Man's World

Out of the Santa Marta Mountains, whose 19,000-ft. snow peaks are a breathtaking sight to tourists on Caribbean cruise ships, an Austrian-born anthropologist brought news of an Indian tribe so cut off that until recently its 2,000 members thought Spanish kings still ruled Colombia. The scientist is Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, 40, working with a grant from New York's Wenner-Gren Foundation. The Indians are the Kogis, perhaps the most remarkable community of aborigines still flourishing on the American continents.

Kogi men, says Reichel-Dolmatoff, loathe sex and shrink from it, an attitude they learn as boys from priests who spend nine years in darkness studying the tribal rituals. The priests, called mamas, teach that women are evil--but a necessary evil, because they provide men with food. Thus embittered against women, boys are initiated into a reluctant sexual role by a 60 year-old hag, and then sent out to seek wives.

Since a woman's place in this man's world is to grow and prepare his food, a Kogi man's idea of a good catch is a lass with a workhorse physique. He helps in the fields (sugar cane, turnips, potatoes) as little as he can. He and his wife live in separate conical houses. Daily, the woman cooks a thin soup of vegetables, sets it on a terrace outside her house, where her husband comes to eat. Nights, she lures him to lie down in the fields, threatening to cut off the soup if he refuses. To keep the nagging at a minimum, most Kogi men try to keep their women pregnant.

Once the wife is with child, a Kogi man can throw himself without reserve into the male community's fervid philosophical life. He gathers nightly with other men in a big conical ceremonial house to chew coca leaves and listen to the mama extoll the merits of inactivity and incuriosity, the Kogi ideals. The drug dispels the physical and sexual hunger that the Kogi man despises; at his nightly talk fest, he is content.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, turning to psychiatry for an explanation of such behavior, says the Kogi man's aversion to sex stems from a cult of love for a world-mother spirit. Kogis think life is only a larger womb than the one from which they sprang, and death only a return to the womb of the great All-Mother. Their aim is to put themselves "in balance" with the All-Mother--mostly by idleness in the uterine universe.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, a six-footer with a blond mustache, is justifiably proud of having gained the Kogis' confidence in four years of close association. Last week, after reporting to the foundation, he hurried back to the Santa Marta Mountains for further study and picture-taking among his short, black-eyed friends.

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