THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER FEMALE CANNIBALISM IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

In Papua New Guinea, gender identity has been described as strict segregation and oppression of women. However, cannibalism can give us new insights into a gender identity. Culture creates boundaries that imply division, though “sameness” is experienced. This social experience is projected onto the body. In the act of cannibalism, substance and power are exchanged. Gender identity reflects then an ideology, not a body function.

is first examined as a cultural and historical embodiment in symbols, myths, or rituals, or as the physical act itself. But rather than interpret the act of cannibalism as such, present a different image of gender identity in PNG that contrasts with the notion of fixed gender identity. Consequently, cannibalism as an actual observed behavior and the question of why. Some people practice cannibalism and some do not are of little interest. However, cannibalism's recounted past, present, or mythical existence in relation to female imagery is of concern. The question is, why are women in PNG believed to eat their dead kinsmen? 3 The answer I suggest is that cannibalism can be seen as a substance transfer or transformation between corpse and consumer. The symbolic cannibalistic image or the physical act then becomes a defining characteristic of what it means to be female or male in these societies. I do not intend to give an all-inclusive picture of cannibalism or gender images in PNG since I do not concentrate on a single society. Instead, an "ideal type" is demonstrated to compound a range of apparently related forms. Thus the phenomenon of female cannibalism provides a different understanding of gender imagery. In many ethnographies these images are described as extreme segregation of the sexes and· the subordination of women.
The main argument of this article is based on Gillian Gillison's account of the Gimi -speaking people in the Eastern Highlands Province of PNG. Her assertions resonate strongly in other Eastern Highlands and Central Highlands ethnographies as well. Gillison noted extreme forms of sexual segregation and antagonism plus an exclusive association of the act of cannibalism with women (1983: 33). The style of symbolism and the implications must be seen as more important than has formerly been appreciated. These male -female oppositions are connected with specific ideas about cannibalism and dominance in the Highlands, revolving around ideas of exchange of substance and power and the reproductive cycle.
Women are seen as uniquely nurturing and able to make children, plants, and pigs grow through an intense projection of themselves. Men are severely threatened by this. Male initiation cults serve to separate men from female potential. This danger is symbolized in a purely female substance: menstrual blood. If a man comes into contact with this substance -and especially if he eats it -, "his body (by implication equivalent to his penis), symbolically retraces the path travelled by what he ate, is taken back inside the female and (is) devoured, the eater 'places himself back inside the female' where he becomes the 'child,' her ingested 'food'" (Gillison 1980: 150).
However, menstrual blood carries a very ambivalent symbolic load: although it may be seen as the ultimate threat to men, it is also a powerful promoter of health and growth. Similar ambivalence is found in all kinds of female imagery. The act of cannibalism and male initiation rituals aim to resolve such ambiguity, yet in doing so they reveal it. "Fixed" male -female identities are, in fact, created. In the transfer of substances it becomes apparent, either through eating the male corpse or expelling female substances in the cult context, that substances of the opposite sex are present. The female cannibal becomes male by eating male substance (the male corpse), and at initiation the male initi-3 The term "women" includes uninitiated boys or low-status men (Gillison 1993: 70, f.), who were not seen as "male" but as belonging to the "women's houses." This means that they are looked on as men with too many feminine qualities. ate is defeminized, implying that female substances were initially present. 4 Through these acts, substances are manipulated. Ideas about substances are used to differentiate what would otherwise remain the same: ego and alter (see Levi-Strauss 1969). Harrison (1989) argues that for the Avatip, it is the threat of people's "secular equality" (sameness) to the permeable boundaries of their society that calls for "ritual hierarchy" (differentiation) in warfare. Such ritual hierarchy restores individual power and autonomy, whereas secular equality stands outside the context of warfare. Neither concept, though, should be understood as exclusive to a specific social group (i.e., men or women): both are present in everyone, male or female. The moment of action determines whether the individual responds with equality or hierarchy.
Gender imagery, then, might not be seen as exclusive, at least not for the PNG case under discussion. Fluctuation between ego and alter (between female and male imagery) might be the reality, a reality of permeable boundaries whose nature is apparently disguised. Distinctions between ego and alter seem to be necessary for identification. There is an attempt to regulate fluctuations between alter and ego to create a social reality that implies separation, despite an apparent sameness. Hertz (1973), in his essay titled "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand," argues that the slight biological preponderance of the right hand in no way justifies the fundamental polarity between left and right: it is the social experience that is impressed onto the physiological. This means that the social experience of separation finds its expression in the belief that men and women, biologically speaking, are absolutely different. Social experience thus includes, as Yanagisako and Collier (1987) rightly suggest, a fundamental inequality. As systems of values (with evaluation), social systems are systems of inequality. Assuming that it is difficult or impossible to see the social consequences arising from "natural" differences or to expect a "natural" world of equality, one has to explain, not why there is inequality, but rather how it is articulated. Gayle Rubin (1975) has suggested that societal inequalities can be understood as taboos against sameness. For women and men, this means taboos that exacerbate the biological differences between them and thereby create genders. Seen from the standpoint of nature and the diversity of its species, women and men are far closer to each other than either is to anything else.
In the case of PNG, I believe it is the manipulation of substances through cannibalism -symbolically, mythically, and perhaps even practically -that creates gender. The notion of gender is far more fluid than much Western imagery suggests, causing ambivalence to be more apparent.
In this article, the example of the Gimi given by Gillian Gillison is contrasted with specific idioms of masculinity. Notions of the body and its internal and external substances are connected to the idiom of cannibalism and to gender identity. Special consideration is given to the ultimate female substance, menstrual blood. What it means to be female, detached, or consumed is explored, and the account concludes with an examination of what it means to be the same and to be different in PNG, following Henrietta Moore's suggestions in her 1993 paper, "The Differences within and the Differences between." 4 The aim of ritual cannibalism is to have men entering the spirit world; women "bear" men into the ancestral world through their act of cannibalism and thus eat male corpses only.

