Jun 15, 2024
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Interview with Tobias Schneebaum: Artist, Author, Cannibal?
by Doniphan Blair
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Author, artist, anthropologist and incredible adventurer Tobias Schneebaum, circa 1999. photo: Lacy Atkins, courtesy SF GateNOTE: This article was first published in 1984 in The Clinton Street Quarterly (Portland, Oregon), Gai Hebdo Pie (Paris, France), The Gay Times (Miami, Florida), and other periodicals.
'Keep the River on Your Right' is the title of both Schneebaum's excellent memoir and documentary by Laurie Shapiro and David S. Shapiro (2000), for more info on the book, go here, or viewing options, go here .
WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN I HEARD A STORY
that inspired and mitigated one of my most serious adventures. Even the rather long name of the protagonist stuck with me through the years: Tobias Schneebaum. Apparently, he was a New York artist who had gone down to Peru and moved in with a ‘primitive” tribe. Not only did he immerse himself in their spontaneous, joyous existence, living naked in the jungle and sharing their homosexual intimacy, but he also witnessed a cannibalistic raid and partook of human flesh. Farfetched perhaps but a close friend had hear the tale from Tobias’s own lips!
So, as I wandered the globe, though I hardly came close to such circumstances, I would remind myself, in tricky situations, that Schneebaum had weathered much weirder. By coincidence, I ended up in Peru, not far from where he had explored, a quarter of century earlier. It was there that the thin, second-hand descriptions could no longer placate my awesome fantasies of “jungle morality.” Not until I returned and read Tobias’s beautiful, little book, “Keep the River on Your Right,” were my morbid doubts displaced by realistic descriptions of tribal life and death.
“Cannibal” is a word used in the South American jungle by white settlers to denote the tribal people’s supposed inferiority and it can conjure blood and gore in the mind of the uninformed. Though the tribes “rationalize” their acts through magic, the jungle’s most mentally- and sexually-developed animal sits atop and is responsible for a delicate eco-system. Without such Darwinistic control, overpopulation would threaten all the species of the jungles, including the humans.
So these environmentally sound acts, though they bring the innocent “cannibal” great notoriety, tend to obscure their genteel deportment the vast majority of the time. It is this peaceful and profoundly developed “natural” aspect that attracted Mr. Schneebaum. Through his amazing adaptability, aided by his proclivity to interact deeply with the men, he has been able to observe and experience various aboriginal societies from the inside.
In a tradition originating with Gauguin and Rimbaud, he has delved even further back into the primordial lifestyles of humans and returned with equally eloquent observations of, perhaps, what it was like for all of us before we were kicked out of the “The Garden of Eden,” cemented together the bicameral mind, and became civilized and neurotic.
Even though, as Tobias maintains, “there are no societies where you can do anything,” while we were sublimating our “cannibalism” toward the thermo-nuclear version, they were evolving simpler more sensuous arrangements. Recently, Tobias has been living with the Asmat of south-western New Guinea and his revelations about their life, their traditions and their varied and various types of relationships vaults the cultural gap with something to inspire us all.
Tobias Schneebaum meets with a friend in a Papua New Guinea tribal community, circa 1984. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumDoniphan Blair: How should I refer to where you were: New Guinea or Papua?
Tobias Schneebaum: New Guinea is Papua. The people are Papuans but we must separate the eastern and western halves of the island. Papua New Guinea is the eastern half and now an independent country. The western half, formerly Dutch New Guinea, now belongs to Indonesia and is called Irian Jaya. The Portuguese seemed to have coined the word in the 15th century. Papua means frizzy haired either in Portuguese or Malay, I’m not sure which.
Did you study anthropology formally?
Yes, but only after I was fifty. When I first went to Asmat in 1973, I was so intrigued by the people and the art that I decided to go back, and I had to find a way to stay there for a length of time. It turned out that just at that moment, the Catholic Mission was about to open a museum of Asmat art for the people. It was not a museum for tourists. In fact, last year we had four tourists and we think that’s a lot.
In the museum?
Four tourists in Asmat, period. So it’s not for the tourists, it’s for the local people, to help them retain their culture. I asked the Bishop, who is really the owner of the museum, if anyone was cataloging it and he said, ‘No.’ So I asked if I could come back, after I trained myself, to work on the museum and catalog all the artifacts— there were two thousand. He said, ‘Sure, happily.’ So I went back to New York and started studying anthropology.
Whereabouts?
Well, I took it through Goddard College on independent study. I had to find my own teachers because they don’t have an anthropology department. I asked Douglas Newton, who was the head of what was the Museum of Primitive Art, and he agreed to help train me, together with Rhoda Metraux. She was Margaret Mead’s associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and a close friend—they lived together for several years. In spite of the fact they were only getting about a hundred dollars each, they agreed to take this job on for four years. That’s how long it took me to complete the requirements for the degree.
The main thing, of course, was the cataloging, which I did through the wonderful people at Museum of Primitive Art. It wasn’t difficult but I felt that as long as I was studying I might as well go for the degree. I went back to Asmat in ’75 and stayed there for sixteen months at the time. I finished my thesis and sent it back to my field teachers Dr. Metraux and Douglas Newton, and to my advisor at Goddard College. I went back to Asmat in ’78 and stayed for close to three years. It was terrific, and then again last year for five months. I love it.
I finished the card catalog in ’80. I made drawings of several hundred artifacts, old style, liked engravings, and I photographed everything. I threw out a great number of pieces because I didn’t like them—they weren’t museum material. They had been collected by some of the missionaries who had little or no understanding of art, or carving, or the meaning of the museum. All the missionaries under the Bishop were told to collect. Some did not know what they were doing and collected junk. Which is fine because they didn’t know any better, but I threw most of it out or burnt it.
Right now there are about one thousand pieces in the museum. Many artifacts we saved even though they were duplicates of others we had by the same carvers. There simply wasn’t enough storage space although the storage room is the same size as the display room, which has about one hundred objects. The great thing about the job—if you call in one, because I went as a volunteer—was not only was I studying the designs by drawing them but I had to travel all over Asmat. I went to all 98, or whatever number there are of the villages, because there were not labels on the artifacts, and I had to find out where they came from.
Now after a total of almost four years, I can look at almost any Asmat object—not every but almost—a drum or a shield, a bow or a food bowl, and tell you where it comes from, the river that is. Not necessarily the village but the river. Spears are impossible. There is no way to tell where they came from, because they are so similar. And, of course, I had wonderful experiences with the people—there is no way to get the information without talking to them.
Schneebaum meets with another New Guinian friend, circa 1984. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumDo they all speak a similar language?
There are about 40,000 Asmat and that is an enormous group. I think it’s the only that large on the whole island. It’s divided into five language groups, all of which are called Asmat, although the people on the south-west coast cannot understand the people from the north-west coast. Nevertheless, there is a great similarity in the language. In the structure, the vocabulary, certain words are exactly the same throughout all of Asmat.
Then as you approach the mountains, as you go east, it is fascinating the changes that take places. As you go upstream, you get close to the foothills, which are the outer limits of the Asmat. There the people have the great feasting and carving that they have on the coast. The coastal people are into ritual headhunting much more than the people upstream, although they did have headhunting and do have it today.
But it is not ritualized?
It was not ritualized in the same way. People on the coast use the heads for their initiation ceremonies.
What type, for the youth?
Yes. The kids among what we call the coastal people. When a boy was anywhere between nine and eleven, he was initiated. To have an initiation, you needed a head.
A fresh one?
A fresh one. Sometimes, where there was a whole group of people, they used a wooded head or a head for several kids. They don’t talk about it but it had to be, because if you figure out the number of children who were initiated and population of the tribe, you find they have all been killed off in a few generations. There was no way, over the years, that they could have existed if they kept killing one for one. So many people would have to die.
Anyway, the initiation ritual is fascinating in itself. First the head is brought in and treated, burnt, put on the coals of the fire and then the skin is stripped off. Then the skull is decorated with feathers, seeds and painted with red marks on the forehead. The young man sits in the men’s house with skull at his groin facing his penis. The boy absorbs through his penis the essence of the dead man. So if he goes to the village where the man was killed he is treated just like the dead man although he may be only nine or ten years old.
Who does the killing: his father?
Well, it can be anyone in the immediate family. His father, an elder brother, most often it is one of his mother’s brothers. That’s the closest—the uncle. He sits in the men’s house with the head at his groin for two or three days and is not allowed to go out and eat, shit or anything like that. If he does it, he does it right there, spreads the bark on the floor and the shit goes right down. Then he is taken out into the canoes. All decorated up, with feathers in his hair and paint on his face and body. Asmat men are naked. Then men wear a very tiny ‘cache sex’ [penis covering] made of sago leaves that are twisted into a fiber but the men have always been naked.
He’s taken out by his mother’s brothers into the water and as he goes along, in the canoe toward the settings sun, he’s supposed to get older and does get older. This nine or ten year old boy gets so old he can no longer stand up, he can no longer paddle the canoe any more and falls down in the canoe. As he gets still older, he dies. When he dies, they lift him out of the canoe and dip him into the water, then in a ritual rebirth they bring him out of the water and he lies in the canoe in the fetal position. From the fetal position he begins to move as they travel back to the village. He crawls around the bottom of the canoe, then he stands up and begins to paddle.
