Male Pregnancy and the Reduction of Sexual Opposition in a New Guinea Highlands Society

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Abstract
Sexual classification can be by any of a number of different criteria, providing the possibility of competing forms of sexual classification within a single society. Pollution, where it is viewed as sexual in origin, provides one such possible alternate criterion for sexual differentiation. In relation to social categories, any opposition sets up tensions. Male-female is no exception. Individuals find the categories to which they are assigned restrictive. Efforts are made to reduce the distance and differences between categories in the interest of reducing the discomfort of being consigned to only one. In this light the Hua male''s rather bizarre interpretation of kwashiorkor as male pregnancy and bloodletting as male menstruation may be understood. It is easy to interpret the male consumption of food identified with the soft, juicy, fast-growing fertility of women and the female consumption of foods identified with the hard, dry, slow growing infertility of males in this same light. The kakora-figapa distinction, being an alternate opposition to male-female, provides a similar release from confinement and tensions. Implicit in the kakora-figapa distinction is a theory of sex as transmittable. To be female is to be polluted, to be male is to be pure. A person''s gender does not lie locked in the genitals but can flow and change with contact as substances seep into and out of the body. Gender is not an immutable state but a dynamic flow. Such a view permits most persons to experience both genders before they die. All New Guinea Highlands ethnographies describe societies in which an extreme opposition is made between male and female. This opposition is made with tremendous force among the Hua as well. It is precisely because it is made with such force that these rather extreme attempts at elimination of physiological differences and reversals of social position exist. The more dramatically or rigidly a category distinction is drawn, the more alternate distinctions can be found through which the tensions and dissatisfactions set up by the original are released.

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