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 men's cult--the dominant symbolic system shaping social and religious life in the East Sepik region. For the Arapesh, the Tambaran is not simply a set of rituals or spirits: it personifies tradition itself, integrating collective identity, authority, and cosmology into a single, mystically compelling framework.
Structured around the initiation sequence that spans a man's lifetime, Tuzin's study traces how ritual secrecy, myth, and symbolism in art and architecture define masculine power, social control, and ethical life in the village. He 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 commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