Then they teach him the names of all the villages around, all the trees, all the rivers and by the time he gets back to the village he’s a man able to get married.
Then he would begin his sexual initiation?
There is no sexual initiation in that sense here. There are other groups that do have that kind of thing but not in Asmat. They start having sex from the moment they become aware of their penises and vaginas. The boys and the girls do it from day one—two years-old. It’s common practice for the kids to go to the river together, mixed sexes. The boys will stick their fingers up the cunts of the girls or up their assholes or up their own or their male friends’. That kind of thing is common.
Schneebaum in his large, one-bedroom studio in the famous artist building in the West Village, Westbeth, 1984. photo: D. BlairWhen do they start having erections and actually penetrating?
That’s normal in western terms. The same as anywhere else. You can always have an erection I suppose it’s when you have an orgasm that you start really having sex. There it is the same as it is here: eleven, twelve, thirteen.
Now in Asmat, do they do what you described the last [visit], the boys sucking the men off to gain power?
That particular group was described by Gerald Herdy, an anthropologist who was on the other side of the border in Papua New Guinea. It’s a people calls the ‘Sambia,’ apparently not their real name. That group has ritualized sexuality, they believe that is the only way for a boy to become a man, the only way to grow into a great warrior, is by absorbing semen. The more semen you swallow, the stronger and braver you will become and the faster you will grow up. So the more men you suck off, the quicker you will become a man, a good headhunter, a good hunter of animals.
Now next to the Asmat are the Marind-Baal who are called in a book ‘Dama’ by a man called Van Baal, and they believe in an opposite. They believe the only way for a child to become a man is through sodomy, by absorbing semen through the asshole. It is ritualized to the extent that the mother’s brothers will fuck him in the ass and then a whole series of men in the men’s house will sodomize him one after the other. I should think it would not be a pleasant feeling to have a dozen men sodomize you one right after the other the first time.
Anyway, they also believe that the only way to become a man is by absorbing semen. Then he becomes an apprentice of his mother’s brothers and not only does he learn how to till the fields, how to hunt, to use the bow and arrow, all the rituals of life, he is also his uncle’s sexual partner.
Now is this true in where you were staying in the Asmat?
Not in the those terms, Asmat itself varies. No one has yet described any of the sex life of Asmat because no one knows anything about it except me. And I don’t know much but I know some things because of my experiences. I had been told, when I first went there in 1973, that all evidence of sex between men was gone. That is, if it did exist earlier, it was gone now. The missionaries had come and told them that fornicating with one another was the work of Satan, and they had to stop it.
Well, some of these missionaries weren’t so bad, and some of them are worse than others. But there is one of them who told me he lived among the Marind-Anim [the people who believe in sodomy] and he had stamped out every bit of homosexuality, if you call it that, any evidence of sex between men amongst these people. I don’t believe that for a second—it was hidden, I guess—and it continues to be hidden.
What I did learn immediately was that sex between men exists and is a common practice in Asmat. It varies in intensity or in the number or partners or in the importance it plays in the life of the man as you go from the south to the north of Asmat. The people closer to the Marind-Anim have a great deal of homosexual behavior among the men. I don’t know anything about the sex life between the women.
You didn’t see the equivalent of lesbianism?
It’s very difficult because you would never see that, a man would never see that.
Cause their life is hidden away in their huts?
The women are always in their family houses and the men are more often sleeping in the men’s houses. Now I had expected from what I was told by the missionaries, because no one else had been there, that there would be no homosexual behavior in the north of Asmat. Nevertheless, I had no trouble having brief affairs with men ranging in age from fifteen to men in their fifties.
There is something in Asmat called ‘papisj,’ a ‘bond friendship.’ It is a relationship that is formed between two children when they are very young, sometimes at birth. The parents obviously form this relationship. The partners say they form it themselves, when they are around two, but I doubt it. I think it is the families that form this relationship, to strengthen the clan. The boys have this relationship since they are two, and they pull at each other’s penises and, as they get older, they begin fucking each other and sucking each other’s cocks and masturbating.
Now these bond friends, after they have been married and after each one has had one child, exchange wives on ritual occasions. Ritual occasions can be anything from a very severe thunder storm when everyone is terrified, or before a great headhunting raid or anything different, like a white man coming and spending some time in the village. They exchange wives to keep a certain type of balance going. It is only through semen that the forces of life and death can be balanced. The forces that are in what they call heaven and what they call earth.
There is no such thing as heaven, obviously, to them, but it is a place for the ancestors. To balance this relationship between the dead and the living a lot of semen has to flow. The more semen that flows the quicker the balances. So a lot of sex will go on simply to balance that. And one of the ways of doing that is through the papisj relationship, because at that particular time a man might have sex two or three times a night, whereas when he does it with his wife he might do it once a week as we do it in Western countries.
If they exchange wives the women might get pregnant, what do they do then?
Any children that result from the exchange of the wives between ‘mbai’ [another name for papisj] belong to the husband of the woman that bore them. Such children are treated exactly like other children. To get back to the mbai for a moment I want to make sure that it’s understood that the relationship that is formed between them lasts until the death of one of them.
So they are highly monogamous?
Yes, in that case, much more so then with the women.
If they want to quote unquote divorce their wife, what do they do?
There is no such thing as divorce in that sense, they just throw them out of the house or take another wife. One of the things that is always so remarkable to me is when I ask my particular friend, my mbai—if I can call him that, because he calls me that in front of the women and the other men—I asked him, ‘What you would do if you found your wife sleeping with another man?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I would beat her,’ which to me was perfectly normal in that society.
Then I asked what he would do if he found his mbai with another man and he said, ‘I would beat the other man.’ I said, ‘Why wouldn’t you beat your friend?’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t do anything like that, he’s my mbai.’ And its true, in many ways, the women are treated like chattel there. They are paid for with brideprice and if they want to get rid of them, they get rid of them and if want a new wife, they take a new wife but once you have a mbai, that is for life.
So there's no marriage ritual?
There's a marriage ritual, yes, but it involves brideprice. The most important headhunters have several wives.
So the word 'homosexuality' doesn't really apply to the majority of the Asmat?
And I think 'bisexual' is not the word, either. There is no word I know of yet.
Pansexual maybe?
Pansexual would imply that they also have sex with animals or whatever and that's not true. They would horrified at the thought of having sex with any animals. Of course they don't know of an animal with which they could have sex [they don't have domesticated animals] and wouldn't be apt to go for a wild pig.
Do you think there is a certain biological necessity for quote unquote homosexuality as they practice it?
I don't know what you mean by 'biological necessity.' It is probably a combination of biology and culture.
Or do you think it is motivated by pleasure, simply?
They are into pleasure, I can tell you that. One of my great experiences was, after I arrived the second time, I was working for the museum, and I was with Father [Frank] Trenkenschuh—he was the advisor [from North Dakota, he served as Vicar General for 29 years in Irian Jaya]—and a group of people came in looking absolutely wild. They had feathers in their hair and were all painted up with bones and shells through their noses—looking absolutely fantastic, thrilling, to say the least.
They said they came from the village Otjenep, and that is one of the villages I very much wanted to go to because I heard they can't keep a teacher, they can't keep anybody. I don't mean necessarily white people, I mean that no Indonesian or Asmat teacher or catechist or policeman has ever stayed there for more than a few hours. They are so terrified of these people, they immediately run away.
Of course, that attracts me. And they are looking so wild and beautiful, Trenkenschuh said, 'Here are these people you wanted to go see, so go with them.' Well, I went, that is, I had to asked them first. They agreed to take me and came for me the next morning. We started out: there were four canoes, each one with about ten men.
Then we hit this terrible storm, it was really dreadful. It was so bad that the men in our canoes were thrown right out—the waves were so high. I thought, 'My god, this is going to be another Michael J. Rockefeller incident [the scion to the famous family died/was killed in the same area in 1961].' Nobody would ever suspect that these people—with whom I was traveling, who were the ones presumed to have killed Michael—would have drowned. That would be impossible. Everyone would presume they killed me and ran off to hide.
So I figured, 'Well, it's going to be the same thing.' There was no way to see the shore but I knew it must be about two miles away. I turned around and saw the two men who had been thrown out standing in the mud. It's so shallow at that point on the south coast of New Guinea that a motor boat has to go six or seven miles from shore before it can use its motor.
Anyway, it was a dreadful night, [we finally got to shore but] nobody had any sleep. The rain kept coming into this little bivouac in which we were sleeping. [Then] the tide came in and covered all the ground and there was no where to sleep. In the morning, the tide went out and, finally, the sun came out and we started. Then we got so hot, we got dehydrated—or I got dehydrated! They didn't, but you could see by the way they were paddling so languidly that it was getting warm even for them.
