A WITCH’S HAND

Hau
Books

Director
Anne-Christine Taylor

Editorial Collective
Erik Bähre
Deborah Durham
Casey High
Nora Scott

Managing Editor
Jane Sabherwal

Hau Books publishes works for

the Society for Ethnographic Theory (SET)

SET Board of Directors

Kriti Kapila (Chair)
Janice Boddy
John Borneman
Frédéric Keck
Enrique Martino
Anne-Christine Taylor

www.haubooks.org
A WITCH’S HAND
Curing, Killing, Kinship,
and Colonialism among
the Lujere of New Guinea

William E. Mitchell

Hau Books
Chicago
© 2024 Hau Books

A Witch’s Hand: Curing, Killing, Kinship, and Colonialism among the Lujere of New Guinea by
William E. Mitchell is licensed under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Cover images (clockwise from top): Richard Thurnwald amid his boats and men on the upper Sepik
River, 1914; a Lujere na wowi mask strides through the village to meet his patient, 1971; a map of the
Yellow and Sand Rivers during German control, 1924.

Layout design: Deepak Sharma, Prepress Plus Technologies

Typesetting: Prepress Plus Technologies (https://prepressplustechnologies.com)

ISBN: 978-1-912808-45-8 [paperback]

ISBN: 978-1-912808-85-4 [electronic]
ISBN: 978-1-912808-46-5 [PDF]
LCCN: 2020951266

Hau Books
Chicago Distribution Center
11030 S. Langley
Chicago, Il 60628
www.haubooks.org

Hau Books publications are printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press.
www.press.uchicago.edu

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

 This book is dedicated to all whose names
appear within these pages, both the living and the dead.
Each, in her or his way, helped me write this book.
Contents

List of Illustrations xix

Figures xix
Tables xxi
Maps xxi

List of Abbreviations xxiii

Glossary xxv

Acknowledgments xxix

INTRODUCTION 1
Beginnings 1
Signposts 6

Part One: THE COLONIAL INVASION

Chapter One: GERMANY, THE LUJERE’S ABSENTEE RULERS 15

The Colonial Cannibalism of New Guinea 17
Richard Thurnwald, Pioneering Ethnographer and Explorer-Surveyor 21
Thurnwald Encounters the Lujere, 1914 25
The Yellow and Sand River Excursions 26
The Trashing of Thurnwald’s Camp 32

vii
 A Witch’s Hand

Chapter Two: AUSTRALIA, THE LUJERE’S NEW RULERS 37

From Australian Occupation to the League of Nations Mandate 37
Constructing a Colonial System of Administration 39
The Trade in Bird-of-Paradise Plumes 40
The First Lujere Patrols 44
Robinson’s Pioneering 1929–1932 Patrols 45
McCarthy’s 1936 Patrol 54

Chapter Three: THE JAPANESE INVASION 61

The Fall of Rabaul, 1942 62
Guerrilla Warfare in the Upper Sepik Basin, 1943 64
The Lujere and the Mosstroops Guerrillas 66
Steel tools at last 70
Lujere memories of the war 74
The Japanese Peril 77
Japanese attacks in Lujereland 78
The flight of the Mosstroops 80
Operation Persecution: The Aitape Coast Recaptured 83
The End of the War in New Guinea 85

Chapter Four: AUSTRALIAN HEGEMONY RESTORED 89

Return of the Patrol Officers 90
Patrol Officer Gilbert and Father James’s Patrol to the Sepik, 1949 92
Seeking a Yellow River Airstrip Site, 1951 94
Wakau’s First Indentured Laborers 99
The First Official Census of the Lujere, 1956 100
A Patrol Officer’s Assessment of the Lujere Colonial Predicament, 1962 106
Here Come the Missionaries! 107
The Sola Fida Mission and the First Regional Airstrip, 1958 107
The Christian Brethren Arrive, 1961 108
Wakau Village Makes a Move 109

viii
 Contents

Chapter Five: COLONIAL TWILIGHT 111

Establishing the Yellow River (Edwaki) Base Camp 111
A Failed Attempt, 1968 111
Success, a Triumph of Local Politics, 1971 118
Here Come the Anthropologists! 124
The Fast Track to Independence 129

Chapter Six: THE SEARCH FOR A VILLAGE 133

Gilbert Lewis’s Lujere Experience 133
The Search 135
A Hasty Flight to Edwaki Base Camp 136
Visiting Multiple Lujere Villages 136
Narrowing the Options 143
The Choice 150
A temporary move to Edwaki Base Camp 150
Settling in at Wakau village 154

Part Two: WHO ARE THE LUJERE?

Chapter Seven: LUJERELAND 161

The Lay of the Land: Low, Wet, Hot, and Humid 162
Colonial Consequences 164
“Isolated and Undeveloped” 164
The South Wapei Census Division 165
Indentured laborers 165
Villagers’ knowledge of the colonial government 170
Councils and the Southwest Census District 171
Jobs: An unfulfilled wish 173
Rural Airstrips 175
Hunting with Shotguns 176
Scientific Medicine in the Bush 178
Radios and Newspapers 179
Trade Stores and Markets 180

ix
 A Witch’s Hand

Tok Pisin Schools and Literacy 181

Yellow River Preparatory School 181

Chapter Eight: THE LUJERE VILLAGES 185

A Muddle of Terms 185
Population and Gender 187
Lujere Regions 189
Leadership and Authority 191
Ancestral Origins 191
A Man, His Son, and Dog Go Up the Sepik 192
Male Initiation: Myth or Authentic History? 196
Talk, the Essence of Life 197
A Plethora of Papuan Languages: Namia’s Neighbors 198
The classification gambit 198
Namia 200
Tok Pisin 202

Chapter Nine: OLD ENEMIES 203

Traditional Enemies 204
Trading with the Enemy 205
Dressed to Kill 207
The Lujere Fight Shield 208
Slaying the Enemy 210
The Tsila Village Massacre 211
The Yellow River Massacre 213
Prelude to a Cannibal Feast 217
The Massacre 220
The Aftermath 223

Chapter Ten: WAKAU VILLAGE 229

Wakau Local History 229
Cultural Impact of the Mission 232
A Pragmatic People 232

x
 Contents

Cultural Changes Since Robinson’s and McCarthy’s Patrols 234

Dating Local History 236
The People and Households of Wakau 237
Betty Gillam and Jalman’s Medical Clinic 237
Who Lives Where? 239
Women’s Houses 241
Family Bush Camps 243
Men’s Houses 245
The House as Cultural Metaphor 249
The Fieldwork Camp 249
The Lower Village: Dramatis Personae 252
Village Rhythms 254
Morning and afternoon 254
The evening dinner 259
Greetings, Old and New 260
The Ancestors’ Stones 261
Taboos in Daily Life 262

Chapter Eleven: DISCORD AND DISSENT 265

Domestic Quarrels 265
Disputes Among Villagers 269
Colonial Offenses, Official and Unofficial 272
Klowi’s Crimes 274
Patrol Officers and Villagers 276
Playing Politics 276
The Ten-Cent “Tax” 277
The 1972 National Election 278
The Power of the Patrol Officer 281
The Ethnologist’s Rant 282

xi
 A Witch’s Hand

Chapter Twelve: CLANSHIP, KINSHIP, AND MARRIAGE 283

The Work of the Patriclans 284
Dual Clan Affiliation 285
Adoption 289
Economic Resources 290
Resource Transmission 292
Kinship Terminology 292
Wakau Kin Terms 294
Joking Relationships 296
Love and Marriage 297
Yaope Takes a Bride 298
Threatening Female Abduction 299
Tsaime and Nemia: A Turbulent Nuptial Scenario 300
An aborted elopement 300
A stick fight 305
The patrol officer’s court 306
Klowi’s stern lectures 308
The bow-and-arrow confrontation 309
A rained-out political meeting 311
The closing nuptial exchange 311
Nauwen and Kunai’s Marital Woes 312

Chapter Thirteen: INTO THE BUSH: THE QUEST FOR FOOD 315
Sago, the Lujere Staff of Life 316
Relentless Gatherers 318
Reluctant Gardeners 318
The Fervor of the Hunt 320
Ginger’s Magical Power and Use 324
Hunting Dogs and Wild and Tame Pigs 324
Finding Fish 326
The Omnipresence of Food Taboos 328

xii
 Contents

Part Three: MAGIC, MURDER, AND THE LUJERE IMAGINATION

Chapter Fourteen: STORIES FROM AN IMAGINARY PAST 333

Mental Worlds 333
The Storytellers’ Tales 336
Why Dogs Eat Shit 339
A Pond Python Eats a Mother and Her Baby 340
Filial Love: The Cassowary Mother and Her Human Son 340
The Turtle Moon and the Naughty Children 342
The Selfish Husband and a Magical Skirt 344
A Cannibal Demon and the Villagers’ Revenge 345
Wararu and the Spirit Woman 346
The Origin of Frogs 346
A Tale of Two Brothers 348
Water-Snake Woman Is a Good Wife 350

Chapter Fifteen: THE LUJERE CURING FESTIVALS 351

Modes of Therapeutic Intervention 351
The Lujere View of Sickness 353
The Lujere Spirit World 354
Souls, Spirits, and Ghouls 354
Tracking Down the Wowi Spirits 358
The Ways of Ritual 359
The Wowi-Spirit Curing Festivals 360
Mauwi’s Na Wowi Curing Festival 361
Day one: Preparations 363
Day two: The exorcism 368
An outsider’s perspective 370
Ritual phallocrypts in the upper Sepik Basin 372
Mokadami’s Aewal Wowi Curing Festival 377
Preparations 377

xiii
 A Witch’s Hand

The aewal wowi ritual horns 380

The concluding rituals 382
Wakau’s Aewal Wowi Curing Festivals 384
The first curing festival 385
The second curing festival 388

Chapter Sixteen: ‘SANGUMA’: THE TERROR OF MAGICAL RITUAL

MURDER IN OCEANIA 391
‘Sanguma’ as Magical Ritual Murder 391
Sorcery and Witchcraft 392
Geocultural Distribution of ‘Sanguma’ 395
Ethnographic Descriptions of ‘Sanguma’ in Papua New Guinea 395
The first descriptions by Codrington and Seligman 395
‘Sanguma’ in the eastern islands 397
Hogbin’s Guadalcanal description 397
Ludvigson’s Espiritu Santo Island description 398
Fortune’s Dobu account 398
‘Sanguma’ in the Sepik region 400
Bateson’s Iatmul account 400
Roscoe’s Yangoru Boiken description 401
Gesch’s Yamuk village (Middle Sepik) description 402
Kulick’s Gapun and Juillerat’s Yafar descriptions 402
Scorza’s Tumentonik village (Torricelli Mountains) description 403
Morren’s Telefolmin description 403
‘Sanguma’ in Papua (former British New Guinea) 404
Knauft’s Gebusi (Western Province) description 404
Burton-Bradley and Julius’ Motu village (Port Moresby) description 404
Malinowski’s Mailu description 404
‘Sanguma’ in the north coastal region 406
St. Lehner’s Markham-Ramu plain description 406
Hogbin’s Wogeo Island description 406
Koster’s Banara (Bogia area) description 407

xiv
 Contents

‘Sanguma’ in the Highlands 408

Berndt’s Jate (eastern Central Highlands) description 408
Stewart and Strathern’s Wiru and Hewa (Southern Highlands)
descriptions 408
Ethnographic Descriptions of ‘Sanguma’ in Indonesia 409
‘Sanguma’ in North Maluku province 409
Bubandt’s Halmahera Island description 409
‘Sanguma’ in West Papua province 410
Held’s Waropen description 410
‘Sanguma’ in Papua province 411
Wirz’s Marind-Anim description 411
Ethnographic Descriptions of ‘Sanguma’ in Australia 412
‘Sanguma’ in South Australia 412
Spencer and Gillen’s Arunta description 412
‘Sanguma’ in Western Australia 413
Tokinson’s Jigalong description 413
‘Sanguma’ in the Northern Territory 413
Reid’s and Warner’s Murngin accounts 413
Conclusion: The Cultural Extent and Mapping of ‘Sanguma’ 415

Chapter Seventeen: ‘SANGUMA’ AND SOCIETY 417

Lujere ‘Sanguma’ 417
The Apprenticeship of a ‘Sangumaman’ 418
Positive Roles of a ‘Sangumaman’ 420
The Origin Story of Lujere ‘Sanguma’ 421
An Iwani Sorcery Trial in Lumi 422
Etymology of ‘Sanguma’ and Its Conflicting Referents 425
Don Laycock and ‘Sanguma’ 426
Margaret Mead and ‘Sanguma’ 427
Is ‘Sanguma’ Real? 430
Father G. J. Koster’s Accounts 430
F. E. Williams’s Accounts 432

xv
 A Witch’s Hand

Dr. Becker’s Surgical ‘Sanguma’ Patient 434

Iwani’s Double ‘Sanguma’ Murder 436
The Queen v. three ‘sangumamen’ 436
The villagers’ version of the murders 438
‘Sanguma’ and the Law 440
Reo Fortune’s 1932 Critique of the Sorcery Ordinance of 1893 440
The Sorcery Act of 1971 441
‘Sanguma’ Witch Hunts in Papua New Guinea Today 442
The 2015 Repeal of the Sorcery Act 443

Chapter Eighteen: THE AFFLICTED AND THEIR CURERS 445

Patients’ Curing Options 445
Medical Services through the Administration and Mission 446
Litabagi’s Wakau Medical Patrol 446
Home Remedies, Physical and Ritual 448
Pourame and Oria’s Family Health Crisis 452
Magical Curers 454
Male Magical Curers 454
Female Magical Curers 455
Magical Curing Practices 455
Magical Curers and Their Patients 457
Klowi Treats Iwanauwi of Mauwi Hamlet 457
Menetjua Treats Tschorai 458
Eine’s and Tschorai’s Curer Treatments 460
A ‘Sangumaman’ Treats Ime 460
A Curing Clinic 463
Mangko Treats Kaukobu of Gwidami 469
Three Weari Curers Treat Klowi 471
Sickness, Curing, Placebos, and the Male Curers 473
The Curer Paradox and Self-Referential Magic 474
Psychosis or Devil Possession? 477

xvi
 Contents

Chapter Nineteen: DEATH IN WAKAU 479

Rampant Pneumonia 479
A Hunting Camp Visit 484
A Graveyard Ritual 485
The Death of Ukai 485
Ukai’s wake 488
Ukai’s burial 490
The Death of Kairapowe 494
Saying Goodbye 496
Magical versus Medical Curing 498
Curing Modes and Techniques 499
The Lujere Separation of Local and Introduced Curing Systems 501
‘Sanguma’: Some Final Thoughts 502

Appendix: AI’IRE’S CHRONIC ABDOMINAL ILLNESS:

A CASE-STUDY LOG OF MAGICAL AND MEDICAL
INTERVENTIONS 503

References 507

xvii
List of Illustrations

Unless otherwise indicated in the text captions, all photos are by William E. Mitchell.

Figures
Figure 1. Richard Thurnwald amid his boats and assistants on the upper Sepik
River, January 1914. 23
Figure 2. Richard Thurnwald’s photo of Lujere men and boys on the Sand River,
November 1914. 31
Figure 3. A Mosstroops photo of the Sepik River, marked up to show the seaplane
landing area where men and supplies could be off-loaded. 69
Figure 4. A Lujere headman with a traditional pipe, as photographed by a
Mosstroops member. 72
Figure 5. The Aukwom aid post orderly on the porch with some patients below. 139
Figure 6. A Lujere man stands on the porch of a traditional-style men’s
house (iron), one of two in Nami village. 145
Figure 7. Nakate and Manwai ready a canoe to cross the Yellow River. 147
Figure 8. View south from Wakau’s upper village, looking over lower village roofs
towards the ‘kunai’ plain, the West Range, and Victor Emanuel Range. 155
Figure 9. A Wakau village fight shield. Australian Museum, Sydney. 209
Figure 10. Aerial view of Wakau village, looking north. 230
Figure 11. Mothers visiting at Oria’s wife’s house, across from my office.
Kwoien’s wife Wariyeh with her newborn son is on the right. 231
Figure 12. Enmauwi smokes a traditional mero pipe as his daughter Wea plays
with the stem of Nimo’s mero. 236
Figure 13. Nurse Betty Gillam and the medical orderly Jalman set up for a
medical clinic. 238
Figure 14. Wawenowaki (Klowi’s wife, second from right) relaxes with family
and friends on the front veranda of her traditional house. 243
Figure 15. K____ bush camp, a two-and-a-half-hour hike from Wakau. 245

xix
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 16. Klowi’s bush camp in the fens, across the Sand River. 246
Figure 17. The interior of Klowi’s bush camp. 246
Figure 18. The abandoned men’s house (iron) in Wakau, once the men’s sleeping
quarters. 247
Figure 19. The new men’s house in the upper village of Wakau. 248
Figure 20. Villagers outside my office listening to a tape recording of a
curing ritual. 250
Figure 21. My office, with its two indispensable and faithful assistants:
an Olympia typewriter and an Aladdin lamp. 251
Figure 22. Wakau men returning home late afternoon with their hunting
weapons. Note the old, abandoned iron in the background. 254
Figure 23. Wakau women returning home with firewood. 255
Figure 24. Boys spinning tops in the lower village. 257
Figure 25. Ai’ira’s daughter Yawori holds a toy bow as boys spin their tops
in the lower village. The path connects the lower and upper villages. 257
Figure 26. A boy astride an archaic grinding stone near the end of the
upper village. 262
Figure 27. Breakfast with Joyce, Elizabeth, and Ned in my screened-tent
dining area. 279
Figure 28. An Iwani villager receives a ballot from PO Lanaghan. 280
Figure 29. Ai’ire casts his ballot assisted by the Iwani ‘luluai’; in the middle
distance, women line up for a ballot. The house belonging to the ‘kiap’ is in the rear. 280
Figure 30. Leno striding angrily by the lower iron, bush knife in hand. 301
Figure 31. Tsaimi, face blackened to express his powerful emotions, holds
the ‘kiap’ baton inlaid with the Queen’s coin portrait to give to Leno. 303
Figure 32. Leno and Tsaime at PO Lanaghan’s informal court. 307
Figure 33. Kairapowe washing sago by the Sand River with Oria’s daughter
Womkau. 317
Figure 34. Men carry a wild boar shot by Klowi to the ‘kunai’ house. 321
Figure 35. Klowi in the upper village with a recently shot Victoria crowned pigeon. 322
Figure 36. Mangko with boys and the cassowary he shot with his bow and arrow. 323
Figure 37. The boys and youths who created the na wowi masks. 364
Figure 38. Lijeria quietly awaits the beginning of his na wowi curing festival. 365
Figure 39. One of the na wowi masks approaches Lijeria, seated. 367
Figure 40. Na wowi mask carriers, Iwowari, Purkenitobu, and Katweli,
practicing their moves. 369
Figure 41. A na wowi mask kneels next to Lijeria for the curing climax. 371
Figure 42. A na wowi mask parades across the village plaza, followed by chanting
children and women. 375
Figure 43. Men playing aewal wowi horns encircle afflicted victims. The
“grandfather” horn is the undecorated one and the others known as the “children.” 380
Figure 44. Orana and Anwani are treated near the four aewal wowi placed
on the ground. 383
Figure 45. Decorated aewal wowi horns perform for Maruwami’s curing rituals. 389
Figure 46. Chest x-ray slide of victim’s thoracic cavity with three casing wires. 435

xx
 List of Illustrations

Figure 47. Partial lineup of Wakau families for Litabagi’s medical patrol;
Mowal far left, next to Mangko and Kairapowe chatting. 447
Figure 48. Aid post orderly Litabagi gives oral amodiaquine to Oria’s sister’s baby. 448
Figure 49. Oria makes an aewal wowi curing bundle for his sick wife. 450
Figure 50. Oria covers Pourame for the curing ritual. 451
Figure 51. Warajak helps Oria complete the aewal wowi curing ritual for Pourame. 453
Figure 52. Ime with K____ and Kowali, her mother’s brother, holding a betel
bespattered bundle. 462
Figure 53. Yabowe, supported by her father, is treated by Ari. 466
Figure 54. As Klene clings to a rafter for support, Ari tugs on his belly skin. 467
Figure 55. Little Manwe is held down by his mother as Ari treats him. 468
Figure 56. Ari explores Manwe’s belly as his helper leans down with a curing
bundle. 469
Figure 57. Enaru squeezes Lijeria’s flesh as his helper waits with her curing bundle. 470
Figure 58. Men plan and prepare Ukai’s gravesite. 491
Figure 59. Two young women bring water to the gravesite for the men to wash
the body. 492
Figure 60. Meyawali and Mowal closing Kairapowe’s grave with palm branches. 495
Figure 61. The author with his cargo and two local boys on the Yellow River
airstrip awaiting his MAF chartered plane to Lumi. Photo by Ray Lanaghan. 497

Tables
Table 1. PO Oakes’s Lujere village census data, 1956 105
Table 2. Lujere shotguns, radios, and male literacy in Tok Pisin 180
Table 3. CMML Yellow River primary school students 182
Table 4. PO Lanaghan’s Lujere village census data, November–December 1971 188
Table 5. Lujere enemy villages by cardinal direction and language 204
Table 6. Wakau population by marital status, 1972 239
Table 7. Wakau population by age and gender, 1956 and 1972 239
Table 8. Key to map 6, women’s houses and men’s collective houses in Wakau
village 242
Table 9. Iwani village males convicted of offenses 1955–1971 273
Table 10. Variability in Lujere curing modes and techniques, 1971–72 499

Maps
Map 1. The island of New Guinea, with the Sepik area framed in the center box. 2
Map 2. The Lujere homeland and some of the Sepik cultures with ethnographic
studies, 1972. 3
Map 3. The Sand and Yellow (Gelb) river basins during German control. 24
Map 4. PO George Oakes’s patrol map of villages in South Wapei Census
Division, 1957. 101

xxi
 A Witch’s Hand

Map 5. Lujere villages visited by Barry Craig on his 1969 collecting trip. 127
Map 6. Wakau village women’s and men’s houses in November, 1971.
Drawing by Dan Holbrow. 241
Map 7. Oria’s map of his land across the Sand River with sago stands and creeks. 291

xxii
List of Abbreviations

A$: Australian dollar

ADC: Assistant District Commissioner
ADO: Assistant District Officer
AIB: Allied Intelligence Bureau
ANGAU: Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit
AN&MEF: Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force
CMML: Christian Missions in Many Lands
CPO: Cadet Patrol Officer
DASF: Department of Agriculture, Stock, and Fisheries
DC: District Commissioner
DDS: Department of District Services and Native Affairs
DORCA: Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs
FELO: Far Eastern Liaison Unit
JN: Joyce’s typed field notes
Lang.: Language
MAF: Missionary Aviation Fellowship
MBE: Member of the Order of the British Empire
MD: Author’s typed diary notes
MN: Author’s typed field notes
NAA: National Archives of Australia
NB: Author’s field notebook
OBE: Officer of the Order of the British Empire
OIC: Officer in Charge
PNG: Papua New Guinea
PO: Patrol Officer
RAAF: Royal Australian Air Force
SVD: Society of the Divine Word, a Catholic religious order
SWCD: South Wapei Census Division
TP: Tok Pisin (Pidgin English, Melanesian Pidgin, Neo-Melanesian)

xxiii
Glossary

Throughout this book, terms in the Tok Pisin language are indicated by single quotes;
terms in Namia are indicated by italics.

Tok Pisin

‘bus kanaka’: unsophisticated, old-fashioned person (pejorative)

‘hatwara’: sago pudding
‘haus kiap’: patrol officer’s rest house
‘haus kuk’: kitchen
‘haus meri’: women’s house
‘haus polis’: police rest house
‘haus tambaran’: male ceremonial house
‘kalabus’: jail
‘kanaka’: Indigene, local, Native
‘kanda’: cane, rattan
‘kapiok: bread fruit tree
‘kaukau’: sweet potato
‘kawawar’: ginger
‘kiap’: patrol officer
‘kot’: court; to be accused
‘kulau’: green coconut for drinking
‘kunai’: grass plains
‘kundu’: hand drum
‘laplap’: waistcloth or sarong
‘limbum’: flooring made from a palm trunk; pliable flower sheath of a palm sometimes
made into containers
‘luluai’: top village official appointed by the ‘kiap’
‘mami’: a type of yam
‘maski’: never mind
‘meri’: female

xxv
 A Witch’s Hand

‘morata’: thatch shingles made of sewn palm leaves

‘muruk’: cassowary
‘ofis’: office
‘ol i ranawe’: everyone ran away
‘pangal’: sago palm stem
‘popo’: papaya
‘Popi’: Roman Catholic
‘posin’: sorcery
‘ring moni’: shell wealth
‘saksak’: sago
‘sanguma’ (‘sangguma’): magical homicide
‘sarip’: small sickle for cutting grass
‘satu’: dice gambling game
‘selmani’: shell money
‘sing-sing’: festival usually including dancing and feasting
‘sot win’: shortness of breath
talatala: Protestant
‘tok pilai’: joking
‘tultul’: secondary village official appointed by the ‘kiap’
‘wailis’: a radio transmitter
‘wantok’: person who speaks your language
‘wanwok’: person who shared your contract labor
‘waspapa’: a foster father, a guardian

NAMIA

aewal: stinging nettles

aewal wowi: stinging nettles bush demon
aijan aokwae: spirit associated with natural phenomena
amei: stone axe
anapi: bow
aokwae: spirit
aokwae bidami: spirit of dead person
aokwae naki: spirit of newly dead person
aokwae nebu: rainbow
Edwaki: Lujere central villages
ena aokwae: pond spirit
iju aokwae: stream spirit
imoulu: traditional male curer
iron: men’s house
ithu wowi: water bush demon
lei aokwae: swamp spirit
Lawo: northwestern Lujere villages
mero: two-piece smoking implement
nakwolu: murderous male witch
na wowi: sago bush demon

xxvi
 Glossary

Pabei: southern Lujere villages

paumei: sorcery
poketaiyup: a person’s spirit or soul
tiramli: hand drum
walamaku: settlement
waniwani: wooden trumpet
Weari: eastern Lujere villages
wowi: bush demon

xxvii
Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the Lujere residents of Wakau ham-
let of Iwani village, Aitape-Lumi Subdistrict, Sanduan (West Sepik) Province, who in
1971–72 and during my brief revisits in 1982 and 2000, generously shared their lives and
stories with me. A few names warrant special mention, as their valuable contributions
were so extensive: Oria, Kaiera, Nauwen, Arakwaki, Kunai, Klowi, and Waratchak, a boy
in 1971 but on my return in 2000 a grown man called Jek.
I am deeply grateful for the generous three-year research grant awarded by the Na-
tional Institute of Mental Health in 1970 that made it possible for me to live with the
Lujere and collect the data upon which this book is based. I am also grateful to the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for an earlier summer travel grant that brought me to Papua
New Guinea in 1967 to join anthropologists Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux on the
Sepik River.
I am also grateful to the following institutions and governmental departments for
facilitative support, and to their staffs for personal courtesies: Carolina Academic Press;
Christian Missions in Many Lands; Cornell University Library; Department of An-
thropology and Sociology, University of Papua New Guinea; Division of Anthropol-
ogy, American Museum of Natural History; Franciscan Friars of Papua New Guinea;
National Archives of Australia; National Archives and Public Records Services of Papua
New Guinea; Kreitzberg Library, Norwich University; Davis Family Library, Middle-
bury College; Morrisville Public Library, Morrisville, Vermont; Ethnological Museum
of Berlin; New Guinea Research Unit, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian
National University; National Department of Health, Department of Social Develop-
ment and Home Affairs, and Office of the Administrator, Papua New Guinea; Univer-
sity of Berlin Library; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; University of
Michigan Library; Thomas James Rodoni Archive, University of Newcastle; University
of Pennsylvania Museum Library; University of Sydney Archives; Howe Library, Uni-
versity of Vermont; Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; Sanduan
(West Sepik) Province, Aitape-Lumi Subdistrict, and Edwaki Base Camp offices.
I am greatly indebted to the following individuals, some lamentably departed, who at
very different times and in often vastly different ways each gave generously of their time

xxix
 A Witch’s Hand

and expertise to keep my research rolling along (listed alphabetically): Phillip Ace, Rose-
mary Ace, Alex Achjanie, Timoti Aliowoni, Bryant Allen, Dan Anderson, Janet Ander-
son, Ian Bean, T. O. Beidelman, Lauri Bragge, Peter Broadhurst, Ralph N. H. Bulmer,
B. G. Burton-Bradley, Barry Craig, Kathryn Creely, Laurent A. Daloz, Diane De Terra,
Jared Diamond, Mark Dornstreich, Stephen J. Duggan, T. Wayne Dye, May Ebihara,
Harry Feldman, Tom Feldpausch, Becky Feldpausch, Oswald C. Fountain, Deborah
Gewertz, Elizabeth A. Gillam, Risto Gobius, Robert Gordon, Phillip Guddemi, Eike
Haberland, Karin Hanta, Robert Haynes, Alan Healey, Linda Hoffmann, Ian Hogbin,
Heidi Horsely, Leo Hoy, Mary Taylor Huber, Peter Huber, Richard Hutchings, Adell
Johannes, Dan Jorgensen, Bernard Juillerat, Christian Kaufmann, Antje Kelm, Heinz
Kelm, Sander Kirsch, Ron Kitson, Raymond Lanaghan, Don Laycock, David A. M. Lea,
Hope Leichter, James Leichter, Gilbert A. Lewis, Kay Liddle, Claudio Lomnitz, Joseph
K. Long, Laura Marshall, Adrian Matthews, Shirley Matthews, Aileen R. F. McGregor,
Donald E. McGregor, Marion Melk-Koch, Margaret Mead, David Merau, Rhoda Mé-
traux, Wolfgang Mieder, Joyce Slayton Mitchell, Peter Moriarty, Lyn Wark Murray,
Douglas Newton, George D. Oakes, Lita Osmundsen, Nina Parris, Cecil Parrish, Mary
Parrish, Mark Pendergrast, Veronica Richel, Paul Roscoe, Jo Scanlan, Markus Schindl-
beck, Meinhard Schuster, David P. Scorza, John R. Slayton, William E. Staley, Yvonne
Starcheska, Andrew Strathern, John Sturt, Joseph Subasic, Nancy Sullivan, Pamela
Swadling, Patricia Townsend, Edgar Tschadjin, Jacques Van Vlack, Beatrice Voirol, An-
nette Weiner, and C. S. Wigley.
During the actual writing of this book there are a few names already mentioned that
deserve a separate shout-out for the many times they lent their expertise to my work:
Bryant Allen, Lauri Bragge, Peter Broadhurst, Barry Craig, Kathy Creely, Stephen Dug-
gan, Tom Feldpausch, Betty Gillam, Gilbert Lewis, David Merau, and Veronica Richel.
Lastly, a special acknowledgment and commendation is due the dedicated patrol of-
ficers who wrote the detailed reports I have extensively drawn from, and to their supervi-
sors up the chain of command who added their own comments. Without making this
“readerly pilgrimage” (Lomnitz 2014: xl) into the colonial past via these officers’ com-
prehensive writings, all situated in time and place, I could not have enfolded my account
of the Lujere into their long and deep history of foreign occupation. The patrol officers
whose reports I gratefully cite are T. G. Atchison, Lauri Bragge, Merton Brightwell,
J. K. Broadhurst, P. E. Feinberg, J. E. Fowke, Ric Hutchings, Frank D. Jones, Ray La-
naghan, J. Martyn, J. K. McCarthy, George Oakes, R. Orwin, G. F. Payne, E. W. Rob-
inson, A. Stevens, M. E. Tomlinson, R. K. Treutlain, C. A. Trollope, F. J. Wafingian,
P. B. Wenke, John White, A. S. Wright, and D. Young-Whitford.
Regarding Hau Books, my first thanks are to Hylton White, who initially appreciated
the ethnographic scope and historical significance of my book about the Lujere people.
The dedicated copy editors who worked on the book were Dan Holbrow (who also drew
the charming map of Wakau village (map 6), Honora Perkins, and Julee Tanner; I owe
a special thanks to Julee for all the laughs we had in Zoom meetings as we scrambled to
finish the final editing.
Some of the material in the book was first presented in talks to the Anthropology Sec-
tion, New York Academy of Sciences; Department of Behavioral Science, Pennsylvania
State University College of Medicine; Department of Psychiatry, Tufts University Col-
lege of Medicine; Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Papua

xxx
 Acknowledgments

New Guinea; and in sessions at the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological

and Ethnological Sciences (1973); Seventy-Third Annual Meeting of the American An-
thropological Association (1974); One Hundred Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (1976); Wenner-Gren Founda-
tion Ninety-Fifth International Symposium, “Sepik Research Today” (1984); and the
Johnson State College lecture series, “The Creative Audience” (1990).

xxxi
Introduction

The Sepik is a very large river.

Gregory Bateson (1932: 4)

Beginnings
Nostalgia is a troublesome sentiment. Like unrequited love, it is too self-serving, too
wistfully sentimental, too intellectually sloppy. And it is usually only half of the story—
the good half. Yet whenever I think of New Guinea and its Sepik provinces, as I did when
beginning this book about the Lujere people, I inevitably succumb to nostalgia’s seductive
embrace. As I began to write, the faint whiff of tropical mold that even today clings to my
old notebooks transported me back to the Lujere’s swampy homeland and the “messiness
and imponderabilia of fieldwork” (Dalton 2000: 291–92). Then the languid tropical air is
suddenly suffused with voracious mosquitoes or angry bolts of lightning and torrents of
rain transforming a pleasant afternoon into a hellish storm. It is the same when recalling
the villagers with whom I lived. First, their personal warmth and gentle kindnesses to-
wards one another and to me immediately jump to mind, and then I recall their obsession
with the terrifying male witches—the nakwolu—who they said didn’t hesitate to secretly
attack and kill their neighbors.
Although nostalgic memories are a part of any author’s ethnography, more important
are the many hundreds of pages of handwritten and typed field notes, the boxes of taped
interviews, hundreds of black-and-white and color photos, fragile decaying maps, stacks
of film canisters and, today, video recordings and digital photos. Unlike nostalgic memo-
ries that uncritically gloss the past, a large corpus of clearly identified fieldwork materials
critically jerks the writer back in time and space to specific persons and concrete events
personally known or witnessed. Vague memories and even events long forgotten come
scurrying back, leaping into one’s consciousness, often with surprising vividness.
This book is about the Lujere people of Papua New Guinea as witnessed from the vil-
lage of Wakau, where I lived with them in 1971–1972, a long time ago. I first heard about
them when I lived in the foothills of the Torricelli Mountains, where I was studying the

1
 A Witch’s Hand

Wape people in the village of Taute.1 The Lujere were located about a three- or four-days’
walk to the south. On a clear day in the right spot, I could see their wet grasslands far
away in the Sepik River Basin; even farther in the dim distance were the Central Ranges
on the other side of the hidden river.2 Map 1 depicts the island of New Guinea and the
Sepik area, while map 2 shows the location of the Lujere in relation to neighboring Sepik
societies that had been the focus of ethnographic studies around the time of my research.

Map 1. The island of New Guinea, with the Sepik area framed in the center box. Reprinted from
Lutkehaus et al. (1990: 664) by permission of Carolina Academic Press.

The government referred to the Lujere as “the Yellow River people,” but the Wape
called them ‘ol man belong tais’ (“the swamp dwellers”), usually adding with a look of
scornful fear, ‘Em i as ples bilong sanguma!’ indicating that to them, the Lujere were the
home of ‘sanguma,’ an old and dreaded form of ritualized magical homicide with, I would

1. When I first began to think about New Guinea as a field site for extended research with my
family, I read an article by Eike Haberland (1965) on the areas in the Sepik region that needed
ethnographic research and later talked with him personally at an anthropology meeting. One
area was the Torricelli Mountains that lay between Aitape on the north coast and the Sepik
River; the other was the area south of the Torricellis that Haberland (1965: 40) identified as
“the river basin of the Yellow and Sand River.” Neither had been studied ethnographically yet,
although Gilbert Lewis was soon to do fieldwork among the Gnau in the Torricellis. As it
resulted, I studied the Wape in the Torricellis, west of the Gnau, and the Lujere in the area of
the Yellow and Sand Rivers.
2. Looking at map 2, the physiographic regions are the Northern Ranges of the Bewani, Torri-
celli, and Prince Alexander Ranges; the Intermontane Trough of the Sepik and Ramu River
Basins; and the Central Cordillera of the West, Central, and Schrader Ranges (Löffler 1972).

2
 Introduction

Map 2. The Lujere homeland and some of the Sepik cultures with ethnographic studies, 1972.
Reprinted with permission from Mitchell 1975: 412.

learn, a wide cultural distribution in Oceania that stretched even into Indonesia and Aus-
tralia and examined here in depth for the first time. On the rare instance when any Yellow
River people happened to enter our village en route to the subdistrict headquarters in
Lumi, word spread quickly as my neighbors and friends vanished into their homes. Eve-
ryone was afraid of the swamp people and their ‘sanguma’ witchcraft. Among the Lujere,
‘sangumamen’ are called nakwolu. In later chapters, you will learn why and how they are
both feared and hated as killers but also respected and valued as curers called imoulu.
In 1962, Patrol Officer R. K. Treutlein made a fifty-six-day patrol of the villages be-
tween the Wape dwelling in the mountains and the Lujere in wet grasslands. He wrote:

Once one goes further south the position changes, though, and the fear of “Sanguma”
becomes very strong. Every sudden or unusual death, be it due to sickness or not, is
blamed on Sanguma. The people are afraid to leave their houses at night, they barricade
the doors at nightfall and will not come out except under the most dire circumstances,
until daylight. Two cases of death allegedly due to Sanguma reported at Tubum village,
were on investigation quite obviously pneumonia, yet the people blamed the Yukilos
[Yukilo villagers] for having killed these two men by Sanguma. They said that this sort
of thing has always been going on. (Treutlein 1962: 12)

3
 A Witch’s Hand

For the Wape, ‘sanguma’ was called numoin, but the men who had that daunting power
were no more; the last one in my fieldwork village of Taute died shortly before I arrived.
But his death did not extinguish their formidable belief in ‘sanguma’ witchcraft or their
mortal terror about the way they believed a victim was secretly assaulted and killed. First,
a ‘sangumaman’ rendered his lone chosen victim unconscious by strangulation. With his
victim now prostrate, if not dead, he made cuts in the body’s fleshy parts, removed small
bits of muscle; then, piercing the victim’s armpit area, he drained some blood into a
bamboo container. Once the bodily lacerations were finished, he magically closed them
without scarring. His victim, who would have no memory of this murderous encounter,
was then magically returned to life and sent home to meet his or her inevitable death in
so many marked days. My neighbors’ belief in ‘sanguma’ murders was thoroughgoing, but
my thinking, so deeply grounded in Western rationalism, could not accept the details of
a murderous ‘sanguma’ assault as factually possible. For one, human skin that has been
sliced open in a tropical forest cannot be closed without a trace, and second, a dead person
cannot be brought back to life. It seemed to me the belief in ‘sanguma’ murders was just
a supernatural belief, a cultural “superstition” ungrounded in actuality, something the pio-
neering Sepik anthropologist Ian Hogbin (1952: 136) flatly declared “as almost certainly
a figment of native imagination.”
I made my first trip to the Sepik in the summer of 1967 to join Dr. Margaret Mead,
my former Columbia University professor and dissertation advisor for my study (Mitch-
ell 1978a) of New York City Jewish “family circles” and “cousins’ clubs,” and Dr. Rhoda
Metraux, a former senior colleague on a multidisciplinary research project at Cornell
University Medical College about Chinese students stranded in New York after the
Communist Revolution (Hinkle et al. 1957). My task in New Guinea was to help Mead
and Metraux with their American Museum of Natural History research in the middle
Sepik Iatmul village of Tambunam, where Mead had worked with Gregory Bateson in
1938, and to explore where I might return with my family for extended research.3 Hav-
ing decided on the Lumi Sub-District of the West Sepik District, I secured funding and
returned to Papua New Guinea in May 1970 from Vermont with my wife Joyce and our
two preschool children, Ned and Elizabeth, for two years of fieldwork. The intent, as
outlined in my grant proposal, was to study the therapeutic systems, both Indigenous and
introduced, of at least two hitherto undocumented cultures in the West Sepik District.
Compared to the highland districts, few anthropologists had worked there, so the region
was rife with research opportunities.
My prior fieldwork with the Wape had been prolonged by the delayed climax of a
great niyl curing festival that was essential to my research. Consequently, only a scant
six months remained to study the Lujere, not a year as originally planned. Fortunately, I
already had learned to live comfortably in the middle of a roadless jungle with no modern
infrastructure, but I was also counting on my year and a half of fieldwork with the Wape
to help speed my new research along. This would be solo work. Joyce and the children

3. See Silverman (2018: 192) for a despairing account of Tambunam village today, since the rav-
ages of Sepik floods have destroyed its great ceremonial houses and swept much of its land
into the river: “The river, once an asset, is now viewed by the Eastern Iatmul as a liability, while
the bush, a former source of impoverishment, is seen as a source of prosperity [lumber!].”

4
 Introduction

would stay in Lumi, then go to Australia to be with friends. At the completion of my

fieldwork, they would rejoin me in New Guinea for our journey home to Vermont.
The Wape told me that all the people living south of them toward the Sepik River
had ceremonial lives different from theirs as well as numerous different languages. Two
anthropologists from Germany, Antje and Heinz Kelm (1975, 1980), already had studied
two of the villages, Kwieftim and Abrau that respectively spoke Ak and Awum. Joyce and
I met them briefly in Lumi at a dinner given by the missionary physician Dr. Lyn Wark
just as they were leaving and we had just arrived.
While still living with the Wape, in June of 1971, I began actively searching for my
next solo field site. Joyce and I flew down to Magaleri, an Amal-speaking village near
the Sepik that interested me, then we trekked westward through partial wetlands to visit
several inland Lujere villages as well as two on the Sepik River. None completely met my
research criteria, but there were a number of others unvisited and I remained optimistic.
The Assistant District Commissioner (ADC) in Lumi, Peter Broadhurst, generously
volunteered to help me find my second fieldwork site and, from a set of questions I had
compiled for him (Broadhurst 1970), made an anthropological survey while on a routine
government patrol in May to a group of villages located on the lowland hills between the
Wape and Lujere. Based on his survey and our discussions, in September, I set out to visit
several Bouye- and Yis-speaking villages. While the Bouye speakers in Maurom village
had especially interesting ceremonial lives, many men were away at plantation work mak-
ing village life abnormal. Then a second solo reconnaissance trip to the Lujere towards
the end of October, including a visit to the western Iwani hamlet of Wakau, convinced
me of the aptness of my initial optimism. I would leave the interesting Bouye speakers for
another ethnographer to document.4
The sweltering riverine ecological niche of the “Yellow River people,” so very differ-
ent from the Wape’s mountains, as well as their different rituals, notorious reputation for
‘sanguma,’ and being both linguistically and ethnographically unstudied, promised plenty
of research challenges, especially with my curtailed fieldwork time. Having spent the
summer of 1967 on the middle Sepik River with Drs. Mead and Metraux, I already knew
about the river’s oppressive heat and legions of marauding mosquitoes. With the villag-
ers’ enthusiastic permission, I selected Wakau and their swampy domain astride the Sand
River as my new home. It also had a special appeal because of a reputation for being more
traditional, in both the positive and negative connotations of that term, not to mention
that it was more like a two-hour walk, instead of two days, to a new government post, the
Yellow River (Edwaki) Base Camp.
One way that my village research role would be different from many anthropologists
was that my task, as already indicated, was to study both their own curative practices and
those introduced by Westerners. Consequently, I would not be offering first aid assistance,
as my methodological intention was to interfere as little as possible with the Wakau vil-
lagers’ resort to curative practices. But I also knew that no European raised as I was could
endure to witness severe suffering or death if s/he had the means for successfully inter-
vening. As a result, I describe several health emergencies where I felt constrained to play
a role, sometimes successfully, at other times with tragic consequences.

4. After I returned home, I promoted the Bouye as an interesting culture to study when speaking
to anthropology graduate students, but they are still awaiting their ethnographer.

5
 A Witch’s Hand

On November 3, 1971, I flew in a chartered, small Missionary Aviation Fellowship

(MAF) plane with my equipment and supplies to the only usable landing field among
the Lujere. It belonged to the Christian Mission to Many Lands (CMML) mission and
serviced both them and the government’s new station, the Yellow River (Edwaki) Base
Camp, established the previous summer in part to deal with the ‘sanguma’ problem. Hot
and humid, mostly flat and swampy, it was one of the country’s more remote stations; the
only way out was by a long boat ride down the Sepik, a hard two- or three-day hike up to
Lumi or, if you had the money, in the mission’s plane. For a patrol officer, it was one of the
country’s more undesirable postings. Ray Lanaghan was the patrol officer at the Yellow
River Base Camp during my stay. After we both had departed and he was reassigned, he
wrote to me from the high cool beauty of the Oksapmin Patrol Post, recalling “the heavy
hot oppressive heat of Yellow River” adding with grim humor, “I will always look back
on that place as a vermin-infested, mosquito-ridden, malodorous and ingravescent lair of
inimitable iniquity.”5

Signposts
Here I wish to alert the reader to some of the caveats for reading this book. Although
the first Sepik anthropologists, such as Richard Thurnwald, Gregory Bateson, Margaret
Mead, Reo Fortune, Phyllis Kaberry, and John Whiting, all used the term “primitive” to
refer to the people they were studying, contemporary anthropologists have long since
abandoned the term as they have “savages.” As Rutherford observes, “For the most part,
[even] politicians and pundits have learned not to call people primitive” (Rutherford
2018: 2). “Nonliterate” is a term frequently used to designate a society that did not de-
velop its own writing system, a trait of all the societies of precolonial Papua New Guinea.6
When Margaret Mead (1938: 153) and Reo Fortune went to New Guinea in 1931 to
work with the Arapesh they were unnamed and, as “the habits of English thought require
that a people be named, we have called them the Arapesh, their name for human beings.”
Gregory Bateson (1932: 5), another Sepik River pioneer anthropologist who was similarly
challenged, wrote, “I have adopted the name Iatmül as a general term for the people. But
I doubt whether I am right in so doing.” The people who are the subject of this book also
had no word for themselves. Following naming conventions, I have called them the Lujere,
a term in their Namia language that means “people.”7 But like Bateson, I too am troubled
by the implied hubris such an editorial act implies and by David Napier’s (2003: xxi) moral

5. Letter written at Oksapmin Patrol Post, West Sepik Province, January 9, 1973.
6. See Edward Dozier’s (1956) article, “The Concepts of Primitives and Native in Anthropol-
ogy,” which explores in historical detail the changing currency of these concepts by anthro-
pologists. The problem with the term “nonliterate,” as Dozier (1956: 197) notes, is that it risks
confusion with “illiterate.”
7. My initial working term to refer to the Lujere was Lu, their term for man/men, which was
also indicative of the level of my linguistic sexism in 1971. On a trip to Lumi at Christmas
to see my family, Dr. Lyn Wark, an Australian medical missionary and friend, clued me into
the fact that “Lu” could be mistaken for “loo,” Aussie slang for a toilet. In mid-February 1972,
while Yellow River missionary Ces Parish was an overnight visitor at my campsite, we agreed

6
 Introduction

injunction that in “so many societies naming is a powerful and often dangerous activity.”
Nevertheless, I took a similar semantic liberty in naming the Lujere’s geographic area as
“Lujereland.” It is not an Indigenous concept nor an administrative one but simply a work-
ing construct of the ethnographer that allows me at times to make the occasional gener-
alization regarding its inhabitants who share a language, cultural traditions, and a “safe”
territory surrounded by former enemies, some of whom were headhunters and cannibals.
My 1971–1972 fieldwork with the Lujere was conducted in Tok Pisin, one of the
official languages of Papua New Guinea, along with Hiri Motu and English.8 While I
collected vocabulary of their Indigenous language Namia, interviewed on Namia terms
central to my inquiry, and learned phrases to amuse both them and me, I could not speak
the language or follow in detail their verbal exchanges. At best, I knew enough vocabulary
to sometimes have an idea what a conversation was about but no idea where it was going.
Thus, I have tried not to clutter the narrative with Namia terms but, more often, have
used the Tok Pisin term that they used to educate me. At various points in the book, I
quote brief conversations with my informants, which I have translated from Tok Pisin.
Villagers’ discourse in Namia is also occasionally included, but as translated into English
via a bystander’s Tok Pisin translation.
While I have tried to standardize the spelling of Tok Pisin terms according to Father
Mihalic’s (1971) dictionary, this could not be done for place names, such as towns, vil-
lages, and hamlets, without distorting the historical record. For example, the same vil-
lage appears on maps as: Worikori, Warukori, Warankori, and Walukali. Strange words
pronounced by different villagers and heard differently by different colonialists receive
diverse renderings. Most of the variances are in vowels and less frequently in consonants.
To minimize confusion and advance understanding, I have at times followed a term with
an alternative spelling in parentheses. Villagers’ names were often pronounced differently
(very differently!) depending on whom I was talking with, especially the vowels. I tried
to standardize my spelling of their names in my written and typed field notes but didn’t

on “Lujere,” their term for “people,” as an appropriate name for this group when referring to
them in ethnographic contexts.
8. Since its inception, Tok Pisin has been controversial. As far back as 1921, Colonel Charles
Monckton (1921: vii), a resident magistrate in British New Guinea, characterized the lan-
guage as a “ridiculous jargon.” On the other hand, Richard Thurnwald (1936b: 315), who
was using it in the early twentieth century, wrote, “It is amazing to find how much can be
expressed with it, when one gets used to it, with the help of intonation and gesture.” But in
1931, Malinowski (1963: xxii) wrote disparagingly of “pidgin English,” stating that “I never
worked through this misleading and unpleasant medium,” and in 1932, Reo Fortune (1963:
286) noted, “Pidgin is the legal language, if such it can be called.” Fortunately, both Malinow-
ski and Fortune were learning relatively easy Austronesian languages, not a difficult Papuan
language of the Sepik area. While still in New Guinea, I took exception to this patronizing
attitude in a colleague’s article that obviously disparaged Tok Pisin as a language. I wrote a
short article, “Use and Abuse of Pidgin” (Mitchell 1971), noting that “it is frequently treated
as if it were a kind of broken English slang not really worthy of serious analytical considera-
tion but, instead, a linguistic embarrassment,” and cited some egregious examples and how to
correct the problem. To my surprise, the article was reported on in Port Moresby’s Post Courier
(September 12, 1971) with the banner, “Research Worker: Attitudes to Pidgin Criticised.” I
have reread my article and, in the following pages, have tried to heed my youthful advice.

7
 A Witch’s Hand

always succeed; I hope I have done better here. Throughout the text Tok Pisin words ap-
pear between apostrophes, and Namia words are italicized.
Regarding Namia terms, I followed the Feldpauschs’ spelling if the term appeared in
their dictionary (B. Feldpausch 2003).9 However, some Namia terms I collected in Wakau
village, especially ritual ones, do not appear in the Namia Dictionary. These words fre-
quently had different pronunciations—the two brothers Nauwen and Oria I saw almost
daily often pronounced a term differently—and I have made an arbitrary decision.
Apropos the multitude of New Guinea languages, researchers have frequently identified
the same language by different names. Here I have adopted the name used in the compre-
hensive Ethnologue drawn up by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Lewis et al. 2015).
At first mention of a language, I try to give the Ethnologue name followed in parentheses
by others. More detailed comments regarding the research languages are in chapter 8.
In what Bateson (1978: 77) called “the business of making anthropology out of field-
work,” and Diane Losche (2011) called “that remarkable but usually suppressed process
by which fieldwork becomes ethnography,” I have purposely tried to make this a multivo-
cal ethnography including, whenever I could, the voices of numerous people of diverse
status and concern. Thus, the narrative does not move smoothly the way a classic eth-
nography does when only the writer’s summarizing objective voice tells the stories. The
upside is that the narrative’s sociocultural complexity in time, place, person, and purpose
more authentically represents what I saw, heard, and read. Part 1 is mainly historical,
while parts 2 and 3 are more ethnographic, and here I have tried to convey an under-
standing of the Lujere culture from the perspective of Wakau village as these were the
people I lived with and knew best.
Unless I indicate otherwise, as in part 1, the temporal frame or “historical present” for
my ethnographic findings is during my fieldwork in the early 1970s, the terminal phase
of the colonial era just prior to Papua New Guinea’s self-government on December 1,
1973, and full independence from Australia on September 16, 1975. At that time just
over three thousand Lujere lived in fifteen (by official count) small, scattered villages
and even more widely dispersed bush camps for hunting, gathering, gardening, and sago
processing (Lanaghan 1971: 25).
I have referred to the men and woman, whether of the village or expatriates, who
educated me in the ways of their society as “informants,” the term’s root signifying they
were the ones who “informed” me when I sought understanding and knowledge. It is a
term with a long, affirmative history among notable ethnographers publishing in English.
I am aware that more recently, some anthropologists believe it too close to “informer,” a
term used for police collaborators, and have opted instead for “interlocutor”—apparently
unaware that this term historically referred in the US to the actor posing questions in
blackface minstrel shows, hence making it unacceptable to me.10

9. This accounts for the difference in spelling of some terms in my earlier Lujere publications
before the Feldpausch’s published their linguistic accounts of Namia in the 1980s and whose
spellings I have adopted here.
10. See Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, for the entry interlocutor:
1. one who takes part in dialogue or conversation

