The April 21 number of the New Yorker features a long article by Jared Diamond entitled Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need To Get Even. Anthropologists have a tendency—increasingly shrill and kneejerk these days—to be very critical of Jared Diamond. Mostly I think this is because he does what they wish they did: write popular, widely read books. I’m not as affected by this sour grapes syndrome as some, and in the case of this article I’ve already had my druthers because I helped fact check it (this consisted in talking for ten minutes on the phone with a New Yorker employee). However there are still some kvetchable things in the article that deserve a going over.

The basic idea of the article is simple. In it, Diamond contrasts a tribal fight in Nembi distict, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the death of his father in-law’s mother (wife’s father’s mother, or WFM as we say in the kinship biz) in the holocaust. In PNG, Diamond’s friend Daniel undertook a long vendetta to avenge his uncle and was eventually successful. In the holocaust, the killer of Diamond’s WFM was arrested, detained for a year and then freed. Daniel was well-adjusted and emotionally reconciled to his uncle’s death—vengeance satisfied him. Diamond’s father in-law was haunted the rest of his life by the fact that justice was never delivered. The moral of the story, Diamond says, is that procedural justice under a state may not be as obviously superior to vengeance in tribal fighting as we might think. Its a typical anthropological technique: compare The West to The Rest, and open people’s minds by pointing out that They might know something We don’t, and that Our Ways may not be as hot as we imagined.

In its factual reporting, Diamond’s account of tribal fighting in PNG more or less rings true to me, and the things that don’t ring true are most likely simply variants between what is done in Nipa and what is done in west Enga, where I lived. I also appreciate Diamond’s spin on the topic—that tribal fighting is comprehensible and not mere barbarism, and that the people who do it are humans who live normal, albeit culturally distinct, lives.

That said, I do have some issued with what Diamond actually does with his data. (more…)

Share This

I was lucky enough to be in Australia for the Australian Government’s historic apology to aboriginal peoples and just got done teaching it in my political anthropology class after having read Beth Povinelli’s “The State of Shame” a few weeks earlier. The similarity between Povinelli’s epigrammatic voicing of white settler guilt and Rudd’s apology is striking. I thought I’d throw it out here just by way of a fun contrast.

I know I have hurt you. But I want to make (it) up to you, repair the rupture, bridge the rift between us, heal the pain that I have caused. I want us to imagine a place where the possibility of our hurting each other does not exist. Where we can each be our different selves without shame, without fear, without alienation. True partners in peace. A world of brothers and sisters. A world of recognition and enhancement. This is the right thing to do: to heal, to move on, to found and never a New Society

versus (edited)

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written. We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

I am not sure what to make of this overlap, except to say that Povinelli got it right?

Share This

There has been some discussion on SM concerning the possibilities and implications of digital technologies in relation to indigenous communities, most notably when Michael Brown was a guest blogger. I mentioned in my first post that the reason I was in Tennant Creek over the last two months was to install a digital archive in the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in town. I’ll just give a brief overview of the project and then discuss the possibilities I see growing from these types of projects.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive was developed collaboratively over the last two years by myself, Warumungu community members, Craig Dietrich, Tim Dietrich (software developers) and Chris Cooney (designer). Mukurtu means ‘dilly bag’ in Warumungu. Dilly bags were used as safe keeping places for sacred materials. The archive is thus a “safe keeping place.”

The gist of the project is this: Warumungu community members wanted a way to manage the digital materials they received from a number of sources—mainly researchers, teachers and missionaries who had once worked in the community. How could they store, organize, distribute, and allow access to these images based on the Warumungu cultural protocols that surround viewing and distribution of images and the associated knowledge that goes with them?

Over two years of consultation, we developed a browser-based digital archive (using a MySQL database and PHP scripting language, the archive runs locally on an iMac in a MAMP web environment—Mac OSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP—for those techies out there) using the cultural protocols to drive the technology. That is, the information architecture of the system was driven by the specific Warumungu cultural protocols for the viewing, distribution, and reproduction of images. There is a detailed summary concerning the functionality of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive on my blog.

