"The child feels the drive of the Life
Force...
you cannot feel it for him. "
----George Bernard Shaw
INCEST AND THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN NEW GUINEA
As with infanticide, the sexual abuse of children is widely
reported by anthropologists, but in positive terms: maternal
incest is seen as indulging the infant's sexual needs, oral and
anal rape of boys is described as both desirable and as desired
by the boys and rape of both girls and boys is presented as an
unmotivated "cultural" artifact. I will begin with the
use by mothers of their infants as erotic objects.
Anthropologists maintain that "the incest taboo is the very foundation of culture" 140 and that "the taboo on incest within the immediate family is one of the few known cultural universals." 141 The culturally-approved sexual use of children, therefore, must be renamed wherever it is found as something other than incest. Ford and Beach's widely-cited Patterns of Sexual Behavior makes this false distinction clear: incest, they say, "excludes instances in which mothers or fathers are permitted to masturbate or in some other sexual manner to stimulate their very young children," 142 then going on to call incest rare. The authoritative Growing Up: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia covers 87 cultures in which it says there is no incest, just adults playing with, stroking, masturbating and sucking their baby's genitals: "Truk adults play with an infant's genitals...In China, Manchu mothers tickle the genitals of their little daughters and suck the penis of a small son...in Thailand, a Banoi mother habitually strokes her son's genitals." 143 But again this isn't incest. Davenport's cross-cultural study similarly concludes that "Mother-son incest is so rare that it is insignificant and irrelevant [since] genital stimulation as a means of pacifying a child may be regarded as nonsexual..." 144 Konker reviews cross-cultural adult-child sexual relations and finds that "the ethnographic record contains many...examples of normative adult/child sexual contact" but said this isn't a problem since experts have found there is "no reason to believe that sexual contact between an adult and child is inherently wrong or harmful." 145 Korbin's Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives likewise finds that mothers masturbating children is widespread in her large sample, but she says it is not incest since the society doesn't call it incest:
In some societies, children's genitals are fondled to amuse and please them, calm them or lull them to sleep...This would not constitute 'abuse' if in that society the behavior was not proscribed and was not for the purposes of adult sexual satisfaction, even if the adult tangentially experienced some degree of pleasure. 146
Since the use of infants and children as erotic objects is so common cross-culturally, 147 it is not surprising that New Guinea adults also commonly use their children sexually. Babies in particular are treated as if they were breasts, to be sucked and masturbated all day long. Whenever ethnologists mention childhood in any detail, they often begin with such comments as, "My strongest impression among women was created by their incessant fondling of infants" 148 or "As babies and small children their genitalia are fondled." 149 As with most infanticidal mothers, this sexual fondling most often occurs when the mother is nursing the baby (or even older child, mothers nursing until the child is three to six years of age), since nursing is highly erotic, occurring over a hundred times a day or as often as the mother needs the stimulation to overcome her depression. 150 Gillison describes the process of masturbating infants among the Gimi:
The mother insists upon continued contact, interrupting her toddler's play repeatedly to offer the breast. Masturbation...with a baby girl [occurs when] the mother or amau holds her hand over the vulva and shakes it vigorously. She may kiss the vagina, working her way up the middle of the body to the lips and then inserting her nipple (often when the child has given no sign of discontent). With a boy, she kisses the penis, pulls at it with her fingers and takes it into her mouth to induce an erection. Several women may pass a baby boy back and forth, each one holding him over her head as she takes a turn sucking or holding the penis in her mouth. When the child then pulls at his own organ, the women, greatly amused, offer squeezes and pulls of their own. 151
Many ethnologists in the New Guinea-Australian area notice the connection between nursing and the erotic use of infants, first describing the mother putting her nipple into the baby's mouth whenever it cries, even if it is not hungry, while massaging her other breast and "caressing the fleshy parts of its body...and implanting breathy kisses over and over again in the region of its genital organs." 152 Only Hippler, however, notices the incestuous trance the Yolngu mother goes into while nursing and masturbating her child:
the child is sexually stimulated by the mother...Penis and vagina are caressed...clearly the action arouses the mother. Many mothers develop blissful smiles or become quite agitated (with, we assume, sexual stimulation) and their nipples apparently harden during these events. Children...are encouraged to play with their mothers' breasts, and...are obviously stimulated sexually... 153
Maternal incest, like other sexual perversions, will often also reveal the sadism of the mother as she uses the child as an erotic sadistic object to overcome her depression and despair-which is rooted in her own loveless childhood. As Poole reports, "It should be noted that these erotic acts are often somewhat rough. Mothers' stimulation of the penis may involve pulling, pinching, and twisting in a manner that produces struggling and crying in infant boys. Also, I have treated many women whose nipples had been bruised and lacerated by their infants." 154 Similarly, in addition to masturbation during nursing, Roheim reports that mothers will sometimes "lie on their sons in the [female on top] position and freely masturbate them" at night. 155 That all this masturbation of children by parents is socially acceptable is shown by how often the mothers do it in front of the anthropologist. 156 This helps explain why children in the area spend so much of their time when playing with dolls making them repeat over and over again the cunnilingus, masturbation, anal penetration, intercourse and other incestuous acts which their parents had inflicted on them: "their only, and certainly their supreme, game was coitus." 157
The incestuous use of children in New Guinea and Australia extends to the other Melanesian and Polynesian islands, although as the societies become more complex the sexual practices become more ritualized. For instance, in the Marquesas Islands, besides simple masturbation of infants, 158 "the mons Veneris is massaged during infancy and girlhood...accompanied by stretching of the labia to elongate them. This was done by the mother during the daily bath. The child was seized by the ankles and its legs held apart while the mother manipulated the labia with her lips." 159 In Hawaii, a "blower" is designated for each male infant, ostensibly to prepare him for subincision of the foreskin, and "the penis was blown into daily starting from birth. The blowing was said to loosen and balloon the foreskin [and] continued daily...until the young male was 6 or 7." 160 For infant females in Hawaii, "milk was squirted into her vagina, and the labia were pressed together. The mons was rubbed with candlenut oil and pressed with the palm of the hand to flatten it...the molding continued until the labia did not separate. This chore usually was done by the mother..." 161 The Ponapé islanders "pulled and tugged at the labia of the little girls to lengthen them, while men pulled on the clitoris, rubbing it and licking it with their tongues and stimulating it by the sting of a big ant..." 162 This oral manipulation of the labia and clitoris extends to many of the other Pacific islands. 163
Mothers are not the only ones to use their infants as sexual objects. Although fathers in New Guinea are often reported avoiding their infants during the nursing years because they say they get sexually aroused when they watch them nurse, 164 when they do handle their infants, they too are reported as using them erotically. In the New Guinea Highlands, Langness reports "There was a great deal of fondling of the boys' penes by males. Women fondled infants but not older boys. Individuals of both sexes would pick up infants and mouth their genitals..." 165 " Like all other anthropologists who report the regular masturbating and sucking of children's genitals, he calls this love: "Any adult is apt to love and fondle any child almost at random." 166 Roheim, too, describes similarly widespread oral-genital contact by fathers: "The father...stimulates [his children] sexually at a very early period while they are still being carried. He playfully smells the vagina or touches it with his mouth; with the boys he playfully bites the penis..." 167 It is this common use of the child as a breast by the father that is mistaken by so many anthropologists as "close, loving fathering" in New Guinea and elsewhere.
Virtually all anthropologists report the long maternal nursing period of from three to six years as "nurturant" and "loving," assuming without evidence that this universal incessant nursing is done to satisfy the child's needs, not the mother's. Only one, Gilbert Herdt, interviewing the Sambia with the help of the psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller, asked the mothers directly about their sexual feelings during nursing. The Sambia, like most New Guinea groups, have prolonged postpartum taboos that prohibit couples from engaging in coitus for at least two and a half years following the birth of each child. 168 Anthropologists always portray these postpartum prohibitions as unexplained "cultural beliefs," as though there were no personal motive for them, but in fact they are simply practices chosen to express the mothers' desire to use their children rather than their spouses for sexual arousal. Since a taboo this long means women choose to have sex with their children rather than their husbands for much of their lives, it is obvious that they are unable to achieve the level of mature love relationships, and instead, like other incestuous individuals, need to have sex with children in order to counter deep feelings of depression. 169 Like all infanticidal mothers, New Guinea mothers, unloved themselves in childhood, feared as polluted by her society, devoid of intimacy with her husband, needs her children rather than loves them.
