Fattening the Women of Tabar
A bizarre ritual from the 1950s depicted in Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s 1962 “shocumentary” Mondo Cane:
On Tabar, an island in the Bismark archipelago off the coast of Papua New Guinea, women were locked up in wooden cages and fattened with tapioca in preparation for marriage to the local chief, Utame Alunda, “famous all over the islands for his physical power and his odd personality.” The fattening process could take months. Alunda’s favorite wife weighed in at 150 kilograms (331 pounds) and gave him 10 children. Alunda himself was a svelte 34 kilograms (75 pounds). We have no idea whether this practice continues today.
Update: There has been some debate about whether this video is a hoax or not. Alex Boese at the Museum of Hoaxes weighs in:
The maker of Mondo Cane was accused of staging footage, and taking customs wildly out of context, but most of the material was true. After all, there’s no shortage of bizarre human behaviors in the world. And, as far as I know, Melanesian culture did, in the past, include the custom of wife fattening. The BBC has an article about wife-fattening in current day Mauritania. Different part of the world, but same idea.
December 6th, 2006 at 11:08 am
I don’t buy it. Not only does it sound like a hoax, the Amazon plot synopsis includes this sentence: “Nominally a documentary, this film combines a number of unrelated sequences (both real and staged) — including a South Pacific “cargo cult”, the ritual slaughter of a bull, tribal dances and rituals, and a visit to an ornate pet cemetery — all focused on the lurid, sensational, and eccentric.
December 6th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
There’s a similar ritual in Nigeria to this day, but it’s more of a rite of passage and the girls choose whether or not to participate. There’s a documentary about it, called Monday’s Girls (imdb link - http://imdb.com/title/tt0132328/)… in both cases, I’d be hesitant to call it a “terrible practice”, though - imposing western perspectives on other cultures’ rituals is usually not the best way to interpret them.
December 6th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
Point taken.
December 6th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
Fucking savages.
December 6th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Cargo cults are real, though. This clip, I don’t know.
December 7th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
I don’t think this is a cargo cult video. Check out these links on cargo cults.
http://backwardscity.blogspot.com/2004/12/cargo-cults.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
There is a John Frum Movement.
http://enzo.gen.nz/jonfrum/
John Frum, if he ever existed at all, was a man who described himself as John-From-America.
This is the American god who is worshipped and ritualized in the primitive Jon Frum villages on the island of Tanna, in the Vanuatu archipelago, in the South Pacific. This is the god for whom the Jon Frummers have built crude airplane runways cut out of the forest, and jerry-rigged boat wharves along the rugged coastline.
Jon Frum might come by plane, he might come by sea. But he will bring lots and lots of material goods - refrigerators and stoves, generators, television sets, trucks and automobiles.”
above from
http://enzo.gen.nz/jonfrum/text009.html
December 9th, 2006 at 5:09 am
Tapioca isn’t too fattening, either. I mean, it has carbs, but not fat.=p
January 15th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
The explorer Richard Burton found in the Mountains of the Moon (today’s highlands of Rwanda?) a tribe that fattened their women to tremendous sizes on milk. “Corpulence is a beauty: girls are fattened to a vast bulk by drenches of curds.”
http://tinyurl.com/ymlb7m
March 8th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
The National Geographic channel sometimes shows a documentary called “Fat Fiancées” that shows this practice among the Hima people of Uganda. I always assumed it was a legacy from a time of food scarcity as it was in the US during the Depression–when it’s hard to afford food, someone with enough resources to become fat is successful and to be admired.
FTR, at least one woman interviewed on the program questioned the fattening process, noting that being fat seemed to make it harder to move around, do daily chores, etc.
March 8th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
The National Geographic channel sometimes shows a documentary called “Fat Fiancées” that shows this practice among the Hima people of Uganda (they used fresh milk, gallons per day). I always assumed it was a legacy from a time of poverty–when it’s hard to afford food, or when much physical labor is necessary to survive, someone with enough resources to become fat is successful and to be admired.
January 11th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
If these guys want fat wives, they ought to go to the US which appears to have an over-abundance.