Cannibalism: What Does It Represent?
This article examines female necrophagy of men. Although there are three main theories about cannibalism discussed in the literature, I do not deal with them at length because they have little or nothing to say about gender issues. The first is a utilitarian model in which cannibalism overcomes a protein deficiency in cases where animal protein is scarce, as with the ancient Aztecs, which is discussed by Michael Harner (1977) and Marvin Harris (1977). Derek Freeman (1964) gives another explanation: cannibalism, like warfare, can be seen as an act of innate human aggression. A third theory is advanced by Arens in his book "The Man-Eating Myth." Arens denies that cannibalism has been and continues to be a customary form of behavior in any society; cannibalism, he argues, is simply a statement about primitivity of the "other" (that is, women as "internal other") (Arens 1979).
Whether or not cannibalism actually does occur, the reported acts or beliefs can be seen as a form of ontology in which the bodies of consumer and consumed serve as mediums of cultural conception. Whatever the case may be, an interpretation at a metaphoric, symbolic, and ideological level is possible. Mortuary cannibalism by women can come to represent a general concept of gender identity throughout the Highlands of PNG.

Superior Female Powers
Because girls mature earlier than boys, in many PNG societies the female body is seen as endowed with superior biological powers (Herdt 1987: 170-172). This idea influences the cultural conception of male gender identity formation and has direct bearing on the practice of mortuary cannibalism by women. Women are seen as naturally equipped with all the necessary reproductive functions, whereas men have yet to achieve manhood. In the cannibal act, women and their male "meal" both share a reproductive task, but it is through women that the male corpse becomes reproductive. As Gillison (1980) reports, women eat the dead bodies of men in order to release their individual spirits, enabling them to join the collective body of ancestral spirits in the forest.
Reproduction as such can be understood as a way of transferring fertility and regenerating social identity -in other words, connecting ego and alter by using female particularity. The problem that arises is how ego best avoids becoming alter, drawing on resources that lead to a complete incorporation and possibly not to a social identity of its own. An extreme form of incorporation can be found in the idiom of cannibalism. In mortuary cannibalism, the dead and their social identity and procreative powers are dissolved into the ancestral world through their incorporation by women, becoming a male source of fertility.
In some societies pig feasts are held, where pork can be seen to represent the deceased. Both instances, pig feast and cannibalism, reflect a specific notion of life and death as a transaction: Death  (Strathern 1989: 128). Thus, cannibalism could be identified as a symbolic recognition of female procreative powers and a possible female autonomous status, whereas it is the exchange (of pigs) that represents male autonomous status. Sharing in consumption permeates the boundaries between ego and alter, between women and the deceased. Through the act of ritual exchange, it is men who fulfil the cultural act of differentiation.
Mortuary cannibalism, therefore, can be seen as a cultural system of symbolism and ritual, providing a model of, and for, specific behavior of men and women that seems to facilitate the proper flow of life -generating substances and power. It is a strong statement about the sources of life and death -as perceived in many societies of PNG, as well as a way to control them.

Male Control and Substance Exchange
The female body is understood as the source of biological life. Biological life has to be culturally created and regulated by controlling the flow of substances (i.e., food rules). Life, social identity, human transformation, and descent into the ancestral world are all connected to the female body. However, the proper flow of substances is regulated by men even though, as in the Gimi case, they claim cannibalism was invented by women. Women's perceived role in reproduction allows them access to vital substances (for example, to semen through intercourse or through the consumption of a corpse on its way to the ancestral world). Women's access to the substances is threatening, though, and must be curtailed by men so it does not become uncontrolled consumption, giving women autonomy over life and death. Men's task is to control the transfer of substance.
Transfer of substance includes external substance regulation of food prohibitions and transfer of bodily substance through interpersonal contact of mother and child or husband and wife. What differentiates men and women in PNG societies is the negative encoding of female substances, which are considered pollutants. Pollution goes back to menstrual blood and fertile fluids mirroring an uncontrolled incorporation by women and contaminating everything with which females come into contact, including garden products and children. In contrast, men's spirit is seen as positive fertilization of clan territory.
This opposition is reflected and reproduced in the act of mortuary cannibalism, which aims to control incorporation and the continuation of social life. "Food" consumption and its regulation creates social relationships (Meigs 1984), that is, a control of substance exchange. These acts of control distinguish alter from ego; and it is the domain of exchange that distinguishes men from women, separating what was joined through cannibalism. Women's autonomous consumption is transformed into an exchange in which cannibalism serves male ends.
Cannibalistic transfer of vital substance means that when women eat a dead man's body, internalizing his flesh, they are preparing his bones (the symbol of a man's essence) to return to the forest spirit world to fertilize nature (Gillison 1983). But such cannibalistic acts must always be controlled by men so that it does not turn into the asocial (female) principle described by Poole (1992) for the Tamam -Witch, who destroys the ritual importance of the male substance and transforms it into female substance. Bimin -Kuskusmin control the asocial female principle not only through a substitution of substance but also by adjusting bodily balances through proper intake of substance quantities.
The cannibalistic consumption of male parts of either male or female corpses is believed to strengthen the hard, strong, internal, ritually significant "male anatomy" of either men or women. Such acts also weaken the soft, weak, external, ritually unimportant "female anatomy" of persons of either sex. Conversely, the anthropophagic consumption of female parts weakens the "male anatomy" and strengthens the "female anatomy." Similarly, male or female foods strengthen male or female parts of the anatomy of humans, respectively… (Poole 1983: 9).

What Does Cannibalism Symbolize?
To understand the cultural logic behind these ideas of life, death, and reproduction is to understand what cannibalism represents. Substance exchange creates life, leads to death, and ultimately regenerates society. The idiom of exchange is seen as being monopolized by men in many PNG societies. It appears that although women's reproductive power is recognized in the notion of consumption, men in ritual exchange direct the reproductive energy of women to a "good" end for society.
The question remains "whether rituals reflect social relationships, or act so as to mask or deny them (?)" (Lindenbaum 1983: 99). In other words, is it ritual exchange carried out by men that induces the regeneration of the male corpse, or does it only mask women's autonomy in their act of consumption?