The motive for New Guinea maternal incest is clearest in the case of the Sambia, for the mothers in this group report regularly having orgasms during nursing. 170 Herdt's informants told him that when they breast-fed their children they felt orgasms that were "the same" as when having intercourse with a man, 171 and that "all the women feel that...not just me...all of them do." 172 So powerful is this ability to orgasm during nursing that even thinking about nursing can provide sexual excitement for the mother:
P: Then my baby thinks, "My mother doesn't bring back my milk quickly, so I am crying and crying waiting for her." He cries and cries and waits. And when he thinks that, then my breasts have to have an imbimboogu [orgasm].
H: You're saying that at that time, that's when you're feeling imbimboogu, when you walk about?
P: Yeah...I'm hot in the nipples, inside. 173
Herdt asks Stoller what this means, saying "as she's walking back to the hamlet, she has this experience she's calling an orgasm. I mean, it doesn't, can't...sound believable." 174 Stoller reports that occasionally "women in our society report genuine orgasms with suckling," 175 though this is rare compared to the mothers in New Guinea. 176
Since Poole was the only New Guinea ethnologist who interviewed both mothers and children, he obtained the most complete reports of maternal incest. 177 Like infanticidal psychoclass mothers everywhere, Bimin-Kuskusmin mothers consider their babies to be part of their own bodies, "never permitting the infant to be detached from contact with her body" and breastfeeding the baby "not only on demand, but also sometimes by force," whenever the mother needs the stimulation. 178 Mothers, Poole says, constantly masturbate the penes of their baby boys, while trying not to let their incest get out of hand:
She is expected to masturbate him periodically to ensure the growth of his genitalia, but she must carefully avoid the excessive development of erotic 'infant lust' which may injure his finiik [spirit]...When mothers rub the penes of their infant sons, the little boys wriggle on their mothers' laps and have erections. These tiny erections bring laughter. It is play. It will make their penes big when they are older. But 'infantile lust' can become too strong and can damage the growing "spirit or life-force" (finiik) of little boys. You will see mothers and sons together in this way everywhere. 179
Much of the ribald joking among mothers is for the purpose of denying that the erotic use of the child is in fact incest-it is blamed on the infant's "lust" only-for only "bad" mothers "are believed to stimulate their sons beyond the bounds of 'infantile lust' in order to satisfy their own sexual desires..." 180 Those mothers who completely give in to their own "lust" are called "witches" who are said to be "driven...to destroy all aspects of masculinity through jealousy and rage" 181 a condition all women can fall into, particularly when they are young, inexperienced mothers or are treated harshly by their husband's family. In order to prove that she isn't being too lustful,
mothers deliberately cover their breasts with bark cloth when they are stimulating the penis in a ritually prescribed manner. Indeed, this often highly ostentatious act of covering the breasts is a display to an ever-watchful public that the mother is acting properly in tending her son. On occasion, I have witnessed older women admonish a young mother for failing to cover her breasts when rubbing her son's genitals. 182
More privacy is afforded at night, however, when mothers can rub against their children's entire bodies because they sleep naked with their them, "together in each other's arms" and when they also can "regularly rub" the boy's penis to erection. 183
That these infants and children who are used as erotic objects function as poison containers for the mothers' split-off and denied anxieties and anger is quite clear. Poole interviewed one young boy, Buuktiin, who described how when his mother was depressed or angry she often "pulled, pinched, rubbed, or flicked a fingernail against his penis" 184 until he cried, afraid it might break off. "When he struggled to escape, she held him tightly and rubbed his penis even harder." 185
Kiipsaak [his mother] had masturbated him earlier as mothers often do...[But] now she increased the tempo and roughness of the episodes...and he often jerked at her touch and struggled to get away, hitting her and complaining of throbbing pain in his penis. 'It hurts inside. It goes 'koong, koong, koong' inside. I think it bleeds in there. I don't like to touch it anymore. It hurts when I pee." 186
Like so many victims of maternal incest, Buuktiin constantly cuts himself, both to get the "bad maternal blood" out of himself, since he feels polluted by the constant incest, and to punish himself, since children regularly blame themselves for the mother's sexual abuse:
Sometimes after such [incestuous] encounters, he wounded himself slightly in the thigh and the abdomen with a sharp stick and with slow deliberation, drawing blood and watching his penis. "Now it hurts here, outside, not in penis. Look, blood. Feels good...Good to be a girl, no penis...Mother twist penis, tight, tight...Hurt, hurt, inside. Cry, she not listen. Why? She cut off father's penis? She cut off mine? Father tell her, cut off Buuktiin's penis? Mother angry, hurt Buuktiin's penis. Mother sad, hurt Buuktin's penis...Mother not like Buuktiin's penis, want to cut off." 187
No better description can be imagined of the infanticidal, incestuous mother using her child as a poison container to handle her depression: mother wants to annihilate her inner tormentors, she kills her child; mother needs sex to counter her depression and deadness, she masturbates it; mother is angry or sad, she twists and hurts his penis.
MATERNAL REJECTION IN NEW GUINEA
The "love" of the infanticidal mode parent is mainly
evident when the child is useful as an erotic object. When
children are off the breast or otherwise not useful, they are
rejected as emotionally meaningless. The infanticidal parents'
emotional bond does not really acknowledge the separate existence
of the child, whose main function is to provide "bodily
stimulation [that] helps the mother to come alive, and she seeks
this from the child...countering her feelings of lethargy,
depression, and deadness." 188 As with all pedophiles, the
child is a "sexual object...that must show a readiness to
comply, lend itself to be manipulated, used, abused [and]
discarded..." 189 There is never just "incest" it
is always "incest/rejection."
There are many ways New Guinea parents demonstrate that when the child cannot be used erotically, it is useless. One is that as soon as infants are not being nursed, they are paid no attention, and even when in danger are ignored. Anthropologists regularly notice that little children play with knives or fire and adults ignore them. Edgerton comments on the practice: "Parents allowed their small children to play with very sharp knives, sometimes cutting themselves, and they permitted them to sleep unattended next to the fire. As a result, a number of children burned themselves seriously...it was not uncommon to see children who had lost a toe to burns, and some were crippled by even more severe burns." 190 Langness says in the Bena Bena "it was not at all unusual to see even very small toddlers playing with sharp bush knives with no intervention on the part of caretakers." 191 But this is good, say the anthropologists, since when "children as young as two or three are permitted to play with objects that Westerners consider dangerous, such as sharp knives or burning brands from the fire, [it] tends to produce assertive, confident, and competent children." 192 Children, they explain, are allowed to "learn by observations...e.g., the pain of cutting oneself when playing carelessly with a knife." 193 As Whiting says, when he once saw a Kwoma baby "with the blade of a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid no attention to him," this was good for the infant, since in this way "the child learns to discriminate between the edible and inedible." 194 Margaret Mead is particularly ecstatic about the wisdom of mothers making infants learn to swim early by allowing them to fall into the water under the hut when crawling and slipping through gaps in the floor or falling overboard into the sea because they were "set in the bow of the canoe while the mother punts in the stern some ten feet away." 195
Children are experienced by mothers as extensions of their bodies, and any separation or independence is seen as rejection of the mother, as reminders of the severe rejection of the mothers' own childhood. Mothers do not allow others to nurse their children, saying their milk is "poison," and even do not allow their one- to two-year-olds to visit their relatives for fear they would "poison" them. 196 When a mother dies, often the "infant would be buried with her even if perfectly healthy," 197 and if the infant dies, "the mother remains secluded with it for days, wailing, attempting to nurse it," blaming it by saying "I told you not to die. But you did not hear me! You did not listen!" 198 When infants begin to show any sign of independence, they are either wholly rejected and ignored or forced to stay still. Typical is the Wogeo child, who Hogbin describes as often being "put in a basket, which is then hung on a convenient rafter...or tree" and "discouraged from walking and not allowed to crawl...[forced to] sit still for hours at a time [and only] make queer noises" as he or she is immobilized to avoid even the slightest movement of independence from the mother. 199 Anthropologists regularly see these ubiquitous New Guinea baskets and net bags in which the infants are trapped and in which they are often hung on a tree as "comforting," even though it means that the infants often live in their own feces and urine and can neither crawl nor interact with others. Only Hippler describes them as a function of the mothers' pattern of "near absolute neglect" of her child when it is not being used erotically. 200
Parental rejection in preliterate cultures is often overt it is what Boyer found was called "throwing the child away." Boyer discovered that "a great many mothers abandon or give children away; babies they have been nursing lovingly only hours before," when he and his wife were offered their babies, a practice he ascribed to the mothers' "shallow object relations." 201 Few anthropologists have seen the high adoption and fosterage rates in the New Guinea area-some as high as 75 percent 202 as rejection, but of course that is what it is. Child rejection is widely institutionalized in various forms, usually after weaning, when the infant has stopped being useful as an erotic object. In the Trobriands, for instance, "the transfer of children who have already been weaned from true parents to other parents is a frequent occurrence..." 203 Anthropologists usually see giving away a child as evidence of parental love. Kasprus, for instance, says the Raum really "love and like children," but that "although they love children they may readily give one away..."204 Mead describes the giving of a child away by her parents as a "happy" event. The occasion is a family giving a seven-year-old girl to the family of her betrothed, an older man:
The little girl is taken by her parents and left in the home of her betrothed. Here her life hardly differs at all from the life that she led at home....Towards her young husband, her attitude is one of complete trust and acceptance....He calls out to her to light his pipe, or to feed his dog...she becomes warmly attached...I asked her: "Did you cry when you first went to Liwo?" "No, I did not cry. I am very strong." 205
Rejection of the child when off the breast is ubiquitous in New Guinea. Small children are rarely looked at or talked to. Whereas in American families an average of 28 minutes of an average hour is spent talking to and interacting with the child (including an average of 341 utterances per hour), 206 in at least one New Guinea study mothers were found to interact with their children only one minute out of each hour. 207 The millions of looks, communications, admirations, mirroring and emotional negotiations between mother and child the "emotional dialogue that fosters the beginnings of a sense of self, logical communications and the beginnings of purposefulness" 208 are simply missing for the New Guinea child. The result is that the early self system in the orbitofrontal cortex has no chance to develop, and since "the orbitofrontal cortex functionally mediates the capacity to empathize with the feelings of others and to reflect on internal emotional states, one's own and others," 209 when these emotionally rejected children grow up they are unable to empathize with others or have much insight into their own emotions.
