Male Birth-Giving in the Cultural Imagination of the Sambia

In the cultural imagination of many Melanesian peoples the adult man is prepared by ritual initiation to give birth to the younger generation of boys who are coming of age and require support to achieve masculinity. This is often understood in anthropology to be a purely social and cultural process. However, the force of my own work has been to demonstrate the ontological reality of this model in the developmental subjectivity of the individual. The Sambia of New Guinea elucidate these symbolic and unconscious processes as I have shown before (Herdt, 1981, 1982, 1984; Herdt & Stoller, 1990; Stoller & Herdt, 1982). But the larger dimensions of the phenomena remain to be examined in the cultural area as an whole, and it is toward this end that I examine two points of interest: the cultural fantasy of male birth-giving in Melanesian men's societies; and the interpretation of the secrecy which nearly always surrounds such ritual practices. Generally, the secrecy has been regarded in a purely defensive matter, by what I refer to as a “cynical” approach that derides the local ontology and meaning systems of people. Psychoanalytic models, beginning with Freud's (1913), and followed by others', on up to the present (reviewed in Herdt, 1989), have illustrated the complexities of conscious/preconscious/unconscious in these cultural systems, but often at the expense of obstructing the comparative project in ethnographic study.

Initiation ceremonies since at least the time of Roheim (1942) have been well identified with problems of psychological birth and rebirth, and fertility and reproduction, both social and biological,