And the chief pointed to a great mound of mud that was ahead of us. So, as the first canoe banked into the mud—it just barely reached it—all the men—who were naked at that point—all the men, including me, dove headlong into the mud and began rolling around. It was an oozy slime that was fabulous. Now I understand women who take mud packs. I don't know how sensual that experience is for them but this rolling around in the mud was absolutely fantastic. It is difficult for anyone who has never done that kind of thing to imagine how sensual and exciting it can be.
Did it continue into an orgy?
No, not at all. Everyone rolled around and when the time came to leave we left. Everyone got up and washed. They were not having sex with one another. The experience was rolling around in the mud. To me, it was a sensual experience.
Yeah, sure. Do they ever have orgies?
I don't think they do. The first time I went to my village, where I have my particular friend [mbai], I was staying in the teacher's house, the catechist. It was still a very primitive village. All the men were still naked, none of the women had any type of Western garments, there were still no Western garments in the village except on the teacher. And I went into the men's house at night, and they didn't expect me. By the light of the embers, I could see that there were pairs of men masturbating one another, which they stopped instantly when they saw this outsider. Of course, I couldn't help but get an erection with all those men looking at me and me looking at them, even though it was dark. That's how I first became involved with that particular group.
Over the years I would say I have had some kind of sexual contact with 90% of the men over fifteen in that village. Of course the population is not very high, about two hundred, the entire population, babies included.
Do all the men in your district have mbai friends?
A 100% except for those whose friends have died and they have not yet taken another mbai. Although I did hear of one older man whose friend had died or had been killed, and he was more or less 'playing the filed' with the younger men. It's also interesting that they are of the same age group, these mbai. In other groups of people, where there is homosexual contact, to a great extent it's always an older man and a younger man. It's never between men of the same age group. Therefore it's so peculiar that among the Asmat, it's true, it's the same age.
Of course, they do have relationships with older and younger men but not through fellatio and sodomy. You must do that with your mbai only, they told me. How true this is, I can not say. They insisted that you might be able to have sex with another man, but you can't swallow his semen. You can have masturbation with another man, but you can't suck him off, and he cannot suck you off, and you can't have sodomy to orgasm with another man.
Do they seem to prefer sex with either men or woman or are they very egalitarian about that?
That's an impossible question. I don't know the answer to that.
So they do it with their wives kind of infrequently.
Well, I don't really know. They are not really aware of how often they have sex. No matter how many men I have asked, 'How often do you have sex with your wife and how often do you have sex with your male friend,' they are confused. In the first place, they can't count. They can count to three or four but that is about it.
Would you say they are sexually satisfied as a rule?
Yes. That is: they have sex with their wives, with their mbai, and sometimes with other women and perhaps even with other men—that should satisfy anyone! There are always problems though, when someone is particularly taken with a man or a woman. And where on earth is anyone particularly satisfied with what they have? In some groups, not the Asmat, they have younger boys as well.
At what age does that start?
It can start at six, seven or eight, anything like that. They are completely open about that.
Is that done with love?
I think it is done with affection if not love. They get along very well.
What do you think of adult men seducing adolescent boys in this society?
Well, that has nothing to do with what happens among the Asmat, or for that matter any where in New Guinea. I don't think there is such as thing [there] as an older man seducing a young boy. If there is a sexual relationship, it is completely ritualized and the boy never feels any type of seduction. It is something necessary to their manhood.
We have nothing comparable in our society. Although I am firm believer in allowing children to find their own way to sex because, obviously, they have sexual feelings that have to be satisfied in some way, I don't like the idea of seduction. Although everything depends upon whether by seduction you mean enticement in only a negative way. Then, of course, I am against it. Whether the seduction is [at age] ten or thirty, male or female.
I was going to ask: Do they have swear words?
Yes, they have phrases like 'fat ass,' because that is ugly, 'small penis' and 'big cunt.' Names are given to people like 'big ass.' The people not too far from Asmat, the Muyu, who live in the foothills, have very big asses, enormous compared to other people. All the mountain people have big asses but the Muyu have the biggest asses of anyone I have ever seen in New Guinea. One of their curses is 'small ass!'
The Asmat have what we in the West would consider beautiful asses. To them, saying 'fat ass' is a curse word. There are names given to people who carry those names for a great part of their lives. 'Big Vagina' would be a perfectly normal name, as a name and 'big vagina' would mean somebody who has had a lot of sex with men. 'Small penis' would mean someone who doesn't have much sex and whose penis is small and therefore wouldn't have much sex with women.
They also have that problem. They say women don't like penises that are very small. Those people are called 'cemenopok' but I have not seen them erect so I have no idea what they are [really] like. Six inches for example would be quite large, very large, whereas that is normal in western society.
So only these 'cemenopok,' by virtue of the disdain the women have for them, they sort of become homosexual by default?
Through default. They are not proud of having small penises.
So that is a big difference with homosexuals here? In terms of a cosmic comparison with homosexuality as it is practiced among the primitive people, it seems to come from a different source?
Well, we are trained to believe it is wrong, of course. They are not at all in that way. It seems normal to them, it's part of their normal lives. for men to have sex with other men—in certain groups. It's not true all over New Guinea.
What I am saying is that the majority of them seem to be quote unquote bisexual, whereas the majority of homosexuals in the United States are...
Homosexual.
It seems they [the gays here and there] are not that similar in terms of their whole outlook.
Whether it is because of society or what, I have no idea as to why they are exclusively homosexual for the most part. We have plenty of bisexuals too, And we have homosexuals, who have gotten married and have relationships with their wives that were unsatisfactory, but because of the way society is based they married. No matter how much we have advanced in many ways in American culture, homosexuality is still frowned upon by the masses.
Would you say they, more or less, have the same sort of tendencies as people in our society but because their society is more open to it they evolved this quote unquote bisexuality whereas perhaps the alienation and pressure from a repressive society makes it more delineated?
I think they also have repressive societies but they find, in Asmat, among certain groups, that homosexual relations are necessary to their culture, for whatever reasons.
For magical reasons?
For magical reasons, or to become a man or to strengthen clan ties, they find that necessary. They also find it necessary to be heterosexual. They must have children, otherwise the group can't go on, so therefore they have their pleasures there too. And it's... I don't know. It isn't purely biological thing, you aren't always born with the traits.
Well, there we are: we are getting into determinism as opposed to environmentalism. There has been so many anthropological fights on that very question. I don't know the answer, but I do think it is interesting their society can accept all these things.
Their society can develop this theory whereby men, in order to grow and become men, must absorb semen, one way or another, either through the asshole or through their mouth. Whether they are sucking someone off or being sodomized, that’s the only way they can become men.
On the other hand, our society makes that person into the passive partner, the ‘queenie’ partner, into the female partner, it is completely different, it is a whole opposite way of looking at it.
And also, if I recall what you said correctly, as soon as they become men by absorbing semen then they get married and have to deal with—
Women! According to Gerald Herdt, in his group, it’s a traumatic experience to have to have sex with women because they have been taught, all the time growing up, that the vagina is a horrible thing. That menstrual blood is something to be terrified of, and they are and always continue to be horrified of that.
So how do they reconcile that?
It takes them a while and, according to Gerald Herdt, the wives, to start them off more easily, suck them off. That’s the way they begin. Their adjustment takes sometime before they become quote unquote heterosexual. Because in the meantime they have grown old enough to be the what-we-call ‘active’ partner in the male to male relationship—they’re the ones who are being sucked off or are committing sodomy on the younger ones.
But, as far as I know, it’s rare for a man and a woman to perform fellatio, in those groups, particularly for a man to perform fellatio on a woman. I don’t know anyone who has written on that subject but I asked, in Asmat, many men whether they have ever performed fellatio, cunnilingus as we call it, on a woman. Oh god, they die at the thought. They cringe at it and almost get sick.
From what you said they don’t have great relations with their wives.
They are separated most of the time from their wives. They gossip at night if they are in the family house; they gossip when they are out in the ‘sago’ [a palm that produces a starchy extract, their principal food] fields, cutting and preparing the sago—that kind of thing.
When you watch someone you know well, will you see him have as good a time sitting and laughing with his wife as with his mbai friend?
If I have seen it, and I have, it’s because of the influence of the missionaries. They are trying to get the men and the women to have more contact then they had in the past. In some villages you can even find a man and a woman sitting next to each other in church. It’s rare but in some villages you find it.
The missionaries have brought churches to most of the villages?
Yes, if you call them churches, But no matter what kind of roof or wall, or lack of a wall, it’s still a church.
Now the people don’t really convert to what we think of as Catholicism.
I don’t think so, but they do, the missionaries think they do.
They’re satisfied?
'Satisfied' is a very difficult word. I don’t know what it means for them. It’s one thing for them to be converted. It’s another for the people to practice in front of the missionaries what he preaches: no more papisj, no more wife exchange. Well, practically all the villages continue that.
Of course, no one is even aware of the homosexual element in Asmat. None of the missionaries are aware of that.
So they put on a whole charade for the missionaries?
I asked in several different places—I would say 15 different villages: How come this still exists? Don’t the missionaries say anything about the homosexual relations? And everywhere they say the same thing: it is forbidden to mention it to the missionaries or any outsider. I think I am the only one who has ever gotten this information.
