The Voice of The Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion

The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion by Donald F. Tuzin is a landmark ethnography of the Ilahita Arapesh of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the Tambaran mens cult and its role in shaping social and religious life. It explores the paradox of a cult that commands cultural significance while systematically excluding and terrorizing women and children, and analyzes how Arapesh communities adapted and reinterpreted imported ritual forms to fit their own mythological understandings. The book provides a full-scale portrait of the cult in its local setting and complements Tuzins earlier study of Ilahita social organization by adding the dimension of cultural meaning to structures of reciprocity and dual organization.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 378 pages
Publication date: 13 May 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion by Donald F. Tuzin is a groundbreaking ethnography of the Ilahita Arapesh of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the Tambaran men's cult—the dominant symbolic system shaping social and religious life in the East Sepik region. For the Arapesh, the Tambaran is not merely a set of rituals or spirits; it embodies tradition itself, integrating collective identity, authority, and cosmology into a single, mystically compelling framework.

The book is structured around the initiation sequence that spans a man's lifetime, tracing how ritual secrecy, myth, and symbolism in art and architecture define masculine power, social control, and ethical life in the village. Tuzin confronts the paradox of a cult that commands supreme cultural significance while systematically excluding and terrorizing women and children, probing the nuanced politics of belief and the divisions it produces among men as well as between genders. Drawing on earlier anthropological work on diffusion, Tuzin also analyzes how Arapesh communities adapted and reinterpreted imported ritual forms to fit their own mythological understandings.

By combining meticulous description of ceremonies and myths with theoretical reflection on symbolism, secrecy, and social integration, The Voice of the Tambaran provides the first full-scale portrait of the cult in its local setting. It complements Tuzin's earlier study of Ilahita social organization by adding the dimension of cultural meaning to structures of reciprocity and dual organization. Richly detailed and analytically ambitious, the book is essential reading for scholars of religion, Melanesian ethnography, and the anthropology of cultural change.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which celebrates the legacy of anthropological fieldwork by publishing previously unpublished or out-of-print works.

Weight: 544g
Dimension: 234 x 156 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520308107