Synopses & Reviews
In the first systematic documentation of New Guinea rituals of manhood, Gilbert Herdt places the homosexual customs of the Sambia in their ecological and ideological contexts while exploring what they mean to the individuals who practice them. Raising a host of issues concerning gender identity, hostility between the sexes, and the relationships between myth, culture, and personal experience, Herdt provides a vivid and convincing portrait of how Sambia men experience their sexual development.
Synopsis
This unique study of boy-inseminating rituals among the Sambia of New Guinea challenges our deepest assumptions about the role of culture in understanding homosexuality and gender-identity development.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 355-368) and indexes.
About the Author
Gilbert Herdt is professor and director of the Graduate Program in Human Sexuality at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and director emeritus of the National Sexuality Resource Center at San Francisco State University. His books include Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
A Note on Language
Foreword
Robert A. LeVine
Preface to the 1994 edition
Preface
Introduction
1: People of the Mountain Forest
2: Idioms and Verbal Behavior
3: The Inward Cosmos
4: Genderizing the Pandanus Tree
5: The Phantom Cassowary
6: Femininity
7: Masculinity
8: Male Parthenogenesis: A Myth and Its Meaning
9: Conclusion
Appendix A: "Tali Says": On the problem of symbolic meaning and its relationship to field conditions among the Sambia
Appendix B: Nilutwo's Dreams
Appendix C: The Myth of Cassowary
Appendix D: On the Origins of Warfare and Initiation
Appendix E: The Myth of Gandei
References
Name Index
Subject Index