There is a group who believe that sperm comes from an organ called the ‘tingu’ (or something similar) and that for the tingu to grow properly, boys must perform oral sex on older men. They even have penis shaped sacred flutes. Anthropologists had long known of this aspect to their culture, but not published because- well apparently they like covering up anything that’s homosexual.
I can’t recall the name of the group.
You’re probably thinking of the Sambia people of New Guinea, whose culture (including their sexual practices and beliefs regarding sexuality) was documented by Gilbert Herdt.
The Sambia believed that pre-adolescent boys had to ingest semen from older boys or mature men in order to reach sexual maturity (in contrast to women, who were born with the wherewithal to mature without assistance). Once a man had engaged in vaginal intercourse he could no longer engage in oral sex with boys, because his penis was considered to have become contaminated by contact with women.
Guardians of the Flutes seems to match. I don’t see any words like “tingu” popping up, but I just skimmed quickly.
Thanks, the Sambia seem to be the people I was thinking of.
:dubious:
Frylock
My readings on the Sambia included that they had been known of by anthropologists for quite some time, but nobody published as part of an ‘ignore the gay’ habit. Likewise, anthropologists have known about the Two Spirit/Berdache people among various Indian tribes. Nobody published. Want information on how there were two varieties of magic among the vikings, one given by Odin and practiced by men, and the other given by Freyja and practiced by women? Look in any good book on the vikings. Want information on how a man wanting to practice Freyja’s magic had to dress as a woman and take a woman’s role in sex with other men? You’re gonna need a book like Queer Spirituality. Information on the homosexual practices of the Greeks, the Romans, the samurai are all swept under the rug.
I first read of the “berdaches” (nowadays called “Two-Spirit” because the old term is felt to be derogatory) many years ago, as an undergraduate. At the time I was conscious that my inner self was female, but back then I wasn’t aware that it was possible for me to transition. There was no internet in those days, and information (let alone support) was scarce and hard to find.
At first I took heart when I read about the two-spirits, since their example seemed to offer a solution to my gender dilemma. (I don’t remember which anthropology book I read this in.) But as I read on, I got disappointed, because the life of the “berdache” was made to appear degraded and unappealing. The information provided was also so incomplete as to be misleading. I was discouraged, and put off my transition until a few years ago. Back in the 1970s when I was in college, American Indian voices had only just begun to speak for themselves and be heard. In the academic world of the 1970s, American Indian studies were still the preserve of white men with all the racial/cultural/gender bias that entailed.
Have a look at George Catlin’s 1835 painting “Dance to the Berdash” which depicts a ceremony of the Sauk and Fox nation.
Catlin wrote about this scene:
(Letters and Notes, vol. 2, pp. 210-15, pl. 296). Sketched at the Sauk and Fox village in 1835.
*unfortunately, this was written before the white man learned how to use the right pronouns for trans people.
The point, which seems to escape Catlin as he trivializes the ceremony by calling it “funny” and “disgraceful,” is that the two-spirit woman was “looked upon as medicine and sacred.” His white male bias is showing, since he can only interpret a change from male to female gender as “degradation” (because of course women’s status was supposed to be far inferior to that of men). Anyway-- Never forget that there have been times and places when we were honored and revered, instead of trashed and despised.
A Polish anthropologist named Maria Antonina Czaplicka* spent years doing fieldwork in Siberia toward the end of the Czarist period, only a few years before Soviet collectivization began to destroy the shamanist traditions. So her her legacy is an invaluable document of the past.
*pronounced chop-LITS-ka
She found that the origin of ancient shamanism was first attributed to women.
She goes on to present evidence from several ethnic traditions that shamanism as practiced by men originated from imitation of women’s practices. Moreover, she found that women’s primordial shamanism was paralleled by that of transsexual women. Also, there were male crossdressers who imitated the women and transsexuals.
Czaplicka clearly and correctly distinguished between transsexuals and crossdressers in her book Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology published in 1914, based on her fieldwork, years before Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin discovered this. Her remarkably accurate analysis of gender identity is in Chapter 12, “Shamanism and Sex.”
What’s significant is how she clearly delineated the difference between “change of sex”–i.e. transsexual-- and “change of dress”–i.e. crossdressing.
Hirschfeld was a physician and a sexologist, not an anthropologist. His book Die Transvestiten published in 1910 had failed to distinguish transsexualism as a very different phenomenon from crossdressing. By 1923 when he published Die Intersexuelle Konstitution he had learned the difference. But Czaplicka had already learned it from Siberian shamans several years previously. The Nazis destroyed Hirschfeld’s work, so it remained for his colleague Harry Benjamin to fully develop a clinical theory and practice of transsexual care.
Another early writer who distinguished between the two was the 13th-century scholar of Islamic jurisprudence Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi.
So for me Maria Czaplicka is a counterexample to the usual misunderstandings by anthropologists. I suspect it helped that as a woman she was able to get closer to the people she was studying and understand them more empathetically than was the norm in the male-dominated sciences of her day. She related to them as people like herself instead of with the objectification of regarding them like scientific specimens under a microscope.