Since to the infanticidal mother, as Hippler puts it, "the child is an unconscious representative of [her own] mother, his autonomous actions are seen by the mother as abandonment. The response on the part of the mother to this 'abandonment' by her infant...is anger" and rejection. 210 Mothers throughout the South Pacific are said to "hold their small infants facing away from them and toward other people while the mother speaks for them rather than to them." 211 Obviously the infant is an extension of the mother's body, not an independent human being at all. "No one says very much to babies," 212 and when they begin to walk, they are felt to be abandoning the parent and are emotionally rejected. As Hippler puts it,
I never observed a single adult Yolngu caretaker of any age or sex walking a toddler around, showing him the world, explaining things to him and empathizing with his needs. While categorical statements are most risky, I am most certain of this. 213
This emotional rejection and lack of verbalization has been widely noted among infanticidal mode parents in simple societies. 214 When the baby stops being a breast-object, it simply doesn't exist. In my New Guinea childhood files, for instance, I have over 1,000 photos from books and articles showing adults and children-including one book of over 700 photos of Fore children taken randomly so as to capture their daily lives. 215 Virtually all the photos capture the adults continuously caressing, rubbing, kissfeeding and mouthing the children's bodies, but only two show an adult actually looking at the child. Not a single one shows a mutual gaze between the adult and child which Schore contends is the basis of formation of the self. The photos illuminate Read's description of the "customary greeting, a standing embrace in which both men and women handled each other's genitals...hands continually reaching out to caress a thigh, arms to encircle a waist, and open, searching mouths hung over a child's lips, nuzzled a baby's penis, or closed with a smack on rounded buttocks." 216 This emotional abandonment is further confirmed by Boram, who recorded every detail of a typical day of one six-year-old Ok girl. Interactions or talking to the mother were found to be rare, while the child spent the day going about looking for food, hunting frogs and cooking them, "fondling" babies and pretending to nurse piglets from her breast. Boram concludes that for Ok children "most of the day is spent simply in killing time..." 217 It is not surprising that he also mentions that tantrums are frequent and suicide is high among these children, and that he observed many "episodes of insanity" in Ok children. 218
MALNUTRITION AND THE WEANING CRISIS IN NEW GUINEA
So difficult is it for New Guinea area mothers to relate to their
children as independent human beings that they are unable to feed
them regularly once they are off the breast. Like contemporary
pedophiles, they do not so much love their children as need them,
so when the parents' needs end, the child can be emotionally
abandoned. When still on the breast, New Guinea children are
constantly being force-fed, so that nursing "becomes a
battle in which the mother clutches the child, shaking it up and
down with the nipple forced into its mouth until it must either
suck or choke." 219 As soon as they are off the breast,
however, the mothers no longer need them as erotic objects, and
they have difficulty understanding that their children need three
meals a day. Although there is almost always plenty of food to
eat for both adults and children, "several authors have
stressed what appears to be a nonchalant attitude toward infant
and child feeding on the part of Papua New Guinea mothers,"
220 so that "over 90 percent of children under five have
been measured as having mild to moderate undernutrition."
221 In one careful statistical study, almost all children
remained underweight for years, because "none were fed three
times daily as clinic sisters encourage..." 222 In the New
Guinea-Australian culture area, meat, in particular, is rarely
given to children, being eaten up by the adults first. 223
Hippler reports that "parents eat all the substantial
food...before the child can get any. Adults...do not believe that
deaths result from anything but sorcery, they make no connection
between these practices and childhood illness and attendant
death." 224 In a careful study of Kwanga child malnutrition,
two-year-olds who had been weaned were found to average only two
meals a day, so that child mortality was extremely high. 225
Nurses in the clinic kept telling the mothers, "Why don't
you tell me the truth? You do not feed your child properly!"
but the mothers didn't seem to comprehend why it was necessary to
feed them regularly each day, and so the weaned children kept
losing weight and even dying. 226
In her book on child malnourishment in New Guinea, Patricia Townsend cites all the studies showing the majority of children are underweight between age one and four, emphasizing that the toddler group-after weaning-are most malnourished, since the mothers do not feed them regularly. 227 Children are constantly being described by observers as throwing tantrums "for hours" trying to get food, "standing in the middle of the house floor and shrieking monotonously until someone stops work to cook for them." 228 Anthropologists ascribe these constant hunger tantrums to children's willfulness, agreeing with a chuckle with the natives' saying that "young children have only one thought/emotion, which is to eat," 229 unable to empathize with the despair of the hungry, unloved, lonely, rejected children they see throwing the tantrums.