The Example of the Gimi
Gillison states that for the Gimi "exchange has a profoundly sexual origin and meaning; and, conversely, that the sexual relation is a transaction of which one party . . . is symbolically unaware, or 'still a child,' and, therefore, innocent of the disastrous outcome" (Gillison 1993: xv;emphasis in original). This outcome is the first gift, the firstborn child of ancient time, who is born as dead blood, menstrual blood. Gimi men try to reclaim the "child" that women stole from them. "When a man goes . . . to his wife to induce birth, to 'wake the child' so it does not 'stay asleep and die inside the mother,' he becomes the true husband by gently dislodging the child from the Moon's embrace -offering the Moon a second course in place of the child" (Gillison 1993: 215). 5 5 The Moon is the woman's primordial first husband; he "'throws his giant penis out of the sky' and copulates with (all women), making their blood flow. Both sexes refer to menstrual blood as 'dead womb blood' and as 'the same as a firstborn child,' suggesting that it signifies not only penetration by the moon but also a stillbirth, the lifeless residue of a child" (Gillison 1993: 11).

Exchange
Ritual transactions, understood in this way, exclude women from exchange, symbolizing their subordinate female sexual identity (Rubin 1975: 195). Men exchange, making life possible, to gain back the "child" stolen by women. Gillison sees in Gimi ritual and myth "the notion that death can be overcome or delayed if only it could be decided which sex invented it" (Gillison 1993: xviii).
"By satiating the Moon, the husband stops the cannibalism and induces between Moon and fetus the kind of soporific embrace a woman extends to nurtured objects. The one who mothers a man's unborn child, in this sense, is not his wife but the mythic father he divides and conquers inside her" (Gillison 1993: 220).

Autonomy
What is not as obvious at first glance is that Gimi men, in their struggle with women, grant them an equal status. Although it is the Moon they pacify with exchange, it is women who appear to be cannibals since the Moon is ·never seen, and they appear to own the flute because of their seamless union with the Moon (Gillison 1993: 346). This subtle recognition of women's possible autonomous status is expressed in men's fear that women could take back that which, in the symbolism of myth, once belonged to them. Sacred bamboo flutes, hidden from women in men's houses throughout the Eastern Highlands, are said to have been invented and once played by women. One woman was supremely independent and lived without a husband. One night her haunting music woke a small boy asleep in the men's house. The boy… stole her flute. Robbed of her "bird," the woman began to menstruate and lost her independence… If men fail to keep this secret, their myths warn, …women will "take back" the flutes and regain their ancient autonomy (Gillison 1993:5).
Besides the image of women's autonomy through the previous ownership of the flutes, it is their role in cultivation that gives women another kind of autonomy. Gimi believe that "the vigour and fruition of all nurtured life… depend upon exclusive attachment to, or symbolic incorporation by, individual female caretakers" (Gillison 1980: 147). New life can be created only if it is bound to women, and although is supposed to be men's semen alone that creates the fetus, the fact that women's nurturing ability is necessary for the continuation of social life contradicts men's dominance in social life. Men, therefore, have to reappropriate their dominance in order to prevent an overly intensive attachment of life to women, as this inhibits independent social life. Through sexual intercourse a man places a living part of himself (his semen) into a woman to create life; the woman, for her part, instead of giving life, kills this life, his potential child, by giving it back as menstrual blood. The male fear of menstrual blood is a fear of being devoured by women. It suggests that female and male have too great an affinity, are too easily brought together and unified. Menstrual blood originates inside women but is associated with the wounding penis/the retained "food"/the cannibal meal: it represents the destruction of the boundary between male and female, the end of men's separate existence in the world (Gillison 1980: 150).
Men's fear itself, as I argue above, exhibits women's potential to dominate social life.

Male Intervention
Mortuary cannibalism and menstrual blood annul the separation of women and men. Men's rituals (mainly initiation cults or marriage rituals) thus try to prevent the male body from becoming a permanent part of the female body, as this would mean they would no longer be separate, no longer alive. The way this has to be understood, however, is that without menstrual blood there would be no fertility. Female cannibalism plays on this notion: women must destroy so men can create life.
The flute might be seen as a symbolic penis, giving the first women an androgynous status. When men stole the flute, males and females became differentiated. Women, "wounded" in such a way, began to menstruate. In other words, menstruation was caused by the loss of the penis. However, with the penetration of another penis, the penis of woman's first husband, the Moon is said to cause menstrual flow as well. When a woman is penetrated by her husband she again loses something that has already been inside her. Her husband, then, takes control of her androgynous potential.
The relationship of women to cannibalism has to be understood as a reassessment of the male element women once possessed. By eating corpses, women internalize once again the stolen penis and feminize the dead man's body. 6 Ultimately men must intervene ritually, by feeding to women portions of pigs anatomically identical to the man's body and feeding to women identical female parts of their male "meal" (the pig is equated with the female domain). Such male intervention forces the spiritual essence of the man into the male ancestral world; he is "recycled." After the cannibalistic act, the dead man's bones are buried in the forest, and their dissolution "enriches his clan forest, giving rise to new life forms in the way semen engenders life in a woman's body" (Gillison 1993: 101). Gimi men then have to face an insoluble contradiction: though it is men who intervene into the absolute female attachment and detachment, so preventing self-destruction, they do not control life cycle processes. Men must go "inside" women to create life. Men may have created a "vessel" in the name of self-perpetuation, yet they never overcome the danger of being devoured, the danger of being "kept in."

