Introduction

Abstract

Papua New Guinea Highlands peoples have long been famous for extremes of male dominance and sexual antagonism. Today violence against women in the Eastern Highlands is “only getting worse.” One group of Gimi women possess myths, rites, songs and ritual theatre that protest men’s vilification, contradict their origin myth about the tyrannical First Woman and address women’s complicity in their subordination. Children once lived exclusively with their mothers in separate houses, giving mothers’ disproportionate influence on both sexes and perhaps explaining why women’s narratives seem to be more than mere responses to men’s dominant discourse. Women’s and men’s separate “secret” myths and rites ‘read’ at first as a cycle of blame and opposition but a closer look suggests that men appropriate and subvert women’s usages as a ritual strategy to ‘undo’ motherhood and confiscate children at puberty.

However improbable, Gimi women’s views and practices recorded during 1973–1985 (the book’s ethnographic present) recall the just-so story of primal parricide that Sigmund Freud lays out in the final chapter of Totem and Taboo. If the band of brothers were enraged by a father who denied them access to their sisters, then the sisters whom the father raped, and whose bodies he occupied in perpetuity, were just as angry or even angrier.