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Gilbert H. Herdt (ed.): Rituals of manhood: male initiiation in Papua New Guinea . xxvi, 365 pp., 2 maps [on endpapers]. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, [1982]. £24.50, $42.25.

At first sight, this collection of eight essays is a compendium of horrors. All but one describe the ritual practices of small groups of people, seldom more than a couple of thousand and mostly far less populous, distributed in four major sub-regions of Papua New Guinea. The initiations which form the focus of each essay include homosexual practices, including fellatio, genital mutilations, defloration of girls by groups of men, nose and penis-bleeding as well as ordeals by fear, hunger and beatings. The initiands are terrified and degraded in a way which makes even a trained anthropologist react in emotive terms. But it would be a pity if such strong stuff diverted attention from what else is in the book for there is much of value and interest to be found in it. In the last essay, Tuzin attacks the problem directly. He remarks that' violence is a central component of ritual life in many New Guinea societies ' and goes on to argue that anthropologists have failed to deal with it, for in seeking to dissociate themselves from the wholesale condemnation of peoples by earlier writers such as Webster, they have either ignored violence or sought to explain it away. Their reluctance to condemn has resulted in a failure to investigate such behaviour in depth, or consider the participants' own understanding of what they are doing. In his essay Tuzin argues that the Ilahita Arapesh are themselves disquieted by the ritual acts they must perform. There are indications in the other essays too (Newman and Boyd, p. 283) of concern that the violence may get out of hand but the suffering is seen as essential (Poole. p. 138). An analogy that might have been drawn to illuminate the views of adults and elders in these societies is with surgerv performed on children in the West; the anaesthetic which accompanies the operation does not eliminate post-operative pain or psychological trauma but the surgery is deemed essential if children are to survive to adulthood.