Requisition
What does it mean to be female? An essential maleness is characterized by the secret of the flutes; to know about the flutes is to be a man. Why is it that men claim the flutes were originally female? I might suggest from the images presented that women are the original source of the flute/child/male body. Could it be that to be a man means to be originally female? Or is everything male?
Though men "use" women's procreative power and pansexually create themselves, the stealing of the flutes reasserts that women could easily gain this power back for themselves, showing that: "The combination of male and female characteristics in the male is the secret of male dominance; their combination in the female is men's doom … From this perspective, sexual antagonism is a conflict over who controls the indivisible power to reproduce the world, a power which resides in the body… The contested issue is whether women's power to "absorb the male" -to negate body boundaries through cannibalism and menstruation -surpasses men's ritual power to release the male spirit and to elevate it through the absorption of female elements" (Gillison 1980: 171;emphasis in original). Is it the male element (men's pig ritual) or the female element (women's consumption/incorporation) in the act of cannibalism that helps the dead men to transcend into the ancestral world?

Conflict and Cooperation
It seems that female cannibalism may be both an expression of conflict between men and women and an unspoken cooperation between them. 7 It becomes a merging of the sexes. Through cannibalism, women destroy sexual differentiation, whereas men, through the exchange of pig parts, separate the sexes again. With the descent into the ancestral world, men use male and female powers to create, whereas women are left with nothing. From this perspective, men presently own parthenogenetic abilities that in mystical times belonged to women (flutes). However, in the Gimi worldview it seems that these two images correspond and communicate with each other; gender identity, defined as the possession of reproductive power, is perceived as very unstable. Cannibalism is a way to alter gender identity. The possession of the flutes can never be final. Both symbolize the idea that everyday reality is, like sexual identity, alterable and perhaps even reversible (Gillison 1983: 50). Yanagisako and Collier (1987: 39) put it this way: "there are no 'facts,' biological or material, that have social consequences and cultural meanings, in and of themselves. Sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and parturition are cultural facts, whose form, consequences, and meanings are socially constructed in any society, as are mothering, fathering …and talking with the gods".
Further, sexual identity is in and of itself socially constructed. This is made clear if we recall the female imagery of mortuary cannibalism. Such images stress how, through substance transfers, one's sexual identity is at a specific moment in time temporarily defined.

Idioms of Masculinity
Elements of the male cult complex pervade many rituals in PNG. Describing the male cults conveniently illustrates ideas about male -female substances and pollution, gender antagonism, and separation. Specific and recurring themes may be found in these 7 Men claim cannibalism was entirely women's idea (Berndt 1962: 271, Lindenbaum 1979: 22, Gillison 1993. Gillison reports complaints by men about women who let their men rot, stating this as "striking contrast to men's direct statements and women's own burlesques, that cannibalism was not entirely 'women's idea' nor merely the result of women's loss of self-control" (Gillison 1993: 77), and that the cannibalistic act has to be seen as "part of the ritual, acting in unspoken collusion or fulfillment of men's demand" (Gillison 1993: 83, emphasis in original). cults, including sacred flutes, systematic deception, specific understandings of growth, maleness and pollution, revelation of cult secrets, bleeding rituals, and the association of men with the wild forest and hunting. They center around human procreation and lead to the notion that men are not a natural entity but are instead created.
One major theme of these cults is the exclusive separation of men and women, issuing from the notion of dangerous female fluids, substances, and powers. These notions are acted out in daily life through division of labor on the homestead and through the exclusively male politics of exchange.
Men have to avoid the deadly threat of female procreative powers (i.e., menstrual blood), although on the other hand these powers are projected onto male bodies -nose bleeding or penis bleeding 8for example, the possibility of male pregnancy (Meigs 1976, Newman andBoyd 1982) and by overtaking the nurturing role of women by male initiators feeding initiates their semen, which is equated with breast milk (Herdt 1987). Purification, nurturance, and instruction are given to initiates of different cults throughout PNG, along with the secret of the flutes. Their deceptive role toward women, and the uninitiated, and their revelation toward initiates subscribe an ultimate sense of separation between initiates in the cult houses and people from the "women's houses" (Poole 1982: 136). 9

Female Threat and the Creation of Manhood
In societies where male cults are found, the uninitiated boy is seen as feminized, too close to the mother. This threat of exclusive attachment to or symbolic incorporation by the mother has to be broken through initiation; otherwise boys will not grow and become strong. Men have to be strong to be warriors. They have to protect women and territory. Thus they have to create men to "celebrate and reinforce male dominance in the face of women's visible power to create and sustain life" (Keesing 1982: 23). "At the same time men's shared secrets of ritual contribute to the maintenance of a super community within which they conduct the politics of exchange and marriage, as well as warfare" (Keesing 1982: 24;emphasis in original). Central to male secrecy are bamboo flutes. The flutes, potent symbols of male identity, produce the conviction that they belonged to women in mystical times. Underlining this, Herdt describes the Sambia's perception of gender identity and role: "(M)en believe that a girl is born with all of the vital organs and fluids necessary for her to attain reproductive competence through "natural" maturation. This conviction is embodied in cultural perceptions of the girl's development with the sex assignment at birth… Underlying men's communications is a conviction that maleness, unlike femaleness, is not a biological given. It must be artificially induced through secret ritual … Girls possess a menstrual -blood organ, or tingu. Boys …are thought to possess an inactive tingu. They do possess, however, an-8 Nose bleeding or penis bleeding is a form of blood purging, getting rid of the contaminated feminized blood of the mother. Whitehead says that a collective substance riddance replaces a collective substance sharing as the modality for stating shared identity (Whitehead 1986: 87).
other organ -the kere-ku-kereku, or semen organ -that is thought to be the repository of semen, the very essence of maleness and masculinity; but this organ is not functional at birth, since it contains no semen naturally and can only store, never produce, any. Only oral insemination, men believe, can activate the boy's semen or an, thereby precipitating his push into adult reproductive competence : 54, f., emphasis in original). Ritual transformation is the code for expressing such bodily imagery, masculinity set against female substance. A prime fear among Sambia men is the belief that semen disappears into the female body, failing to create masculinity in men, opposing separation. Women, by "eating" men's semen, take away their strength and slowly kill them (Herdt 1987: 283). Initiation, therefore, brings about not just the separation of boys from the female world but also the polarization of the sexes, creating a distance that is seen as vital.
Through insemination, men create men and overcome their feminized substances. However, contact with women is perceived as threatening to their masculine identity. Men, who are thought to have a precariously inactive tingu, could become feminized again. Women could attain masculine attributes as well by taking in excess semen, above and beyond immediate reproductive needs. This would danger the creation of men, and by extension society, because it would divert semen from its proper end. Secrecy surrounding the Sambia cult hides the fact that men are unable to create semen by themselves. Bamboo flutes become the substitutor the nurturing mother, symbolizing the penis and glands penis (female penis) (Herdt 1987: 250). Female substances are denied; male substances are monopolized. Although both substances are needed to reproduce society, this fact remains hidden.

