The Voice of The Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion

The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion by Donald F. Tuzin is a landmark ethnography of the Ilahita Arapesh of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the Tambaran men’s cult—the dominant symbolic system shaping social and religious life in the East Sepik region. For the Arapesh, the Tambaran is not simply a set of rituals or spirits: it personifies tradition itself, integrating collective identity, authority, and cosmology into a single, mystically compelling framew...