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

3. Secrecy among the Sambia, 1974–1976

chapter 3 Secrecy among the Sambia, 1974–1976
the central problem of the anthropological study of secrecy is to understand not only what a people believe in, but also what they fear and doubt; not what they celebrate in public ceremonies but how their mistrust is transferred into hidden acts and whispered stories behind the stage of society. It is hard to fathom how the secret masculinity vaunted in this book was conditional in a double sense: the men feared their inability to create and sustain it in themselves and they feared losing it once they had it. Moreover, concerning the reproduction of their own kind, they were frantic but also hesitant, and resisted passing on even the coveted secret masculinity to their sons. This paradoxical cultural reality is the ontological province of ritual secrecy, and it existed long before the historical Western concept of “utopia” was invented to cover the idea of “heaven on earth.” Indeed the contrast of this archaic sociality of secret masculinity in New Guinea with what is hidden in Western life (e.g., the idea of a “family secret”) is simplistic and terribly vulnerable to exoticization. But such an understanding was far ahead of me in my ‹rst ‹eldwork, as the following story tells. August 1976 It is late in the dry season and I am near the end of a many weeks’ long reconnaissance of the two dozen or so Sambia villages and their near neighbors, the feared Yagwoia. The patrol brings to a close a two-year period of ‹eld research with which I began the study of the Sambia. Trav65 eling with me is a troop of ten Sambia men and youths, all from my village, Nilanga. They include the carriers of supplies and interpreters, as well as my key informant-colleague, Tali, a ritual expert well known to the locals from his younger years (Herdt 1981: app. A; see also Herdt and Stoller 1990: chap. 5), and my close associates Weiyu and Sakulambei. The weeks have been occupied with the collection of ‹nal census and genealogical information on the Sambia villages in adjacent river valleys. However, it is the collection of the Anga area epic myths and the incredible origin myth of parthenogenesis common to the region that has most riveted my imagination . My main job—to study how male identity develops through secret initiation—has come to an end. Many performances of ritual initiation, each of them elaborate, some taking weeks to complete, have been observed during these years, from the ‹rst-stage initiation to the ‹nal, sixth-stage initiation, which signals fatherhood and the achievement of full moral personhood for Sambia males. And in the process I have been transformed, though not as radically as the Sambia youth who experienced embodied change. However, once my presence was accepted at the rites, I became suf‹ciently acquainted with rituals to be permitted to ask the elders a few questions about their meaning . My oh-so-tentative interrogations signi‹ed a status change, of course, away from being the know-nothing puny red-skinned youth who had begun without language or cultural knowledge nearly two years before. I worried that I might never be able to return to the Sambia and could not have dreamed that my ‹eldwork was merely the beginning of a long process of learning. Before returning to Australia, I felt a terrible need to ‹nish tracking the myths of Sambia back to their fabled origin hole, Kokomo, a sacred place a few days’ walk to the south near Menyamya. The trip, which had hitherto been attempted only once by the Australian government patrol of‹cer, was long and somewhat dangerous, as it involved crossing the border of the territory of the neighboring tribe, the despised Yagwoia. In precolonial times the Sambia rarely ventured there except to raid. Even today they are extremely reluctant to travel into Yagwoia country. Not only were these enemies hated for the raids they in›icted upon the borderland, but they were said to be cannibals as well, who enjoyed the taste of “long pig,” which, indeed, the Yagwoia admit. Sambia successfully raided them enough times to have left behind rage and many scores to settle . After days of resistance to my pleas for help along the trail in Sambia66 • secrecy and cultural reality land, my companions consented to cross the mountain range that marks the tribal boundary. Passing for long...