Similarly, once the infant is off the breast both the parents and the anthropologists seem unable to empathize with the feelings of the children as they are subjected to all kinds of tortures which anthropologists dismiss as merely "cultural practices" and therefore consider as unmotivated. For instance, babies in many areas have their skulls deformed, highly elongated with painfully tight bindings that are renewed every day for months. 230 Making infants crawl over dead bodies and terrorizing little children with frightening masks and threats of devouring witches is quite common. 231 Children are also regularly described as "shouted at, jerked roughly, slapped, shaken" bitten and hit with sticks 232 yet the standard study on child abuse in New Guinea claims they are "rarely abused" because although "it is not uncommon for adults to strike children...there is no such thing as a formal spanking." 233 Since only formal disciplinary spankings as we administer them in the West seem to count as child abuse, anthropologists regularly conclude that "child abuse...is virtually unknown" in New Guinea. 234
INFANTICIDAL PARENTING AND PARENTING IN OTHER PRIMATES
Most New Guinea area parenting practices from infanticide and
maternal incest to the inability to feed properly-are shared with
other primate parents, thus lending further credence to the
conclusion that they still have a childrearing mode that is
rather close to that of our earliest ancestors. The inability of
most non-human primates to share food with their children after
weaning is well established. Jane Lancaster sums up primate
post-weaning behavior:
...adults are not responsible for seeing that young have enough to eat...[even] an injured or sick youngster still has to feed itself and get itself to water or it will die virtually before the eyes of other group members. Individuals who would risk their own lives in defense of the youngster are psychologically incapable of seeing its need for them to bring it food and water. Once weaned, then, young monkeys and apes must feed themselves... 235
The primate mother nurses her infant only for the erotic pleasure it affords, not for "love" of her child. Like the New Guinea mother, she has difficulty conceiving that her child is hungry. After the suckling period, primate mothers almost never give any kind of food to their infants. "Even gorilla infants have never been seen being given solid food by their mothers." 236 In fact, primate mothers are often observed to grab food from their offspring, who must get by on "tolerated scrounging" of leftovers. 237 Like New Guinea mothers, chimpanzee mothers are described as losing interest in their children when off the breast, often rejecting and punishing them. 238 The result of this severe maternal rejection is that there is a "weaning crisis" for primates when they abruptly must learn to find food for themselves, a deadly rejection process that kills from one-third to three-fourths of them before they reached adulthood. 239
Primates parallel human infanticidal mode parents in other ways too. They frequently give away their infants a practice called "alloparenting," 240 which often results in the infant being abused, abandoned or killed. 241 Primates are also infanticidal, cannibalistic and incestuous. 242 Indeed, there appears to be only a relatively small degree of childrearing evolution between our nearest primate ancestors and infanticidal mode parenting such as that in New Guinea. Lovejoy 243 cites the high infant mortality of primates during weaning he places it at around 40 percent as evidence that early hominids estimated at over 50 percent infant mortality 244 had difficulty feeding their children once off the breast, just as New Guinea mothers still do today.
THE FUNCTION OF CHILD GANGS IN NEW GUINEA
After the mother rejects the child during weaning, he or she must
rely on peers in child gangs for much of its needs. A
cross-cultural study of this pattern among preliterate groups
concludes:
In one ethnography after another there is a description of intense mother-infant contact...until weaning, and outright maternal hostility and rejection afterward...
Children typically eat with other children in these groups after weaning, often in outright scramble competition when food is scarce. The description of this pattern usually goes with assurances by the ethnographer that the child receives 'emotional support' from peers and from others in the group. Our bet is that any of these kids would prefer a square meal to emotional support. The point here is that many people in the world do not share our American middle-class view that children need and deserve a lot of input. They treat children much as other primate parents treat their children... 245
Throughout the New Guinea area, children are "not only turned loose for the daylight hours but also actively discouraged from returning to the parents" and so are forced to join "a transient gang." 246 As is usual in gangs, the older children "lord it over" the younger, often beat them and make them their servants, 247 particularly their sexual servants, since they were used to constant sexual stimulation by their parents as studies have shown, "incestuous children are uncommonly erotic...easily aroused...and readily orgasmic." 248 Malinowsky was one of the first to report sexual intercourse beginning at age four in the Trobriand Islands, where "children are initiated by each other, or sometimes by a slightly older companion, into the practices of sex," including oral stimulation, masturbation, and anal or vaginal intercourse. 249 Others since then have confirmed the pattern:
The boys poke sticks into each others' anuses...If parents see boys having sex with little girls they joke about it and laugh. 'Good. You can do it. Your mothers and fathers did this...'" 250
The younger children are of course raped by the older ones, although this is never obvious in the language of the anthropologist, who usually says some neutral phrase like "they are typically initiated into intercourse by older and more experienced children," 251 as though the older child was only a helpful teacher. The same misleading language is used when describing young girls "subjected at about age eight to ten to serial sexual intercourse by adult men...to procure sexual fluids for rubbing on the girl's groom-to-be, to help him grow," 252 as though this weren't simple gang rape. Some anthropologists even claim that the raping of little children by child gangs is "healthy," because, as Kurtz puts it, "the group seduces a child out of immaturity by offering and imposing on that child multiple experiences of sexual pleasure..." 253
Studies of children who have been sexually abused by their parents show they were "highly eroticized" 254 and often restaged their own seductions on other children. In New Guinea, the child gangs often had their own houses in which to have sex, as in the Trobriand Islands, where "young people usually do not sleep in their parents' houses. They move to a small house next door or a few doors away...In this way, they have the freedom of their own sleeping quarters to which they can bring their lovers." 255 Roheim says both boys and girls are constantly sexual, even with their siblings:
Homosexuality plays a conspicuous role in the life of a young girl [using] little sticks wound around at the end so as to imitate the glans penis...All the virgin girls do this...One of them plays the male role and introduces the artificial penis into her cousin's vagina...they then rub their two clitorises together...At the age of eight or ten boys and girls frequently have their own little houses...They do it first to their little sisters. Sipeta says that her older brothers every evening before they went to the girls would pet her this way. 256
Boys throughout the Melanesian and Polynesian areas take great pride in "deflowering virgins," both individually and in gangs, and often "count coup" as to how many little girls they have deflowered." 257 Parents encourage the rape; Berndt describes how "children...are invited by a mother, older brother or sister, or some other person, to indulge in sexual intercourse with an adult or a child of the same age..." 258 Gang raping children is often done as part of rituals, as when Australian aborigines mutilate and rape their young girls:
A most severe form of mutilation, introcism, was formerly practiced among Australian aborigines...the vagina of a pubertal girl was slit with a knife or torn open by the fingers of the operator, the purpose being to enlarge the vaginal opening. This painful operation was immediately followed by forced intercourse with a group of young men. 259
Women, too, rape young boys; Firth describes how women would "cover the child and herself with a blanket and insert his penis in her genitals. She lies on her back, holds the child on top of her and with her hand works his loins." 260 Anthropologists occasionally admit that child rape in New Guinea might be "sometimes associated with violence," 261 but usually claim it is voluntary, as when Knauft claims rape of young girls by "between five and thirteen men" was "willingly submitted to...in the belief that it was necessary to enhance their personal fertility as well as that of the Marind cosmos." 262
RAPE OF BOYS AS RESTAGING OF MATERNAL INCEST
When New Guinea boys begin to want to individuate at around seven
years of age, adult men, identifying with their desires to grow,
begin to experience severe growth panic and restage in various
ways their maternal incest traumas. Mainly in the less-evolved
South and Eastern Lowlands, this restaging takes the form of oral
and anal rape of the boys, as men force their penis into the
boy's mouth or anus the same way the mothers used them in forced
erotic feeding as infants. Like pederasts who have been
psychoanalyzed, 263 New Guinea men fear women as incestuous,
engulfing mothers whose "menstrual blood could contaminate
and kill them." By raping boys, these pederasts reverse
their own being passively used as erotic objects and instead
actively use the boys sexually. Thus the boys become sexual
objects devoid of the mother's frightening configurations, while
restaging the maternal rape of their own infancy. Both the boys
and the men recognize the rape as being like breast-feeding,
rationalizing it as necessary for growth, telling the little
boys, "You all won't grow by yourselves; if you sleep with
the men you'll become a STRONG man...when you hold a man's penis,
you must put it inside your mouth-he can give you semen...It's
the same as your mother's breast milk." 264 Among many
groups, the fellatio of men by young boys occurs daily and
continues until puberty, when he then can begin raping younger
boys himself. The swallowing of semen is so important that men
often blame accidents on not drinking enough. As one Juvu
tribesman said about a man who had fallen from a tree, "He
didn't drink semen: that's why he fell." His friend agreed:
"I still never stop thinking about semen or eating it...[a]
man who didn't [swallow semen] enough will die quickly, like an
airplane without gasoline!" 265
The notion that boys must be given semen to stop them from growing into females has a certain logic to New Guinea people. Like all maternally incested children, they feel that being used sexually by their mothers "pollutes their blood" and since the boys consider themselves responsible for the seduction they feel "full of women's pollution" and need semen to "get mother's poison" out of them. Since as infants they were used erotically by always being rubbed against the mothers' bodies, they were intimately familiar with her menstrual fluids, remaining with her in the menstrual hut, 266 and so an explicit association is made between menstrual fluids and poison. Everyone therefore agrees that women's blood is so poisonous that sexual intercourse at the wrong time can kill men and that wives can and do kill their husbands and children by giving them polluted food. 267 Since attacks by witches and spirits "follow the path of menstrual blood," 268 boys who remain "polluted" by mother's blood are open to death by witchcraft, so during their whole lives this incestuous "maternal pollution" must be constantly removed through semen ingestion and blood-letting rituals where men make incisions in the boys' bodies and rub sperm into the cuts. 269
Anthropologists often state that orally and anally raping boys is both chosen by and beneficial to them. Although occasionally they reveal that the boys "fear punishment" 270 and that their "first response to doing fellatio was fear that is how most boys respond," they nevertheless conclude that the boys "do not just accept fellatio: they want it." 271 Like most pederasty defenders, they depict the boys as "enthusiastically anticipating" their rape, 272 and as "eager to suck" mens' penises and "enjoying" the rape with "fine erotic enthusiasm." 273 Oral and anal rapes are said to be "grounded in personal affection rather than obligation" 274 and "have a positive effect on the boy's development." 275 Some of the anthropologists are open pedophile supporters, who praise the "positive tradition of paedophilia over the last hundred years" and term pederasty an "enormously nurturant relationship" in interviews in Paedika: The Journal of Paedophilia, 276 one even having been prosecuted for bringing New Guinea boys back to the U.S. and sexually abusing them. 277 Of the several hundred anthropologists whose work I have researched, I found none who said pederasty was detrimental, agreeing instead with the New Guinea natives that it was both desired by and beneficial to the victims.
