The Cassowary's revenge : the life and death of masculinity in a New Guinea society /

Tuzin has had career-long engagement with the Ilahita Arapesh of the Sepik region of New Guinea, a group that Margaret Mead had studied. This book is based on a return trip after 13 years, during which he found the secret men's cult, emblematic of so many New Guinea societies, in collapse. Tuzin's third monograph treating the Ilahita Arapesh (see The Ilahita Arapesh, CH, Feb'77, and The Voice of the Tambaran, CH, Apr'81), this work is distinctive as an ethnographic account of the cult's demise. As the author points out, men's cults have always been dying, but there has been no previous extended study of one's demise. Tuzin's writing is full of passion, wit, and interesting references and associations throughout. Beginning with an evocative meditation on a parricide in the village, the book proceeds through chapters that touch intimately on the close connections between past and future, and the tragedy of a process of change that seems cataclysmic but is deeply registered in Ilahita myth, cosmology, and everyday life. Although there is much with which to argue here, Tuzin offers some provocative ideas about the end of traditional forms of masculinity in Ilahita and in the contemporary West. Upper-division undergraduates and above. G. E. Marcus; Rice University