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Initiation As Experience, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

In honor of Kenneth E. Read, Terence Hays' essays of The New Guinea Highlands and their culture are a memory brought to the surface by Read's descriptive imagery of his experience witnessing a boy named Asemo who entered into manhood. Hays remembers his own experience of observing a right of passage in Ndumba in 1971 of five young boys. Hays infers the level of importance this culture puts on rights of passage and the shift in behavior exuded by those who are terrorized by the act. Hays remarks how what he saw before him were five very different boys from …