"In this powerful and unprecedented book, Gilbert Herdt exposes the secrecy of Melanesian male cults and sharpens his insights to reveal breathtaking and provocative secrecies at the heart of anthropologists' own practice. Ranging with scholarly mastery from discussions of anthropological history - including the secret cult practices of Lewis Henry Morgan - to a range of Melanesian societies, social theorists, and processes of culture change, Herdt ultimately exposes the ideologies of freedom and neo-liberal democracy that prevent us from adequately understanding the conflicted and conditional masculinities that attended secret societies in world areas such as Melanesia. This book will be of intense interest to those interested in sex and gender, religion, social change, and the unexamined identities of researchers own subject positions - in addition to those interested in the Melanesian societies and their relation to the history of anthropology. This is a wonderfully fertile and truly wide-ranging work."--Bruce M. Knauft, Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology, Emory University
