New Guinea

New insights garnered in New Guinea

New Guinea in two parts
February 13, 2014

The Baliem Valley in New Guinea is unique among all of the places I have visited on the planet, mostly because the culture of the indigenous stone-aged Dani people who’ve lived here for millennia is still dominant and palpable, although fading fast.

The plane we fly on from Jayapura on the north coast of Indonesian Papua New Guinea to the central market town of Wamena in the Baliem Valley is crowded at least in part because there are still no roads into or out of the Baliem Valley and no other way than by air to get to Wamena. Indeed, the Valley was first “discovered” and explored by westerners only seventy five years ago and those first western explorers also first flew in – by sea plane – which they landed on a mountain lake before setting out into the interior.

We are met in Wamena by our tour guide Olfied, who is from Sulawesi, by our driver, Richard the silent hearted, and by our indigenous Hoopla vouchsafe guy and porter, Yeskeel, named after the prophet Ezekiel, who is wearing nothing but a feathered headdress, a penis sheathe gourd held up by a woven thread wrapped around his waist, a loose bamboo decorative “belt” holding up nothing, a necklace with beads, keys, and safety pins, and a nice wristwatch. I’m told Yeskeel wears the watch strictly as jewelry, not because he knows how or needs to use it. I can’t confirm or deny this, but it is decidedly a nice watch. Most of all Yeskeel is definitely a man of the deepest tribal traditions, and seems to know every path, every hill, every compound, every plant name and each plant’s medicinal properties. He walks everywhere barefooted no matter how rocky the surface. And in what for me is a moment of disconcerting awareness I realize as I’m walking down the streets of Wamena with this handsome completely naked black man, with feathers in his hair and a penis sheathe, that it is me, the tall white guy, who is being stared at, a personage far less frequently seen on the streets of Wamena than naked Hoopla or Dani men are.

Olfied carries with him a well worn original of the photo-filled book “Gardens of War,” co-authored by Karl Heider, the premier American anthropologist/ethnologist on Dani culture who I met in Bukittinggi, Sumatra and who lived among the Dani for over two years in the early nineteen sixties when ritual but deadly warfare was still a core aspect of Dani culture, and Robert Gardner, the producer of the movie “Dead Birds,” as beautiful an ethnographic film as I have ever seen that documents the ritual and deadly consequences of Dani warfare and that Joy and I watched in advance of coming to New Guinea.