Forest and Demons in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The Wola people of the Southern Highland Province of Papua New Guinea believe that two kinds of demon spirit inhabit the montane forests of their region. They call them saem and iybtit. When people are attacked by these frightening creatures, they are injured or fall sick, and may die; their relatives perform rituals to drive the demons away and promote their recovery. The attitude of the Wola towards demon spirits expresses something of their ambivalent and enigmatic attitudes towards the forest that covers large areas of their region. They are neither innate conservationists nor reckless destroyers of forest, but something more equivocal, an antipathetic combination of both.     

Hunting for Conservation in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The animals of the Papua New Guinea highlands are relatively defenceless. People not only value their meat, hunters sharing catch with kin, but also formally transact several creatures in the all-important socio-political exchanges that characterise their social life. The local sedentary population is dense, yet it has not hunted species to extinction regardless of their value and vulnerability to predation. This paper seeks an answer in the context of socio-political exchange values that inform social status. It uses data from a survey of animal skull trophies displayed in a sample of houses in the Was valley of the Southern Highlands Province to investigate connections between hunting and social standing - exchange status, kin group affiliation and age - with a view to elucidating tacit conservation behaviour which agencies concerned to protect biodiversity might profitably consider given current participatory rhetoric.     

Contested Knowledge, Contingent Classification: Animals in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

New Guinea highlanders appear to conceive of animal taxonomy in a way that is simultaneously familiar to a scientist, yet different. This is often attributed to interaction between natural ecology, which constrains content, and cultural context, which conditions the structure of any taxonomy. The evidence presented here confirms this view, although the considerable, and initially disconcerting, disagreements between persons over taxonomic issues raise the question: To what extent is Wola classification of natural phenomena analogous to Western hierarchical classification? The stateless political environment conditions the Wola constantly to challenge hierarchy, obfuscate boundaries, and think in terms of "fuzzy sets," confounding the assumption of agreed classes and threatening intellectual anarchy. However, their taxonomic regime offsets this, facilitating discourse in the absence of authorities to adjudicate in disputes. No formal classificatory scheme devised so far can adequately represent such an oral tradition's ever negotiated ordering of animals; whatever framework we adopt will somewhat distort it. [Keywords: Papua New Guinea, ethnozoology, taxonomy]     

A Place against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Place against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Paul Sillitoe. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. 438 pp.     

A Social Anthropologist's View of Papua New Guinea Highlands Prehistory

The Highlands of Papua New Guinea have usually been regarded as relatively homogeneous, socially, culturally, and ecologically. In this article I begin with the view that the ethnography of the Eastern and Western Highlands shows great diversity. I argue that this diversity is also evident in the prehistory of the Highlands and that the Eastern and Western Highlands have followed markedly different paths in the development of agriculture and pig husbandry and in their rates of change and transformation. Intensive agriculture and linked pig exchange are very old in the Western Highlands, nascent in the Eastern Highlands. This difference is clear in the ethnographic present, but I argue that it is upon the very different prehistories of the Eastern and Western Highlands that a synchronic comparison of Highlands societies should be mounted.     

Many medicines in one: Curing in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

The actual means by which the clinical successes of non-Western medical treatments are achieved has been little explored. More specifically, analyses have focused almost exclusively on their psychotherapeutic value, with some attention to the pharmacodynamics of plant remedies. The central argument of this paper is that such a perspective has been generated more by the selective psychiatric orientation of cross-cultural field workers than by the diverse realities of the curing systems themselves. The paper describes medical care among the Nekematigi, Benabena-speaking horticulturalists of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Presented within an ecological framework, these materials demonstrate dependence upon a wide range of physical manipulations such as bleeding and flagellation with nettles, dietary alterations including increased protein consumption, social rearrangements, verbal spells, and plant medicinals of both specific and general application. The potential effects of each contribution to the medical regime are examined and a twofold conclusion is reached: (1) that it is precisely the mix of physical and psychological elements that accounts for Nekematigi success in treating the chronic infectious diseases which predominate in their environment, and (2) that this is likely to be true of many previously reported medical systems hitherto interpreted primarily in psychological, social, or symbolic terms.     

The Lost Drum: The Myth of Sexuality in Papua New Guinea and Beyond

The Lost Drum: The Myth of Sexuality in Papua New Guinea and Beyond. James F. Weiner. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1995. 199 pp.     

The Mount Kare Python and His Gold: Totemism and Ecology in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Lying between the Huli and Paiela peoples of the Papua New Guinea highlands, Mt. Kare, the site of a gold rush from 1988 to 1990, presently inspires millenarian speculations about an imminent cosmic revolution. Mt. Kare was traditionally a ritual site where pigs were sacrificed to Taiyundika, a totemic python, to promote the fertility of plant, animal, and human species. Today it is where gold is mined in pursuit of unprecedented riches and millenarian transformations. Although sacrifices are no longer conducted at Mt. Kare, the python still has some salience for Paielas, who consider the gold to be the flesh of the totemic python. Blending Christianity with traditional cosmology, Paielas interpret the finding of the gold as a millenarian sign. As an ancestral figure who guarantees the continuing fertility of the earth in exchange for pork sacrifices, the python stands at the core of Paiela constructions of nature and humanity's position within it. Paiela totemism is explored for what it can teach us about an indigenous symbolic ecology and how "local knowledge" or a "cognized model" can inflect capital-intensive resource development at a time of ostensible globalization. The ecology of Mt. Kare gold mining must be sensitive to intercultural processes and how global flows (of ideologies, technologies, and capital) are mediated by vernacular constructions. [Papua New Guinea, mining, totemism, symbolic ecology, place]     

Dialectics of the Bowerbird: An Interpretative Account of Ritual and Symbolism in the Udabe valley,Papua New Guinea

The association of men and women with birds, as expressed in dance, is a common theme in Melanesian ritual. Often, this is seen as a means by which humans attain some relation with a transcendental reality. But this is only part of the picture. Pigs, in contrast to birds, represent an opposite sort of reality. It is argued here — by an interpretation of the gab — that through such rituals, men and women symbolically situate themselves between the two. The rituals are performed to overcome the precarious nature of human sexuality, appearance and aging associated with the life-cycle process, which contrast with that of both birds and pigs.     

Das Innere des Ausseren: Ritual, Macht und historische Praxis bei den Ngaing in Papua New Guinea

Das Innere des Ausseren: Ritual, Macht und historische Praxis bei den Ngaing in Papua New Guinea. Wolfgang Kempf. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1996. 277 pp.