1 - Introduction

Summary

In March 1981, having just arrived in the Murik Lakes, I went to a meeting of men from two feuding villages. They had assembled in the male cult house of a neutral community to begin to resolve a recent sequence of brawls which had broken out between their respective youth. The men of Darapap, numbering ten or twelve, arrived first and engaged their neutral hosts in a riotous comedy, the content of which was far beyond my comprehension. However, new as I was then to the culture of Murik men, and uninformed about its meanings, what they did made a lasting impression.

One elderly man hobbled into the male cult house with the aid of a staff, stood to rest for a moment a few steps inside the doorway, surveyed the scene until he spotted a junior man lying motionless on the floor, supine. Darting across the hall, the man launched himself crotch first onto the face of the prone figure. Squatting over him, he began to bob up and down, as he shouted something about the younger man's penis. Another man rubbed his buttocks on the leg of a youth. I saw a man lift his leg over someone's head. Others groped each other in the genitals. At the same time, the men engaged in a mock repartee which I gathered (because it was partly spoken in Tokpisin) was about adultery.