The Long Road To Manhood

The Long Road To Manhood

While most people might think that becoming a man is much easier than becoming a woman, this is not true of all cultures around the world. According to Gilmore, becoming a man is problematic (1990). Accordingly, in some cultures, such as the Sambia of New Guinea and the Samburu tribe in Africa, becoming a man constitutes a tremendous amount of rituals. In other cultures, such as the Mundurucu tribe of Brazil, becoming a man, while a lot more complicated than becoming a woman, is not as ritualistic as the Sambia and the Samburu. In most of the societies discussed in class, the road to manhood involves such rituals as circumcision, blood letting, and living in seclusion for a period of several years.

The Samburu tribe of Africa force their boys to engage in several rituals, on their voyage to becoming men. “Samburu males must pass through a complicated series of age-sets and age-grades by which their growing maturity and responsibility as men in the light of these tribal values are publicly acknowledged” (Gilmore, 133:1990). The first initiation into manhood is the circumcision ceremony, which is preformed at the age of fourteen to fifteen. The young boys of the Samburu tribe are taken away from their mothers after the circumcision ceremony, and sent out onto their voyage to manhood. There are a series of different ceremonies that the boys must engage in before they are allowed to move onto the next level of their voyage. Their voyage ends after about twelve years, in which the boys have proved themselves as men, by successfully completing all the different tasks asked of them, they are allowed to take on wives and start their own families. However, the tests of manhood are not limited to the rituals in which the young boys engage in. Even after completing the rituals, a man must always prove his manhood to the others in the tribe. The Sambia, which are similar to the Samburu tribe in their manhood rituals, engage in a majority of the same acts in regards to the transforming young boys into men. However, while circumcision is a major role for the initiation into manhood, the Sambia believe that in order for a boy to start maturing as a male, he must swallow semen. The Sambia “are firmly convinced that manhood is an artificially induced stat that must be forcibly foisted onto hesitant young boys by ritual means” (Gilmore, 147: 1990).