Over the last few years of development I have met several people involved in similar projects—mainly in Australia (I’d love to know about others). Finally having Mukurtu installed in Tennant Creek though gave us the opportunity to 1) think of ways to develop it further in the context of Nyinkka Nyunyu as an art and culture centre and 2) reach out to others to find ways to improve and share what we have. We have begun to develop a framework for a flexible system that would allow other communities to customize the system to fit their own cultural protocols—what we need now are more developers! Although at present most of the content in Mukurtu is from personal collections, the goal is to now reach out to museums and begin a process of virtual repatriation of Warumungu cultural materials. The South Australian Museum and the Museum of Victoria have already loaned physical objects to Nyinkka Nyunyu for their museum space. These objects are displayed at Nyinkka Nyunyu and are accompanied by Warumungu narration.

The local archive allows for thousands more objects to be virtually repatriated at a fraction of the cost. Mukurtu allows for the content to be curated by individuals in the community. People can tag the content with restrictions, add multiple stories and recollections, and sort it by culturally relevant categories. People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu’s development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Digital archives—powered by Indigenous protocols and intellectual property systems—have the potential to create a mutually beneficial relationship between the institutions that hold Indigenous materials and the communities to whom they belong. Even if one thought that all objects should be repatriated, most Indigenous communities don’t have the money or facilities to store the objects properly. Many communities want museums to keep their objects safe—they want a voice in the way they are displayed and curated. Digital projects can provide one avenue for Indigenous curation. One great example of this is the Virtual Museum Canada project. The Canadian government has funded many First Nations web based museum projects (see the Dane Wajich project by the Doig River First Nations community).

There is potential, then, for digital archives and other web-based projects (that take seriously and integrate Indigenous protocols) to reanimate the terrain of museum display, curation, and information management and to establish collaborative development projects between technologists, anthropologists and communities. Local archives, “safe keeping places,” that use Indigenous cultural protocols to define access and distribution parameters should not be read as closing down the commons or sealing off information. Instead, these projects give us a way to interrogate the limits of commons-like narratives about information or information freedom. They give us a way to redefine access and control apart from big business models. They allow us to examine different modes of information distribution and reproduction and the ways in which these systems maintain and create knowledge through their specific protocols. These archives are as much about production as they are preservation—in these cases the two are intertwined. Can these systems also inform the larger debate about access to information in relation to digital technologies? They seem poised to do so.

Share This

Just a quick post to let everyone know that the several groups in Australia, including the Green party, have planned rallies for November 17 as an “International Day of Action on the NT Invasion.”

The Government’s current top-down approach in the Northern Territory simply will not succeed. But John Howard doesn’t seem to want to listen. Join groups around Australia and the world on November 17th – an International Day of Action on the NT Invasion.

For more information check out the Green Party Blog here—the Greens are one of the only national political parties to openly denounce the intervention since day one. Like I said in previous posts this issue has not gotten very much attention outside Australia. This is a chance for folks to spread the word and let people know what the Australian government is doing to thousands of Aboriginal people. I’ll post more about it on my blog, Long Road, on November 17, hopefully others will too.

Share This

I know that there has been a lot of discussion here at SM over the role of anthropologists in war situations, particularly in Iraq. As I said in my last post, the state of emergency and militarization of Aboriginal communities in Australia is by no stretch Iraq. Still, anthropologists are (to continue the military metaphors) on the front lines in many cases (not just anthropologists though, linguists—a lot of linguists). Many work in Aboriginal communities long term as part of organizations or on-going projects, as consultants, etc. There is more “applied” anthropology work in Australia than in the US (from what I can tell—others might be better placed here to know if this is the case). So consequently many anthropologists (and other degreed folks) are caught up in the intervention. My most recent field trip coincidently overlapped.

One of the things that struck me the most when I got to Australia in August was the state of depression, for lack of a better term, that had taken hold of many of these folks. In Alice Springs I met several anthropologists and linguists who worked in several of the communities in the region at an event one night. The mood was very somber. Not in a pity me sort of way, of course their lives weren’t being upended by racist policies, perspective was in tact, but the feeling was one of utter disbelief. The Howard government has been hostile to Aboriginal issues for the last eleven years, but even this seemed extreme.

