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Long ago van Gennep (1960) pointed out a relationship between ritual and social interaction, demonstrating that rites de passage affect people's relationships. Gluckman has developed this idea in a critical review of van Gennep's writings, emphasising that the;" roles which whole ceremonies and specific rites play in the ordering and reordering of social relations" are more central to understanding a culture than merely focusing on the mechanism of rituals (Gluckman 1962: 4). Both the mechanism of the ceremony and the relationships of the participants are important to initia tion since the ceremony acts as a catalyst for bringing together people who know the mechanism and its meaning. For the Samo of the Strickland Plain of Papua New Guinea (Shaw 1973, 1974a, 1976), relationships are central to life in the longhouse and affect how that community interacts with all others. Before administrative control in the mid …