TORTURE AND MUTILATION AS PUNISHMENT FOR GROWTH
Even in those Highland areas that do not have ritualized
pederasty, growth is psychologically felt to be dangerous to
adults, and so older children are everywhere tortured and
mutilated as punishment for their individuation and independence.
Although these tortures are called "initiation rituals"
by anthropologists, they are less "initiations" into
anything than punishments for growing up. They dramatize a
cleansing of maternal poisons so boys can now be used by men for
their projections. Most of them restage maternal traumas in one
way or another. One ritual begins by blaming their mothers as
"evil defilers" of the boys who "have polluted and
weakened their sons" with their bad menstrual blood. 278
Another describes how "bad polluted maternal blood" is
purged from prepubertal Gahuka-Gama boys:
The boys, placed in the front ranks of the vast crowd, see a score of naked men standing in the river exhibiting their erect penises and masturbating. Then, several of the men stride into the river where one takes two rolls of razor-sharp leaves and pushes them up and down his nostrils until blood gushes into the water...each initiate...is held firmly by his sponsor, while another man thrusts the leaves back and forth in his nostrils until the boys bleeds profusely into the river. After all of the initiates have been bled, [a man] doubles a length of cane and thrusts it down his esophagus like a sword swallower and draws it back and forth until he vomits into the water. The dangerous procedure is then carried out on the initiates who are now weakened and slack from the bleeding....
As soon as the boys are out of sight, the men verbally attack the women for being bad mothers and delaying their sons' growth. A warrior holds up a bunch of leaves soaked by the blood from the boys' noses, and...two men seize one of the mothers and a warrior forces the bloody leaves down her throat while cursing her... 279
The ritual both demonstrates "we are all bleeding, polluted mothers here" and tries to undo the feeling of being polluted by cutting the boys with the razor-sharp leaves in their nostrils and the cane-sword down their throats. The boys understandably "tremble, urinating and defecating in fear" during their torture. 280 Yet the feeling of still being incested, polluted maternal sex-objects remains with them, since so many continue to bleed their noses, tongues or penises periodically the rest of their lives. 281
Mead describes Arapesh men cutting their penises to remove bad blood every time they experience growth anxiety: after first intercourse with his wife, after erecting a new house, after initiating a growing youth, etc. 282 The cutting is clearly to remove the mother's polluted blood; as one informant put it, "We say [the mother's] blood and bad words enter our skin and lodge there, so we expel it [by bleeding]." 283 Boys are told: "You [initiates] have been with your mothers...they have said 'bad words' to you, their talk has entered your noses and prevented you from growing big." 284 Some groups additionally purge boys by such rites as penis-bleeding and the "painful procedure of lying with open eyes under a jet of water to cleanse the eyeballs" of female pollution. 285
That New Guinea teenage boys continue to cut themselves, often their penises, after initiation rites shows they are self-injurious as punishment for the incest they have endured. Clinical studies of self-cutters show "cases of self-injurious behavior are rare in...children who have not been physically or sexually abused." 286 Case histories of incest victims who slash themselves sound very much like how New Guinea youth slashing their penises with crab claws:
Leigh, now 25, had been sexually abused by her father...her mother told her that only a "whore" would accuse her father of such things. "So here I was, 11 years old, standing in front of a mirror thinking, 'You filthy slut! You deserve everything you get!' Then I'd go into a trance almost, and cut my arms and legs with a razor blade. Later I cut my breast and even my genitals because I learned that those were the parts of my body that made me a whore." 287
Although fathers may use their girls sexually, they do not use their boys although in some areas fathers rent out their boys to other men who do use them sexually, establishing a "anus father" and "anus son" relationship. 288
Genital mutilation, which is always punishment for growing up, also occurs in New Guinea. It is not, as Reik contends, "a punishment for incestuous wishes," 289 but rather a self-punishment for real maternal incest for which children blame themselves. Genital mutilation rituals are cross-culturally correlated with exclusive mother-infant skin-to-skin sleeping arrangements, where the father sleeps separate, so the mother is likely to use the child incestuously. 290 In the New Guinea area, they are sometimes as brutal as the infamous Australian subincision, where the penis is cut the length of its underside until it "splits open like a boiled frankfurter." 291 The long wound on the penis is then called a boy's "vagina," 292 and the men have intercourse in it. 293 In other New Guinea tribes who mutilate genitals, it usually involves cutting little pieces of the penis off. Girls, too, are sometimes initiated by having their noses bled with leaves or having stinging nettles thrust up their vulvas before they are gang raped. 294 Subincision in the whole culture area is said to be accompanied by the mutilation of the girls' genitals; according to Montagu, it was "once widely practiced throughout Australia and Oceania." 295 Whether in the form of painful inch-long body incisions, "often over a hundred," 296 or genital mutilations, New Guinea girls, too, are cut as punishment for being sexual and for purging poisonous blood. 297
Other punishments during initiations for growing children include brutal beating with sticks and stinging nettles, sometimes for months or years, being burned over a fire, being starved and tortured, being made to swallow lime which severely blisters the boys' mouths and throats, shooting a miniature sharp-pointed arrow up girls' urethras until blood is drawn, pushing barbed grass up the urethra, cutting the glans penis with a crab claw, etc. 298 Although one anthropologist mentioned that "undoubtedly these rituals are exceedingly painful," 299 they are usually considered as neither nor as very traumatic to the children. Sometimes the "rebirth" of the boys by the purgings is accomplished by first crawling through the legs of the men and sometimes it is in the form of other death-and-rebirth rituals. In either case, the rituals are a restaging of one of the most powerful traumas New Guinea children must endure: watching their infanticidal mothers strangle or drown their newborn siblings. The ritual first restages the murder of the newborn and then undoes it by showing that men can bring babies back to life (while mothers only want to kill babies.)
The brutal initiation punishments are often combined with gang rape by men-either, as in the Trans-Fly area, oral rape by all villagers or visitors (combined with the pouring of lime down their throats to ensure the boys do not become pregnant) or as in the Marind, where anal rape is limited to the uncles. 300 Initiations are also often followed by war raids, 301 sometimes a cannibalistic headhunt, to demonstrate to the boys how through group violence they can actively identify with the infanticidal, devouring mother and kill and eat people rather than being passively killed or eaten by her. Bloch describes this transformation from victim alter to killer alter in his book, Prey Into Hunter:
the transformation of the initiates from victims into killers is a typical aspect of these rituals...men shouting that they are spirits arrive as if from the forest and chase the children, maltreating them. The intruders are terrifying: they advance biting and assaulting...and shouting 'Bite, bite, bite'. Meanwhile the parents beg the spirits not to 'kill' the children. The reason that it is believed that the ritual may very possibly lead to the death of the children [is] that this indeed happens not infrequently....[Therefore] from having been victims the children have become murderers... 302
In addition to the brutality of persecutory initiation rituals, daily life with parents is full of physical and psychological abuse. One group of childhood memories tape recorded by one anthropologist regularly features "parents harshly punishing" children, the following being typical: "She grabbed my arm, twisted it and bit one of the small veins..." (mother); "they beat me until I was half-dead [then] tied me to a tree and left me there for the night" (both parents); "He kicked me very hard and I fell over a large rock and hurt myself very badly. 'Kill her and throw her away!' he said. When we return to Dandipe we will still have plenty of other children to replace her." (father) 303 Since empathy with children's feelings is nearly absent, gratuitous mutilation of the children is common, such as tightly binding newborn infants heads for months to elongate the skull or chopping or biting off infant's fingers while mourning. 304 These kinds of brutal daily abuses, added to the various types of ritual pederasty, torture and mutilation, are so widespread that the conclusion in the standard anthropological work on cross-cultural child abuse that there is a "virtual absence of child abuse in New Guinea" 305 appears quite inexplicable.