At the beginning, with little in the way of information about what was going to happen, many people felt like their hands were tied—what were they to do? No one knew what exactly the intervention was going be like. The Brough intervention team went out of their way to ignore and dismiss the people who worked in Aboriginal communities. Non-Aboriginal people—especially academics and other so-called “lefties”—have been painted as part of the problem. If self-determination failed then it did so with these “outsiders” as part of the problem. People working in Aboriginal communities, where abuse and other social problems were documented, were indeed as much to blame as anyone—or so the logic goes.

The first week in October, (about three months since the declaration of a state of emergency) Jack Waterford (a reporter) wrote an article in the Canberra times called “Anthropologists’ Silence makes them Complicit.” The first sentence of the article sets the tone:

“Has there ever been a more contemptible, despicable or obvious silence than the silence of academics in the Aboriginal industry—anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, et al—over the Federal Government’s invasion of Aboriginal Australia?’

Although he singled out anthropologists in the title, other academics, according to him, are equally silent and complicit.
In the wake of the article a sometimes heated discussion erupted on the Australian Anthropology Society listserv debating Waterford’s accusations. I won’t quote anyone since it is a semi-private discussion board (although I believe anyone can join). I’ll summarize some of the views.

1. Anthropologists haven’t been silent, they just haven’t been listened to—or the venues in which they have spoken in are not well publicized and the mainstream media have been fairly pro-intervention


2. The issues of abuse are too complex to boil down to a sound bite, so anthropologists are left out because their views don’t lend themselves to sound bites.


3. There is a danger of anthropological work being used against Aboriginal people—i.e. one never knows how or where ones work will circulate or if parts of it will be used to uphold policies antithetical to its argument, so some material may not be published


4. Anthropologists have failed to adequately deal with the harsher realities of Aboriginal life focusing instead on more “traditional” aspects


5. Anthropologists know that the solutions to the social problems must involve long term collaborative work and the crisis mentality undermines the type of work that needs to be done


6. Ethically anthropologists have a responsibility to the people with whom they work and that is complicated when they work for/with government.

The “it’s too complex” argument seems the weakest. I remember hearing Fred Myers give a talk in which he said it was incumbent on anthropologists to make our arguments in ways that many audiences could hear. Complexity exists in all situations and yet solutions need to be found and be articulated.

Over the course of the few weeks that the discussion went on it became clear that ethical issues within the field are hotly contested and that there isn’t one view of the intervention (as to be expected). Some of the points link up with the discussion of anthropologists in the military, in fact this was directly brought up by a few people on the AAS listserv, that working with government “compromises” anthropologists work.

How should anthropologists work in these times of crisis? If it is not a war zone, but has become a de facto militarized space do different sets of criteria apply? Should anthropological work inform government policy? Is there a dividing line between anthropology and advocacy?

A friend of mine (non-academic) said that after reading my blog posts on Long Road said that my writing struck him as advocacy not academics. I’m not sure the distinction holds up for me. Where would I draw the line and what would anthropology look like without advocacy-type work? If one works in communities that are being over powered and subject to racist and dehumanizing policies doesn’t one have an obligation to expose these situations?

Update: I fixed up the post the server cut out on me at the end and the whole thing didn’t get saved….but now it’s fine.

Share This

I think we’ve got the comments issue fixed…seems mine were going to the spam filter, to many links in them I think.

Back to the intervention. As Jangari mentioned in a comment below there was a great Four Corners program on yesterday, you can watch the entire program or extended interviews online here.

Once the “emergency” was declared Northern Territory Aboriginal communities the Howard/Brough team set out their plan for action. The ‘intervention’ was given a mission: “stabilize, normalize, exit,” a “team of experts” (list here) and an operational commander: Major General Dave Chalmers. The military language continued as they announced a “boots on the ground strategy,” “command operations” and “strategic plans” and an “embedded” national media presence.

