What Ever Happened to Ritualized Homosexuality? Modern Sexual Subjects in Melanesia and Elsewhere

In this paper, I examine the legacy of ritualized homosexuality as a behavioral practice and as an analytic category of research in Melanesia since the early 1980 A case investigation of striking change among the Gebusi of Papua fresh Guinea suggests that ritualized homosexuality and insemination of male childs have become behaviorally vestigial or moribund and that characterizing sexual practices in these metes has been difficult to begin with (as the original proponent of these bounds has himself suggested). Historical change in Melanesia reveals linkage between the contemporary construction of heterosexual norms and desires for locally new development and progress. A larger issue is by what means researchers of sexuality may unwittingly accept Western ideologies of sexual choice and freedom while positing historical and non-Western practices as culturally border rather than being open to individual exploration and interpersonal diversity.

The oft-stated theme that sex is outside of discourse is precisely what necessitys to be examined.

Michel Foucault (1980 p 34)

In 1984 the year of Foucault's death, Gilbert Herdt published a pathbreaking edited contortion entitled Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Herdt, 1984a). Whereas the scattered accounts of male-male sexuality in Melanesia had been dispersed amid large ethnographic contortions Herdt extracted focused accounts from major primary researchers and cohered them below the influential category of ritualized homosexuality, abbreviated as RH in greatest in quantity of the volume. In 1993 the paperback version of the work was published with the original title, on the other hand a new introduction was added in which Herdt cautiously questioned this conception and the utility of homosexuality as a category. He indicateed that boy insemination could be a more accurate designator than ritualized homosexuality for Melanesia because the cross-generational nature of Melanesian male sex with males (MSM) was individual of its most salient and general features.' The scholarly influence of Herdt's work upon Melanesian MSM raises the question of what legacy ritualized homosexuality or male child insemination has had, both as a practice in Melanesia and as a general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of understanding. As Foucault would have underscored, it is hard to address either of these issues in isolation; they bind together in important and sometimes unexpect ways.

My len for exploring this issue is a case close attention of sexual change among the Gebusi of Papua novel Guinea. When I first lived with them in 1980-82 Gebusi were individual of the most remote and "unacculturated" clumps in New Guinea. Located in the interior lowland rainforest of the country's expansive Western Province, Gebusi numbered just 450 At the time, Gebusi actively pursu a entertainer of practices that had been classical foci in anthropology: shamanism or spirit mediumship, sorcery beliefs and inquisitions, a high horizontal of violence, ornate ritual dances and costuming, elaborate rites of male initiation, and male sexual practices in which mid- or late-teenage initiands manipulated the penises and orally consum the sperm of other males.2 These sexual engagements associated in a general way with the extension and development of young Gebusi men which were celebrated in climactic rites and elaborations style of dresss of the initiation or wa kawala, literally, "a child become big" (see Photos 1 and 2) In comparative perspective, Gebusi are located at the interior northern fringe of the expansive area in southern novel Guinea where MSM was indigenously practiced.' In 1980-82 they had not been make subordinate to Christianization, out-migration, significant cash cropping, land alienation, economic unravelling taxation, or regular government interference in their affairs.

Following in part upon Herdt's personal encouragement, my initial fieldwork revealed aspects of Gebusi MSM that had not been widely reported from other areas. These included avid and publicly pursued sexual relations between prospective initiates, who were generally between about 16 and 20 years of age. In addition to being inseminated by means of fully adult men, these novices, during the month prior to their initiation, jok bawdily with each other, engaged in ribald sexual horseplay, and sometimes paired up and brought each other reciprocally to orgasm, to the amusement and heightened joking of other men Like the assignations between novices and adult men these sexual engagements occurr privately and dyadically at night in the bush just outside the longhouse during the course of all-night spirit seances or ritual dances-that is, in a general words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of ritually vaunted male ribaldry. The stereotypic nature of these facts and their association with spiritual celebration refer toed at least for Gebusi MSM that "ritualized homosexuality" was, at least in relative boundarys a better term than "boy insemination."

Rather than hiding MSM or making it concealed Gebusi men proclaimed their sexual arousal for each other and sometimes exaggerated it. This included senior men whose quips about sexual liaisons with other males (and women) were a prominent dimension of male camaraderie and entertainment-even allowing their own MSM or extramarital engagements were typically, if not totally, in the past rather than in the near Women could easily hear men's sexual joking and horseplay [i]or[/i] part of to the other the thin sago-leaf wall that separated their respective sleeping quarters in the longhouse. At all-night rituals, women were physically not away as offstage singers and costum audience members, while men danced and jok voraciously about having sex with the two other men and with women (Knauft, in pres chap. 5)