...Anthropologists regularly notice that New Guinea adults regularly switch into alters "It was as if someone had turned a switch in these people. We thought we knew them, and all of a sudden they were acting in ways we didn't understand at all"307 and often comment on the natives' own descriptions of what they call their "hidden self." It is widely recognized that the "public persona one presents to others is not only different from, but a deliberate mask of...the divided self..."308 But because anthropologists are unaware of the clinical literature on multiple selves they do not call them "alters," saying, "In probably all Melanesian cultures...there is not one 'true' self but rather many selves...[however] English lacks a [word for] dual or multiple self."309
Since Poole is the only anthropologist who actually interviews children about their inner life, his descriptions of their formation of alters during Bimin-Kuskusmin childhood are especially valuable. This tribe recognizes that people have hidden alternate personalities, called finiik and khaapkhabuurien, that "temporarily depart from the body to wander abroad...during dreams, illnesses, trances, and other forms of mystical experience."310 One five-year-old child, whose mother constantly masturbated him and whose father beat him, learned that his twin had been killed by his mother at birth and constructed an "imaginary unborn sibling" alter "as an adversary, scapegoat, surrogate, confidant, companion, friend, and twin."311 Like all multiples, he used this consoling alter to reduce his anxiety that his mother might kill him too. For instance, one day after he watched his father-who was a renowned killer and cannibal-beating his mother bloody, he "rushed shrieking frantically to his mother, and began caressing her abdomen. Then he began to press his mouth against her navel and to call to Fuut'tiin, his imaginary unborn sibling."312 When he was depressed, he took Poole into the forest and introduced him to his many alters, including a "person-in-the-stone" and "a red bird who told him secrets," and told him about being possessed by witch alters that appeared both in dreams and in waking life.313
Switching into alters is the basis for all political and religious behavior. New Guinea natives recognize this when they say things like "the khaapkhabuurien may sometimes become detached from the body in dreams, shadows, reflections, spirit possessions, trances, and illnesses..."314 When one becomes a sorcerer or witch, one enters a trance state and switches into persecutory alters-called "familiars"-termed the "key concept" for understanding New Guinea shamanistic religion.315 One of the main purposes of the various "initiation rituals" is to coordinate individual persecutory and victim alters, substituting shared group alters. When, for instance, young warriors go out on headhunting raids they practice switching as a group into killing alters through "special magic, which places the fighters in a trance-like state of dissociation in which they became capable of extreme, indiscriminate violence [which] made them capable of killing even their own wives and children..."316 They are often amnestic of being in their alter, and "speak of the aftermath of the fighting as a kind of re-awakening or recovery of their senses. They claim not even to have perceived the enemy corpses until the magic was removed and 'our eyes became clear again, and we saw all the fine men and women we had killed'."317 Thus they can be friendly to anthropologists at one moment and vicious warriors or cannibals the next, after switching into their murderous, devouring alters...
no subject
Since Poole is the only anthropologist who actually interviews children about their inner life, his descriptions of their formation of alters during Bimin-Kuskusmin childhood are especially valuable. This tribe recognizes that people have hidden alternate personalities, called finiik and khaapkhabuurien, that "temporarily depart from the body to wander abroad...during dreams, illnesses, trances, and other forms of mystical experience."310 One five-year-old child, whose mother constantly masturbated him and whose father beat him, learned that his twin had been killed by his mother at birth and constructed an "imaginary unborn sibling" alter "as an adversary, scapegoat, surrogate, confidant, companion, friend, and twin."311 Like all multiples, he used this consoling alter to reduce his anxiety that his mother might kill him too. For instance, one day after he watched his father-who was a renowned killer and cannibal-beating his mother bloody, he "rushed shrieking frantically to his mother, and began caressing her abdomen. Then he began to press his mouth against her navel and to call to Fuut'tiin, his imaginary unborn sibling."312 When he was depressed, he took Poole into the forest and introduced him to his many alters, including a "person-in-the-stone" and "a red bird who told him secrets," and told him about being possessed by witch alters that appeared both in dreams and in waking life.313
Switching into alters is the basis for all political and religious behavior. New Guinea natives recognize this when they say things like "the khaapkhabuurien may sometimes become detached from the body in dreams, shadows, reflections, spirit possessions, trances, and illnesses..."314 When one becomes a sorcerer or witch, one enters a trance state and switches into persecutory alters-called "familiars"-termed the "key concept" for understanding New Guinea shamanistic religion.315 One of the main purposes of the various "initiation rituals" is to coordinate individual persecutory and victim alters, substituting shared group alters. When, for instance, young warriors go out on headhunting raids they practice switching as a group into killing alters through "special magic, which places the fighters in a trance-like state of dissociation in which they became capable of extreme, indiscriminate violence [which] made them capable of killing even their own wives and children..."316 They are often amnestic of being in their alter, and "speak of the aftermath of the fighting as a kind of re-awakening or recovery of their senses. They claim not even to have perceived the enemy corpses until the magic was removed and 'our eyes became clear again, and we saw all the fine men and women we had killed'."317 Thus they can be friendly to anthropologists at one moment and vicious warriors or cannibals the next, after switching into their murderous, devouring alters...