Domination
But why are men seen as the dominant sex? Godelier believes that for the Baruya the opposition between the sexes is an "opposition between two realities each of which has its limits in the positive characteristics of the other in the positive characteristics that it itself lacks but fuat collaborate with those that it does possess in order to produce a result beneficial to both. Looked at in this light, male domination is no longer a reflection of the superiority of one group that possesses power over another that does not" (Godelier 1986: 65).
Men reduce the powers held by women to mystical times, but nevertheless they must simultaneously recognize female powers as part of themselves. In sum, one can conclude that idioms of masculinity are characterized by an "ideology" of male dominance over women defining social values, creating men and women. Men, then, create the difference between maleness and femaleness.
On closer examination, though, one can sense that men do not perceive themselves as masculine except in the context of the cult; the female "threat," the fear of not being so different from women and the fear of femaleness as more basic than maleness, is constantly present. 10 This conclusion is drawn substantively from Herdt's Sambia case but 10 Added to this, comes the belief that to replenish semen "lost" through their fellatio in-can be inferred from other accounts as well. The attachment of children to their mothers is seen to feminize them. This "spell" has to be broken to create future warriors. "Men, as total men, are not born in New Guinea; they are ritually constructed. Only commonality of cult makes for commonality of manhood" (Whitehead 1986: 88). What the cults are producing is an allocation of substances (female/male), creating identity and separation.

Male Violence
What is startling is how men are able to take over female reproductive power despite the fact of women's gestation. The answer from Collier and Rosaldo would be that it is the creation of social bonds that are taken over by men and placed beyond the realm of biological reproduction (Collier and Rosaldo 1992). Collier and Rosaldo connect this takeover to male violence, perceived as vital for defense and meat supply. Women are excluded from these domains and do not get the opportunity to offer, in practice or symbolically, a contractual exchange of female domestic support (cooked food, sex, gardening, child production) for male products (particularly defense and meat). Their domestic labor, gardening and child rearing, vital for survival of society, do not create social bonds but are instead limited to the household.
Male fertility becomes connected to male violence. Exchange and violence, two different expressions of the same concept of social bonds (Harrison 1989), are central to many PNG societies. In exchange, as in violence, power is distributed and creates difference. The mystical theft creates an either -or situation as well. The result is that procreative abilities cannot be held by both sexes at the same time. Manipulation of substance through male cults achieves this goal.

Body and Substance Inequality and Domination
The relations I have described between men and women in PNG do not necessarily have to be seen as relationships of domination and inferiority. Marilyn Strathern notes in her conclusion: "Where agency is linked to subjectivity, it implies a self-evident relationship between persons and what they do, and the kinds of control persons exercise over the natural world and over one another. That such relations constantly reduce to a hierarchical form makes it difficult to conceptualise 'difference' in a non-hierarchical manner… since we hold that to concentrate on differences between persons is to put some at an advantage or disadvantage in respect of others" : 280, f.). Strathern suggests that it is absurd to believe that differences must to be perceived as hierarchical. Difference does not have to mean inequality. Gender might not be a form seminations men have to take control of the aerial root, of female iku trees whose white sap is believed to replace lost semen. However, this white sap is also seen as female breast milk (Herdt 1987: 111). of symbolism explaining differences. If so, we should ask to what does gender really refer.

Gendered Substance and Value Transfer
The male cults show that female fertility does not have to be connected to women, and that mortuary cannibalism can be seen as a system of gendered substance transfer rather than as revenge or recycling due to men's domination and use of women as a vessel. "In so far as women embody values, men's deployment of these values involves their constructing and entering into concrete relations with women themselves" (Strathern 1990: 287). These values are not female values but constructions of separation. Fertility and sexuality become split and are assigned negative and positive value, the former working for the latter against society, a distinction that is ultimately independent of gender. 11 Women's association with death and mortuary cannibalism seems related to values thought of as female attributes that can be detached and transferred. That they are not male attributes derives, I believe, from the monopoly of exchange by men. Men give and take, but women receive.
It seems, nevertheless, that in PNG societies, gender identity is not exclusive for either sex but rather a combination-separation flux, a constant process. Relationships are acted out through flows of substances; the flow of substance from mother to child is counteracted by men through exchange (Strathern 1990: 25). This could mean for notions like kinship that substances that can be detached can also be brought together to create something else -meaning that shared food or shared territory leads to shared substances (Lindenbaum 1979: 49).

Pollution
Food is used as a metaphor of incorporation: food = substance = kinship/territory = exchange; sharing of food creates social bonds and society. Strict residential segregation or expulsions of female substances through nose bleeding and restrictions on foods demonstrate a fear of female substances, leading to an ideology of female pollution. Langness suggests that such antagonism between the sexes is intimately related to the warfare endemic to the PNG Highlands (Langness 1967). To achieve the necessary solidarity, males need to be separated, physically and emotionally, from women. The ideology of pollution is an expression of this underlying need for male solidarity. However, as a source of fertility, female substances are needed in nutrition (food/pigs) and procreation and are praised and incorporated into male cults, thus recognizing male dependency on women (Buchbinder andRappaport 1976, Lindenbaum 1976).

11
Sexuality through its individual status of desire falls out of the moral realm of society. Sexuality does not work for society and becomes connected with the death of society (Bloch and Parry 1982: 24).

