Avatip

Avatip is the largest of the Manambu-speaking villages on the upper reaches of the middle Sepik, and Simon Harrison's study of it describes a graded men's cult through which boys and young men were initiated in successive stages, each stage taught more secret and more powerful ritual knowledge than the last. The whole system rested on concealment: the cult barred women entirely. Both the bullroarer and the slit-gong belonged to that hidden world. In the wider Manambu ceremonial-house cult, the yam-harvest rites displayed clan pythons through poles and lianas. Sprinkled with pigs’ blood, their representations gave way to spirits returning to coil around the houseposts.

The male cult, like most such cults in Melanesia and elsewhere, debars women and involves the deliberate hoaxing and deception of women and children.

Harrison, Stealing People's Names: History and Politics in a Sepik River Cosmology (Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 5 "Male initiation"