Major General Chalmers assignment is to act as the operational leader. There haven’t been machine guns, IEDs or tanks and the soldiers have playing footy with the kids pretty regularly. This is not Iraq. There is a joke circulating in Australia that Australia is the first member of the “Coalition of the willing” to invade itself (remember Australia was one of the first and remaining supporters of Bush and the war on terror). In Willowra, this sign greeted intervention teams:

Over the first six weeks of the intervention as the command team was moving from community to community a pattern started to emerge. The team would go in, often unannounced or with only a few hours notice. They would convene meetings in which intervention team personnel would often read from pre-written scripts about the changes ahead. The changes (which are part of the bundle of legislation passed on August 17, 2007, a good summary, here) included:

1. Changing the permit system (people need to get permits to enter Aboriginal land in the NT, this is handled by the land councils. The CLC approves over 90% of permit requests each year)


2. Increased alcohol restrictions


3. Restrictions on pornography and x rated television


4. Compulsorily taking over communities through five-year leases (and paying “just compensation” to the landholders)


5. Appointing a “community manager” to oversee the bureaucratic and “law and order” changes


6. Cutting off the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) which employee over 8,000 Aboriginal people in the NT and are the economic lifeblood of most remote communities


7. “Transitioning” people to “real jobs” through STEP programs or when their are no jobs putting them on “work-for-the-dole”


8. Quarantining 50% of people’s Centrelink payments (welfare, old age pensions, etc).

For a good summary guide see the Central Land Council fact sheets, here (more…)

Share This

Thanks to the gang here at Savage Minds for inviting me to guest blog for the week!

I returned a few weeks ago from a two-month field trip to Tennant Creek a small town in Australia’s Northern Territory. I’ve been working in Tennant Creek since 1995 with Warumungu people. This trip was focused on installing a community digital archive—a collaborative project that we have spent about two years on. I’ll get to that at the end of the week, but I want to begin my blogging here with a discussion of the “intervention” into Aboriginal communities that began in June of this year and has no clear end in sight (sound familiar?).

First, the “emergency.”

In June of this year the “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: Little Children are Sacred” report by Rex Wild and Patricia Anderson was released by the Northern Territory (NT) government. The report detailed child abuse (including sexual abuse) in Aboriginal communities and made dozens of recommendations for specific ways to address the problem including more community consultation, the use of interpreters, education, safe houses, etc. The report made it clear that this was not a new problem, and that solutions need to be long term and had to involve Aboriginal communities at every level (full report here, summary here). I’m not going to re-hash the debate that went on here at SM concerning the veracity of the report or who saw what where.

My purpose here is to examine and pose some questions about the relationship between settler governments and their indigenous populations in light of the events that followed the release of the Anderson/Wild report in Australia.

On June 21 2007 Prime Minister John Howard (who has been in office since 1996) and his current Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough called a special news conference to declare a national “state of emergency” in 73 Northern Territory Aboriginal communities and the town camps in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Katherine (see the map here). Using the Anderson/Wild report as their basis, they announced their intent to ignore “constitutional niceties” in order to adopt a plan that was “radical, comprehensive and interventionist.”

It didn’t take long for the crisis rhetoric to be undermined as some commentators noted that similar reports had been released consistently over the last ten years without so much as a peep from the Howard government. But these critiques were largely eclipsed by the emphasis on crisis—John Howard even likened the NT situation to the hurricane Katrina: “We have our Katrina here and now. That it has unfolded more slowly and absent the hand of God should make us humbler still.” This is one of the only mentions of the long history of problems predating the “emergency.” Most of the crisis rhetoric places the problem squarely in the present and thus The PM’s need to take “swift” action lest he be left looking like GWB post-Katrina.

What does the Commonwealth gain by defining Aboriginal communities as in crisis? How does this frame the way that Aboriginal issues are dealt with in the nation?

(more…)

Share This

One topic of growing interest to me is the role that China—PRC, Taiwan, diaspora, etc. etc.—is playing in the Pacific today. There are many reasons for this: PRC-based companies are growing increasingly active in Papua New Guinea’s mineral industry (which I study), and I’m married to a China scholar and so China/Pacific overlap is a no-brainer as an area for me to be interested in. So I am interested in—and thought you might be interested in—this new open access paper with four chapters by different scholars, entitled Chinese in the Pacific: where to now? published by the newly-formed Center for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora at the Australian National University. This is the second post in a row where I’ve shilled for ANU, I know, but there is a Savage Minds connections—they credit Savage Minds for hosting an earlier version of their expanded bibliography of Chinese in the Pacific (PDF link). Check it out.

