PAPUA

island’s folk sayings according to which “for each village, a
different culture”, is apparent in the number of languages and
local dialects, of which there are over 800. Of these, less than
half are related to each other whilst the others appear to be
completely independent, unrelated to any of the island’s other
languages or any larger language groups.
The inhabitants have more in common in terms of their diet,
as amongst the main foods we always find starchy vegetables,
bananas, mangoes, coconuts and other fruits. Their meat supply
comes mainly through rearing pigs and poultry as well as
hunting, whilst in the coastal areas fish and seafood are a main
element of the local diet.
Prior to the coming of the Europeans, there were no
towns anywhere in the country. During the colonial period
the scattered settlements were merged into larger villages
for the first time, making them easier to govern and provide
education and health services. The first towns grew around the
administrative centers and the missionaries and at first housed
only men, who worked mainly in construction. These towns
gradually grew into the country’s urban, political, administrative
and commercial centers.
As regards social stratification, there are no castes and social
classes only developed recently: in general, one could say that
the society is divided into the “upper class” and the “simple
citizens”. The first group includes the educated, high-income
town dwellers (the “coffee millionaires,” in the local lingo), and
the second group includes the inhabitants of the countryside
and the low-income town dwellers. In the past few years a
middle class has begun to emerge. Even so, the villagers are
not poor, or at least not in the sense that we mean poor. You
would be hard pushed to find in the microeconomic activities
of the tribes any kind of accumulation of goods and wealth, and
consumption as a way of life is completely incomprehensible.
The annual income per capita of these people may not be more
than a few dollars but in a barter economy such as there still
is to a great extent, no one lacks essential goods. Whatever
money is available is invested in the development of social and
political relations within the tribe or village, through which the
members of each local society maintain their position in the
tribal hierarchy.
Labor within the village is divided less on the basis of position
and more on the basis of gender; the men build the houses and
the dams, they hunt, they fish and they cultivate the banana,
coffee and cocoa. The women grow all the other vegetables, rear
the poultry and pigs, weave baskets and clothes and raise the
children. Any income from the sale of coffee and cocoa is taken
by the men, who are socially stigmatized in both the villages
and the towns, if they commit the “crime” of performing work
that is traditionally attributed to women. Things have changed
somewhat today and a hard-working woman is given her due
respect - she may even leave her husband for someone else
without suffering any social stigma if her husband is deemed
not to have cared for her as he should have.
Marriage takes place as an agreement between two families
and very rarely as the personal choice of the couple. A girl’s
parents will hope to marry her to a wealthy man, whilst what
is sought for in a woman, is first that she is willing to work
and secondly her external appearance. Polygamy is generally
accepted for men as traditionally a well-built man always
enjoyed a greater share of the women.
There is an unheard of tolerance in the rearing of children
throughout almost the whole island, at least for the first five or
six years of their lives. This is due to the common conviction
that the spirit of a small child may abandon its body if it is
hit or frightened. The selfishness, cruelty or malevolence of
some children are ascribed to bad spirits and not to the child
themselves or their bad upbringing. In these cases the parents
often invite a priest-magician to expel the evil and restore calm
to their home. As they grow towards adulthood children are
taught by following the examples of adults, participating in
various, often inhuman, initiation rituals. All this preparation is
considered essential in order for the young adult to be able to
respond fully to their social and marital responsibilities.
Almost patriarchal societies keep women at a distance and
in clearly distinct roles. As described above, the process of
separating small boys from their mothers begins at an early age:
they start to sleep far from women, in the houses of men, whilst
in many tribes there are initiation rituals into the world of
men, so as to remove all traces of female influence and achieve
full catharsis of the pollution from the “hot” discharges of the
female body.
As for religion, approximately 96% of the population is
Christian. Of course, as often happens in many cases where
Christianity coexists alongside preceding religions, what
eventually arises is a completely new fusion, with Christian
practices being combined with primeval beliefs – prayers to
Christ in order to expel the subterranean spirits, monsters and
the invisible creatures of the forest. The traditional religions
are often animistic and include elements of ancient worship.
A prevailing belief amongst the traditional tribes is that of the
masalai, the bad spirits who have the power to provoke death
and destruction. Another common conviction is the parallel
existence of the physical and metaphysical world; in order for
the living to prosper, the interaction between the two worlds
necessitates the observation of customs and the preservation of
social ties, such as satisfying the spirits of the dead ancestors,
who continue to observe, beyond the bounds of death, the
activities of the tribe. Very few accidents, illnesses or deaths are
attributed to chances or natural causes. Almost every fatal event
is attributed to curses, angry water or forest spirits or simply to
the vengeance of the insulted ghost of an ancestor. Great store is
put upon the use of a magical substance known as “mana”, and a
large number of natives have knowledge of magic.
Much has been said about the cannibalism of the Papua; it
has even been claimed that the first Australian explorers who got
as far as the isolated regions of the hinterland in around 1930,
provided a most nutritious meal for their hosts. Nonetheless,
the truth is that cannibalism had a prominent place in the
cult practice and burial customs of many of the island’s tribes,
who believed that by eating the dead they would acquire their
positive characteristics, gaining strength and bravery. Women
often ate a part of their dead husband so as to absorb something
of his masculinity into their female nature.
The kuru disease (or “laughing sickness”, as the symptoms
include pathological outbursts of laughter) has been
demonstrated to result from the ritual practice of cannibalism,
in particular of the Fore tribe in the Eastern Highlands. This
is an incurable and fatal neurological disorder, a transmissible
spongiform encephalopathy that appeared for the first time in
the mid-20th century and spread progressively in the form of
an epidemic to the neighbouring regions. It primarily affects
women and children, due to deposits of the protein particle
prion in the human brain, which showed a preference for the
“weaker” members of the tribe: during Fore burial customs
those present had to honour the dead by eating them. Men
chose first which pieces they would eat and the rest of the body
went to the women and the children, including the infected
brain. The kuru disease was studied by the American physicians
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek and Baruch S. Blumberg, who proved
the infectious nature of this type of encephalopathy for the
first time, for which they won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in
1976. The disease gradually disappeared when cannibalism was
abolished through the implementation of Australian colonial
laws and the efforts of the local missionaries.
The majority of the inhabitants, approximately 84%, belong
to groups of the Papua tribe. The oldest is the Negrito tribe
(Pygmies), whilst amongst the autonomous Papua tribes are,
the Orokolo, known also as the “People of the Sea”, the Daudai,
the Goigala and others. Also of great interest are the huge
demographic diversity and the over 820 languages spoken on
the island, comprising one-fifth of the world’s total languages.
The official language is English, which is used in education and
by the authorities, whilst the main languages of daily speech
are the Creole Tok Pisin and, in the south, Hiri Motu. Tok Pisin
(Tok = talk, Pisin = pidgin) developed as a necessary means of
communication between the Melanesian colonists who worked
on the plantations of Queensland in northwest Australia. These
workers, who spoke countless different languages, gradually
started to develop a language structure, drawing the vocabulary
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