Pascale Bonnemère

Women as unseen characters : male ritual in Papua New Guinea

Rituals have always been a focus of ethnographies of Melanesia, providing a ground for important theorizing in anthropology. This is especially true of the male initiation rituals that until recently were held in Papua New Guinea. For the most part, these rituals have been understood as all-male institutions, intended to maintain and legitimate male domination. Womens exclusion from the forest space where men conducted most such rites has been taken as a sign of their exclusion from the entire ritual process.Women as Unseen Characters is the first book to examine the role of females in Papua New Guinea male rituals, and the first systematic treatment of this issue for any part of the world. In this volume, leading Melanesian scholars build on recent ethnographies that show how female kin had roles in male rituals that had previously gone unseen. Female seclusion and the enforcement of taboos were crucial elements of the ritual process: forms of presence in their own right.Contributors here provide detailed accounts of the different kinds of female presence in various Papua New Guinea male rituals. When these are restored to the picture, the rituals can no longer be interpreted merely as an institution for reproducing male domination but must also be understood as a moment when the whole system of relations binding a male person to his kin is reorganized. By dealing with the participation of women, a totally neglected dimension of male rituals is added to our understanding.

A relational approach to a Papua New Guinea male ritual cycle

The article analyses the male ritual cycle of the Ankave-Anga in Papua New Guinea. In the 1980s, male initiations in this region were interpreted as institutions for the reproduction of male domination. And yet, looking at the ritual gestures performed at the same time by the men in the forest and by the women in the village, it becomes possible to offer another interpretation, one that, following Marilyn Strathern, underscores a relational dimension. But, whereas Strathern saw these rituals as times when boys went from a ‘cross-sex’ state to a ‘single-sex’ state capable of reproduction, following a process of extraction, the article argues that the Ankave ritual cycle can be read as an ordered series of transformations of the relations between the boys and their mothers and sisters, in the presence of these female relatives. At the heart of these initiations lies the boys’ accession to the capacity to act for others. Such an analysis of specific ethnographic Melanesian material makes possible a critical appraisal of the Strathernian notions of partibility and detachability, which have often been taken as granted by researchers outside the region.

The Materiality of Relational Transformations: Propositions for Renewed Analyses of Life-Cycle Rituals in Melanesia and Australia

ABSTRACT This paper introduces this special issue and analyses Papua New Guinea and Australian initiation and death rituals as moments of relational transformations. Although the general argument is not completely new, it has often remained an undemonstrated statement. The paper hence focuses on the specific ways people make these changes effective and express them in their rituals. It is suggested that an invariant modus operandi is in play in which, for a relation to be transformed, its previous state must first be ritually enacted. Towards the end of the ritual, the new state of the relationship is itself publicly enacted through a manifestation of the form the relation takes after the ritual. The paper suggests that a relationship cannot be transformed in the absence of the persons concerned. The relational components need to be either directly present, such as in initiations, or mediated through objects, such as in death rituals.

Foreword from the Editors

Foreword of the Special Issue: Matter(s) of Relations: Transformation and Presence in Melanesian and Australian Life-cycle Rituals

Marilyn Strathern en Mélanésie : un regard critique sur le genre, les objets et les rituels

Dans un article paru en francais en 1987, Marilyn Strathern explique comment elle est passee de l’etude, a la fin des annees 1960, des roles et de la capacite d’action des femmes dans une societe de Nouvelle-Guinee a la redaction d’un ouvrage sur la personne, le genre et la vie sociale en Melanesie qu’elle a intitule The Gender of the Gift. Problems with Women and Problems with Society (1988). Entre ces deux moments, elle identifie un evenement qui, d’une part, a declenche chez elle une refle...