Why do you think they respect the missionaries so much.
They bring in goods.
It’s a sort of bribery?
It isn’t bribery in that sense. They see that the way of life of the missionary is better than their own lives and he has his own gods. And to them, the gods that the missionaries worship have brought them that stuff.
So they respect the magic of the missionary?
Yes, they want whatever it is that brings canned goods, canned sardines. They are crazy for canned fish, or steel knives or the tobacco. Anything that the missionary brings, they feel is better than what they have. It is only his gods that make this possible, and they feel if they worship his gods, they too will get the same thing. Whether the missionary gives it to them personally or not, it doesn’t matter.
Their gods are mostly land spirits and water spirits?
Yeah, well, mostly they are involved in ancestors. They have other spirits, but it is the ancestors who control their lives more than anything.
Whom they remember by name?
Yes. The most recent ancestors, those who are recently dead. And the death of ancestors must be avenged. Nobody dies except through either murder in warfare, someone outright killed him, or through magic. Someone has performed magic to kill this person.
Magic through the ritual skull?
Or whatever, for whatever reason: magic makes you get sick and die. If you get sick of malaria and die of it, someone has performed the magic to make you get sick of malaria. So that death has to be avenged. All deaths have to be avenged.
By another death?
By another death. That’s the only way you can avenge a death. The ancestors won’t let you alone until those deaths have been avenged.
They come in dreams?
Well, it is possible for one to come in dreams, but they’ll come openly and stand around and watch you, and force you while you are awake.
Sort of a hallucination?
If that is what you want to call it. There are many people who claim to have seen them. There are all kinds of spirits.
There’s one kind of spirit of a living person: you might be talking to me in my house, then you would go into the jungle and would be cutting firewood—no, if you were a man you wouldn’t be cutting firewood. You might be cutting a sago tree, or looking for fruit or something, and meet me there. You will think to yourself, ‘But I just saw him in his house.’ If you are clever, you will realize this is my spirit—it is not really me. And if you come back to me in the house and tell me you saw my spirit in the forest, the real me will instantly die. That's a way of killing me.
Then, of course, the spirits wander at night. My own goes out of my body and wanders around. You have to be very careful because if you try to wake someone up when his spirit is wandering around, then he will die. His spirit won’t have a chance to go back into his body.
So they put a lot of emphasis on their dreams?
They don’t talk much about their dreams and, anyway, it is not dreams, it is real life to them. There are very few dreams, in our sense. I think that either they forget them immediately or, if something important happened, they make a big thing out it. I often wonder, I have not yet asked the right questions about it, what do they think when they are not doing anything. When they are sitting around carving canoes or paddles or whatever. Do they think about revenge? How they are going to avenge the death of a brother or father or mother... I don't know.
There's one sort of slight contradiction that has dawned on me: When a boy is initiated with the skull of somebody, you said he goes back as that person. Wouldn't they want revenge on the boy?
Not on the boy. On the other people of the village. The boy has actually not done the killing anyway. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter on whom you take revenge as long as it is somebody from that village. But you cannot take revenge on the person who has taken the name of the dead man. That's absolutely verboten. And that child, as he grows older, can go into that other village and become a spy. He just goes back and forth into that village as if it were his own.
Also, there is no point in killing anyone unless you know his name, otherwise you can't give it to the boy who is being initiated. You have to know the name of the person you are killing.
So really the killing is all based on magic. Getting the names and transferring the energy and sort of balancing the heavens, as it were?
Yeah, the cosmos. Of course, they don't use those terms.
Right. Do they philosophize at all in their own way?
I have not been able to find out if they do. There is no way I have yet been able to talk about those things.
The language itself?
The language itself is very difficult and there are no verbs for that sort of thing.
Right. To get back to what I mentioned earlier: about if there is biological necessity for homosexuality, to avoid perhaps overpopulation—you don't think so. It seems more magical, getting the semen, the power, the energy of semen.
The power of semen is the most important thing in growing older. They also use semen on ritual objects. Various carvings are made for various kinds of feasts. All carvings represent dead people.
Like for a certain feast, what is called a 'Bisj Pole' feast, which is an ancestor's pole feast, it's carved in a certain coastal area and only there. This is one type of carving which is best described as a totem pole with figures one above the other. At the top is a great projection, what is called a ' phallus wing,' the penis of the particular carving.
It's a symbol of virility and fertility. Every [village] has its different kind of carving, but semen is rubbed into this particular one before they go off on a headhunting raid. Most carvings, most rituals have to do with head hunting.
I've not seen this but in the past, they say that when they make drums, after the carving is finished, they put a lizard skin on top. Now the lizard skin is sealed with a mixture of white lime and human blood. Human blood is usually gotten from the calves of the man who will own the drum.
They gather the blood in mussel shells and mix the blood with the white lime, and that's the glue. I heard that they used to mix semen with it for magical purposes but I haven't seen that so I don't know.
You say it is a fairly egalitarian society but the important headhunters must have some sort of respect.
Yes and also the good carvers. Good carvers have almost as much respect of the great headhunter. Almost, but not quite.
How do they select their chiefs?
The men who are powerful headhunters become chiefs. Simply by the fact that they have taken several heads, they have a certain prestige and eventually lead groups in the village.
But there's no witch doctor as such?
No. There is magic that is performed, but it's not by one person in the village. Anyone can perform magic, either a man or a woman. There are certain women who seem to perform it more than others, they have some kind of power. They wouldn't be called witches. I did try to get some information on that but I only got a little.
If someone is sick they will make cuts in the body wherever the pain is. If you have a headache, they will make cuts on the forehead or tie a piece of rattan string tightly around the head. They will make cuts on the chest or the leg, wherever the pain is.
To kill people, you have to have the right type of leaves.
I was wondering do they maintain some sort of privacy or do they practice sex openly?
Sex mostly takes place in the jungle, it does not take place in the home. That is because there are several families living together—the extended family—there might be twenty people living in one house. And the houses are all connected, or they were in the past when I first went down there.
Since the Indonesian government has been there they have burnt down all all the old style houses and are forcing the people to live in nuclear families, thinking that is the way they should live, but it is no good for them.
So they have their own form of modesty?
Yes, well, you never see a [fully] naked woman.
No, I take that back. When someone dies, his wife, his mother, his daughter or someone very close to him will usually take off her skirt, this 'cache sex' they women wear and then will jump in the river and roll around in the mud.
From your experience around the world would you say that the more primitive a tribe is the more open they are about their sexuality and homosexuality?
No, perhaps the reverse. I don't know what you mean by primitive.
Well, in terms of structure, dogma?
There are no open societies where you can do anything. Every society has its boundaries that you can't go beyond, whether they be sexual, or what they consider moral or whatever. Homosexuality does not exist in all so-called primitive societies, by no means.
There are two friend of mine who live in this building [WestBeth, in lower Manhattan], who have worked with the people next to the Sambia, or who are called the Sambia by Gerald Herdt. They have this ritualized homosexuality, where their outpouring of sexual energy is limited to the men, and they are only permitted to have sexual relations with men before marriage.
On the other hand there are the people right next to them, the Gimi, who are being studied by my friends on the ninth floor. They were astounded when they read that book because among their people, there is no active sexual relations among men. None, absolutely none.
They asked me to read it to see if it was right. How could it be that one group is completely homosexual and the other has none?
Can you think of an explanation?
There is no explanation except that they are divided from one another by mountains and forests. There's no reason why they should grow up doing the exact same thing.
There's no environmental influence?
There is no reason to have sex between men in every society. I suppose that they never have any reason to have ACTIVE relationships. Now the friends of mine say that it's implicity in all the rituals, that everything that's described, everything that they do, can be turned into a homosexual—what is the word?
Gesture?
Yes. The way they use flutes, to these friends, is a homosexual gesture. It's just like sucking on the penis.
So perhaps they were homosexual centuries ago?
No, not necessarily. There is no obvious reason for it. Some groups are and some groups aren't.
I would be interested to know if they were as sensuous or whether, perhaps, they were a prudish people.
The Dani, who are a people in the Baliem Valley, in Irian Jaya, north of Asmat, are described by Carl Heider as having very low sex potency. A man is not allowed to have sex with his wife after she becomes pregnant. After that, he may not have sex with her for two or three years. There's no evidence of any sexual contact between men.
How do you explain that?
I don't think he attempts to explain it.
In general, one can say, the people of the highlands of New Guinea are inclined to have no homosexuality and the coastal people have a great deal of it. That's a big generalization because there are many groups of people on the Papua side, who live in the mountains and do have homosexuality.
For instance, the Sambia, they are mountain people, and the Kukukuku and several other groups have it. Only as a generalization can you say it doesn't exist. Mountain people are agricultural people and they are more conservative than coastal people who are hunters and gathers. The Asmat are hunters and gathers.
That probably holds true with the Peruvian Indians to some degree.
I don't know enough about them in Peru, in Brazil or in South America to discuss anything but my own group. In Claude Levi-Strauss's 'Triste Tropique', he said there was a great deal of homosexuality in the group that he studied many, many years ago in Brazil.