SOCIAL ALTERS IN NEW GUINEA
Like all children who experience incest, torture and severe
physical abuse, New Guinea children only manage to retain their
sanity by constructing various alters as they grow up, which
contain split-off identifications and selves that are experienced
as separate from their central selves. When they are incested and
raped, for instance, they split off the horror into a victim
alter and an abuser alter-which then abuses other children when
they become teenagers. Pedophiles who are in therapy often reveal
they switch into their abuser alters when raping children:
At the start of therapy, Jennifer experienced repeated flashbacks of a gang rape at about age four...She had alters representing the rapists as well as herself as the victim. These alters had imagined themselves to be perpetrators in order to avoid experiencing the pain of the rape....Jennifer's abuse...included sexual and physical abuse at home, by all family members. There was also systematic, ritualistic abuse by a Satanic cult in which her family was involved as well as pornographic film-making...we went through her memories of abusing the little boys she had baby-sat...this abuse caused pleasure to some alters and pain to others...Jennifer's system was able to identify that pedophilic desires belonged to alters whose only pleasant life experience was that of sexually abusing younger children. They saw the little boy in the shelter as vulnerable and neglected, and they felt they cared for him. They thought their sexual abuse of him would be a caring act, something he would find pleasant compared to what Jennifer had been through. 306
Anthropologists regularly notice that New Guinea adults regularly switch into alters "It was as if someone had turned a switch in these people. We thought we knew them, and all of a sudden they were acting in ways we didn't understand at all" 307 and often comment on the natives' own descriptions of what they call their "hidden self." It is widely recognized that the "public persona one presents to others is not only different from, but a deliberate mask of...the divided self..." 308 But because anthropologists are unaware of the clinical literature on multiple selves they do not call them "alters," saying, "In probably all Melanesian cultures...there is not one 'true' self but rather many selves...[however] English lacks a [word for] dual or multiple self." 309
Since Poole is the only anthropologist who actually interviews children about their inner life, his descriptions of their formation of alters during Bimin-Kuskusmin childhood are especially valuable. This tribe recognizes that people have hidden alternate personalities, called finiik and khaapkhabuurien, that "temporarily depart from the body to wander abroad...during dreams, illnesses, trances, and other forms of mystical experience." 310 One five-year-old child, whose mother constantly masturbated him and whose father beat him, learned that his twin had been killed by his mother at birth and constructed an "imaginary unborn sibling" alter "as an adversary, scapegoat, surrogate, confidant, companion, friend, and twin." 311 Like all multiples, he used this consoling alter to reduce his anxiety that his mother might kill him too. For instance, one day after he watched his father-who was a renowned killer and cannibal-beating his mother bloody, he "rushed shrieking frantically to his mother, and began caressing her abdomen. Then he began to press his mouth against her navel and to call to Fuut'tiin, his imaginary unborn sibling." 312 When he was depressed, he took Poole into the forest and introduced him to his many alters, including a "person-in-the-stone" and "a red bird who told him secrets," and told him about being possessed by witch alters that appeared both in dreams and in waking life. 313
Switching into alters is the basis for all political and religious behavior. New Guinea natives recognize this when they say things like "the khaapkhabuurien may sometimes become detached from the body in dreams, shadows, reflections, spirit possessions, trances, and illnesses..." 314 When one becomes a sorcerer or witch, one enters a trance state and switches into persecutory alters-called "familiars"-termed the "key concept" for understanding New Guinea shamanistic religion. 315 One of the main purposes of the various "initiation rituals" is to coordinate individual persecutory and victim alters, substituting shared group alters. When, for instance, young warriors go out on headhunting raids they practice switching as a group into killing alters through "special magic, which places the fighters in a trance-like state of dissociation in which they became capable of extreme, indiscriminate violence [which] made them capable of killing even their own wives and children..." 316 They are often amnestic of being in their alter, and "speak of the aftermath of the fighting as a kind of re-awakening or recovery of their senses. They claim not even to have perceived the enemy corpses until the magic was removed and 'our eyes became clear again, and we saw all the fine men and women we had killed'." 317 Thus they can be friendly to anthropologists at one moment and vicious warriors or cannibals the next, after switching into their murderous, devouring alters.
SOCIAL ALTERS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION IN NEW GUINEA
New Guinea social, religious and political institutions are
primarily constructions by men to defend against maternal
engulfment fears through shared beliefs and rituals. Institutions
such as war, headhunting, cannibalism, witch scares, shamanism,
and gift exchange are all made up of dream objects and projected
alters that are experienced as ghosts, witches, shamans,
warriors, enemies and magical leaders. They regularly speak to
dream-figures, both in dreams and afterwards, and regularly
hallucinate ghosts and witches. Because so much of their
emotional life is contained in their alters, they cannot for long
stay out of them-it isn't that they are just "attached to
the group" as anthropologists claim. It's that only while in
a group trance can they rejoin their split-off alters, inheritors
of their developmental traumas. So complete is the domain of
their social trance and so total their struggles with their
projected fears that little energy has been available to produce
cultural innovation, so they have remained in the infanticidal
psychoclass long after most groups have evolved beyond it. Male
fear of and hostility toward women in New Guinea has been so
overpowering that routinely battered mothers have had little
ability to produce the "hopeful daughters" who could
evolve childhood and psyche.
