Summary. For several reasons it is difficult to find examples of pederastic practices in historical and ethnological sources. Besides the social taboo, these practices have always been mixed up with other forms of sexual contact. However, existing material shows pederastic practices in primitive societies as initiation rituals for male youth. Several examples of institutionalized pederasty, especially from the area of Papua-New Guinea and Melanesia are described. These practices, with a clear societal function, are part of a distinct outlook on life and only superficially resemble the man-boy relationships we can observe today. In other parts of the world, pederastic practices were forms of prostitution. Taking place in a religious context, it was also a different form of prostitution than one we commonly know. Both forms of man-boy invovement attempts to attain assimilation through physical contact. In these practices sexuality serves purposes other than sexual satisfaction and procreation.
In the study of history we are on fairly firm footing as long as we can make use of written records. Even though the material might be meager, we have the actual observations of the people being studdied - or at least those of contemporary witnesses or people who lived close to the period when these ethnic groups flourished. Thus to no small degree we are acquaintained with pederatic practices in a number of higher non-European cultures (for example, those in the "fertile cresent," the Orient in general, India, Burma, Japan and South America). Because the documentation resides in rather out-of-the-way places, or the records are written in antic or old Oriental languages, this information is not normally available to non-specialists since there are virtually no translations. Often, too, we discover, quite by accident, vital information in records dealing with quite different amtters which could seem to have little relevance to pederasty.
The difficulties are compounded when we turn to the pre-literate cultures, the groups and tribes which are described as "primitive," a classification which cannot always ethnologically be followed. With them, the sources are almost always to be found in the opinions and reports of members of our own culture, and they thus reflect all our own ethnocentristic ideas and standards. As a result, there is very little information about pederasty and related themes from ethnologically-interesting regions because, for many centuries themes were, in our culture, socially taboo.
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Small wonder, then, considering our own Occidental morality, that pederasty, like every other form of sexual behaviour at variance with our standards, was nowhere tolerated during the period of colonialism, i.e., for no less than 500 years. It was intentionally persecuted and, where possible, eliminated. And this is another reason why we have so little trustworthy information about pederasty among primitives: the custom had been already exterminated before real scientific ethnological research (then called "anthropology") began in about 1880. The small number of reports which contain information on the subject deal with periods during which the colonial conquest had not yet been completed - and it is just these reports which are not "scientific" in the modern sense. And they could hardly be so, for their authors were usually traders, missionaries, ship or military commanders, or simply adventurers who often found it difficult simply to set down their observations adequately and comprehensibly, even if we concede that they desired to do so, in light of the sexual taboos which existed at the time throughout Europe.
Educated people had for many years, certainly since the 17th century, some knowledge about ancient man-boy love. This was one important reason why all homosexual behavior was classified and described as "pederasty." [...]
The existence of astonishingly similar initiation rituals in ancient Europe suggests that there must have been some kind of societal forces more or less at work universally. For all practical purposes, we can exclude the possibility of cultural contacts considering the enormous distances invoved between, for example, Melanesia and Sparta.