NOTE: This is up to page 12 of 16 interview pages.
Posted on Nov 11, 2017 - 04:34 AM
by Doniphan Blair
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Author, artist, anthropologist and incredible adventurer Tobias Schneebaum, circa 1999. photo: Lacy Atkins, courtesy SF Gate'Keep the River on Your Right' is the title of both Schneebaum's excellent memoir and documentary by Laurie Shapiro and David S. Shapiro (2000), for more info on the book, go here, or viewing options, go here .
WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN I HEARD A STORY
that inspired and mitigated one of my most serious adventures. Even the rather long name of the protagonist stuck with me through the years: Tobias Schneebaum. Apparently, he was a New York artist who had gone down to Peru and moved in with a ‘primitive” tribe. Not only did he immerse himself in their spontaneous, joyous existence, living naked in the jungle and sharing their homosexual intimacy, but he also witnessed a cannibalistic raid and partook of human flesh. Farfetched perhaps but a close friend had hear the tale from Tobias’s own lips!
So, as I wandered the globe, though I hardly came close to such circumstances, I would remind myself, in tricky situations, that Schneebaum had weathered much weirder. By coincidence, I ended up in Peru, not far from where he had explored, a quarter of century earlier. It was there that the thin, second-hand descriptions could no longer placate my awesome fantasies of “jungle morality.” Not until I returned and read Tobias’s beautiful, little book, “Keep the River on Your Right,” were my morbid doubts displaced by realistic descriptions of tribal life and death.
“Cannibal” is a word used in the South American jungle by white settlers to denote the tribal people’s supposed inferiority and it can conjure blood and gore in the mind of the uninformed. Though the tribes “rationalize” their acts through magic, the jungle’s most mentally- and sexually-developed animal sits atop and is responsible for a delicate eco-system. Without such Darwinistic control, overpopulation would threaten all the species of the jungles, including the humans.
So these environmentally sound acts, though they bring the innocent “cannibal” great notoriety, tend to obscure their genteel deportment the vast majority of the time. It is this peaceful and profoundly developed “natural” aspect that attracted Mr. Schneebaum. Through his amazing adaptability, aided by his proclivity to interact deeply with the men, he has been able to observe and experience various aboriginal societies from the inside.
In a tradition originating with Gauguin and Rimbaud, he has delved even further back into the primordial lifestyles of humans and returned with equally eloquent observations of, perhaps, what it was like for all of us before we were kicked out of the “The Garden of Eden,” cemented together the bicameral mind, and became civilized and neurotic.
Even though, as Tobias maintains, “there are no societies where you can do anything,” while we were sublimating our “cannibalism” toward the thermo-nuclear version, they were evolving simpler more sensuous arrangements. Recently, Tobias has been living with the Asmat of south-western New Guinea and his revelations about their life, their traditions and their varied and various types of relationships vaults the cultural gap with something to inspire us all.
Tobias Schneebaum meets with a friend in a Papua New Guinea tribal community, circa 1984. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumTobias Schneebaum: New Guinea is Papua. The people are Papuans but we must separate the eastern and western halves of the island. Papua New Guinea is the eastern half and now an independent country. The western half, formerly Dutch New Guinea, now belongs to Indonesia and is called Irian Jaya. The Portuguese seemed to have coined the word in the 15th century. Papua means frizzy haired either in Portuguese or Malay, I’m not sure which.
Did you study anthropology formally?
Yes, but only after I was fifty. When I first went to Asmat in 1973, I was so intrigued by the people and the art that I decided to go back, and I had to find a way to stay there for a length of time. It turned out that just at that moment, the Catholic Mission was about to open a museum of Asmat art for the people. It was not a museum for tourists. In fact, last year we had four tourists and we think that’s a lot.
In the museum?
Four tourists in Asmat, period. So it’s not for the tourists, it’s for the local people, to help them retain their culture. I asked the Bishop, who is really the owner of the museum, if anyone was cataloging it and he said, ‘No.’ So I asked if I could come back, after I trained myself, to work on the museum and catalog all the artifacts— there were two thousand. He said, ‘Sure, happily.’ So I went back to New York and started studying anthropology.
Whereabouts?
Well, I took it through Goddard College on independent study. I had to find my own teachers because they don’t have an anthropology department. I asked Douglas Newton, who was the head of what was the Museum of Primitive Art, and he agreed to help train me, together with Rhoda Metraux. She was Margaret Mead’s associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and a close friend—they lived together for several years. In spite of the fact they were only getting about a hundred dollars each, they agreed to take this job on for four years. That’s how long it took me to complete the requirements for the degree.
The main thing, of course, was the cataloging, which I did through the wonderful people at Museum of Primitive Art. It wasn’t difficult but I felt that as long as I was studying I might as well go for the degree. I went back to Asmat in ’75 and stayed there for sixteen months at the time. I finished my thesis and sent it back to my field teachers Dr. Metraux and Douglas Newton, and to my advisor at Goddard College. I went back to Asmat in ’78 and stayed for close to three years. It was terrific, and then again last year for five months. I love it.
I finished the card catalog in ’80. I made drawings of several hundred artifacts, old style, liked engravings, and I photographed everything. I threw out a great number of pieces because I didn’t like them—they weren’t museum material. They had been collected by some of the missionaries who had little or no understanding of art, or carving, or the meaning of the museum. All the missionaries under the Bishop were told to collect. Some did not know what they were doing and collected junk. Which is fine because they didn’t know any better, but I threw most of it out or burnt it.
Right now there are about one thousand pieces in the museum. Many artifacts we saved even though they were duplicates of others we had by the same carvers. There simply wasn’t enough storage space although the storage room is the same size as the display room, which has about one hundred objects. The great thing about the job—if you call in one, because I went as a volunteer—was not only was I studying the designs by drawing them but I had to travel all over Asmat. I went to all 98, or whatever number there are of the villages, because there were not labels on the artifacts, and I had to find out where they came from.
Now after a total of almost four years, I can look at almost any Asmat object—not every but almost—a drum or a shield, a bow or a food bowl, and tell you where it comes from, the river that is. Not necessarily the village but the river. Spears are impossible. There is no way to tell where they came from, because they are so similar. And, of course, I had wonderful experiences with the people—there is no way to get the information without talking to them.
Schneebaum meets with another New Guinian friend, circa 1984. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumThere are about 40,000 Asmat and that is an enormous group. I think it’s the only that large on the whole island. It’s divided into five language groups, all of which are called Asmat, although the people on the south-west coast cannot understand the people from the north-west coast. Nevertheless, there is a great similarity in the language. In the structure, the vocabulary, certain words are exactly the same throughout all of Asmat.
Then as you approach the mountains, as you go east, it is fascinating the changes that take places. As you go upstream, you get close to the foothills, which are the outer limits of the Asmat. There the people have the great feasting and carving that they have on the coast. The coastal people are into ritual headhunting much more than the people upstream, although they did have headhunting and do have it today.
But it is not ritualized?
It was not ritualized in the same way. People on the coast use the heads for their initiation ceremonies.
What type, for the youth?
Yes. The kids among what we call the coastal people. When a boy was anywhere between nine and eleven, he was initiated. To have an initiation, you needed a head.
A fresh one?
A fresh one. Sometimes, where there was a whole group of people, they used a wooded head or a head for several kids. They don’t talk about it but it had to be, because if you figure out the number of children who were initiated and population of the tribe, you find they have all been killed off in a few generations. There was no way, over the years, that they could have existed if they kept killing one for one. So many people would have to die.
Anyway, the initiation ritual is fascinating in itself. First the head is brought in and treated, burnt, put on the coals of the fire and then the skin is stripped off. Then the skull is decorated with feathers, seeds and painted with red marks on the forehead. The young man sits in the men’s house with skull at his groin facing his penis. The boy absorbs through his penis the essence of the dead man. So if he goes to the village where the man was killed he is treated just like the dead man although he may be only nine or ten years old.
Who does the killing: his father?
Well, it can be anyone in the immediate family. His father, an elder brother, most often it is one of his mother’s brothers. That’s the closest—the uncle. He sits in the men’s house with the head at his groin for two or three days and is not allowed to go out and eat, shit or anything like that. If he does it, he does it right there, spreads the bark on the floor and the shit goes right down. Then he is taken out into the canoes. All decorated up, with feathers in his hair and paint on his face and body. Asmat men are naked. Then men wear a very tiny ‘cache sex’ [penis covering] made of sago leaves that are twisted into a fiber but the men have always been naked.
He’s taken out by his mother’s brothers into the water and as he goes along, in the canoe toward the settings sun, he’s supposed to get older and does get older. This nine or ten year old boy gets so old he can no longer stand up, he can no longer paddle the canoe any more and falls down in the canoe. As he gets still older, he dies. When he dies, they lift him out of the canoe and dip him into the water, then in a ritual rebirth they bring him out of the water and he lies in the canoe in the fetal position. From the fetal position he begins to move as they travel back to the village. He crawls around the bottom of the canoe, then he stands up and begins to paddle.
