New Guinea in Two Parts – Part 2

On our second full day in New Guinea we drive north from Wamena and then walk to Obia – a very traditional Dani village where the people live a traditional Dani lifestyle, supplemented by holding mock battle enactments and offering traditional pig roasts to visiting tourists such as we are. None of it feels artificial in the ways a Hawaiian luau or hula dance would, nor is it the equivalent of the pale traditional greeting the Maasai offer visiting tourists. Rather it is the actual living out, as opposed to recalling, of an ongoing way of life. And although the battle enactment is clearly a ritualized recalling of a practice now strictly prohibited and subject to seriously enforced sanctions by the Indonesian government, many of the older Dani men actually fought in battles such as these up until the 1980s or so, and some have the scars to show for it.

We are greeted and welcomed into Obia as honored visitors. There is singing and dancing. The adult men all wear penis sheathes and go about barefooted and naked other than the ceremonial feathers and seashells they wear. The women all wear traditional grass or woven skirts and are bare-breasted. The villagers form a semicircle with the tribal chief in the center and we walk from person to person within the semicircle, softly shaking hands and exchanging the traditional Dani tribal welcome, “Wha! Wha! Wha!” said repeatedly and very breathlessly.

A smallish pig is selected for slaughter and killed in the traditional Dani way with an arrow to the heart. A fire is started using dry grass and a twirling bowstring. Large and small rocks are heated in the fire. A baking pit has been dug and lined with straw. The pig’s skin is seared and the pig’s hair singed and removed before the pig is placed on edible leaves for butchering. The pig is butchered by three men working together using only bamboo knives, which they sharpen as they work by peeling away the dulled bamboo knife’s edges with their teeth. The men doing the butchering are watched closely by a trio of five to seven-year old boys. The men’s skill is remarkable, they remove the pig’s belly and all its internal organs in one fell swoop, then remove the spine, then flay open the pig and absorb the pig’s blood with edible leaves. The pig’s spleen is thrown to the dogs, one of which is very lucky.

Meanwhile the largest hot rocks are carried from the fire to the straw lined cooking pit and placed inside it before being covered by another layer of leaves, then yams and other vegetables are added, then more leaves, then more rocks and leaves, then the pig, then more leaves, more rocks, more veggies, more leaves. Ultimately the entire tiered structure is completely sealed in leaves, wrapped in larger leaves, and then tied around the middle with vines so that it stands, a streaming pile of trussed together grasses, hot rocks, veggies, and a whole pig, all about four feet in diameter and three feet high. The moving of stones, the placement of the stones, and the adding of leaves and vegetables to the pile are all activities carried out by about a dozen women and a few older men.

Once the pig is cooking the women retire to the women’s house and the men to the men’s. I am invited inside the men’s hut with the chief, his two sons, one who will inherit the chief’s title and authority, the other a handsome twenty year old who has clearly chosen or been chosen to be a mainstay of carrying on the tribal traditions. The men’s hut is dark, but clean. There is a fire pit around which hang sacred objects. Talk is murmured and soft. They want to know about my children, about how my daughter got married. They seem shy and a bit ashamed or embarrassed about their material conditions. I ask them as much as I can about relations between men and women, given that the sexes eat separately, work separately, and sleep in separate houses. The answers seem stylized and stereotypic but the language limitations are also vast, my questions in English being first translated into Indonesian by Olfied, then translated into Dani by the chief’s son to the men, whose answer is translated back by the chief’s son to Olfied who tells me what I fear he thinks is best to share with me, some of it answers Olfied has decided upon even before he even gets answers to my queries from the men. It raises in my mind questions and doubts about how deep anthropologists can actually get and reminds me of a classic story about the Zuni of the American southwest who are very secretive about their activities in the sacred kiva and refuse to share information about the kiva ceremonies with outsiders because it would be a tragic – perhaps even fatal – giving away of their power and how an American anthropologist fell so deeply entranced and enamored of Zuni culture that he actually dropped out of sight and became as much as was possible a Zuni himself. And, as the story goes, how more than twenty years later another American anthropologist came to study the Zuni and found the first anthropologist still living among them, who the second anthropologist imagines will be a fantastic source of information and data, only, as you can guess, the first anthropologist refuses to disclose what he knows for fear of losing his power.

I am told in regard to conjugal relations that a man goes infrequently and quietly out of the village men’s house to visit his wife in the women’s house late at night where they have very quiet sex and that the man must be back in the men’s house before sunup. Naturally I just don’t get it given what I have experienced and know about the inherently/genetic/hormonal power of the sexual impulse as manifest by European, American, Polynesian, and African men and women, at least as best as I know. And like much else about the Dani this access to their inner worlds remains beyond my grasp.