Share This

Anyone whose seen the movie Rabbit Proof Fence, or read about the Stolen Generation knows that the history of government intervention on the behalf of Aboriginal children has been quite tragic. So the chances of anything good coming out of Prime Minister John Howard’s drastic new proposals aimed at curbing child abuse in Aboriginal communities seem quite slim. Here is a roundup of some of the reaction in the blogsphere:

Culture Matters offers some background:

Howard, in reaction to a recently released report about child abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory called Little Children are Sacred [pdf], has introduced sweeping measures, including banning alcohol in certain communities for six months, cracking down on pornography (both legal and illegal, it would appear), and introducing a raft of other measures aimed at forcing Aboriginal parents to ensure the welfare of their children. These include tying welfare payments to certain outcomes, such as school attendance or holding payments in reserve to ensure that money is spent on food and other necessities, though I’m not entirely sure how this would be implemented. This Associated Press article outlines many of the measures to be taken.

Kimberly Christen echos the thoughts of many bloggers when she writes:

Many commentators have noted the outright racist overtones of the plan, the problems with linking government welfare to “benchmarks,” and the undermining of indigenous rights and self-determination. This is all true, as it has been for some time under the Howard government. But the truly scary part is Howard’s admission that he is trampling on constitutional rights, but oh well. This is the same logic the Bush administration used to push through the Patriot Act after 9/11–in times of crisis “we” have to sacrifice some “freedoms” for the good of all. The illogic disregards the fact that constitutional rights are not crisis-optional, they are, in fact, meant to withstand crisis and maintain rights.

(more…)

Share This

I just finished reading Ira Bashkow’s book The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World for a review article that I am writing. Ira is a good friend of mine, but even setting aside our obvious intellectual affinities I must say that his book is one of the best ethnographies that I have read in a very long time time, and I really do recommend it to anyone—including anyone who is looking for a good mid-level ethnography to teach to undergraduates.

The topic of the book is what people in Papua New Guinea think of white people and more particularly how modernity is a ‘raced’ concept in Orokaiva thought. Orokaiva have been dealing with white for four generations and are hardly people whose encounter with ‘the outside world’ is hardly new. Along the way it deals with many of the hottest topics in Melanesian studies today—we have material that touches of partible personhood, cargo cultism, alternate modernities, identity, and consumption.

But the book is really about how humans imagine the other in order to say something about themselves. As a result it is not just about Orokaiva, but the possibility and utility of ethnography as a way of knowing. As someone with a keen interest in the history of anthropology and a genuine and informed commitment to the Boasian program (the book is about race after all), Ira has produced a book that defends the feasibility of anthropology as a comparative project. The introduction and conclusion deftly sketch out a defense against criticisms which claim that representing the other must necessarily mean disempowering those who you speak to. (more…)

Share This

I’ve just returned from the Association for the Social Anthropology of Oceania meetings in Charlottesville, Virginia (more on which later). One of the sessions I sat in on at that meeting was the one on interpreting the discourse of intellectual property rights in the Pacific. Most of the participants at the session had a sense—to put it very roughly—that they did not like it when representations of indigenous people and knowledge about them slipped out of the control of indigenous communities. At the same time, many felt disatisfied with the solutions offered by the appurtenances of copyright, trademark, and patent. At the same time, given the power differentials that exist between indigenous people and enormous corporations (and other bad guys) it seems that Pacific islanders have to use something like the law to get the leverage necessary to level the playing field

Many of the papers in the sessions discussed alternatives to IP drawn from Pacific. Although not much of a practical solution (we won’t have IP laws based on Sepik cosmology coming to a Parliament Near You anytime soon) they did offer some ways to think out of the box about how to approach property etc.

But what other options were there? How do we find a language (other than IP) to speak about the ways to control the flow of information about you when it slips out of your graps and starts circulating in wider spheres. The solution, it seemed to me, came from my own (or perhaps just Strong’s) native theory of semiotics: branding.

(more…)

Share This

I’m flattered to have been given a guest-worker permit at Savage Minds. I was invited to comment especially on the intersection of anthropology and intellectual/cultural property. But since my work is now moving in new and different directions, I’ll also have a few posts on other issues before management yanks my login rights toward the end of the month.