Then they teach him the names of all the villages around, all the trees, all the rivers and by the time he gets back to the village he’s a man able to get married.
Then he would begin his sexual initiation?
There is no sexual initiation in that sense here. There are other groups that do have that kind of thing but not in Asmat. They start having sex from the moment they become aware of their penises and vaginas. The boys and the girls do it from day one—two years-old. It’s common practice for the kids to go to the river together, mixed sexes. The boys will stick their fingers up the cunts of the girls or up their assholes or up their own or their male friends’. That kind of thing is common.
Schneebaum in his large, one-bedroom studio in the famous artist building in the West Village, Westbeth, 1984. photo: D. BlairThat’s normal in western terms. The same as anywhere else. You can always have an erection I suppose it’s when you have an orgasm that you start really having sex. There it is the same as it is here: eleven, twelve, thirteen.
Now in Asmat, do they do what you described the last [visit], the boys sucking the men off to gain power?
That particular group was described by Gerald Herdy, an anthropologist who was on the other side of the border in Papua New Guinea. It’s a people calls the ‘Sambia,’ apparently not their real name. That group has ritualized sexuality, they believe that is the only way for a boy to become a man, the only way to grow into a great warrior, is by absorbing semen. The more semen you swallow, the stronger and braver you will become and the faster you will grow up. So the more men you suck off, the quicker you will become a man, a good headhunter, a good hunter of animals.
Now next to the Asmat are the Marind-Baal who are called in a book ‘Dama’ by a man called Van Baal, and they believe in an opposite. They believe the only way for a child to become a man is through sodomy, by absorbing semen through the asshole. It is ritualized to the extent that the mother’s brothers will fuck him in the ass and then a whole series of men in the men’s house will sodomize him one after the other. I should think it would not be a pleasant feeling to have a dozen men sodomize you one right after the other the first time.
Anyway, they also believe that the only way to become a man is by absorbing semen. Then he becomes an apprentice of his mother’s brothers and not only does he learn how to till the fields, how to hunt, to use the bow and arrow, all the rituals of life, he is also his uncle’s sexual partner.
Now is this true in where you were staying in the Asmat?
Not in the those terms, Asmat itself varies. No one has yet described any of the sex life of Asmat because no one knows anything about it except me. And I don’t know much but I know some things because of my experiences. I had been told, when I first went there in 1973, that all evidence of sex between men was gone. That is, if it did exist earlier, it was gone now. The missionaries had come and told them that fornicating with one another was the work of Satan, and they had to stop it.
Well, some of these missionaries weren’t so bad, and some of them are worse than others. But there is one of them who told me he lived among the Marind-Anim [the people who believe in sodomy] and he had stamped out every bit of homosexuality, if you call it that, any evidence of sex between men amongst these people. I don’t believe that for a second—it was hidden, I guess—and it continues to be hidden.
What I did learn immediately was that sex between men exists and is a common practice in Asmat. It varies in intensity or in the number or partners or in the importance it plays in the life of the man as you go from the south to the north of Asmat. The people closer to the Marind-Anim have a great deal of homosexual behavior among the men. I don’t know anything about the sex life between the women.
You didn’t see the equivalent of lesbianism?
It’s very difficult because you would never see that, a man would never see that.
Cause their life is hidden away in their huts?
The women are always in their family houses and the men are more often sleeping in the men’s houses. Now I had expected from what I was told by the missionaries, because no one else had been there, that there would be no homosexual behavior in the north of Asmat. Nevertheless, I had no trouble having brief affairs with men ranging in age from fifteen to men in their fifties.
There is something in Asmat called ‘papisj,’ a ‘bond friendship.’ It is a relationship that is formed between two children when they are very young, sometimes at birth. The parents obviously form this relationship. The partners say they form it themselves, when they are around two, but I doubt it. I think it is the families that form this relationship, to strengthen the clan. The boys have this relationship since they are two, and they pull at each other’s penises and, as they get older, they begin fucking each other and sucking each other’s cocks and masturbating.
Now these bond friends, after they have been married and after each one has had one child, exchange wives on ritual occasions. Ritual occasions can be anything from a very severe thunder storm when everyone is terrified, or before a great headhunting raid or anything different, like a white man coming and spending some time in the village. They exchange wives to keep a certain type of balance going. It is only through semen that the forces of life and death can be balanced. The forces that are in what they call heaven and what they call earth.
There is no such thing as heaven, obviously, to them, but it is a place for the ancestors. To balance this relationship between the dead and the living a lot of semen has to flow. The more semen that flows the quicker the balances. So a lot of sex will go on simply to balance that. And one of the ways of doing that is through the papisj relationship, because at that particular time a man might have sex two or three times a night, whereas when he does it with his wife he might do it once a week as we do it in Western countries.
If they exchange wives the women might get pregnant, what do they do then?
Any children that result from the exchange of the wives between ‘mbai’ [another name for papisj] belong to the husband of the woman that bore them. Such children are treated exactly like other children. To get back to the mbai for a moment I want to make sure that it’s understood that the relationship that is formed between them lasts until the death of one of them.
So they are highly monogamous?
Yes, in that case, much more so then with the women.
If they want to quote unquote divorce their wife, what do they do?
There is no such thing as divorce in that sense, they just throw them out of the house or take another wife. One of the things that is always so remarkable to me is when I ask my particular friend, my mbai—if I can call him that, because he calls me that in front of the women and the other men—I asked him, ‘What you would do if you found your wife sleeping with another man?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I would beat her,’ which to me was perfectly normal in that society.
Then I asked what he would do if he found his mbai with another man and he said, ‘I would beat the other man.’ I said, ‘Why wouldn’t you beat your friend?’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t do anything like that, he’s my mbai.’ And its true, in many ways, the women are treated like chattel there. They are paid for with brideprice and if they want to get rid of them, they get rid of them and if want a new wife, they take a new wife but once you have a mbai, that is for life.
So there's no marriage ritual?
There's a marriage ritual, yes, but it involves brideprice. The most important headhunters have several wives.
So the word 'homosexuality' doesn't really apply to the majority of the Asmat?
And I think 'bisexual' is not the word, either. There is no word I know of yet.
Pansexual maybe?
Pansexual would imply that they also have sex with animals or whatever and that's not true. They would horrified at the thought of having sex with any animals. Of course they don't know of an animal with which they could have sex [they don't have domesticated animals] and wouldn't be apt to go for a wild pig.
Do you think there is a certain biological necessity for quote unquote homosexuality as they practice it?
I don't know what you mean by 'biological necessity.' It is probably a combination of biology and culture.
Or do you think it is motivated by pleasure, simply?
They are into pleasure, I can tell you that. One of my great experiences was, after I arrived the second time, I was working for the museum, and I was with Father [Frank] Trenkenschuh—he was the advisor [from North Dakota, he served as Vicar General for 29 years in Irian Jaya]—and a group of people came in looking absolutely wild. They had feathers in their hair and were all painted up with bones and shells through their noses—looking absolutely fantastic, thrilling, to say the least.
They said they came from the village Otjenep, and that is one of the villages I very much wanted to go to because I heard they can't keep a teacher, they can't keep anybody. I don't mean necessarily white people, I mean that no Indonesian or Asmat teacher or catechist or policeman has ever stayed there for more than a few hours. They are so terrified of these people, they immediately run away.
Of course, that attracts me. And they are looking so wild and beautiful, Trenkenschuh said, 'Here are these people you wanted to go see, so go with them.' Well, I went, that is, I had to asked them first. They agreed to take me and came for me the next morning. We started out: there were four canoes, each one with about ten men.
Then we hit this terrible storm, it was really dreadful. It was so bad that the men in our canoes were thrown right out—the waves were so high. I thought, 'My god, this is going to be another Michael J. Rockefeller incident [the scion to the famous family died/was killed in the same area in 1961].' Nobody would ever suspect that these people—with whom I was traveling, who were the ones presumed to have killed Michael—would have drowned. That would be impossible. Everyone would presume they killed me and ran off to hide.
So I figured, 'Well, it's going to be the same thing.' There was no way to see the shore but I knew it must be about two miles away. I turned around and saw the two men who had been thrown out standing in the mud. It's so shallow at that point on the south coast of New Guinea that a motor boat has to go six or seven miles from shore before it can use its motor.
Anyway, it was a dreadful night, [we finally got to shore but] nobody had any sleep. The rain kept coming into this little bivouac in which we were sleeping. [Then] the tide came in and covered all the ground and there was no where to sleep. In the morning, the tide went out and, finally, the sun came out and we started. Then we got so hot, we got dehydrated—or I got dehydrated! They didn't, but you could see by the way they were paddling so languidly that it was getting warm even for them.
And the chief pointed to a great mound of mud that was ahead of us. So, as the first canoe banked into the mud—it just barely reached it—all the men—who were naked at that point—all the men, including me, dove headlong into the mud and began rolling around. It was an oozy slime that was fabulous. Now I understand women who take mud packs. I don't know how sensual that experience is for them but this rolling around in the mud was absolutely fantastic. It is difficult for anyone who has never done that kind of thing to imagine how sensual and exciting it can be.
