What did you do when you "became a man"? - No, I don't mean losing your virginity, though in many cultures, coming of age is intricately linked to sexual maturity. Did you celebrate by buying a Lotto ticket? Drink a yard glass full of beer? Become a Bar Mitsvah?
Well, weaklings, be thankful that you didn't grow up as an aborigine in Australia, in the Satere Mawé tribe in the Amazon, or in the Sepik River tribe of Papua New Guinea. As you can see below, some cultures take the rites of manhood very, very seriously.
Let's take a look at six of the Strangest Coming of Age Rituals in the World:
Walkabout
In the walkabout, adolescent Aborigine boys are sent to live in the wilderness for as long as six months. It's not just about camping - they go on a spiritual journey to trace their ancestor's songlines, which include navigation instructions and other ancient wisdoms encoded in songs.
Initiation with Bullet Ants
To become men in Amazon's Satere Mawé tribe, boys as young as twelve have to first wear ceremonial gloves filled with stinging bullet ants. They're called not bullet ants without a very good reason: being stung by these suckers feels very much like getting shot. Each ant packs neurotoxins that cause pain 30 times more agonizing than the sting of a common wasp.
And if you think that's bad enough, wearing the gloves once just doesn't cut it - you have to wear it for 10 minutes 20 times to become a man ...
Steve Backshall went through the ritual and described it in The Sunday Times:
I had suffered several hundred stings, and all of a sudden I went beyond pain. The sensations are not describable using simple words or metaphors, so I’ll just try to describe how I reacted.
First, I started wailing, then, once that had passed, the floodgates opened — deep, guttural sobbing, uncontrollable shaking, writhing, convulsing. You could see the neurotoxin kicking in, my muscles starting to palpitate, my eyelids becoming heavy and drooping, my lips going numb. I started to drool, and suddenly I wasn’t responding to anything at all. My legs wouldn’t hold me up, and our doctor was shouting at me to keep moving and not to give in to the urge to lie down and let it take me.
If there’d been a machete to hand, I’d have chopped off my arms to escape the pain. The other boys were in a similar state, but, interestingly, my host, who had been through the ritual before, seemed far more in control.
It took three hours for the pain to ease a little, and shortly after that I was back playing footie with the kids — though with a hand clasped in each armpit and a pause every few minutes to scream a bit. Twelve hours later, my hands were swollen up like inflated washing-up gloves. If I pressed a thumb into them, it took two minutes for the impression to disappear from the fluid-swollen flesh.
Adolescent Circumcision
You don't have to go to remote corners of the world to find this next ritual. Circumcision, the cutting of the foreskin of the penis, is practiced (or forced upon, depending on your perspective) by as many as 1 in 3 males in the world.
There is a lot of controversy about circumcising a male infant right after birth, but at least the baby is too young to remember the painful ordeal. Nay, as a coming of age ritual in Turkey (amongst other cultures), circumcision is practiced on adolescent boys.
The origin of circumcision is lost in time. The most commonly accepted version is that circumcision came from ancient Egyptians, who noticed that a snake is reborn after it sheds its skin. And what part of the male anatomy is closest to a snake? You got the general idea ...
British zoologist Desmond Morris noted in the documentary "The Human Sexes" (clip above) that "I can't help feeling that if male circumcision didn't exist today and someone tried to introduce it, they'd be arrested for child abuse. But it's traditional role as a major rite of passage is too entrenched to bow to common sense or objective medical opinion."
Land Diving
In the tiny South Pacific island of Pentecost, boys as young as five years old engage in a tradition that can be best described as the ancient precursor to modern day's bungee jumping.
In Naghol (N'gol) or the land diving ritual, suicidally brave men jump from makeshift rickety towers as high as 100 feet up in the air with vines tied around their ankles. Land diving is kind of a multipurpose ritual: a rite of passage, a way to appease the gods to ensure a good yam harvest, and now, a tourist attraction.
So it's like bungee jumping - big deal, you think. Well, actually it's a little bit more complicated than that. The whole point of land diving is that the jumper's head touch the ground. But obviously if you're the jumper, you'd want that to be as briefly done as possible: if your head doesn't touch the ground, then it'll be a bad yam harvest. If your head touch too much ground, the yam will be blessed but you'll die. The difference between a good jump and a fatal one is about 4 inches of vine. It's no surprise then, that a jumper is allowed to say anything he wants to anyone before the jump and not be held responsible for his words (Source).
Blood Initiation
In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Matausa tribesmen believe that in order for timid boys to become brave men and attract women, they have to expel the contaminating female blood that they got from their mothers during childbirth. In order to do that, they undergo a brutal bloodletting rituals that involve shoving canes down their throats, sharp reeds up their nostrils and plunging sharp arrows repeatedly into their tongues.
Crocodile Scars
If you think that the initiation rites above are bad, this one is downright horrifying: the crocodile scarification of the Sepik River tribe of Papua New Guinea (what is up with Papua New Guinea?!)
I'll leave the National Geographic video clip above to fill you in on the details (warning: it's TERRIFYING!), but suffice it to say it involves getting hundreds of razor cuts on their bodies to get that fashionable "crocodile skin" look.
