Guardians of the Flutes, Volume 1: Idioms of Masculinity

By Gilbert Herdt

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226327493
• ISBN13: 9780226327495
• Release Date: December 1994
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 402 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Response to "How Do We Know?"

I have not yet read this book, but I will be reading it in the coming semester for a college course. I want to respond to the person below who believes that using a fake name for the tribe somehow implies that the author is lying. This is absolutely not the case. Readers must keep in mind that this book is an ethnography, and Herdt, the author, is an anthropologist. It is standard anthropological practice to disguise the names of groups and people involved in anthropological studies. Anonymity is extremely important in a study such as this one because it allows people to disclose potentially dangerous information without fear. The use of pseudonyms does not take away from the credibility of the work.

One of the most important books ever written....

...about this subject. One reviewer whines "How Do We Know?" and thereby implies directly that the author is a liar, and made up everything reported in this book. While that person may choose to remain in darkness, this book was very well received among professionals, who realized at once that it added more detail (a lot more detail) to the generally known facts about sexuality in New Guinea. In fact, there are many other tribes, reported in the literature, who practice the same system of sexuality -- with the perhaps interesting exception that the sexuality is not oral but via the posterior route. As for disguising the name of the tribe, it seems to me that Herdt has really done something quite remarkable: he has protected his sources. There is no tribe called the "Sambia" in New Guinea, but there is the tribe which Herdt studied, and one of the key elements in their system of male sexuality is that it must be kept SECRET. In this, I must confess that by the age of 60 I have seen this sort of behavior all over the world: men can have all the sex they want together, but it is imperative not to scare the horses. DON'T let the women know. If Herdt had published his book with the tribe's real name, he would have blown their cover. I congratulate him for not doing so. As for what the Sambia are up to, I would suggest reading the book, and not counting on a book review to fill you in on all the details. But as a very high-level view, the Sambia have a superstitious belief that a young boy's development into a full-fledged male is a highly doubtful procedure -- not guaranteed by the spirits or the gods. So they practice "boy invigoration," which entails the young boy receiving regular doses of masculinity. When the boy reaches puberty, the magic has obviously worked, so it is time for him to reverse roles and begin helping the younger ones. All in all, this is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. It's true to say, "We're not in Kansas any more, Dorothy." No, we're in the steamy jungle islands of New Guinea and Papua New Guinea, and learning about some of the very flexible limits of human sexuality. Highest possible recommendation!

how do we know?

Although an excellent study if all of this is true, it remains to be seen whether it is in fact true. Herdt admits that the name of the Sambia is a fake name that he gave them to protect their identity. There is therefore no way for other researchers to study this tribe and compare notes. How do we know that this tribe exists at all? All of the other studies of homosexual customs among New Guinea tribesman describe sodomy as their exclusive mode of behaviour. The Sambia are the one and only tribe of this region to practice fellatio. Why is this tribe out of sync with all of the other tribes? It makes me wonder.

An academic text on male sexual initiation in PNG.

This book describes in detail the initiation of boys in the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, an isolated and "primitive" tribe who believe that masculine characteristics can only by aquired by boys through ingesting the semen of older men. The flutes symbolize the magic of the oral copulation stage through which the boys must go to be considered adult males.

An Academic study of the Sambia in PNG

An investigation into the lives of the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea, an isolated and "primative" tribe who believe that boys must ingest semen in order to reach full adulthood.The flutes are magic phallic objects which the men of the tribe use in initiation cermonies to introduce the boys to the ritualized sexual contacts.