Food and Sexual Identity
The relationship between food and "substances" has to be seen in their transfer; consumption stands for social bonds (Douglas 1991). For the Hua, Meigs describes distinctions in food rules that mirror age, sex, ritual, and reproductive status and carry some of the powers of the persons who cultivate or prepare food for eating. Like blood, breath, hair, sweat, fingernails, feces, urine, footprints, and shadows, food also is viewed as an effusion of the body, more specifically of its labor (Meigs 1984: 20). As a person's status changes, so too do food rules. For a woman, this means that her polluting status changes; a man's cycle differs in his vulnerability to women. Food rules adapt to these circumstances. Food qualities promote effects that are used to regulate pollution and vulnerability of women and men. Food may thus symbolize a person or an object. The food producer is identified with the food he or she produces. The consumer is identified with the food he or she consumes, a fact that gives food social value.
For the Hua, food represents sexual relations (Meigs 1984: 31-44). Their understanding of food supports the general association of PNG societies with male domination. Food transfer reflects social values: the sexual act is viewed as negative, for it is seen as destructive to male vitality, whereas feeding is seen as the opposite of sex and as positive, thereby strengthening men. Both these acts are incorporation of substances. Sexual intercourse and feeding are associated not only with moral values but also with gender identities. Feeding is seen as a female act, sexual intercourse as a male act, implying that it is the female act that is morally superior. It is in the context of male ritual and taboo where the sexual act is looked on as a feeding act and the feeding act is seen as sexual, also reversing the values attributed to the acts. As Meigs indicates: "Body acts and relationships are made to mirror the preferred male conception of social acts and relationships. The physical or natural order has been reversed to bring it in line with the social order… This reversal, like the cult of the secret flutes, the ritual expulsion of female substance, the residential segregation of the sexes, and the exclusive male ownership of land and pigs, impresses a conception of women as inferior… Such a conception is neither fully believed by the males nor fully accepted by the females. It exists as one of several ways of thinking about male-female relations. It is one in a set of competing ideologies… (Meigs 1984: 43, f.)

Body Substance and Its Gender Identification
The theft of the flutes presents another positive picture of women holding the original, superior powers. The picture Herdt gives from the Sambia depicts an understanding of human physiology where a male and female resemble each other more than they differ. The possibility of male pregnancy, the imitation of menstruation by men, and the growth stimulus provided by secretly eating female foods (Meigs 1984: 52-59) all represent a less rigid male image of women and gender in general (Strathem 1990: 100). It is possible that women, as ritual specialists or as postmenopausal women, take on male attributes (Meigs 1984: 67, Poole 1992 and that uninitiated boys are seen as feminized through their contact with female substances (Hays and Hays 1982: 221).
Pollution becomes a gendered threat for men and women. It is not biology but behavior and substance that seem to determine gender. To be female or male means to be the same in extreme opposition; the opposition is socially affirmed, stating a difference in degree but not in kind (Meigs 1984: 97). To live together means to feed each other. Social interdependence and cohesion are expressed through this reality and the metaphor of cannibalism (Meigs 1984: 124). Female cannibalism symbolizes gender and gendered substance.

The Ultimate Female Substance Control
Before I return to the consumption aspect of cannibalism, I wish to draw an explicit connection between women and cannibals, both of whose menstrual and reproductive cycles are beyond the control of men, who nonetheless attempt, through ritual, to take control of them (by ritual nose bleeding, purification, food taboos, etc.) (Hays and Hays 1982: 233-235). Viewed from this perspective, the female aspect is ritually controlled by men, largely for their own benefit (as in the example of the Gimi). 12 The cannibal act comes to be viewed as a ritual regulation of male transcendence through women. In short, men use women as instruments in the movement of male characteristics (in spirit form) into the living world or into the ancestral world.

Revenge
Another way of interpreting the stealing and consuming of corpses by women is to see this action as an act of rebellion or an "expression of defiant autonomy," aimed at compensating for the mystical theft of the flutes and, with them, women's autonomy. Men's ritual and women's antisocial, uncontrollable aspect thus stand in opposition. This opposition, however, is one of degree and not of kind.

Menstrual Taboos?
The female aspect of life is symbolized by the ultimate female substance -menstrual blood. Through "the menstrual taboo" men try to control this female attribute. However, "In other cultures menstrual customs, rather than subordinating women to men fearful of them, provide women with the means of ensuring their own autonomy, influence, and social control" (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988: 7). First it seems that in many, if not most, societies, menstrual taboos restrict others more than the menstruating women themselves. Second, the isolation of menstruating women cannot be regarded unproblematically as a sign of their low status, for it may be seen as a rest time for these women and additionally may provide a context for women's solidarity (Rosaldo 1974: 38). Inherent in the assumption that menstrual taboos are created by men for their own benefit is the dubious implication that "men write the cultural script and that women simply and obediently recite their lines" (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988: 17). However, that menstrual blood is seen as polluting comes more from a recognition of the double nature -of the malefemale relationship. Menstruation challenges the male -dominated social order and defines a subgroup within this society, creating separation and, hence, a threat. As Buckley and Gottlieb indicate, "Menstrual blood is seen as polluting when it symbolically encodes an underlying social-structural ambiguity regarding women and things female. On the one hand a society may have a consciously developed ideology of male superiority but, on the other, it may also permit women access to at least some kinds of power, thereby in a sense undermining its own ideology of male dominance" (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988: 28, emphasis in original). For these Highland societies, I think one can argue that menstrual pollution is not of central concern as such, but the notion of substance transfer is. The transaction may be either positively or negatively valued, depending largely on the social relationships of the subjects involved in substance transfer.

Detachment, Consumption, and Being Female
In PNG, although it is men who exchange, it is women who consume (Sanday 1989: 81). The body becomes the focus of concern over boundaries that are all too easily shifted or obliterated altogether. The separation between ego and alter can never be fully achieved. This fluidity cannot be acknowledged in group ideologies that require a solidarity based on firm, fixed bonds (Josephides 1985: 26).

