n 2006, Gilbert Herdt updated his studies of the Sambia with the publication of The Sambia: Ritual, Sexuality, and Change in Papua New Guinea. He noted that a sexual revolution had overtaken the Sambia in the previous decade. "To go from absolute gender segregation and arranged marriages, with universal ritual initiation that controlled sexual and gender development and imposed the radical practice of boy-insemination, to abandoning initiation, seeing adolescent boys and girls kiss and hold hands in public, arranging their own marriages, and building square houses with one bed for the newlyweds, as the Sambia have done, is revolutionary."[8]
In the 1970s, the system of collective initiations known as the mokeiyu was curtailed. By the end of the 1980s, the ritual of boy-insemination had been abandoned (although certain other traditional teachings, such as nose-bleeding rituals, still continued.) Beginning in the 1990s, a new form of social sexuality appeared, known as the "luv" marriage, where romantic love became the basis for choosing a mate.[8]
Several factors contributed to the slow decline and then abandonment of the traditional rituals, followed by the revolutionary changes to sexual expression among the Sambia. In the 1960s, the Australian government's forced cessation of perpetual warfare between tribes in Papua New Guinea eventually led to a significant altering of male identity and the warrior culture that had long sustained their initiation rituals. Immigration, beginning in the late 1960s, also contributed to change, as tribal members began to leave the highlands to work on coastal cocoa, copra, and rubber plantations. This exposed the Sambia to the outside world, with its fast food, alcohol, sex with female prostitutes, western goods, and money. With the passage of time, it would contribute to the ideas of romance and marriage as a team of equals, rather than the traditional hierarchical antagonistic model.[8]
Schools - both governmental and missionary - were introduced into the Sambia Valley in the 1970s. Rather quickly, Herdt reports, “schools began to displace initiation as a primary means for gaining access to valued positions within the expanding society.” Education was co-ed, which not only increased women's social standing, but for the first time in Sambia society, the genders were mixed in an intimate space prior to marriage. Increasing contact with the outside world led to the appearance of material goods, which undermined the local economy and traditional masculinity, no longer achieved through the production of local goods (such as bows and arrows).[8]
Christian missions also factored in the change through their introduction of schools, material goods, and foreign foods. Missionaries preached against the shamans, the practice of polygyny, and the boy initiations, shaming Sambia elders who still advocated traditional activities. Seventh-day Adventist missionaries had a strong presence among the Sambia, introducing Levitical dietary restrictions, which dramatically altered the indigenous diet, since pigs and opossum – “unclean animals” – were no longer hunted. Thus, one of the major social and political activities for Sambia men – hunting – was abolished among the Adventist converts.[8]
All of these developments contributed to the sexual revolution among the Sambia. The cessation of war, changes in opportunities for women via schooling, exposure to the outside world with its ideas (via immigration, new government, and missionaries), along with the changes in economy in trade goods, food procurement, and the cessation of one social activity (hunting) with substitution of a new industry (coffee trees) which changed traditional roles (men: hunting, women: agriculture) so that men and women now became co-workers together in their gardens (perhaps “the first time in Sambia history that gender cooperation has been attempted”). All of this set the stage for the rise in the 1990s of the “Luv Marriage,” where young people chose their own mates, without any need to go through forced separation from family and obligatory homoerotic initiations (which had died out in the 1980s) or to have parents arrange marriages.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambia_people