It is no coincidence that what is arguably the most anti-female culture area in the world is also one of the least culturally evolved. Sambia men, for instance, fear that menstrual blood may penetrate into their urethra during intercourse, 318 and are certain everything bad that happens to them, especially any sickness, is due to contact with dreaded women's blood. Foods that are either red or hairy are often avoided due to their resemblance to the vagina. 319 The fear of women begins in childhood:
A mother's speech and harangues have a lethal power. A woman's airstream emitted while speaking is thought to emerge from her blood-filled caverns. If it is directed-particularly at close range during anger-toward boys, the boys are believed harmed: simply by inhaling those insults and air...Likewise, women pollute boys simply by lifting their legs in proximity to them, emitting vaginal smells that boys can breathe in: and, for this reason, men keep their noses plugged during coitus, avoiding incorporation of the vaginal smell they describe as most harmfully foul... 320
The resulting fear of and rage toward women lead to widespread wife-beating, 321 the routine torture and execution of women suspected of poisoning men 322 and the high female suicide rates so characteristic of small-scale societies, often reaching 10-25 percent of adult women's deaths. 323 Most anthropologists report extremely high rates of "violence toward women, including rape, murder, and attacks upon their genitals." 324 Men's constant fears of semen depletion by women are behind the belief that boys need to swallow semen during fellatio to become male. 325 Intercourse is often reported as brief, ending in a minute or two, so they don't get poisoned. 326 Marital fidelity is rare, one girl saying to her mother: "All the men have intercourse with you and your cunt is wide open...I've seen you dripping their semen about. I've seen them all have intercourse with you." 327 When a woman commits adultery, they are often severely punished "by having burning sticks thrust into their vaginas, or they were killed by their husbands." 328 Although infidelity is the rule, the reason is little understood, with anthropologists resorting to such rationalizations as "frequent sexual intercourse and sexual partner change is in fact the norm, perhaps because there is so little else to do in one's spare time." 329
Wars are called "the breath of life" and are fought to repair their fragmented self and to restore potency, mainly through ambush, with warriors spearing unarmed men, women and children for wholly imagined grievances that restage their own childhood traumas. Groups decide to go to war whenever they switch into their persecutory alters, mainly on occasions of extreme growth panic, such as after initiations, new tasks such as building new houses or expanding gardens, or during leadership crises, in the fourth, upheaval leadership stage, when the leader seems weak. Anything new can trigger a raid, though it is usually blamed on family disputes or other rationalizations-though studies of war usually avoid any analysis of motivation, calling it a "psychological black box," since "nearly every man nurses a grievance that can precipitate war." 330 Estimates of deaths from war can top 35 percent of adult deaths, the highest rates on record. 331 Male homicide rates also reach the highest levels anywhere in the world. 332 Knauft, for instance, found that over 60 percent of middle-age adult Gebusi males he interviewed had already committed one or more homicide. 333 Distrust of others in many tribes is widespread, for good reason, since most people have killed or poisoned someone and are liable to again. 334 "Both men and women are volatile, prone to quarreling and quick to take offense at a suspected slight or injury." 335 Shame the result of being used as an erotic object in childhood is the central social feeling, "feeling exposed, naked before others," 336 so that in New Guinea, as elsewhere, imaginary humiliations are involved in most social violence. Men cling to their various solidarity arrangements to counter engulfing, poisonous women, because "Women represent an enemy, the enemy, and aggression is based on opposition to them. At every stage of the developmental cycle, men have an internal, united organization as reference; women and external enemies are the target of concern, they are conceptually equivalent." 337 Recurrent group-psychotic episodes of witchcraft poison fears are epidemic throughout the area as maternal engulfment anxieties due to periodic growth panics peak. Retribution for imagined magical sorcery attacks is "personal, immediate and uncompromisingly vicious. The assailants spring on their victim from ambush, brutally overpower him, jab poisons directly into his body, and sometimes twist or rip out organs," 338 thereby paying back their infanticidal and incestuous mothers for early traumatic hurts. The "witch" is in fact simple possession, what would be diagnosed in our society as an alter "inhabiting" the body along with one's "real" self:
"Real people" were wary of those suspected of witchcraft and desperately afraid of convicted and confessed witches. They believed that a witch could kill simply by staring at a person. They believed, too, that the kum inhabiting the body of a witch could arbitrarily leave and leap into the body of a bystander forcing him or her to perform the actions attributed to witches. Some of the persons accused of witchcraft admitted that they had indeed harboured a kum but that it had left them... 339
When inhabited by a violent persecutory alter, warriors join in a social trance that acts out their need to kill, regardless of object. Harrison writes of violence in New Guinea tribes:
Headhunting raids required special magic, which placed the fighters in a trance-like state of dissociation and relieved them of accountability for their actions; it was supposed to make them capable of killing even their own wives and children. ...so long as the magic was in effect, the capacity to kill was quite indiscriminate and turned the fighters into a dangerous menace to all other people, including their own families. 340
THE RESTORATION OF DISINTEGRATED SELVES IN CANNIBALISM
That war among New Guinea natives-as among others-is not about
anger but about the restoration of disintegrated selves caused by
growth panic is most obvious in cannibalism, where the penis,
tongue and muscles of the enemy were often eaten "to absorb
the victim's strength." 341 It is good to have powerful
enemies, they say, because they are good to kill and eat. 342 At
the same time, all war restages early traumas, including
infanticide as the Sambia myth says, "Numboolyu's wife,
Chenchi, killed her first male child...Because she killed the
first male child, we now fight-war." 343 Like contemporary
cults that kill and eat babies, 344 training for killing children
in New Guinea begins early. Mead reports: "It was considered
necessary that every Tchambuli should in childhood kill a victim,
and for this purpose live victims, usually infants or young
children, were purchased from other tribes...The small boy's
spearhand was held by his father, and the child, repelled and
horrified, was initiated into the cult of head-hunting." 345
Whiting says "most Kwoma children actually experience a raid
in which some acquaintance or relative is killed and
decapitated..." 346 Many Fore children died of kuru, because
they were forced to eat the brains of the dead. 347 The genitals,
too, were choice morsels of cannibals, the victim's penis being
eaten by the women and the vagina by the men; the children are
reported to have had horrible nightmares after witnessing the
feast. 348 The perverse ritual was so sexualized that Berndt
reports that during the cannibalistic feast men sometimes
copulate with the dead women's bodies they are about to eat and
women pretend to copulate with the dead men's penis before eating
it. 349 This is similar to the cannibalism of Jeffrey Dahmer, who
also ritualized the killing and eating of body parts of his
homosexual partners, saying "it made me feel as if they were
even more a part of me." 350 So powerful is this notion of
internalization through cannibalism that Meigs says among the Hua
"it is feared that if a person fails to eat the corpse of
his or her same-sex parent, that person...will become stunted and
weak." 351 Obviously, eating the body of one's parent or of
a friend is an extremely primitive form of repairing emotional
loss: "When a good man died our bodies ached with hunger. We
ate him and the pain cooled." 352
THE PSYCHOGENIC PUMP AND EVOLUTIONARY STAGES IN NEW GUINEA
The over 700 distinct cultures in New Guinea show a definite if
complex range of evolutionary stages of childrearing, psyche and
society. The evolutionary ladder ranging from early to middle
infanticidal mode-generally runs from the more southern and
eastern "semen belt" of maternal incest and pederasty
to the more evolved northern and western highlands "Big
Man" areas. 353 Over the millennia, the more advanced
parents migrated north and west, and those who did not evolve and
who preferred the more violent, pederastic, less organized
southern and eastern areas either remained there or drifted back
from more advanced groups. Childrearing patterns show a definite
areal distribution, centering on how much the mothers cling to
their children: "In eastern highlands societies, where
initiation is longest and most elaborate, boys appear to remain
with their mothers and sleep in women's houses for a longer time
than do boys in the western highlands where initiation is
absent...[often in the east] men had little contact with their
sons until the boys were ten years old or older [but] in some
western highlands societies, boys left their mothers earlier and
much more gradually...boys moved to men's houses at about five
years of age..." 354 This pattern follows Richman's
cross-cultural findings that "as cultures evolve, the mother
holds and makes physical contact against their infants less and
talks more to them." 355 Because men in the less evolved
areas were so sexually aroused by watching breast-feeding infants
356 and because contact with children was considered polluting,
357 they tended more either to avoid children, perhaps "only
poking at it with a stick," 358 or just use them sexually
pederasty being found in "nearly all Lowlands cultures or
groups..." 359 This confirms the cross-cultural finding that
fathers tend to be more emotionally involved with children and
use them as objects less as one goes up the evolutionary level of
societies. 360 Fathers in southern areas will sometimes be
described by the anthropologist as "bestowing his
attentions" on his infant children, but then when the
"attention" is described it usually turns out to be
something like sucking its face or mouth, not helping it grow:
"He will take it up and...mumble its face in the full-lipped
manner which is an acknowledged form of caress...When the child
is already running about and showing its independence, however,
the father's interest seems to wane." 361 Fathers in the
more evolved areas, in contrast, care more for their children
from infancy, as in the Trobrianders, whose fathers are described
by both Malinowsky and Weiner as "beloved, benevolent
friends" to their children, "loving and tender"
toward them. 362 Mothers in the western highlands are somewhat
less afraid of their baby's independence, so they are allowed to
crawl about more often and are in slings and cradles less. Shame
rather than sexuality or fear is the central emotion that
describes the relationship between child and parent, 363 evidence
of the beginnings of a stable superego.
The cultures of these two areas are described as follows: "The production of 'men' [through pederasty and training as warriors] is seen to be the focus of cultural attention among Lowland groups, as is the production of "bigmen" {leaders of status] in the Highlands." 364 The former are stuck on the evolutionary ladder between foraging and primitive horticulture, while the latter have allowed enough innovation to develop better ways of irrigating crops and fencing pigs. Feil describes how there is an "archetypal social structure, economic pattern and social environment in which male initiations and sexual hostility flourish...at the eastern end and are all but absent or attenuated in the western highlands." 365 Since mothers are less engulfing in western highlands, fears of their pollution and hatred of women are less and therefore women are less exploited than in the east and south. 366 It is also not surprising that "In the eastern highlands, women were targets in hostile [warfare] encounters; in the western highlands, they were not.' 367 These more evolved western Big Man groups are able to construct more organized political and economic structures that are far more hierarchical than in the east and south, since they can stand more innovation without triggering growth panic, and thus can accumulate the surpluses of pigs and other exchange goods that their more complex societies revolve around. To actually trust a Big Man in economic exchange or in ritual feasts only comes from reducing the incestuous and pederastic use of children and replacing abandonment with the beginnings of tolerance for individuation. Warfare is also more organized and therefore more restricted in the Big Man societies, 368 sometimes occurring as inoften as every decade, 369 rather than having constant headhunting, cannibalistic and other raids as the less evolved groups do.
