The Island of Menstruating Men: Religion in Wogeo, New Guinea

Ian Hogbin belongs to anthropology's heroic age. He was a member of the brilliant between-the-wars generation that included Raymond Firth, Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Hortense Powdermaker, all of whom pioneered modern field research in the insular South Pacific. The Island of Menstruating Men was a path-breaking exploration of gender in Wogeo when first published. Today it remains an important full-length study of a Melanesian religion, examining it in relation to other facets of culture-mythology, beliefs about illness and death, growth and maturity, magic, social structure, and morality. It is an articulate, insightful examination of the meaning of tradition and of the integration of culture. It is also a captivating account of ethnocentrism and the Wogeo's justification for it, exemplifying, in miniature, what appears to be one of the great problems of the human species.Titles of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Rituals in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577661016) and Sillitoe-Sillitoe, Grass-Clearing Man: A Factional Ethnography of Life in the New Guinea Highlands (ISBN 9781577666011).