With a 1959 population of not quite 1300, the Arapesh-speaking village of Ilahita in the East Sepik Province was by no means the largest of New Guineaʹs villages. This honour belonged instead to several coastal fisher-forager groups. The Kawenak Asmat village of Ayam was found to have 1409 inhabitants in its first reliable census, in 1960; in 1930, 1702 inhabitants were counted in the census in the Waropen village of Nubuai; and the two village complexes that made up the Koriki ʹtribeʹ in the early 1920s had 3960 inhabitants between them (Roscoe 2006:40). Even in the Sepik, Ilahita was only...

Some things only become clear with hindsight. This goes for my own fieldwork in the Sepik area (between 1972 and 1983), and it is probably true of other anthropologists as well, many of whom, as I gather from their writings, went through the same difficulties as I did. When I set out for Papua New Guinea, I took with me a pre-postmodern conception of ʹcultureʹ, fuelled by the fascination for other, preferably still ʹautochthonousʹ world views and agency in faraway societies. This predisposition often made it difficult to grasp what appeared to me in my understanding of ʹcultureʹ as seemingly...

With revision, the Lacanian phallus—qua concept of the subject in culture as based on a void of meaning—might also serve as a starting point for this chapter. Here, however, I do not intend to theorise the emptiness of the subject in an abstract, psychoanalytic sense. Instead, my conceptual and empirical focus is on a particular group of rural, post-colonial men. Specifically, this chapter concerns shifting signifiers of masculinity in the Sepik region in Melanesia, this being the issue and region that so vexed Tuzin (1997) in his magisterial account of the demise of the male cult in Ilahita...

During the period of Donald Tuzinʹs impressive fieldwork—from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s—themes of traditional male cults and masculine assertion in Melanesia (MMM1) had special purchase in the anthropology of Oceania and more widely. By the 2000s, another triplicate—of mobile men with money (MMM2)—has gained particular purchase (for example, Lepani 2008), along with various other dimensions of modern masculinity. In many of these more recent treatments (see Taylor 2008), Melanesian masculinity is often seen through the lenses of guns, drunkenness and pronounced, often brutal, male violence.

In 1997, an articulation between the first of these...

As a Caribbeanist studying under Donald Tuzin, I was struck by the ways in which Don could make the implications of his ethnographic work relevant to my struggles with material from Trinidad. Often this involved delving into the ontological and epistemological relevance of ethnographic details, in order to create a context to relate Trinidad and New Guinea. This chapter is, in many respects, a continuation of some of those conversations.

An uncanny event is normally viewed as something unexpected and unexplainable. Even in anthropological thought, uncanniness is a phenomenological concept that serves as a catalyst for cultural meaning but eludes...

Don Tuzin left a magnificent corpus of work on the Ilahita Arapesh, one that presents a compelling analysis of two remarkable transitions in the history of a people. His work is also striking because of the sheer range of issues on which he focused his fine analytical eye; his work might focus on the emotions, dispositions and moral conflicts of particular persons or categories thereof (specific elders, initiands, or Christians, men, women) as readily as on the structural or historically contingent circumstances within which agents must act, and which tend to produce grand historical transformations. There are also significant essays...

Childhood stories in personal narratives of Western subjects often convey pivotal moments of experience aimed at communicating personal identity. Such strategies rely on cultural models that see identity as the product of past life events, with childhood experience especially important. But what do personal childhood stories reveal in societies with very different cultural models of early lifeʹs role in shaping identity? Among the Bumbita Arapesh of Papua New Guinea—a group bordering the Ilahita Arapesh—childhood is the time of life when a new growing being takes in essential life substance from parental nurturing, supplemented by ritual transformation in initiation...

I have learned many things from Don Tuzinʹs books. One of the formative texts of my education, as a graduate student interested in religious secrecy, was The Voice of the Tambaran (1980), and I poured over The Ilahita Arapesh: Dimensions of Unity (1976) just as carefully. Later, The Cassowaryʹs Revenge (1997) became a guiding light for me during the process of writing my thesis on Christianity and cultural change among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. As it has for many of my generation, this book has been a condition of possibility for my own work—a book from the...

Although many anthropologists would not even accept the existence of a deep unconscious such as outlined by psychoanalytic theory of various persuasions, the ethnographic data often provide examples of cultural constructs that seem such vivid realisations of themes described in psychoanalytic practice that one can only stand amazed. If there is no ʹunconsciousʹ, from whence do these extraordinary visions emerge and how is it they have such constancy across cultures? In this chapter, I employ Melanie Kleinʹs work on gender, fantasy and psychosocial development as a framework for comparing Balinese and Ilahita imaginings of the feminine and the maternal.

If...

In 1983, when I was a graduate student, Donald Tuzin changed the course of my career by writing a National Science Foundation grant, part of which funded my dissertation research among the Kwanga of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Tuzin proposed an ambitious comparative study of four neighbouring Sepik cultures. He argued that an important part of socialisation came through experience with other children. Among the Ilahita Arapesh, boys tell each other fearsome stories about cult spirits, and even though they later learn that these stories are just lies designed to frighten women and children, they continue...

In 1982 Donald Tuzin published a short but trenchant article titled, ʹRitual Violence Among the Arapesh: The Dynamics of Moral and Religious Uncertaintyʹ. The work probes a question of broad human significance. The Ilahita Arapesh, in the course of their long initiatory cycles, terrorised their children and subjected them to excruciating ordeals. Tuzin self-consciously ascribes the word ʹbrutalʹ to these acts, partly because many of the Ilahita themselves so saw them, but also because we, if we are honest with ourselves, do so as well. Ilahita ritual (which no longer takes place) was particularly disturbing in that it was at...

All human societies are concerned with the regulation of sexuality—a truism of anthropology. And all of them, past and present, exert cultural, political, economic and even psychological controls over how people talk about sex: when, where, with whom and why—not why they are motivated, but why they must be stopped from sexual discourse. These barriers to sexual communication are created for a variety of reasons—notably, gender power, the strictures on childhood sexual and gender development, the regulation of the development of pleasure, the social control of adult morality and the inhibition of sexual behaviour that violates norms...

Don Tuzin was, among his many other virtues, unerringly gracious and polished. Those fortunate enough to have known him will have their favourite anecdotes about how he gently corrected those in error or deflected indignity from a deserving target. The denizens of Ilahita village were no strangers to Tuzinʹs magnanimity. This is evidenced over and over in The Cassowaryʹs Revenge (1997), his poignant memoir of his return to Ilahita in 1985 after a 13-year absence.

In this book, Tuzin weaves a remarkable account that begins in 1969 when he first arrived at Ilahita, moves through an interlude in (mostly) the...

This chapter is dedicated, as is this book, to the memory of Don Tuzin, a great anthropologist who studied the Arapesh-speaking village of Ilahita in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. If I seem, at times, to be a wayward admirer, critiquing as well as giving homage, I hope that this will be taken in the spirit meant—as an essay presented in the absence of a great talk with Don, usually a brief time out from the chatter of professional meetings when, for a few moments, two voices might be heard speaking animatedly, sometimes hesitantly, grasping for the...