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5 From Youth to Adult—Upe Initiation
5.1 General Background
The description of initiation rites in Rotokas will focus upon a custom peculiar to northern Bougainville Island and will be limited to that of the boys only. For the most part, there is little or no attention paid to young
girls becoming adults. In some areas of the Aita, Rotokas, and Keriaka, young girls will wear a necklace of leaves and vines from a bush believed to make them grow big and be fertile. These are called gavegave in
Rotokas. A girl is considered a young woman when “her milk has fallen” or when there has been a significant development of the breasts.
Not only is the Upe initiation custom peculiar to the young boys, but also only to the male youth of the Rotokas, Aita, Keriaka, Kunua, and mountain districts of Tinputz. Originally, it extended from Buka, in the
north, to Eivo, about mid-way down the length of the main island. When our family first went to the Rotokas area 1965, there were no Upe hats to be seen anywhere. At
that time, the details given about this most interesting custom were all related to past events. An older Upe man, who had built his house and lived at the original site of Togarao village, had gone through the rites years
before. He had become an Upe group leader sometime prior to World War II and could authenticate descriptive materials given about this custom.
Our good friend, David A., said he had been too young to participate with the last group of initiates to wear the Upe. There are several reasons given for the cessation of the custom. One is that the school teachers
were unable to keep adequate class numbers, because the young schoolage boys were periodically taken away from the village as part of the Upe training. Another reason given is that the beliefs and customs taught during
the training period were counter to Christian teaching and that missionaries discouraged the continuation of the custom. It is said that the Keriaka customs were especially at odds with Christian teaching because of the
involvement of the tokarasi, a chief spirit being to whom evil conduct is attributed. This apparently was not the case in the Rotokas area, although the tokarasi is a part of the Rotokas belief system, too.
Although the above factors were no doubt also influencing the general attitude towards the Upe rites, a specific event occurred that triggered the end of this custom in Togarao and the surrounding villages. A man
who had been living in the initiate’s house at the time witnessed a fight between two of the Upe boys. The father of one of the boys came in to intercede between them. This caused another man to come in with the
purpose of defending the second boy. With the possibility of a fight breaking out, the father of the first boy declared, “There will be no more Upe hats here.” It so happened that this man was the councilor of the village,
which made the decision final.
From about 1940, the time of the event described above, the events of World War II, the post-war rebuilding of villages, and the realignment with the Australian administration took the attention of the Rotokas
people. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the Upe began to reappear again in the mountainous area of the Aita country. A visiting anthropologist sent a 35-mm slide to us of an Upe initiate in an Aita village which he had
taken in 1968. I was able to purchase an Upe hat in 1969.
It is interesting that back in July of 1969, before the Upe custom had begun to revive in the Rotokas area, our neighbor called to a young boy using the nickname, Upeto. Since there was not even a hint of the Upe in
this area at the time, most of the men standing within earshot laughed at this. A man of about thirty-three years of age, however, asked why they were laughing, since it should not have been considered ridiculous. It was not
long after that the Upe custom returned to Togarao village.
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Carved image tokarasi at singsing 1965 5.2 Origin and Purpose
There are two stories that explain how the Upe hat came into existence. In both stories, one can see why the strong taboo related to women and girls is associated with the hat.
In the first story, a man is walking about in the bush when he comes across a woman who has a Upe hat in her possession. It is not clear how she acquired the hat, but presumably she had made it herself. The man
covets the attractive hat, and when the woman will not give it up, he kills her and takes it. Later, he buries both the woman and the Upe hat to hide his guilt. In time, he retrieves the hat from the site, but in order to keep his
secret, no woman was allowed to view the Upe hat. This was expanded to the present day taboo system and all that it involves.
The second story concerns a married couple who went into the bush on a brief walk. The man decided that he would like to hunt opossum and told his wife to wait for him where she was. While he was away hunting,
she gathered some bamboo pieces, in order to construct a ring-like object for her finger. The article which she made was much like an Upe hat.
When the husband returned, he saw this thing which his wife had made. It caused a great deal of thought deep in his heart. But he put it aside while retaining the thought of the “ring.”
Later, he and his wife left the large village and went to live in a small hamlet where they had their first child, a boy. When the youngster was old enough, the father built a boy’s house for him to live in. At that time,
he reconstructed the ring-like object and put it on the boy’s head, the very first Upe hat. In time, visitors from the main village saw the hat on the boy’s head and admired it. They knew
instinctively that this was something very important; so, based on their knowledge of the significance of the hat, the custom was adopted and has developed into what it is today.
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A boy from Aita wearing a wooden hat with feathers. This is to show he is becoming a man. The wooden hat is an example of the first type of ‘Upe’ worn by boys before the other type being worn today was made.
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Upe Initiate with ceremonial hat—Rotokas
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Upe initiate with common hat—Bulistoro
These two stories explaining the origin of the Upe hat do not tell of the purpose or value of the initiation mechanism. However, one of the main features, “respect for the feminine sex” can be traced to the fact that the
woman possessed the initial hat in both stories. The fact that the custom includes a training period for young initiates when they become socially, mentally, and most of all physically “fit” is not obvious in the stories. In
some areas, this training period included learning the ways with a woman one of the reasons that missions discouraged the continuation of the custom. For the most part, however, the training centers around learning to
live in the bush, acquiring traditional skills such as the intricate weaving of bird nets, and the development of strong bodies, sometimes by supernatural means. We have seen large trees cut in two more than eight to ten
meters above ground by a single young initiate demonstrating his strength. It seemed that it could hardly have been done without supernatural assistance in some way. Any initiate was considered “ready” when he could
demonstrate his strength in this manner andor when he “passed” a special judging ceremony ooga vago.
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5.3 Construction of the Upe Hat
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