Secrecy and Cultural Reality: Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men's House (review)

In this thoughtful book, Gilbert Herdt proposes a general theory on secrecy by contrasting its uses and historical transformations in Melanesia and in the west. In chapter one, Herdt analyzes how early anthropological approaches to ritual secrecy were popularized. In the nineteenth century, millions of white middle-class American men turned to native Indian religion, to a certain romanticization of the primitive and the wild, to create secret male societies. In later chapters, Herdt uses his Sambian fieldwork to argue for the utopian aspects of secrecy in traditional Melanesia and the historical reconstitution of secrecy with pacification and Christianization. A renowned ethnographer of customary male initiation practices and the forms of subjectivity and selfhood these produced, Herdt shows himself to be a subtle thinker of social change as transformations in secrecy. Among the Yagwoia, the missionaries sought to stop letting new recruits into the secrets of the men's house. Older men started to confine the secrets to themselves, perfecting the exchange and idealization of themselves before their secrets vanished. Herdt explores powerfully the pathos of cultural loss, of cultural treasures passed on since times immemorial but now halted. This is also the pathos of being robbed of one's sons, of the memorializing power of the living ritually directed toward the dead. It was also the castration and demasculinization of a world. Today, missionaries have laid claims to the souls of the young who receive Christian names not grounded in ancestral myths, songs, and places. Christianity also brings new ways of hanging on to one's soul as part of its processes for creating identity and moral order. Its understanding and practices about losing and reclaiming one's spirit or hidden self replace those of initiation and anti-sorcery rituals. By offering heaven, Christianity also removes souls to another world, making it difficult to maintain customary social conceptions of the dead as available for any kind of dialogue.

Herdt accuses anthropologists of negative western attitudes toward secrecy, based on liberal-democratic consensual views of social order. He also accuses them of privileging the rational, political, and utilitarian, by always reducing belief to ideology. Rituals and myths of origin are not just contrivances for justifying male power. Men are not just cynical manipulators; they believe in the hidden reality of the beliefs and objects that provide their political weapons and ideological resources. Instead of downplaying belief and conviction in favor of instrumental views of human behavior, Herdt emphasizes the alternative realities created by ritual secrecy. Here Herdt does not go far enough in his cultural relativism and has too homogenous a view of the relations engendered by ritual secrecy. He takes his Sambian model of layers of disclosing truths as the ultimate model for a precontact cosmology. But what of a world where cynicism is culturally formed and mediated by folk psychologies and that may be closer to a Nietzschean view of sociality as grounded in masks and necessary lies? Herdt too hastily dismisses Barth's sense of the "deception felt in secret" among the Baktaman (144 ). Perhaps this sense was part of the pathos of life, a sense of a necessary lie that did not contradict belief but was part of a sense of truth always escaping and being something more than its present partial articulations. Why should men's cynicism be set up in opposition to belief and ontologies? Why can't there be an ontology of masking, deceptions, and cynicism?

Herdt rightly praises Donald Tuzin for studying the forms of doubt, guilt, and torment experienced by Ilahita men over their secret monsters or tambaran cult, but for Herdt these emotions are the result of forms of self-reflection introduced with colonial change. While I agree that colonial agents institute a culture of guilt that forms their hegemony...