Did it continue into an orgy?
No, not at all. Everyone rolled around and when the time came to leave we left. Everyone got up and washed. They were not having sex with one another. The experience was rolling around in the mud. To me, it was a sensual experience.
Yeah, sure. Do they ever have orgies?
I don't think they do. The first time I went to my village, where I have my particular friend [mbai], I was staying in the teacher's house, the catechist. It was still a very primitive village. All the men were still naked, none of the women had any type of Western garments, there were still no Western garments in the village except on the teacher. And I went into the men's house at night, and they didn't expect me. By the light of the embers, I could see that there were pairs of men masturbating one another, which they stopped instantly when they saw this outsider. Of course, I couldn't help but get an erection with all those men looking at me and me looking at them, even though it was dark. That's how I first became involved with that particular group.
Over the years I would say I have had some kind of sexual contact with 90% of the men over fifteen in that village. Of course the population is not very high, about two hundred, the entire population, babies included.
Do all the men in your district have mbai friends?
A 100% except for those whose friends have died and they have not yet taken another mbai. Although I did hear of one older man whose friend had died or had been killed, and he was more or less 'playing the filed' with the younger men. It's also interesting that they are of the same age group, these mbai. In other groups of people, where there is homosexual contact, to a great extent it's always an older man and a younger man. It's never between men of the same age group. Therefore it's so peculiar that among the Asmat, it's true, it's the same age.
Of course, they do have relationships with older and younger men but not through fellatio and sodomy. You must do that with your mbai only, they told me. How true this is, I can not say. They insisted that you might be able to have sex with another man, but you can't swallow his semen. You can have masturbation with another man, but you can't suck him off, and he cannot suck you off, and you can't have sodomy to orgasm with another man.
Do they seem to prefer sex with either men or woman or are they very egalitarian about that?
That's an impossible question. I don't know the answer to that.
So they do it with their wives kind of infrequently.
Well, I don't really know. They are not really aware of how often they have sex. No matter how many men I have asked, 'How often do you have sex with your wife and how often do you have sex with your male friend,' they are confused. In the first place, they can't count. They can count to three or four but that is about it.
Would you say they are sexually satisfied as a rule?
Yes. That is: they have sex with their wives, with their mbai, and sometimes with other women and perhaps even with other men—that should satisfy anyone! There are always problems though, when someone is particularly taken with a man or a woman. And where on earth is anyone particularly satisfied with what they have? In some groups, not the Asmat, they have younger boys as well.
At what age does that start?
It can start at six, seven or eight, anything like that. They are completely open about that.
Is that done with love?
I think it is done with affection if not love. They get along very well.
What do you think of adult men seducing adolescent boys in this society?
Well, that has nothing to do with what happens among the Asmat, or for that matter any where in New Guinea. I don't think there is such as thing [there] as an older man seducing a young boy. If there is a sexual relationship, it is completely ritualized and the boy never feels any type of seduction. It is something necessary to their manhood.
We have nothing comparable in our society. Although I am firm believer in allowing children to find their own way to sex because, obviously, they have sexual feelings that have to be satisfied in some way, I don't like the idea of seduction. Although everything depends upon whether by seduction you mean enticement in only a negative way. Then, of course, I am against it. Whether the seduction is [at age] ten or thirty, male or female.
I was going to ask: Do they have swear words?
Yes, they have phrases like 'fat ass,' because that is ugly, 'small penis' and 'big cunt.' Names are given to people like 'big ass.' The people not too far from Asmat, the Muyu, who live in the foothills, have very big asses, enormous compared to other people. All the mountain people have big asses but the Muyu have the biggest asses of anyone I have ever seen in New Guinea. One of their curses is 'small ass!'
The Asmat have what we in the West would consider beautiful asses. To them, saying 'fat ass' is a curse word. There are names given to people who carry those names for a great part of their lives. 'Big Vagina' would be a perfectly normal name, as a name and 'big vagina' would mean somebody who has had a lot of sex with men. 'Small penis' would mean someone who doesn't have much sex and whose penis is small and therefore wouldn't have much sex with women.
They also have that problem. They say women don't like penises that are very small. Those people are called 'cemenopok' but I have not seen them erect so I have no idea what they are [really] like. Six inches for example would be quite large, very large, whereas that is normal in western society.
So only these 'cemenopok,' by virtue of the disdain the women have for them, they sort of become homosexual by default?
Through default. They are not proud of having small penises.
So that is a big difference with homosexuals here? In terms of a cosmic comparison with homosexuality as it is practiced among the primitive people, it seems to come from a different source?
Well, we are trained to believe it is wrong, of course. They are not at all in that way. It seems normal to them, it's part of their normal lives. for men to have sex with other men—in certain groups. It's not true all over New Guinea.
What I am saying is that the majority of them seem to be quote unquote bisexual, whereas the majority of homosexuals in the United States are...
Homosexual.
It seems they [the gays here and there] are not that similar in terms of their whole outlook.
Whether it is because of society or what, I have no idea as to why they are exclusively homosexual for the most part. We have plenty of bisexuals too, And we have homosexuals, who have gotten married and have relationships with their wives that were unsatisfactory, but because of the way society is based they married. No matter how much we have advanced in many ways in American culture, homosexuality is still frowned upon by the masses.
Would you say they, more or less, have the same sort of tendencies as people in our society but because their society is more open to it they evolved this quote unquote bisexuality whereas perhaps the alienation and pressure from a repressive society makes it more delineated?
I think they also have repressive societies but they find, in Asmat, among certain groups, that homosexual relations are necessary to their culture, for whatever reasons.
For magical reasons?
For magical reasons, or to become a man or to strengthen clan ties, they find that necessary. They also find it necessary to be heterosexual. They must have children, otherwise the group can't go on, so therefore they have their pleasures there too. And it's... I don't know. It isn't purely biological thing, you aren't always born with the traits.
Well, there we are: we are getting into determinism as opposed to environmentalism. There has been so many anthropological fights on that very question. I don't know the answer, but I do think it is interesting their society can accept all these things.
Their society can develop this theory whereby men, in order to grow and become men, must absorb semen, one way or another, either through the asshole or through their mouth. Whether they are sucking someone off or being sodomized, that’s the only way they can become men.
On the other hand, our society makes that person into the passive partner, the ‘queenie’ partner, into the female partner, it is completely different, it is a whole opposite way of looking at it.
And also, if I recall what you said correctly, as soon as they become men by absorbing semen then they get married and have to deal with—
Women! According to Gerald Herdt, in his group, it’s a traumatic experience to have to have sex with women because they have been taught, all the time growing up, that the vagina is a horrible thing. That menstrual blood is something to be terrified of, and they are and always continue to be horrified of that.
So how do they reconcile that?
It takes them a while and, according to Gerald Herdt, the wives, to start them off more easily, suck them off. That’s the way they begin. Their adjustment takes sometime before they become quote unquote heterosexual. Because in the meantime they have grown old enough to be the what-we-call ‘active’ partner in the male to male relationship—they’re the ones who are being sucked off or are committing sodomy on the younger ones.
But, as far as I know, it’s rare for a man and a woman to perform fellatio, in those groups, particularly for a man to perform fellatio on a woman. I don’t know anyone who has written on that subject but I asked, in Asmat, many men whether they have ever performed fellatio, cunnilingus as we call it, on a woman. Oh god, they die at the thought. They cringe at it and almost get sick.
From what you said they don’t have great relations with their wives.
They are separated most of the time from their wives. They gossip at night if they are in the family house; they gossip when they are out in the ‘sago’ [a palm that produces a starchy extract, their principal food] fields, cutting and preparing the sago—that kind of thing.
When you watch someone you know well, will you see him have as good a time sitting and laughing with his wife as with his mbai friend?
If I have seen it, and I have, it’s because of the influence of the missionaries. They are trying to get the men and the women to have more contact then they had in the past. In some villages you can even find a man and a woman sitting next to each other in church. It’s rare but in some villages you find it.
The missionaries have brought churches to most of the villages?
Yes, if you call them churches, But no matter what kind of roof or wall, or lack of a wall, it’s still a church.
Now the people don’t really convert to what we think of as Catholicism.
I don’t think so, but they do, the missionaries think they do.
They’re satisfied?
'Satisfied' is a very difficult word. I don’t know what it means for them. It’s one thing for them to be converted. It’s another for the people to practice in front of the missionaries what he preaches: no more papisj, no more wife exchange. Well, practically all the villages continue that.
Of course, no one is even aware of the homosexual element in Asmat. None of the missionaries are aware of that.
So they put on a whole charade for the missionaries?
I asked in several different places—I would say 15 different villages: How come this still exists? Don’t the missionaries say anything about the homosexual relations? And everywhere they say the same thing: it is forbidden to mention it to the missionaries or any outsider. I think I am the only one who has ever gotten this information.
Why do you think they respect the missionaries so much.
They bring in goods.
It’s a sort of bribery?