Boundaries
The cultures in PNG might differ in their method of creating the divisibility between ego and alter and between male and female. In all societies under discussion, however, it is exchange that creates and maintains boundaries for men: between great men and followers, between own clan members and other clan, and between men and women. The women's world seems to break down these boundaries with in-married wives (Josephides 1985: 64), mothers, and cannibals as consumers of men's clan territory, as consumers of men's reproductive fluids, and finally as consumers (quite literally) of their bodies. The ambiguity lies in the innate positive, reproductive character (as feeder, as mother of the clan, and as cannibal of transcendence) of consumption that parallels the fear of uncontrolled consumption and social breakdown.

Exchange/Consumption
To differentiate themselves from women and to create controlled boundaries, men use the idiom of exchange and warfare to exclude women. As such, women are indeed politically dominated by men, and to suggest otherwise would be to take great liberties with the data (Josephides 1985: 99). However, to simply note women's inferiority in male power games tells us little, if anything, about why women hold these subordinate statuses in the first place. We should investigate the nature of this inferiority, noting that there is nothing like universal women or universal men, who define specific spheres in society. Men can be seen as dominating the political -social sphere, yet we should not forget that gender distinctions may be drawn in many different ways.
One of these gender distinctions is between exchange and consumption. Men exchange, women consume; but women produce what men exchange, and men consume women's products in exchange. The social relationships in which both production and exchange take place are thus a matter of ideology and defining inequalities, not a matter of actual relationships. Gender thus becomes a means of defining subordination and domination.
The idioms of gender can be used cross-sexually, so that a man may be said to be womanish or a woman mannish, … (but) the fact is that men first create the values to which they then aspire. That is, they create a separate domain (of exchange, warfare, hunting, etc.) in which only they are active, and make this the political centre of group activities (Josephides 1985: 133, emphasis in original).
Women's powers are turned against them, since consumption and dependency are considered female. One reason for this might be that women do not define the group and as such do not act for the group. But gender embodies a broader definition -it mirrors ideas about life forces or general values where society is not solely a structured social world of men.

Power
The act of cannibalism can thus be seen as a state of power relations between the female and male elements of people, between two groups over the monopoly of power. For Josephides, this statement means that it is not necessarily men who come to stand for the "social." Society and its values are taken care of by women and are symbolized by the female world. Female cannibalism is an acting out of values and a means of transcending society. Women are associated with responsibility and social obligation. It is women who feed society and who carry the responsibility of the right substance transfer, although men control it. 13 For the Gimi, it is said that "the vigour and fruition of all nurtured life is believed to depend upon exclusive attachment to, or symbolic incorporation by, individual female caretakers" (Gillison 1980: 147). For Gimi men, females are the source of both life and nutrition; this leads Gimi men to attempt, at once, to sever their attachments to women, and to seek the complete attachment to women in the cannibalistic act of ritual regeneration. And here lies the picture of women creating and reproducing society by themselves, laying out the full social nature of women's involvement in societal affairs.
I am not arguing that this in any way obliterates the distinction made between men

13
Women have to be careful that after sexual encounters semen does not get into the hands of sorcerers or that they do not pollute men with menstrual blood or through the cannibalistic act (Poole 1992, Gillison 1993. and women. I simply want to point out that attempts to assign absolute standpoints to either sex may be misguided. The form of distinction between men and women should to be examined, not assumed.

Cooperation
Marilyn Strathern states that Hagen women are always held responsible for their actions (Strathern 1992). "In taking gender to be a metaphor for the conventional oppositions they impose upon the world, people establish forever these oppositions in their own bodies" (Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976: 33). However, these oppositions are not absolute in the context of social relationships. At any time women can dissociate themselves from the "handicap" of being female. Men, similarly, have to prove that they can utilize the potential of being male. Maleness and femaleness are not absolute idioms of personhood and as notions do not encompass absolute negative or positive values. In the act of cannibalism we cannot argue, therefore, that what males claim to dominate are female elements of extra-social nature. Cannibalism is a social action by both sexes. Gender stands for a different kind of agency and not for the power of a single-sexed group (Strathem 1990: 102).

Amalgamation
The theft of the flutes that allegedly deprived women of their autonomy and power can be seen as an open-ended argument about who has the power (Strathem 1990: 104). Pollution is largely about substance transfer, and not about the sexes endangering each other per se (Meigs 1984). Males and females differ "in terms of capacities to receive, transform, and transmit the very substances that form them" (Poole 1992: 136), and "thus, natural substances …may become a basis for reckoning not only gender, but also social relations that are related to gender differences" (Poole 1992: 118). Since substances are transferable, "this classification permits crossovers: a genitally male person may be classified as female through his contamination by female substances, and a genitally female person may be classified as male through the transfer of pollution out of her body" (Meigs 1984: 70, f.).

Detachment
When (or it) women eat dead men, then maleness or femaleness is seen as detachable. While persons are consuming, the flow of substances between them stands as a visible sign of the alternating conditions in which a person can be: the alternating conditions are the separation and containment of ego and alter. Mortuary cannibalism pictures the transference of "sexual attributes" exchanged between female and male persons -attached and detached.
Flutes and male corpses stand for maleness, but with female features. Men, in their cults and in the use of women in the cannibalistic act, create themselves as men. However, women are parthenogenetic as well: it is male ritual alone that prevents women from being autonomous. It is the giving of pigs to the cannibals, where men initiate exchange and ritually cooperate in the transformation of the dead man's body into clan fertility.
In general, men's fears about women "suggest that female and male have too great an affinity, are too easily brought together" (Gillison 1980: 150), though it is not a static relationship but the "separations in existence (self/other, male/female, human/animal, etc.) are repeatedly destroyed in order that they may be repeatedly created" (Gillison 1980: 171). The power over reproductive capacities is indivisible. The flute is a symbol of something that cannot be shared but possessed by only one sex or the other. Both flute and reproductive power become indivisible but transmissible (Gillison 1983: 49). Female cannibalism is the acting out of this concept -a cooperation between the sexes, expressed in the idioms of competing ideologies. Reproductive power is not shared but transferred from man to woman to create children and from women to men to create ancestral spirits. Women incorporate the male corpse, gaining reproductive power, while men exchange pigs so that women release male spirits, regaining reproductive power.