In any event, after the pig has finished being cooked, the leaves are unwrapped, and I am invited over and given one of the blood-smeared leaves to eat. I nibble it. The woman next to me frowns, takes a few whole leaves and thrusts them in her mouth, demonstrating the gusto with which one should properly approach the eating of such a treat as pig blood smeared leaves. I put the remainder of my leaf in my mouth, but as my own tribe’s former high chief said, I don’t inhale, and I’m actually caught on tape by Joy as I secretly spit out the delicacy.

The men take the pig from the leaves to cut up and distribute. As an honorific I’m given a piece of the pig’s liver. I bite into it gingerly, but it also never makes its way down my esophagus. I have shaken hands with every man and every woman in the village, everyone of whom has wiped their runny nose with their hand, adjusted their penis sheathes with their hand, petted the dogs, picked lice out of their kid’s hair, toileted themselves. Need I go on? It’s not that I have OCD, but I am a fastidious man, compulsive about hand washing before eating, even in American restaurants and at home, and I give away all the food I am given by the Dani other than a yam I selectively and meagerly eat the inside of.

After the meal Olfied takes out the “Gardens of War” book and a crowd gathers round him to look at the fifty year old photographs to see if they can identify anyone, something some of the older men do. Then the souvenirs come out for display and sale. Joy and I are good customers. And as we are leaving one very old woman, whose bag we examined but did not buy, thrusts a tightly wrapped black plastic shopping bag into Joy’s lap, which when we unwrap it later find it contains the woven bag we examined and did not buy. Olfied says it is an unusual gifting. Add the event to our pile of mystery data. Include as well my sense of having fallen in love with these people, with their kindness and seemingly egoless innocence. I cannot fully explain why, but something very deep inside me is touched and moved in ways, something in my core that feels deeply romantic and heartfelt. In a certain mood I might even suggest that my own tribal roots and my genetic memory/inheritance of the times my direct ancestors and my very DNA lived in just this tribal manner has been emotionally and empathically stimulated and I can barely stand tearing myself away from what feels like a deeply romantic and touching encounter/affair.

I must also say that I believe the warmth and welcoming energy of all the Dani people we encounter is real, even in the most tourist-centric settings. This is not Plimouth Plantation where costumed actors are playing out traditional roles from centuries past, at least not yet, but rather a people living their lives as they always have and still do, albeit in some structured ways, almost as a cash crop for the benefit of tourists. But Dani men do routinely hug one another in greeting and every Dani man walking along and encountering a seated gathering of other men will stop to softly shake hands with every one of them, breathlessly whispering “Wua. Wua. Wua.” Their smiles real, the hands and hugs they offer one another real, the hands they offer to help me over narrow bridges, slippery stones, and muddy gateways real in the kindest most caring of ways.

My experience of these stone-age people living in the modern world also leaves me highly energized, as well as curious, and I am frustrated at not being able to understand what I am witness to, at not understanding the meanings of what I am observing at a deeper level, at having absolutely no access to what the Dani think. Still I feel immensely privileged and honored to have been witness to what I believe are the sweet death throes of traditional Dani culture and, in my assessment, traditional Dani village life will only be found in Plimouth Plantation-like settings within two generations at most. The city and modern technology are simply too irresistible. A six hundred kilometer long road is being built from Jayapura to Wamena. The advantage and attraction of motorcycles, electricity, television, cigarette lighters, running water, modern medical treatments, compulsory public school education all contribute to the demise. I’ve read a little bit about how Brazil is struggling with the issue of protecting the remaining indigenous people in the Amazon, not wanting to deny them access to that which they might desire, but also not wanting to impose the dominant culture and cultural views upon them as a fait accompli. Noble, but futile I think. The days of all indigenous stone-aged people are numbered. Their traditions are mostly history. Their way of life more memory than fact.

We bought all the decorative penis sheaths and woven bracelets Yeskeel made. The next day he was taking pictures with his new cell phone. And in light of truths such as these, we must acknowledge we cannot preserve whole cultures, although it is my deeply held wish that everything which can be done should be done to preserve their languages, their poetry and song, their beliefs, and their knowledge, sacred and profane. Perfection in this regard, as in so many others, is the enemy of the good. And I feel strongly a desire to get to the Amazon while I can still walk and squat, before the Great Spirit tells me, as the waiter in Wamena did, “I’m sorry to inform you, but the fried banana sir ordered is empty.”