it today. Doniphan Blair: But it is not ritualized? It was not ritualized in the same way. People on the coast needed the heads for their initiation ceremonies. What type ... for the youths? When a boy was anywhere between 9 and 11 he was initiated. To have an initiation you needed a head. A fresh one? A fresh one. Sometimes when there was a whole group of people they used a wooden head or one head for several kids. They don’t talk about it but it had to be. There is no way, over the years, that they could have existed if they kept killing one for one. So many people would have to die. Anyway, the initiation ritual is fascinating in itself. First the head is brought in and treated, burnt, put on the coals of the fire and then the skin stripped off. Then the skull is decorated with feathers, seeds, and painted with red marks on the forehead. The young man sits in the men’s house with the skull at his groin facing his penis. The boy absorbs through his penis the essence of the dead man. So if he goes back to the village where the man was killed he is treated just like the dead man although he may be only 9 or 10 years old. Who does the killing .. . his father? Well, it can be anyone in the immediate family. His father, an elder brother, most often it’s one of his mother’s brothers. That’s the closest — the uncle. The boy sits in the men’s house with the head at his groin for two or three days and he’s not allowed to go out and eat, shit or do anything like that. If he does it he does it right there, spreads the bark on the floor and the shit goes down below. Then, he is taken out into the canoes. All decorated up, with feathers in his hair and paint on his face and body. Asmat men are naked. The women wear a very tiny ‘Cache sex’ made of sago leaves that are twisted into a fiber, but the men have always been naked ... at least we think they have always been naked. He’s taken out by his mother’s brothers into a canoe and as he goes along, in the canoe toward the setting sun, he’s supposed to get older and does get older. This 9- or 10- year-old boy gets so old he can no longer stand up, he can no longer paddle the canoe anymore and he falls down in the canoe. As he gets still older he dies. When he dies, they lift him out of the canoe and dip him into the water, then in a ritual rebirth they bring him out of the water and he lies in the canoe in the fetal position. From the fetal position he begins to move as they travel back to the village. He crawls around the bottom of the canoe, then he stands up and begins to paddle. Then they teach him the names of all the villages around, all the trees, all the rivers, and by the time he gets back to the village he’s a man and able to get married. When would he begin his sexual initiation? There is no sexual initiation in that sense here. There are other groups that do have that kind of thing but not in Asmat. They start having sex from the moment they become aware of their penises and vaginas. The boys play together and the girls do the same. The girls and the boys do it together from, say, 2 yeafs old. It’s common practice for the kids to go into the river together, mixed sexes. What about the sexual practices you described last time we talked? That particular group was described by Gerald Herdt, an anthropologist who was on the other side of the border in Papua New Guinea. It’s a people he calls the “Sambia,” apparently not their real name. That group has ritualized sexuality; they believe the only way for a boy to become a man, the only way to grow into a great warrior, is by absorbing semen. The more semen you swallow, the stronger and braver you will become and the faster you will grow up. The quicker you will become a man, a good headhunter, a good hunter of animals. Now next to the Asmat are the Marind Anim people, who are described in a book called Dema by a man called Van Baal, and they believe in an opposite way. They believe that the only way for a child to become a man is through sodomy. The mother’s brothers and then a whole series of men in the men’s house will sodomize him one after the other. They also believe that the only way to become a man is by absorbing semen. Then he becomes the apprentice of his mother’s brother and not only does he learn how to till the fields, how to hunt, use of the bow and arrow, all the rituals of life ... he’s also his uncle’s sexual partner. Doniphan Blair: Now is this true where you were staying in Asmat? Tobias Schneebaum: Asmat itself varies. No one has yet described any of the sex life of Asmat because no one knows much about it except me ... and I don’t know much but I know some things because of my experiences. I had been told, when I first went there in 1973, that all evidence of sex between men was gone. That if it did exist earlier it was now gone. That the missionaries had come and told them that fornicating with one another was only the work of Satan and they had to stop it. One of the missionaries told me he had lived among the Marind-Anim (the people who believe in sodomy) and he had stamped out every bit of homosexuality, if you call it that, any evidence of sex between men amongst those people. I don’t believe that for a second; it was hidden, I guess, and continues to be hidden. What I did learn immediately was that sex between men exists and is a common practice in Asmat. It varies in intensity or in the number of partners or in the importance it plays in the life of the man as you go from the south to the north of Asmat. I don’t know anything about the sex life between the women. You didn’t see the equivalent of lesbianism? It’s very difficult; you would never see that; a man would never see that. Sex mostly takes place in the jungle; it does not take place in the home. That’s because there are several families living together — the extended family — there might be twenty people living in one house. And the houses are all connected, or they were in the past when I first went there. Since the Indonesian government has been there they burned down all the old-style houses and are forcing the people to live in nuclear families, thinking that’s the way they should live, but that’s no good for them. So they do have their own form of modesty? There are no open societies where you can do anything. Every society has its boundaries that you can’t go beyond whether they be sexual or what they consider moral or whatever. Homosexuality does not exist in all so-called primitive societies, by no means. There are two friends of mine in this building who have worked with the people next