Male Cults Revisited: The Politics of Blood Versus Semen

In this article I explore some major differences between male initiations in Melanesia that I ignored in my earlier study. In particular, I focus on the differential emphasis that was placed on blood-letting as against semeningesting as the key means whereby boys were believed to be transformed into men. In the case of the blood-letting rites men seemingly sought both to appropriate to themselves the positively valued capacity of women to give birth to children and to protect themselves from women's negative ability to cause either death or destruction through menstruation, sexual intercourse or witchcraft. By contrast, in the semeningesting rites the properties of women that the men seemed most concerned to appropriate focused on their capacities to receive semen in the act of sexual intercourse and to give milk in the nurturant context. Such major cult differences were, I suggest, directly associated with parallel differences in four inter-related sets of variables; the form of marital exchange (direct as against indirect), the predominant variety of social relations (centripetal as against centrifugal), the prevailing form of leadership (conservative as against entrepreneurial) and, finally and most importantly, differences in gender relations, especially concerning the nature of male dependency on female cooperation in attaining specifically male goals.     

REVIEW

The Ra Expeditions. By Thor Heyerdahl. (First Published 1971) Penguin Books, Vic. Revised edition 1972. Pp. 372. Price Aust. $2.10.     

Presidents as Supreme Court Advocates: Before and After the White House

Eight men who took the presidential oath also appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States as advocates. From Senator John Quincy Adams at the outset of the Marshall Court to Richard M. Nixon during the high-water mark of the Warren Court, future and past Presidents have argued before the Supreme Court on such varied and important topics as land scandals in the South, slavery at home and on the high seas, the authority of military commissions over civilians during the Civil War, international disputes as an aftermath of the Alaskan Purchase, and the sensitive intersection between the right to personal privacy and a free press. Here, briefly, are stories of men history knows as Presidents performing as appellate lawyers and oral advocates before the nation's highest court.     

Property Rights versus "Public Necessity": A Perspective on Emergency Powers and the Supreme Court

Chief Justice Earl Warren once wrote that a free government is continuously "on trial for its life." ¹ And never are the foundations of constitutional liberties more fragile than in periods of emergency, when government invokes extraordinary powers. Invariably, emergency powers involve the immediate curtailment of some rights; at their extreme in martial law, they can warrant an entire suspension of normal civilian governmental functions, as well as full suspension of due-process guarantees. ² Once the constitutional fabric has been stretched to accommodate urgent public necessity in such situations, moreover, restoration to its earlier condition is not automatic or inevitable. On the contrary, as Justice Robert Jackson presciently warned, once the Supreme Court validates as constitutional the abridgement of essential rights during an emergency—and especially when the Court does so in relation to "the vague, undefined and undefinable 'war power'"—any principle that is thus articulated to justify such emergency action "then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need." ³