Male Cults Revisited: The Politics of Blood Versus Semen

In this article I explore some major differences between male initiations in Melanesia that I ignored in my earlier study. In particular, I focus on the differential emphasis that was placed on blood‐letting as against semeningesting as the key means whereby boys were believed to be transformed into men. In the case of the blood‐letting rites men seemingly sought both to appropriate to themselves the positively valued capacity of women to give birth to children and to protect themselves from women's negative ability to cause either death or destruction through menstruation, sexual intercourse or witchcraft. By contrast, in the semeningesting rites the properties of women that the men seemed most concerned to appropriate focused on their capacities to receive semen in the act of sexual intercourse and to give milk in the nurturant context. Such major cult differences were, I suggest, directly associated with parallel differences in four inter‐related sets of variables; the form of marital exchange (direct as against indirect), the predominant variety of social relations (centripetal as against centrifugal), the prevailing form of leadership (conservative as against entrepreneurial) and, finally and most importantly, differences in gender relations, especially concerning the nature of male dependency on female cooperation in attaining specifically male goals.