The more I track anthropological work in intellectual property rights (IPR), the more it seems that as a discipline we’ve leveraged ourselves into a strange and contradictory place. On the one hand, many of us enthusiastically support the idea of open access (see Rex’s recent post, for example, or check out the website of the Alexandria Archive Institute). On the other, anthropologists are collaborating with indigenous organizations to create more robust controls over access to indigenous knowledge in the interest of discouraging various forms of cultural appropriation (often described as creating a form of “cultural copyright”). Those controls are likely to have a profound impact on how and what we publish—they already have, in fact—and even on the accessibility of work published decades in the past.

In theory, the two opposed goals are not irreconcilable. In practice, I’m not so sure. After reading Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker article about Google’s ongoing efforts to upload millions of books to the web, I trolled Google Book Search (still way in beta) and was blown away. I typed in “Moyobamba,” the name of a Peruvian town not far from where I did fieldwork in the 1970s and 80s, and immediately found a half dozen travelers’ descriptions of the town from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. OK, most of these works are obscure for good reasons, but I might never have encountered them otherwise. Once every ethnography is available to everyone with a computer, what chance do indigenous people have of limiting access to information increasingly defined by them as “sacred” or “sensitive”?

(more…)

Share This

For those of you who are eager for a ‘first contact’ fix (or a ‘criticize essentialized representations of first contact’ fix) but are burned out on the Korowai, may I suggest the Smithsonian’s excellent website on Matthew Stirling’s 1926 film By Airplane To Pygmyland. Done in collaboration with SIL (who I think have the footage that forms the core of this ‘digital curation’), the website has both the original footage of the expedition as well as photos and interpretive essays. The site is too big and I am—alas—too busy to give it a thorough going-over. One thing that I love about the title is that the ‘aeroplane’ part probably sounded as sexy and mysterious to its 1926 audience as the ‘pygmyland’ bit. Serious though—this is a great and deep on-line resource for teaching culture contact and the representation of the colonized.

Share This

Following previous discussions of semiosilversteinianism and Rex’s suggestion regarding ‘great diagrams,’ I looked up this wild diagram, from perhaps anthropology’s most accomplished sketch artist: Alfred Gell.

From Gell’s essay, “The Language of the Forest,” which relates phonological iconism to the ‘auditory culture’ and sylvan mode of being of Umeda people in New Guinea. I quote at length:

Phonological iconism [...] depends on tracing connections between the sound-substance of individual words and morphemes and their meanings. As a culturally elaborated expressive mode it is probably quite rare, if only because the regular processes of sound-shift which all languages undergo would ensure, other things being equal, that phonologically iconic forms evolved into non-iconic ones after a lapse of time. Only where things are not equal, that is, where there are specific cultural vectors tending to preserve, generalize and intensify expressivity against the countervailing forces of morphological change, should one expect to encounter elaborate phonological iconism as opposed to sporadic onomatopoeia.

Share This

The village I have returned to several times beginning in 1998, Pikosa, seems idyllic, but not because it is quaint or edenic. It is nestled at the base of towering blue mountains, next to a river named Rambanunga, a tributary of the Asaro that eventually joins the waters of the Wahgi, Tua, and Bena rivers as they wind toward the great Purari and thus to the Coral Sea, far to the south. Rambanunga is a small river full of big smooth rocks and deep pools for swimming and fishing – small, but it can become quite rapid with heavy rains, sometimes even impassable, and villagers call their pigs home during such storms for fear that they will be swept away in a rapid current.

People bathe in the river and wash their clothes there, so it has designated areas for men to use and those for women. Men and boys bathe upstream from women and girls, preserving a chaste and non-pollutive separation of the sexes. Rambanunga’s waters are quite frigid, and though Pikosans find the cold water refreshing, I found it bracing as I shivered through Sunday morning (pre-church) baths to the laughter of those bathing with me. There are spits of gravel and sand that interrupt Rambanunga’s flow, and one of these is a recreational spot for the men of the village. They gather there on occasion to stage small afternoon feasts, washing themselves and their clothes, gambling at cards, sunning themselves on huge stones, smoking marijuana and cigarettes. They call it – in English – “naked beach.” (more…)

Share This