Social Complexity in the Making Quotes

“In a community where there is no hostility between men and women, and where the old men, far from resenting the waxing strength of the young men, find in it their greatest source of happiness, a cult that stresses hate and punishment is out of place.”
― Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea

“In some tribes, a woman who accidentally sees the tamberan [sic] is killed. The young boys are threatened with dire things that will happen to them at their initiation, and initiation becomes a sort of vicious hazing in which the older men revenge themselves upon recalcitrant boys and for the indignities that they themselves once suffered.”
― Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea

“These activities would have been nothing like the majestic cults of the Middle Sepik region, including those of the Abelam: great collective enterprises uniting large villages under the patronage of powerful ancestral spirits; men's cults of war and human sacrifice, predicated on ranked secrecy and female exclusion, generating magnificent, world-class works of ritual art and architecture.”
― Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea

“an individual's social identity is defined more by direct ties of blood, marriage, and residence, than by membership in an entity as abstract as a non-localized, corporate descent group, such as a clan. Corresponding with these social features, ritual life would have tended to be relatively small in scale: local “family” observances marking birth, puberty, marriage, and death; shamanic appeals to supernatural agencies to heal the sick or fertilize the plants and animals that are important to human life.”
― Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea

“Because of the small size of settlements, most marriages would have been contracted between separate communities; that is to say, marriage exchange would have been based on local exogamy.”
― Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea

“the advent of this other belief system, one that offered an alternative explanation for life and death, blessings and sufferings, augmented the condition of self-objectifìcation that had received a qualitative boost when the people of Ilahita first encountered white men.6 They say that it will not be a fish that discovers water. Christianity enabled the Ilahita to “discover” the Tambaran, in the sense that it suddenly rendered this institution less transparent, less taken-for-granted, to its adherents. The immediate effect of this confrontation was to intensify and formalize the Tambaran, clarifying and in a sense creating a tradition identified as non-White, non-Christian.”
― Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea

“We will see that identifying certain foods as resources in which self-sufficiency is prohibited is a fundamental logic for integrating Ilahita social relations, and we will encounter this logic again and again.”
― Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea

“we will see that Ilahita village until recently impressively resisted this tendency toward fragmentation and dispersal. How was this possible? We will see three factors at work: first, an accident of history and geography enabled its leaders to perceive the survival advantages of a large, defensible village; second, integrative structures emerging in step with increasing village population served to neutralize pressures that might otherwise have driven people apart; and, finally, the ideology of the men's cult exalted Ilahita village as a spiritual entity, conferring pride and security on those lucky enough to live there, and its rich ceremonialism made people want to be where the action was.”
― Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea