Tag Archives: papua

The Perfect Tribe

This article originally appeared on #ILLUSTRATI n. 51 — Il Barone Rampante

© Markus Fleute

The Korowai people are the perfect tribe, because they are uncontaminated.
The first contact dates back to 1974, when about thirty natives where accosted by a team of anthropologists; it is assumed that until then the Korowai people were unaware of the existence of other populations beyond themselves. A few years later, the missionaries arrived to try and convert them.

The Korowai people are the perfect tribe, because they live in an exotic way.
Hidden in a forest’s corner in one of the most secluded countries—the isle of New Guinea—they build stilt houses on top of the trees. In this way they protect against insects, snakes, boars and enemies from other tribes. Over the years, their engineering skills have been shown in several documentaries: in 2011 an episode of Human Planet, produced by the BBC, detailed the construction of a house at the vertiginous height of 40 metres above the ground, and the move of a family to this new incredible dwelling.

The Korowai people are the perfect tribe, because they are cannibals.
They do not eat their enemies nor are into indiscriminate endocannibalism: they kill and devour only those who practice black magic.
When these people get an unknown disease, before dying they usually mention the name of the khakhua, the male witch who cast the curse on them. Then the relatives of the dead person capture the necromancer and chop him into pieces, distributing his meat among the village families.
In 2006 Paul Raffaele, an Australian adventure reporter and television personality, went among the Korowai people to save a little boy who was about to be cannibalized. The episode of 60 Minutes in which he recounted his expedition was watched by an extremely large audience. The intrepid reporter also wrote a report entitled “Sleeping With The Cannibals” for the prestigious Smithsonian Magazine; this article remains very popular to this day.

The Korowai people are the perfect tribe, because we still need the myth of the Savage.
We like to think that “out of time” tribes exist, crystallized in a prehistoric phase without experiencing any evolution or social transformation. This fable reassures us about our superiority, about our extraordinary capacity for progress. This is why we prefer the Savage to be naked, primitive, rude, or even animal-like, namely characterized by all those features we have abandoned.
Let us take the example of the tsantsa, the famous shrunken heads of the indios Shuar – Jibaros settled between Ecuador and Peru: before the arrival of white men, the natives sporadically produced very few of them. But Western explorers saw the tsantsa as the perfect macabre souvenir, and above all the emblem of the “primitive barbarity” of these tribes. It was only because of the growing demand for these artefacts that the Shuar and Achuar tribes started to organize raids among the neighbouring populations in order to stock up new heads, to shrunken and sell to white man in exchange for rifles.
When visiting museums of anthropology, only a few people realize that sometimes they are not at all looking at the artefacts from an ancient and faraway culture: they are admiring a fantasy, the idea of that culture created and built by Western people for themselves.

And what about the Korowai people, who live perched on trees like Tarzan?
In April this year, the BBC admitted that the house in the tree 40 metres above the ground, shown in the 2011 episode of Human Planet, was a fake.
Namely it was a sequence agreed upon with the natives, who were charged by the television crew of building a giant stilt house—which normally they wouldn’t have normally ever built. A member of the tribe declared that the house had been built “for the benefit of the producers of television shows overseas”: the traditional Korowai dwellings actually reached a maximum height of 5-10 metres above the ground.

© George Steinmetz

And the feasts with human meat?
Cannibalism as well hasn’t actually been practiced for countless decades. “Most of these groups have a ten-year experience in providing these stories [of cannibalism] to tourists” declared anthropologist Chris Ballard of the Australian National University.
Their life now depends on Western people driven to the jungle by their search for strong emotions. The Korowai people have learnt to give them what they want.
And if white people still need the Savage, here they are.

Links, curiosities & mixed wonders – 4

As I am quite absorbed in the Academy of Enchantment, which we just launched, so you will forgive me if I fall back on a new batch of top-notch oddities.

  • Remember my article on smoked mummies? Ulla Lohmann documented, for the first time ever, the mummification process being carried out on one of the village elders, a man the photographer knew when he was still alive. The story of Lohmann’s respectful stubbornness in getting accepted by the tribe, and the spectacular pictures she took, are now on National Geographic.

  • Collective pyres burning for days in an unbearable stench, teeth pulled out from corpses to make dentures, bones used as fertilizers: welcome to the savage world of those who had to clean up Napoleonic battlefields.
  • Three miles off the Miami coast there is a real underwater cemetery. Not many of your relatives will take scuba lessons just to pay their last respects, but on the other hand, your grave will become part of the beautiful coral reef.

  • This one is for those of you acquainted with the worst Italian TV shows. In one example of anaesthetic television — comforting and dull, offering the mirage of an effortless win, a fortune that comes out of nowhere — the host randomly calls a phone number, and if the call is picked up before the fifth ring then a golden watch is awarded to the receiver. But here’s where the subversive force of memento mori comes in: in one of the latest episodes, an awkward surprise awaited the host. “Is this Mrs. Anna?” “No, Mrs. Anna just died.“, a voice replies.
    For such a mindless show, this is the ultimate ironic defeat: the embarassed host cannot help mumbling, “At this point, our watch seems useless…“

  • How can we be sure that a dead body is actually dead? In the Nineteenth Century this was a major concern. That is why some unlucky workers had to pull cadaver tongues, while others tried to stick dead fingers into their own ears; there were those who even administered tobacco enemas to the dead… by blowing through a pipe.
  • What if Monty Python were actually close to the truth, in their Philosphers Song portraying the giants of thought as terminal drunkards? An interesting long read on the relationship between Western philosophy and the use of psychoactive substances.
  • If you haven’t seen it, there is a cruel radiography shattering the self-consolatory I-am-just-big-boned mantra.

  • Man will soon land on Mars, likely. But in addition to bringing life on the Red Planet, we will also bring another novelty: death. What would happen to a dead body in a Martian atmosphere, where there are no insects, no scavengers or bacteria? Should we bury our dead, cremate them or compost them? Sarah Laskow on AtlasObscura.
  • In closing, here is a splendid series of photographs entitled Wilder Mann. All across Europe, French photographer Charles Fréger documented dozens of rural masquerades. Creepy and evocative, these pagan figures stood the test of time, and for centuries now have been annoucing the coming of winter.

Grief and sacrifice: abscence carved into flesh

Some of you probably know about sati (or suttee), the hindu self-immolation ritual according to which a widow was expected to climb on her husband’s funeral pire to be burned alive, along his body. Officially forbidden by the English in 1829, the practice declined over time – not without some opposition on behalf of traditionalists – until it almost entirely disappeared: if in the XIX Century around 600 sati took place every year, from 1943 to 1987 the registered cases were around 30, and only 4 in the new millennium.

The sacrifice of widows was not limited to India, in fact it appeared in several cultures. In his Histories, Herodotus wrote about a people living “above the Krestons”, in Thracia: within this community, the favorite among the widows of a great man was killed over his grave and buried with him, while the other wives considered it a disgrace to keep on living.

Among the Heruli in III Century a.D., it was common for widows to hang themselves over their husband’s burial ground; in the XVIII Century, on the other side of the ocean, when a Natchez chief died his wives (often accompanied by other volunteers) followed him by committing ritual suicide. At times, some mothers from the tribe would even sacrify their own newborn children, in an act of love so strong that women who performed it were treated with great honor and entered a higher social level. Similar funeral practices existed in other native peoples along the southern part of Mississippi River.

Also in the Pacific area, for instance in Fiji, there were traditions involving the strangling of the village chief’s widows. Usually the suffocation was carried out or supervised by the widow’s brother (see Fison’s Notes on Fijian Burial Customs, 1881).

The idea underlying these practices was that it was deemed unconcievable (or improper) for a woman to remain alive after her husband’s death. In more general terms, a leader’s death opened an unbridgeable void, so much so that the survivors’ social existence was erased.
If female self-immolation (and, less commonly, male self-immolation) can be found in various time periods and latitudes, the Dani tribe developed a one-of-a-kind funeral sacrifice.

The Dani people live mainly in Baliem Valley, the indonesian side of New Guinea‘s central highlands. They are now a well-known tribe, on the account of increased tourism in the area; the warriors dress with symbolic accessories – a feather headgear, fur bands, a sort of tie made of seashells specifying the rank of the man wearing it, a pig’s fangs fixed to the nostrils and the koteka, a penis sheath made from a dried-out gourd.
The women’s clothing is simpler, consisting in a skirt made from bark and grass, and a headgear made from multicolored bird feathers.

Among this people, according to tradition when a man died the women who were close or related to him (wife, mother, sister, etc.) used to amputate one or more parts of their fingers. Today this custom no longer exists, but the elder women in the tribe still carry the marks of the ritual.

Allow me now a brief digression.

In Dino Buzzati‘s wonderful tale The Humps in the Garden (published in 1968 in La boutique del mistero), the protagonist loves to take long, late-night walks in the park surrounding his home. One evening, while he’s promenading, he stumbles on a sort of hump in the ground, and the following day he asks his gardener about it:

«What did you do in the garden, on the lawn there is some kind of hump, yesterday evening I stumbled on it and this morning as soon as the sun came up I saw it. It is a narrow and oblong hump, it looks like a burial mound. Will you tell me what’s happening?». «It doesn’t look like it, sir» said Giacomo the gardener «it really is a burial mound. Because yesterday, sir, a friend of yours has died».
It was true. My dearest friend Sandro Bartoli, who was twenty-one-years-old, had died in the mountains with his skull smashed.
«Are you trying to tell me» I said to Giacomo «that my friend was buried here?»
«No» he replied «your friend, Mr. Bartoli […] was buried at the foot of that mountain, as you know. But here in the garden the lawn bulged all by itself, because this is your garden, sir, and everything that happens in your life, sir, will have its consequences right here.»

Years go by, and the narrator’s park slowly fills with new humps, as his loved ones die one by one. Some bulges are small, other enormous; the garden, once flat and regular, at this point is completely packed with mounds appearing with every new loss.

Because this problem of humps in the garden happens to everybody, and every one of us […] owns a garden where these painful phenomenons take place. It is an ancient story repeating itself since the beginning of centuries, it will repeat for you too. And this isn’t a literary joke, this is how things really are.

In the tale’s final part, we discover that the protagonist is not a fictional character at all, and that the sorrowful metaphore refers to the author himself:

Naturally I also wonder if in someone else’s garden will one day appear a hump that has to do with me, maybe a second or third-rate little hump, just a slight pleating in the lawn, not even noticeable in broad daylight, when the sun shines from up high. However, one person in the world, at least one, will stumble on it. Perhaps, on the account of my bad temper, I will die alone like a dog at the end of an old and deserted hallway. And yet one person that evening will stub his toe on the little hump in the garden, and will stumble on it the following night too, and each time that person will think with a shred of regret, forgive my hopefulness, of a certain fellow whose name was Dino Buzzati.

Now, if I may risk the analogy, the humps in Buzzati’s garden seem to be poetically akin to the Dani women’s missing fingers. The latter represent a touching and powerful image: each time a loved one leaves us, “we lose a bit of ourselves”, as is often said – but here the loss is not just emotional, the absence becomes concrete. On the account of this physical expression of grief, fingerless women undoubtedly have a hard time carrying out daily tasks; and further bereavements lead to the impossibility of using their hands. The oldest women, who have seen many loved ones die, need help and assistance from the community. Death becomes a wound which makes them disabled for life.

Of course, at least from a contemporary perspective, there is still a huge stumbling block: the metaphore would be perfect if such a tradition concerned also men, who instead were never expected to carry out such extreme sacrifices. It’s the female body which, more or less voluntarily, bears this visible evidence of pain.
But from a more universal perspective, it seems to me that these symbols hold the certainty that we all will leave a mark, a hump in someone else’s garden. The pride with which Dani women show their mutilated hands suggests that one person’s passage inevitably changes the reality around him, conditioning the community, even “sculpting” the flesh of his kindreds. The creation of meaning in displays of grief also lies in reciprocity – the very tradition that makes me weep for the dead today, will ensure that tomorrow others will lament my own departure.

Regardless of the historical variety of ways in which this concept was put forth, in this awareness of reciprocity human beings seem to have always found some comfort, because it eventually means that we can never be alone.

Smoked mummies

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The Morobe Province, in Papua New Guinea, is home to the Anga people.
Once fearsome warriors, leading terrible raids in nearby peaceful villages, today the Anga have learned how to profit from a peculiar kind of tourism. Anthropologists, adventurers and curious travelers come to the isolated villages of Morobe Highlands just to see their famous smoked mummies.

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It’s not clear when the practice first started, but it could be at least 200 years old. It was officially prohibited in 1975, when Papua New Guinea became independent; therefore the most recent mummies date back to the years following the Second World War.

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This treatment of honor was usually reserved for the most valiant warriors: as soon as they died, they were bled dry, disemboweled and put over a fire to cure. The smoking could last even more than a month. At last, when the body was completely dry, all corporal cavities were sewn shut and the whole corpse was smeared with mud and red clay to further preserve the flesh from deteriorating, and to form a protective layer against insects and scavengers.
Many sources report that the fat deriving from the smoking process was saved and later used as cooking oil, but this detail might be a fantasy of the first explorers (for instance Charles Higgingon, who was the first to report about the mummies in 1907): whenever Westeners came in contact with remote and “primitive” tribes, they often wanted to see cannibalism even in rituals that did not involve any.

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The smoked bodies were then brought, after a ritual ceremony, on mountain slopes overlooking the village. Here they were secured to the steep rock face using bamboo structures, so they could act as a lookout, protecting the abodes in the underlying valley. This way, they maintained their warrior status even after their death.

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The bodies are still worshipped today, and sometimes brought back to the village to be restored: the dead man’s descendants change the bush rope bandages, and secure the bones to the sticks, before placing the ancestor back to his lookout post.

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Despite the mummies being mainly those of village warriors, as mentioned, among them are sometimes found the remains of some woman who held a particularly important position within the tribe. The one in the following picture is still holding a baby to her breast.

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This method for preserving the bodies, as peculiar as it looks, closely resembles both the Toraja funeral rites of Indonesia (I talked about them in this post) and the much more ancient “fire mummies” which can be found in Kabayan, in northern Philippines. Here the corpse was also placed over a fire to dry, curled in fetal position; tobacco smoke was blown into the dead man’s mouth to further parch internal organs. The prepared bodies were then put in pinewood coffins and layed down in natural caves or in niches especially dug inside the mountains. The ancestor spirit’s integrity was thus guaranteed, so he could keep on protecting the village and assuring its prosperity.

Timbac Caves3

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In The Eternal Vigil I have written about how, until recent times, the Palermo Catacombs allowed a contact with the afterlife, so much so that young boys could learn their family history before the mummies, and ask for their help and benevolence. Death was not really the end of existence, and did not present itself as an irreparable separation, because between the two spheres an ongoing interchange took place.
In much the same way, on the other side of the world, ritual mummification guaranteed communication between the dead and the living, defining a clear but not impenetrable threshold between the two worlds. Death was a change of state, so to speak, but did not erase the personality of the deceased, nor his role within the community, which became if possible even more relevant.

Even today, when asked by a local guide escorting the tourists to see the mummies, an Anga man can point to one of the corpses hanging from the rock, and present him with these words: “That’s my grandpa“.

(Thanks, batisfera!)

Endocannibalismo

 Che cos’è il cannibalismo, se non il riconoscimento
del “valore” dell’altro, a tal punto da doverlo ingoiare?
(Francesco Remotti, Identità, 2013)

America 14 Brazil

Mangiare le carni di un essere umano è una pratica antica come il mondo, dallo stratificato e complesso valore simbolico.
In generale, dalla selva di teorie antropologiche o psicanalitiche al riguardo, non tutte condivisibili, emerge un elemento fondamentale, ossia la credenza magico-spirituale di poter assimilare attraverso il banchetto antropofago le qualità del morto. Dall’Africa all’Amazzonia alle Indie, divorare un valoroso nemico ucciso o fatto prigioniero in battaglia era certo un modo per vendicarsi, per negare l’alterità (e per contro, così facendo, rinforzare la propria identità culturale); ma a questo si unisce la speranza di acquisire il suo coraggio e la sua forza. Quest’idea è corroborata dal fatto che lo stesso meccanismo di transfert sarebbe stato presente anche nei riguardi della selvaggina, per cui alcune tribù del Sudamerica non cacciavano animali che si muovevano lentamente per timore di perdere le forze dopo essersene cibati.

Hans_Staden,_Tupinamba_portrayed_in_cannibalistic_feast

Il cannibalismo, quasi universalmente, era poi ritualizzato e regolato da divieti precisi: l’identificazione fra vivi e defunti avveniva su diversi livelli, e ad esempio fra i Tupinamba chi aveva ucciso un determinato nemico non poteva assolutamente mangiare le sue carni, mentre gli era consentito nutrirsi dei corpi delle vittime dei suoi compagni guerrieri; rispetto a tutti gli altri pasti quotidiani, spesso l’agape cannibalesca era riservata ai soli guerrieri, avveniva di notte in speciali luoghi deputati allo scopo, e via dicendo. Tutto questo dimostra la prevalenza della significazione simbolica sull’effettiva necessità alimentare – l’idea che il cannibalismo potesse essere la soluzione ad una dieta con scarso apporto proteico, che pure alcuni autori sostengono, sembra secondaria. Nei contesti rituali, l’atto di consumare il cadavere di un proprio simile è eminentemente magico, e spesso superfluo ai fini della sopravvivenza.
I Tupì-Guaranì, ad esempio, bollivano le interiora dell’ucciso, ottenendo un brodo chiamato mingau che veniva distribuito a tutta la tribù, ospiti e alleati inclusi. Il reale apporto nutritivo fornito dalla carne umana, suddivisa fra decine e decine di persone, in questo caso era del tutto trascurabile.

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Ancora più interessante sotto il profilo simbolico si presenta l’endocannibalismo, o allelofagia, vale a dire il cannibalismo verso individui appartenenti al proprio gruppo sociale.
Il primo a parlarne fu Erodoto nelle sue Storie (III,99):

Altre genti dell’India, localizzabili più verso oriente, sono nomadi e si nutrono di carni crude: si chiamano Padei; ed ecco quali sono, a quanto si racconta, le loro abitudini: quando uno di loro si ammala, uomo o donna che sia, viene ucciso; se è uomo, lo uccidono gli amici più intimi sostenendo che una volta consunto dalla malattia le sue carni per loro andrebbero perdute; ovviamente l’ammalato nega di essere tale, ma gli altri non accettano le sue proteste, lo uccidono e se lo mangiano. Se è una donna a cadere inferma, le donne a lei più legate si comportano esattamente come gli uomini. Del resto sacrificano chiunque giunga alla soglia della vecchiaia e se lo mangiano. Ma a dire il vero non sono molti ad arrivare a tarda età, visto che eliminano prima chiunque incappi in una malattia.

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Se questa descrizione presenta l’endocannibalismo sotto una luce cinica e spietata, la maggior parte delle tradizioni in realtà vi ricorrevano in maniera ritualistica. In linea generale, infatti, soltanto gli estranei o i nemici venivano mangiati per fame o come forma di violazione; nel caso di defunti appartenenti al proprio clan le cose si facevano più complesse. Il capo tribù dei Jukun dell’Africa Occidentale, ad esempio, mangiava il cuore del suo predecessore per assorbirne le virtù; in molti altri casi l’assunzione delle carni umane era trattata come una vera e propria forma di rispetto per i defunti. Per noi risulta forse difficile accettare che vi sia della pietà filiale nell’atto di mangiare il corpo del proprio padre (patrofagia), ma possiamo comunque intuire la portata simbolica di questo gesto: il morto viene assimilato, e diventa parte vivente della sua progenie. Gli antenati, in questo modo, non sono degli spiriti lontani la cui protezione va invocata con riti e preghiere, ma sono verità tangibile e pulsante nella carne della propria stirpe.

Piuttosto significativo in quest’ambito di discussione risulta il caso dei Tapuya brasiliani, presso i quali talvolta, quando un padre invecchiava al punto da non potere più seguire gli spostamenti del gruppo, intrapresi solitamente per soddisfare i bisogni dei vari nuclei familiari, chiedeva ai parenti stretti di mangiare le sue carni e continuare così a vivere nei discendenti, dal momento che le sue precarie condizioni fisiche avrebbero costituito un ostacolo per l’intera comunità. A tale richiesta dunque il figlio maggiore concedeva il suo assenso ed esternava il suo dolore innalzando grida di sgomento di fronte ai propri consanguinei.
Dopo la morte per cause naturali dell’anziano del gruppo, il suo corpo veniva arrostito nel corso di una complessa cerimonia accuratamente eseguita e l’intera famiglia, unitamente alla comunità, ne divorava le parti, accompagnando il pasto comune con urla e lamenti, alternati a racconti delle gesta del defunto. Ossa e cranio venivano frantumati e bruciati, mentre il resto del corpo era disposto in un grande recipiente di terracotta e quindi sotterrato.
Sembra che i bambini invece fossero mangiati soltanto in caso di estrema necessità o di pericolo e unicamente dalla propria madre, oppure quando morivano per cause sconosciute; si pensava infatti di non potere offrire loro una tomba migliore del corpo nel quale si erano formati.

(L. Monferdini, Il cannibalismo, 2000)

Usanze similari erano diffuse in Africa e nel Sudamerica (Amazzonia, Valle di Cauca, ecc.) dove diverse tribù solevano nutrirsi delle ceneri dei familiari mescolate assieme a bevande fermentate. In diverse tradizioni, erano solo le ossa ad essere mangiate, una volta bruciata la carne. I Tariana e i Tucano del Brasile riesumavano la salma alcuni mesi dopo la sepoltura, arrostivano le carni fino a che non rimaneva soltanto lo scheletro, che poi veniva finemente triturato e aggiunto a una bevanda destinata al consumo dell’intera comunità.

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Gli Yanomami del Venezuela praticano questa forma di endocannibalismo delle ceneri ancora oggi. Il corpo del defunto viene in un primo momento avvolto in strati di foglie e portato lontano dal villaggio, nella foresta. Lì viene lasciato agli insetti per poco più di un mese, finché tutti i tessuti molli non sono scomparsi. Allora le ossa vengono raccolte, cremate, e le ceneri sono disciolte in una zuppa di banane distribuita a tutta la tribù. Se avanzano delle ceneri, queste possono essere conservate in un vaso fino all’anno successivo, quando per un giorno (il “giorno della memoria”) viene sollevato il divieto di parlare dei morti e, bevendo la zuppa, l’intero villaggio si riunisce per ricordare le vite e le gesta dei defunti.

Yanoama - endocannibalism

Ma questi esempi non dovrebbero suggerire l’erronea impressione che il cannibalismo sia stato appannaggio esclusivo delle popolazioni tribali del Sudamerica, dell’Oceania o dell’Africa. Recenti scoperte hanno mostrato come la pratica fosse diffusa nelle isole britanniche all’epoca dei Romani, negli Stati Uniti del Sud, e che le abitudini antropofaghe risalgono addirittura all’epoca degli ominidi di Neanderthal o a prima ancora (vedi Homo antecessor). I ritrovamenti di ossa con segni di cottura e raschiatura, e di feci umane fossili contenenti mioglobina (una proteina che si trova esclusivamente nel cuore e nei muscoli), sembrano confermare l’ipotesi che il cannibalismo sia esistito nel nostro passato in maniera molto più diffusa del previsto.

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Un team di esperti capitanati dal professor Michael Alpers della Curtin University of Technology, studiando nel 2003 le malattie da prioni, per capire in particolare perché una buona percentuale di persone in tutto il mondo ne sia immune, è arrivato alla conclusione che si deve ringraziare proprio il cannibalismo. Esaminando un gruppo di donne della tribù Fore della Papua Nuova Guinea, particolarmente resistenti alla patologia da prioni chiamata kuru, si è scoperto che il responsabile della protezione dalla malattia è un particolare gene “duplicato”: le persone che posseggono il doppio gene sono al riparo dal kuru, quelle che hanno un gene singolo sono a rischio. Tutte le femmine Fore dotate di questa specie di “anticorpo” avevano preso parte, dagli anni ’20 agli anni ’50, a banchetti cannibali durante la più disastrosa epidemia di encefalopatie da prioni. Alle donne e ai bambini era consentito di mangiare soltanto il cervello e gli organi interni dei defunti, mentre i maschi si dividevano la carne (non infetta dai prioni). In alcune comunità le donne furono quasi completamente decimate, ma quelle che sopravvissero svilupparono la seconda copia del gene in grado di salvarle.
Il fatto però che questo doppio gene sia piuttosto comune nella popolazione mondiale ha fatto ipotizzare ad Alpers che esso sia un lascito dell’antica diffusione del cannibalismo, o perlomeno dell’endocannibalismo ritualistico, su scala globale: un passato che accomunerebbe gran parte dell’umanità.