THE EMOTIONAL MEANING OF CEREMONIAL EXCHANGE
Ceremonial exchange is centered in the more evolved Western
highlands area, and is usually said to be the cause of the more
cooperative western highlands cultural behavior, but why gifts
are given with stingy self-interest in the east but with dramatic
pride and extensive trust in the west is never explained. 370 The
production of valuables for exchange and the beginnings of
inequalities that more hierarchical social organization involves
depends crucially on men's increasing ability to form male
emotional systems that are effective in binding and reducing
their fears of engulfing women, ultimately engulfing mothers. If
these fears are overwhelming, all men can do is endlessly try to
restore masculinity by raids and initiation tortures, whereas in
more evolved groups "ceremonial exchange rather than killing
is a way of asserting individual prowess." 371 If they are
reduced somewhat, men begin to organize defense tactics,
including political and religious structures, marriage alliances
outside the group, ceremonial feasts and complex extra-clan
trading connections, all designed to stress that men can cling
together and even innovate and create art and more advanced
agricultural economies without being eaten up by women. Thus they
willingly endure submission to Big Men to avoid the worse fate of
maternal engulfment and disintegration.
Some of the symbolism of ceremonial exchange has been already been discussed, such as the slaughtering of thousands of pigs in rituals that restage the infanticide of newborn babies. As mentioned, pigs are considered "almost children" and are even nursed by women, so when pigs are slaughtered in an exchange feast people "mourn and weep for their 'child' when it is killed as though it were a real child." 372 The ritual is an attempt to restage the infanticide in a more evolved way, by killing pigs in feasts not people in war.
The trading of shells under the leadership of Big Men also restages early traumas. Shells, like all fetishes, are said to give men a way of "undoing" the "killing of the child." 373 When men launch exchanges with other men, they are said to "resurrect" the newborn babies who were killed, to "give birth" to them and send them along paths to keep them from "dying." 374 The shells are of course traditional vaginal symbols, reddened with ochre to indicate poisonous menstrual blood, but they contain individuating marks that tell the tragic personal history of the maker:
The more "history" a pearlshell can display the more valuable it becomes...Men create pearlshells as they do the self...giving pearlshells to matrikin is to some extent, perhaps, a sacrifice of self, a presentation of one's own individuality to ensure a continued benevolent maternal influence...pearlshells allow men the illusion of producing wealth independently of women, even though, in the last analysis, it is women's reproduction which stimulates the flow of pearlshells. 375
The shells sometimes have barkcloth bases underlying a skirt, said to be "a child attached to it," and also said to represent the "swallowing up" of men by women. 376 Gift exchanges are said to have the ability "to restore a man's bodily integrity from female pollution," 377 and men fondle and gaze at their shells for hours, healing their hurts. Spending much of one's life arranging the "economically senseless" 378 circulation of various gifts cleansing poison containers (gift=poison in German)-has always been a conundrum to anthropologists because their symbolic basis in early childhood tragedies has been overlooked. The shells are so powerful a group-fantasy of the restoration of potency that they are said to be like semen: "the amount of semen and shells in circulation remains the cause of much male anxiety [and] they have to be kept hidden, tightly bound and wrapped, in the gloomy recesses of men's houses, as if their fragile and transient vitality has to be protected and conserved. This attribute of pearlshells compares strongly with male fears about semen depletion..." 379 Yet ceremonial exchange systems are so effective in cleansing poisons and restoring potency that they dominate the political and economic life of the western highlands.
PSYCHOGENIC ARREST IN NEW GUINEA
Although New Guinea natives have evolved somewhat in the past ten
millennia, they are certainly closer to the foraging and early
horticultural cultures of our ancestors than the
"peaceful" (actually pacified) groups in Africa that
are so often used as models for early human groups. Yet the
unanswered question about New Guinea remains: why have they
evolved so little in the past ten millennia? They didn't get a
late start, since agriculture began in New Guinea over 6,000
years ago, earlier than most other areas of the world that have
vastly surpassed them in psychological and cultural evolution.
380 Indeed, the first foragers were in New Guinea 40,000 years
ago, 381 and agriculture is considered to have developed
independently there, so they actually had ecological conditions
reasonably conducive to farming. It is true that they had no
cereal crops nor domesticable large mammals (though they did have
pigs and kangaroos), 382 but they shared this lack with other
Pacific areas such as Hawaii and other Polynesian islands that
evolved far higher levels of civilization than New Guinea.
Diamond asks the crucial question: "Why did New Guineans
continue to use stone tools instead of metal tools, remain
non-literate, and fail to organize themselves into chiefdoms and
states?"
Diamond's answers are: (1) too few people (1,000,000), (2) too difficult terrain (swamps and jungles), and (3) too much warfare (because of fragmented groups.) 383 Yet these are all conditions that cultural evolution conquers, since innovative natives elsewhere cleared jungle areas, introduced irrigation and created larger populations through more advanced political institutions. If New Guinea never reached the complex chiefdom level of Hawaii, it was because childrearing did not evolve enough to produce psychoclasses that were innovative enough to invent new cultural forms.
Diamond a priori rules out any variation in people's capacity for innovation, saying "all human societies contain inventive people." 384 But if, as we have been insisting here, childrearing evolution is the clue to cultural evolution and innovation, the crux of New Guinea's problems lie in their inability to evolve good mothers and hopeful daughters. Certainly their early infanticidal mode parenting and the resulting depth of their hatred and fear of women confirms this condition currently. But how have they been able to suppress psychogenesis for so long and why have they had so few evolving mothers and hopeful daughters?
Unfortunately, the study of the history of childhood in New Guinea is totally lacking, since childhood even today is considered so ideal. Archeology and ethnohistory never mention children, 385 so the basic materials needed to answer the question are simply missing. A few informed guesses is the best one can do at the moment.
To begin with, New Guinea was part of Australia when humans immigrated into it, so the parents were formed in one of the most arid regions in the world, 386 subject to periodic droughts that must have had some effect in devolving parenting. This may even have been severe enough to alter the genetic makeup of parents, thus passing parenting down both genetically and epigenetically through the generations. Confirming evidence for the effects of famine on the brain wiring of fetuses is shown in the finding that babies who had prenatal exposure to famine during the Dutch Hunger Winter at the end of 1944 had higher rates of schizoid personality disorders, 387 because migration of brain cells through the neural subplate was disrupted, causing the faulty connections that are usually found in schizophrenics. 388 Secondly, the small size of island New Guinea may have inhibited the psychogenic pump effect, limiting migration enough so that early infanticidal mothering swamped the emergence of innovating mothers and hopeful daughters (even biologists sometimes call small islands "evolutionary traps.") And thirdly, the least evolved parenting in New Guinea is to the south, in small pederastic societies, while the most evolved is in the north, where the Trobrianders even managed to approach the level of a chiefdom. Anthropologists are puzzled as to "why the Trobriand Islanders have chiefs. They have neither exceptional population density nor agricultural productivity." 389 What is relevant to this question is that while most of New Guinea came from the Australian continent and speak Non-Austronesian languages, the Trobrianders and some other nearby groups came later mainly from Tiawan via other islands and speak Austronesian languages. Taiwan was far more advanced culturally-and one can assume also in parenting-when people migrated from there to New Guinea four thousand years ago, having grain crops, true weaving, metals, the bow and arrow and even water buffaloes by 4000 B.C. 390 Presumably their descendants began with a head start in childrearing compared to the natives further south of them. In nearby Austronesian-speaking Vanatinai, which was a stopover for those on their way to New Guinea, women are not feared and violence against women is rare, indicating more evolved childrearing than most of New Guinea. 391
Yet these evolutionary speculations rest mainly on inferences that have yet to generate real archeological field studies, so to answer questions of relative rates of evolution of childhood and culture we must turn to the only area of the world in which the history of childhood has been studied: Europe. The evidence which I have found over the past four decades for the evolution of childhood and culture in Europe from its earliest days until today is contained in the final four chapters of this book.