to what are called the “Sambia” by Gerald Herdt, where they have this ritualized homosexuality, where their outpouring of sexual energy is limited to the men and they are only permitted to have sexual relations with men before marriage. On the other hand there are the people right next to them, the Gimi, who are being studied by my friends on the ninth floor. They were astounded when they read that book because among their people there is no active sexual relations among men. None, absolutely none. They asked me to read it to see if I thought it was right. How could it be that one group is completely homosexual and the other has none? Can you think of an explanation? There is no explanation except that they are divided from one another by mountains and forests. There's no reason why they should grow up doing exactly the same thing. Now I had expected from what I was told, by the missionaries, because no one else had been there, that there would be no homosexual relations in the north of Asmat. Nevertheless I had no trouble in having brief affairs with men ranging in age from 15 to men in their fifties. The boy obsorbs through his penis the essence of the deed mon. So if he goes bock to the villoge where the mon wos killed he is treated just like the dead man although he may be only nine or ten years old. They also find it necessary to be heterosexual. They must hove children; otherwise the group can't go on. So therefore they hove their pleasures there too. There is something in Asmat that is called Papisj, a bond friendship. It is a relationship that is formed between two children when they are very young, sometimes at birth. The parents obviously form this relationship. The partners say that they form it themselves when they are about 2 but I doubt it. I think it’s still the families who form these relationships to strengthen the clan. The boys who have this relationship (in the south it’s called mbai) are aware of it from about the age of 2. Now these “bond” friends, after they have been married, and after each one has had one child, exchange wives on ritual occasions. Ritual occasions can be anything from a very severe thunderstorm when everyone is terrified, or before a great headhunting raid or anything different, like a white man coming and spending some time in the village. They exchange wives to keep a certain type of balance going. It is only through semen that the forces of life and death can be balanced. The forces that are in what they call heaven and what they call earth. There is no such thing as heaven, obviously, to them, but it is a place for the ancestors. To balance this relationship between the dead and the living, a lot of semen has to flow. The more semen that flows, the quicker the balance. So a lot of sex will go simply to balance that. And one of the ways of doing that is through the Papisj relationship, because at that particular time a man might have sex two or three times a night whereas when he does it with his wife he might do it once a week. If they exchange wives, the women could get pregnant; what happens then? Any children that result from the exchange of wives between mbai belong to the husband of the woman that bore them. Such children are treated exactly like all other children. To get back to the mbai for a moment, I want to make sure it’s understood that the relationship that is formed between the two men last until the death of one of them. So they are highly monogamous? Yes, in that case, much moreso than with the women. If they want to “divorce” their wives, what do they do? There’s no such thing as divorce, in that sense; they just throw them out of the house or they take another wife. One of the things that is always so remarkable to me is when I ask my particular friend, my mbai, if I can call him that because he calls me that openly in front of the women and the other man, I asked him what would happen if you found your wife sleeping with another man and he said, ‘Oh, I would beat her.’ Then I asked him what would happen if you found your mbai with another man and he said ‘I would beat the other man.’ Then I said, ‘Why wouldn’t you beat your friend,’ and he said ‘I wouldn’t do anything like that — he’s my mbai.' In many ways, the women are treated like chattel there. They are paid for with bridleprice and if they want to get rid of them, they get rid of them and if they want a new wife, they take a new wife but once you have a mbai that’s for life. Doniphan Blair: How was your first meeting with your mbai friend? Tobias Schneebaum: My first sight of him was a real turn on. He is wonderfully masculine, muscular without looking like a rquscle man or a bodybuilder. He liked me, too. Obviously because I had tobacco and other good things to offer. Fortunately, his interest turned to me rather then the things in my possession. Whenever I went back to his village, everyone welcomed me with open arms and seemed to truly like me. My mbai friend seemed to love me, if I can use the word. We had a closeness that I doubt has ever existed before, in Asmat, between one of the men and an outsider. He never failed to come to me at night and left his family to fend for itself. Of course, there was never a problem of food since the women did the fishing and there was almost always sago in the house. The ultimate accolade, as far as I am concerned, was the night he invited me back to his house to sleep with his wife. Was that the first woman you had ever slept with? Yes. And how did it go? Well ... I tried, but I couldn't get an erection. Do you think there is a certain biological necessity for “homosexuality” as they practice it? I don’t know what you mean by biological necessity, it’s probably a combination of biology and culture. Or do you think it’s motivated by pleasure .. . simply? They are into pleasure, I can tell you that. One of my great experiences was after I arrived the second time, and a group of people came in looking absolutely wild. They had feathers in their hair and they were all painted up with bones and shells through their noses — looking absolutely fantastic, thrilling to say the least. They told me they came from the village of “Otjenep” and that’s one of the villages I very much wanted to go to because I had heard that they can’t keep a teacher, they can’t keep anybody. I don’t mean necessarily white people, I mean no Asmat or Indonesian teacher or catechist or policeman has ever stayed there for more than a few hours. They Continued on Pg. 38. 6 Clinton St. Quarterly
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