Masculinity, motherhood, and mockery : psychoanalyzing culture and the Iatmul Naven rite in New Guinea /

Silverman (anthropology, DePauw Univ.) employs a psychoanalytic perspective to reconsider the Naven ritual of the Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea, known primarily through Gregory Bateson's classic Naven (2nd ed., 1958). Basically a ceremony of gender reversal, Naven celebrates certain first-time cultural acts by Iatmul youth. Classificatory mother's brothers, attired in filthy grass skirts, prance around their sisters' children parodying birth and motherhood, while female kin, attired in male finery, caricature masculinity. Silverman sees eastern Iatmul masculinity as a response to certain contrary representations of the maternal body that Bakhtin calls the "moral" and the "grotesque." The Iatmul idealize motherhood as nurturing, sheltering, cleansing, fertile, and chaste, but at the same time motherhood is feared for being defiling, dangerous, orificial, aggressive, and carnal. Silverman traces the cultural pervasiveness of maternal representations, especially among men, to the nostalgia of infancy, oedipal desire, and "womb envy." These themes of motherhood and masculinity are interwoven with notions of personhood, gender, and broader social life, and are also considered cross-culturally. Specialists are bound to disagree with some of Silverman's psychoanalytic interpretations, but this volume contains rich detail on the Naven ceremony in Tambunum and enhances our knowledge of this anthropologically important Sepik River culture. Graduate students and above. R. Scaglion University of Pittsburgh