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Obviously, the article above only covered coming of age rituals for men. This doesn't mean that women don't have it rough - many coming of age rituals for girls are very physically demanding, like Na'ii'ees or the Apache Sunrise Ceremony, or the downright horrible ones like the Sunna circumcision or female genital mutilation practiced in many parts of Africa.
I'd be the first to admit that the article is woefully incomplete (Cracked also has an article on this - I've taken steps not to repeat many of theirs) - if you know of any other strange coming of age rituals, please add them to the comment.
And why rabbis are permitted to perform it, and then suck on the penis until the blood flow stops is both extremely bizarre and dangerous.
Rather spoiled, in hindsight, by the barmaid asking if I wanted my usual.
@GQ
eth-no-cen-trism
–noun
1. Sociology. the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own ethnic group or culture.
2. a tendency to view alien groups or cultures from the perspective of one's own.
He wasn't meaning "ethnic" if that's what you were going on, which doesn't separate it from any other close cultural nonsense like the evangelical speaking on tongues. It was a perfectly legit remark.
Poor turk boys though... OUCH
You don't 'become' a bar mitzvah, you HAVE a bar mitzvah.
Technically, the term refers to the child who is coming of age, and it is strictly correct to refer to someone as "becoming a bar (or bat) mitzvah." However, the term is more commonly used to refer to the coming of age ceremony itself, and you are more likely to hear that someone is "having a bar mitzvah."
Get ye back to the sacred texts--I am Christian, so I will use the Bible's books for reference: In the 17th chapter of Genesis, God is speaking to Abraham about the covenant that He is making with Abraham and in verse 10, God says "This is the covenant that you and your descendants must keep: Each male among you must be circumcised." (New Living Translation). I am sure similar text is found in the Jewish Torah since Genesis is one of the shared books between Jews and Christians.
This is where Jews and Christians got the dictate to the circumcision tradition.
1. Have an 18th birthday. On that very day, you are considered by default to be an adult.
2. Commit a crime so heinous that a court will declare you an adult for trial.
I don't think anyone is actually that desperate, and they'd probably just hire a prostitute and get case of beer before considering option 2.
Oh absolutely, in special situations surgery is required, but most of it is no more then a fad like the craze when caesarian births were popular. Just saying, don't slice off a piece of your son unless necessary.
...and as someone who actually knows a fair bit about scarification I'd say the last example of these rites is the LEAST terrifying one of the bunch. Plus, it's voluntary and it looks good...as opposed to circumcision which is forced and a generally disgusting practice.
So we do it because God told us to. That may not be a good enough reason for some people.
You could have continued by pointing out that many of the Old Testament laws like circumcision were health-related. On a side note, that same story of Moses would also be where the Muslims got their circumcision ritual, IIRC.
And, the tradition of circumcision was essentially tossed out in New Testament times when the early Christians were trying to convince men to join. It wasn't exactly a selling feature of the religion.
The problem is, circumcisions are performed by traditional leaders in the most unsanitary conditions with unsterilised knives. The result is that every year several boys die from infections or associated complications...
At least there is a government-backed initiative to formalise (sterilise) the ceremony.
@ted: or rather, you do it because you believe God told you to. The baby it's done to believes no such thing.
@pwscott: there are no "infections caused by excessive foreskin". "Excessive" in this context means "more than some doctor (most probably with none) is comfortable with."
@FishBottleT: a foreskin is not only easy to keep clean, it's fun!
@Another Tim: "...if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing." Gal 5:2.
@sandalian: does it not occur to you that if you had not been circumcised, you would also think your "snake" looks great (and it would have 20,000 more specialised nerves)?
"I always wondered about the religious reasons for circumcision. If God didn’t want boy babies to have foreskins, surely He would be powerful enough to prevent them from being born with them…?"
It was a way to tell the believers from the non-believers.
My guess it was cir***cision. It's very finicky.
Some days I would gladly give up my job and my home to live remotely and experience a life away from technology. How many people out there do you think would actually survive that?
War, disease, and politics are not unique to Western cultures, moron. And healthcare and Bush are not parts of "culture", either. You experiencing a life away from technology would spare us your imbecilic tanturms.
Is that your technique on finding new friends at the health spa? Also, if that's all that matters, I'm glad to still have my foreskin.
"the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and "the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child"
not
"...Declaration of English-speaking Humans' Rights" or "...on the Rights of the Northern Hemisphere Child."
Cultural relativism means not sneering at people who eat locusts or burn camel feces for heating, it doesn't mean tolerating child labour, wife-burning or infant genital cutting.
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ugg classic cardy
why would you let someone cut you loike that !!!
these people are insane !!!!! (nuts!!!)
Malia- culture is the language, beleifs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are passed from one generation to the next. Culture over arches the structure of society and gives it meaning, personality, and texture.
As no human groups has never not had language, customs, traditions, and institution, culture is the universal, distictive characteristic of human society.
A full understanding of require an understanding of the normative system. Within this system are (in the American society) 15 core values which most people hold to, and which, to some extent or anther, all people within the society hold to. You should look them up some time.