The Sambia Tribe Coming of Age Rituals

The Sambia Tribe Coming Of Age Ritual Children all over the world experience many different transitions from childhood to adulthood. The Sambia Tribe has a very strange coming of age ritual. This ritual was originated in Papua New Guinea, which is a country in Oceania. This is a ritual for male not female. It begins at the age of seven. There are six stages to this ritual. The ceremony lasts seven days. The first stage is when the boys are removed from their mothers and are put in a men’s cult. In the first stage a crowd of men take the boys in beside a river. A war leader picks out a sharp stick and sticks it deep inside the boy’s nostrils until he bleeds into a stream. Then an older man tells all the boys that they have to copulate with them orally so they can grow. Several elders say that boys are unable to mature into men unless they ingest semen. In the second stage the boys continue to take in as much semen as possible. The second stage has no great significant difference from the first initiation other than the reward that is given to the boys from the food taboo. In the third stage the boys shift from being inseminated to being inseminators. They are taken to certain trees where they are whipped and purified from any female contamination that could have taken place between the times that Estrada 2 they left. Another step in this initiation is to capture and kill an enemy warrior. After the warrior must ingest his semen, the semen would transfer to the enemy and slower and strengthen the dying enemy. The fourth stage occurs when he is married. Usually it is a bride chosen by his father or older brothers. They cannot start living together until after or short before her first menstrual period. He is told to protect himself from women’s genital odor. While having intercourse he must not penetrate too deeply because if it enters her urethra it might make him ill. Then they have to go to a ceremony where the youth is now exposed to