Affinity
Claims of encompassing maleness or femaleness are only transient and temporary reflections of power. To claim this power, men appropriate female reproductive powers (i.e., flutes), and women appropriate male corpses. As such, both sexes produce fertility for society, albeit in different forms. The presence of the other sex is a crucial part of these actions and is essential for their effectiveness. Distinctions must be made, but as with the Gimi, gender constructs build on the premise of androgyny. To produce is to separate (by gender), but for something to be separated it must be brought together. Women produce children for Gimi society while men become the spiritual essence for the general fertility of clan soil. However, according to the Gimi, women produce children only through men, as men become spirits only through women. It seems almost as though women and men were no more than variants of one another -a fleeting moment in the flux of time.

What It Means to Be the Same, What It Means to Be Different
By choosing a theme like female cannibalism, I focus on two interrelated topics: gender concepts and cultural categories. The case of mortuary cannibalism in PNG shows a very different concept of gender than is implied in many previous ethnographies. The gender concept becomes a cultural category, and the discourse about gender cannot be divided from the general discourse about female cannibalism.

Cannibalism
Female cannibalism mirrors an understanding of gender as not inclusively hierarchical. The strict segregation of the sexes and the reported oppression of women cannot simply be understood in terms of inequality. In the struggle for reproductive power, us-ing the idioms that are culturally prescribed, women incorporate what men exchange in the act of cannibalism, transferring substances and innate powers and cooperating in the mutual goal of transcendence.
Understanding the idiom of incorporation and hierarchy, as perceived in the act of cannibalism, allows an understanding of gender difference as a category of distinctions between female and male, between women's and men's worldviews, and between the roles of the sexes in society. This difference has to be understood, however, without the implication of hierarchy -an understanding of power exclusively belonging to one social group. Cannibalism comes to resolve the experienced ambivalence of gender identity for a moment in time, but only to reveal it again. Simultaneously, permeable boundaries are disguised and accounted for.

Sameness
Anthropological research has concentrated to a great extent on the variability of female and male concepts cross-culturally, defining not just differences between cultures but between men and women as well. I would suggest that perhaps too little attention has been paid to the concept of sameness (see Moore 1993). In contrast to other living things, men and women are surprisingly similar. Why should there be such an uncrossable divide, as is often implied? Of course, this leaves some questions open: Is being similar equivalent to being the same? Would this imply, on a hierarchical level, equality? Is gender difference the foremost form of differentiation?
This discussion of female cannibalism tries to present an image of gender that cannot be understood in terms of fixity. Gender for many societies in PNG is not fixed and is determined not so much by the physiology of the human body as by the transfer of substances. Gender is not constructed on the biology of the human body but is the same as the actual act of cannibalism: a cultural conception of the flow of life. "Difference" then becomes a social construction and is not derived from biological difference. One then has to ask, where does the notion of difference arise, and how and why is it constructed in society? As I argue, the differentiation is actually between alter and ego as being the most fundamental human principle. To define oneself, one has to separate oneself from the "other." This differentiation creates the inequality discussed by Collier and Yanagisako (1987). However, to separate, one has to first be "the same." This dilemma is recognized in the imagery of gender and its ritual outcome of cannibalism, pointing toward the apparent ambivalence of gender.
The PNG data seem to suggest that the human body is nothing more than culturally sexed, given culturally defined differences. These differences are the outcome of a cultural discourse. They are not innate. Sexual difference thus becomes variable. It cannot be assumed that it is biology that defines such universal notions of femaleness and maleness. 14 I am not arguing that there is no difference physiologically speaking between men's and women's bodies or their reproductive abilities. I am instead arguing about the social construction of such differences, that is, how such differences are perceived and 14 I point out that the reason for a "preponderance" of male dominance might lie in the male monopoly of exchange framed by violence, warfare, and hunting. elaborated into a specific worldview. A worldview that is familiar with the notion of cannibalism and a specific female involvement in this act bears the perception of gendered substance transfer. The cosmologies in PNG perceive life and death as a flow of substances, acted out in the imagery of cannibalism. This is reflected in how people understand their maleness or femaleness. The body itself is sexed through its intake and expulsion of life substance. The body therefore does represent one sex as such. The difference between sex and gender in the anthropological discourse becomes obsolete. Physiological sex itself can no longer be divided from the culturally constructed gender. A body's physical functions can be understood only through gender constructs of a specific society. Sexual difference reflects ideology rather than body functions. Sameness and difference become one. No single concept of gender can be offered within one society or between different cultures. Men and women, perceived as different, come to share personhood. However, must this personhood always be gendered? Body, substances, and social acts are gendered, but do they form personhood?

Fluctuation
The account I present of female cannibalism in PNG demonstrates that personhood does not have to exhibit a single sexual identity. Sexual identity bears the imprint of flowing gendered substances, which determine the momentary sexual status of a person, its autonomy and agency. It has to be considered, however, that the proportion of gendered (that is, male or female) substance determines the sexual status of a person, meaning the quantity of a substance defines the sexual status. That does not single out the presence of the opposite gendered substance, leaving the person with an ambiguous gender status. Control over substance transfer, then, is the only way to solidify, if only temporarily, gender identity. It is through this control, a control exercised by men through their monopoly of exchange, that men and women in PNG are seen as extremely segregated. 15 The separation is the outcome of recognizing the great affinity of people. This affinity is disguised by holding exclusive power, a power that actually fluctuates. It is a power that, though indivisible, is still transmissible (Gillison 1983: 49).
Difference, therefore, is not naturally attached to bodies, but sameness is detached culturally.