleness,’ some with highly erotic content, but little is known of these except that they seem to be a pale imitation of masculine ceremonies and they play little part in tribal life.”2 In all these statements one theme predominates—the attempt to differentiate women’s ceremonies from men’s ceremonies and, in differentiating them, to indicate that women’s ceremonies are inferior in scope, intensity, and religious significance. However, I would contend that, although women’s ceremonies are indeed different from men’s, if we explore those differences, rather than assuming that difference implies inferiority, other interpretations are possible. What is most significant about women’s ceremonies is that, by being different from men’s ceremonies and by focusing on women’s unique experience, they perform the same function for women that the men’s rituals perform for men. The women’s unique experiences are religious experiences and become rituals; they are symbols and metaphors through which women express and attain their adult status as sacred beings within the Aboriginal community. Just as the men’s ceremonies indicate the sacred status and potential of men, so the women’s ceremonies indicate the sacred status and potential of women and not some opposite, “profane” condition. 132 Menstruation and Childbirth as Ritual Gross_Ch07 10/17/08 17:12 Page 132 The basic reason for my interpretation can be stated rather succinctly. The experiences and rituals of menstruation and childbirth are laden with clues and characteristics that, were they found in connection with anything else, would be automatically referred to as “sacred” or “religiously significant.” All attitudes and...