It isn’t bribery in that sense. They see that the way of life of the missionary is better than their own lives and he has his own gods. And to them, the gods that the missionaries worship have brought them that stuff.
So they respect the magic of the missionary?
Yes, they want whatever it is that brings canned goods, canned sardines. They are crazy for canned fish, or steel knives or the tobacco. Anything that the missionary brings, they feel is better than what they have. It is only his gods that make this possible, and they feel if they worship his gods, they too will get the same thing. Whether the missionary gives it to them personally or not, it doesn’t matter.
Their gods are mostly land spirits and water spirits?
Yeah, well, mostly they are involved in ancestors. They have other spirits, but it is the ancestors who control their lives more than anything.
Whom they remember by name?
Yes. The most recent ancestors, those who are recently dead. And the death of ancestors must be avenged. Nobody dies except through either murder in warfare, someone outright killed him, or through magic. Someone has performed magic to kill this person.
Magic through the ritual skull?
Or whatever, for whatever reason: magic makes you get sick and die. If you get sick of malaria and die of it, someone has performed the magic to make you get sick of malaria. So that death has to be avenged. All deaths have to be avenged.
By another death?
By another death. That’s the only way you can avenge a death. The ancestors won’t let you alone until those deaths have been avenged.
They come in dreams?
Well, it is possible for one to come in dreams, but they’ll come openly and stand around and watch you, and force you while you are awake.
Sort of a hallucination?
If that is what you want to call it. There are many people who claim to have seen them. There are all kinds of spirits.
There’s one kind of spirit of a living person: you might be talking to me in my house, then you would go into the jungle and would be cutting firewood—no, if you were a man you wouldn’t be cutting firewood. You might be cutting a sago tree, or looking for fruit or something, and meet me there. You will think to yourself, ‘But I just saw him in his house.’ If you are clever, you will realize this is my spirit—it is not really me. And if you come back to me in the house and tell me you saw my spirit in the forest, the real me will instantly die. That's a way of killing me.
Then, of course, the spirits wander at night. My own goes out of my body and wanders around. You have to be very careful because if you try to wake someone up when his spirit is wandering around, then he will die. His spirit won’t have a chance to go back into his body.
So they put a lot of emphasis on their dreams?
They don’t talk much about their dreams and, anyway, it is not dreams, it is real life to them. There are very few dreams, in our sense. I think that either they forget them immediately or, if something important happened, they make a big thing out it. I often wonder, I have not yet asked the right questions about it, what do they think when they are not doing anything. When they are sitting around carving canoes or paddles or whatever. Do they think about revenge? How they are going to avenge the death of a brother or father or mother... I don't know.
There's one sort of slight contradiction that has dawned on me: When a boy is initiated with the skull of somebody, you said he goes back as that person. Wouldn't they want revenge on the boy?
Not on the boy. On the other people of the village. The boy has actually not done the killing anyway. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter on whom you take revenge as long as it is somebody from that village. But you cannot take revenge on the person who has taken the name of the dead man. That's absolutely verboten. And that child, as he grows older, can go into that other village and become a spy. He just goes back and forth into that village as if it were his own.
Also, there is no point in killing anyone unless you know his name, otherwise you can't give it to the boy who is being initiated. You have to know the name of the person you are killing.
So really the killing is all based on magic. Getting the names and transferring the energy and sort of balancing the heavens, as it were?
Yeah, the cosmos. Of course, they don't use those terms.
Right. Do they philosophize at all in their own way?
I have not been able to find out if they do. There is no way I have yet been able to talk about those things.
The language itself?
The language itself is very difficult and there are no verbs for that sort of thing.
Right. To get back to what I mentioned earlier: about if there is biological necessity for homosexuality, to avoid perhaps overpopulation—you don't think so. It seems more magical, getting the semen, the power, the energy of semen.
The power of semen is the most important thing in growing older. They also use semen on ritual objects. Various carvings are made for various kinds of feasts. All carvings represent dead people.
Like for a certain feast, what is called a 'Bisj Pole' feast, which is an ancestor's pole feast, it's carved in a certain coastal area and only there. This is one type of carving which is best described as a totem pole with figures one above the other. At the top is a great projection, what is called a ' phallus wing,' the penis of the particular carving.
It's a symbol of virility and fertility. Every [village] has its different kind of carving, but semen is rubbed into this particular one before they go off on a headhunting raid. Most carvings, most rituals have to do with head hunting.
I've not seen this but in the past, they say that when they make drums, after the carving is finished, they put a lizard skin on top. Now the lizard skin is sealed with a mixture of white lime and human blood. Human blood is usually gotten from the calves of the man who will own the drum.
They gather the blood in mussel shells and mix the blood with the white lime, and that's the glue. I heard that they used to mix semen with it for magical purposes but I haven't seen that so I don't know.
You say it is a fairly egalitarian society but the important headhunters must have some sort of respect.
Yes and also the good carvers. Good carvers have almost as much respect of the great headhunter. Almost, but not quite.
How do they select their chiefs?
The men who are powerful headhunters become chiefs. Simply by the fact that they have taken several heads, they have a certain prestige and eventually lead groups in the village.
But there's no witch doctor as such?
No. There is magic that is performed, but it's not by one person in the village. Anyone can perform magic, either a man or a woman. There are certain women who seem to perform it more than others, they have some kind of power. They wouldn't be called witches. I did try to get some information on that but I only got a little.
If someone is sick they will make cuts in the body wherever the pain is. If you have a headache, they will make cuts on the forehead or tie a piece of rattan string tightly around the head. They will make cuts on the chest or the leg, wherever the pain is.
To kill people, you have to have the right type of leaves.
I was wondering do they maintain some sort of privacy or do they practice sex openly?
Sex mostly takes place in the jungle, it does not take place in the home. That is because there are several families living together—the extended family—there might be twenty people living in one house. And the houses are all connected, or they were in the past when I first went down there.
Since the Indonesian government has been there they have burnt down all all the old style houses and are forcing the people to live in nuclear families, thinking that is the way they should live, but it is no good for them.
So they have their own form of modesty?
Yes, well, you never see a [fully] naked woman.
No, I take that back. When someone dies, his wife, his mother, his daughter or someone very close to him will usually take off her skirt, this 'cache sex' they women wear and then will jump in the river and roll around in the mud.
From your experience around the world would you say that the more primitive a tribe is the more open they are about their sexuality and homosexuality?
No, perhaps the reverse. I don't know what you mean by primitive.
Well, in terms of structure, dogma?
There are no open societies where you can do anything. Every society has its boundaries that you can't go beyond, whether they be sexual, or what they consider moral or whatever. Homosexuality does not exist in all so-called primitive societies, by no means.
There are two friend of mine who live in this building [WestBeth, in lower Manhattan], who have worked with the people next to the Sambia, or who are called the Sambia by Gerald Herdt. They have this ritualized homosexuality, where their outpouring of sexual energy is limited to the men, and they are only permitted to have sexual relations with men before marriage.
On the other hand there are the people right next to them, the Gimi, who are being studied by my friends on the ninth floor. They were astounded when they read that book because among their people, there is no active sexual relations among men. None, absolutely none.
They asked me to read it to see if it was right. How could it be that one group is completely homosexual and the other has none?
Can you think of an explanation?
There is no explanation except that they are divided from one another by mountains and forests. There's no reason why they should grow up doing the exact same thing.
There's no environmental influence?
There is no reason to have sex between men in every society. I suppose that they never have any reason to have ACTIVE relationships. Now the friends of mine say that it's implicity in all the rituals, that everything that's described, everything that they do, can be turned into a homosexual—what is the word?
Gesture?
Yes. The way they use flutes, to these friends, is a homosexual gesture. It's just like sucking on the penis.
So perhaps they were homosexual centuries ago?
No, not necessarily. There is no obvious reason for it. Some groups are and some groups aren't.
I would be interested to know if they were as sensuous or whether, perhaps, they were a prudish people.
The Dani, who are a people in the Baliem Valley, in Irian Jaya, north of Asmat, are described by Carl Heider as having very low sex potency. A man is not allowed to have sex with his wife after she becomes pregnant. After that, he may not have sex with her for two or three years. There's no evidence of any sexual contact between men.
How do you explain that?
I don't think he attempts to explain it.
In general, one can say, the people of the highlands of New Guinea are inclined to have no homosexuality and the coastal people have a great deal of it. That's a big generalization because there are many groups of people on the Papua side, who live in the mountains and do have homosexuality.
For instance, the Sambia, they are mountain people, and the Kukukuku and several other groups have it. Only as a generalization can you say it doesn't exist. Mountain people are agricultural people and they are more conservative than coastal people who are hunters and gathers. The Asmat are hunters and gathers.
That probably holds true with the Peruvian Indians to some degree.
I don't know enough about them in Peru, in Brazil or in South America to discuss anything but my own group. In Claude Levi-Strauss's 'Triste Tropique', he said there was a great deal of homosexuality in the group that he studied many, many years ago in Brazil.
NOTE: This is up to page 12 of 16 interview pages.
Posted on Nov 11, 2017 - 04:34 AM
