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ÉTUDES ET ESSAIS

D’un sexe, l’autre

Le rituel du kava et la reproduction de l’identité masculine en Polynésie
Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon
p. 7-34

Abstracts

From One Sex to the Other: The Kava Ceremony and the Reproduction of Masculine Identity in Polynesia. – In Polynesia, the kava ceremony is associated with chieftaincies, titles, men. On the Tonga islands, myths of origin, which mention kava and the paramount chief, found the model of relations between chiefs, divinities and people on the idea of a debt. The ceremonial drink, a seminal substance that regenerates life-force, is the means of a double metamorphosis that duplicates the secular plant’s initial transformation into a sacred drink: the transfiguration of chiefs into divine ancestors, and of male subjects into “strong” men. As the place of transmission of an idealized virility, the kava ceremony could, like male initiation ceremonies in Melanesia, play the role of reproducing masculine identity. Given this activation of the social imagination around the production of masculinity in Polynesian and Melanesian cultures where the dichotomy between the sexes is expressed in rather different ways, might one dimension of this dichotomy not have its roots in a paradoxical experience, namely: the feminine origin of male subjects?

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References

Bibliographical reference

Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon, “D’un sexe, l’autre”L’Homme, 157 | 2001, 7-34.

Electronic reference

Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon, “D’un sexe, l’autre”L’Homme [Online], 157 | janvier-mars 2001, Online since 23 May 2007, connection on 16 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/95; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.95

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About the author

Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon

CNRS, Centre de recherche et de documentation sur l’Océanie, Maison Asie-Pacifique, Marseille.

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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