8
 Introduction

As Andrew Strathern (1972: vii), an anthropologist who did extensive research in

Papua New Guinea (PNG), notes, “It is an ethical question whether the anthropologist
should identify his subjects directly.” Don Kulick (2019: 271), who also worked in PNG,
questions the use of pseudonyms, stating, “Whether such disguise always is necessary is
debatable.” Except in the case of a few notorious sorcerers, I have opted not to use pseu-
donyms but to use a person’s name as I knew them—villagers, missionaries, researchers,
and government officials alike. In the years between my fieldwork and the appearance of
this book, many have died, including those who were my friends and generously made
my research possible in myriad ways. It is to all of them, both the living and dead whose
names appear within these pages, that the book is dedicated.
I have purposely placed the term “colonialism” in the subtitle of this book to empha-
size that this was the cultural context of my research. Data on that historical context
permeates the text from beginning to end, a context that Stocking (1992: 217) astutely
observes was “a condition sine qua non of ethnographic fieldwork.” Unlike early Melane-
sian ethnographers, such as Malinowski, who “either suppressed the presence of colonial
powers and interests from his account of Trobriand life or represented them as disinte-
grative of tradition” (Asad 1991: 316), I include them as strategic players in my construc-
tion of Lujere society and culture. Indeed, it is impossible for me to reflect upon Lujere
historiography without acknowledging how German, Japanese, and especially Australian
colonialism impacted the Lujere. The latter personally helped shape how I perceived and
understood my new Wakau village neighbors.
This book is a reflexive account of my research, whether conducted while living
among the Lujere or after having returned to Vermont, emailing colleagues, reading
patrol reports years later, or perusing my wide-ranging collection of notes, tape record-
ings, maps, photographs, films, and other data gathered during fieldwork. Consequently,
I tend to be present much of the time in the text. Viveiros de Castro (2014: 39) asks
the cogent question, “What do anthropologists owe, conceptually, to the people they
study?” Regarding the Lujere, my answer is that I’m professionally obligated to present
the actions and ideas of the people as accurately and completely as possible, acknowl-
edging that it is but one individual’s interpretation of their history and lifeways. For
me, this book must be a reflexive account about the Lujere so there is no mistaking that
it is but one American man’s view of them in terms of their colonial past and how I
understood their way of living and thinking in the early 1970s, a period shortly before
independence.
In the preface to his book on the Maring of PNG, Edward LiPuma (2001: xi) cites a
conversation he had with his professor and mentor, Roy Rappaport, who sagely advised
him that, “The [ethnography] writer stood between two sets of subjects, those he had
lived with and those he wrote for, and so he had a responsibility to honor himself and his
profession by respecting both.” That has been my ardent goal, but I would add another
caveat. The more important of the two responsibilities is to the people, the Lujere, who
generously and trustingly shared their lives with me and told me their stories.
Part 1 of this book, “The Colonial Invasion,” initially surveys the Lujere’s earliest colo-
nial contacts via the Germans, who had assumed suzerainty over the northeastern part of

2. a man in the middle of the line in a minstrel show who questions the end men and
acts as leader

9
 A Witch’s Hand

New Guinea in 1884, calling it Kaiser Wilhelmsland. They briefly contacted the Lujere in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but never colonized them. In 1914, the
German ethnologist and explorer Richard Thurnwald was the first European who passed
through Lujere territory while mapping the Yellow and Sand Rivers but, lacking a com-
mon language, his cultural observations were limited to what he saw. During World War
I, the Germans were routed from New Guinea, and the Australians assumed control over
the Lujere area. However, no government patrols entered a Lujere village until the early
1930s and no census was taken until the mid-1950s. In the early ’30s, a few Lujere had
returned from work elsewhere as indentured laborers, when they had learned the pidjin
language known as Tok Pisin. As a shared medium of communication, this enabled the
Australian patrol officers E. D. Robinson and J. K. McCarthy to record the first socio-
cultural data. Both men later would become New Guinea legends.
In World War II, the Japanese, in turn, routed the Australians from New Guinea’s
north coast and the Sepik River. Although they did enter Lujere territory via the Sepik to
attack an Australian guerrilla post, they never actually visited any Lujere village. During
1943, the Australians had several roving guerrilla groups, the Mosstroops, in the Lujere
area for five months, which had a profound technological impact: the Lujere replaced
their ancient stone tools with metal ones acquired from the Australians. After the Japa-
nese bombed the guerrillas’ supply base in 1943, they quickly departed. The Lujere had
no further pervasive foreign contact until after the war, when the returning Australians
took control of the eastern half of New Guinea and commenced the first patrolling of
Lujere villages in 1956. The coming of the missionaries and artifact-collecting anthro-
pologists quickly followed. In 1971, the Australians’ Edwaki Base Camp was established
on the Yellow River, which allowed me to settle in the area and begin my study of the
Lujere.
Part 2 of this book, “Who are the Lujere?” contains some of my ethnography findings
about Lujere society and culture, including their adaptation to Australian colonialism,
unusual attitude toward descent, their mode of traditional warfare, languages, subsistence
and residence patterns, and kinds of discord among villagers. In this part, I continue to
draw upon patrol officers’ detailed reports to both deepen and expand the reader’s knowl-
edge of Lujere culture and society in the colonial era.
Part 3, “Magic, Murder, and the Lujere Imagination,” concerns the imagination mani-
fested by the Lujere in stories the men tell each other, the community curing festivals
with ritual masks and horns, and in their beliefs and practices related to ‘sanguma,’ a type
of terrifying ritual magical murder. ‘Sanguma’ has a wide Oceania distribution, stretching
from the Moluccas in Indonesia, east across New Guinea to the Solomon Islands, and
south into Australia, which, as already indicated, examined here for the first time. The
last chapters explore sickness and the Lujere options for Indigenous treatments, mostly
magical, including home remedies, curing festivals, and Indigenous healing practices,
plus options introduced by Australia based on Western science and modern medicine.
Paradoxically, the Lujere nakwolu, who are defamed for secretly murdering their fellow
villagers with dreaded ‘sanguma,’ are also the society’s prestigious and sought-after curers
or imoulu. Predictably, it is via a nakwolu’s secret murders that he obtains the power to
cure. When referring to these men within the text I eschew the awkward term nakwolu-
imoulu that correctly denotes their two opposing statuses. More often I use the term
nakwolu—the term I most frequently heard—unless they are specifically in a curing role

10
 Introduction

as an imoulu.11 A short section also examines the infamous witch hunts of contemporary
PNG, where the term ‘sanguma’ has become a loose synonym for “sorcery.” Toward the
end, I compare magical versus medical curing within the context of Lujere society and
the therapeutic techniques available to them and, finally, summarize my findings regard-
ing ‘sanguma.’
As this account of the Lujere is grounded in their years of colonial suzerainty, I have
tried to create an understanding of the Lujere at a time of colonial twilight, when their
ancestral heritage still resonated strongly within their thoughts and actions, and the fu-
ture, even if they thought about it, was an unarticulated unknown.

11. Although nakwolu and imoulu are singular Namia terms, as plurals I would need to add a word
like kara, “plural” or kelo, “many”; thus, to avoid cluttering the text with extra exotic terms, I
have arbitrarily glossed them as both singular and plural (in the same way that lu can mean
“man” or “men”) and to denote possession add an apocryphal apostrophe “s.”

11
part one

The Colonial Invasion

Colonialism: A policy in which a country rules other nations

and develops trade for its own benefit.
Encarta World English Dictionary

History tout court is something that we cannot do without.

Claude Levi-Strauss (1976: 49)

13
chapter one

Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

It must be remembered that Papuans have no

conception of subjection to a territorial power.
German Imperial Government Annual Report, 1902–03

The island of New Guinea—the second largest in the world—is anchored in the South
Pacific just ninety-three miles north of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula. It is over one
thousand miles long from west to east and over four hundred miles wide from north
to south. (Feldt 1967: 1). In 1606, the Spanish maritime explorer Luis Vaez Torres first
sailed between the two lands and gave the strait his name. He was not, however, the first
explorer to definitely have sighted New Guinea. Another Spanish navigator, Alvaro de
Saavedra, has that distinction. Alvaro was leading an expedition prepared in Mexico by
his cousin, Hernán Cortés when, while attempting in 1528 to return home from the
Moluccas, he sailed east along New Guinea’s north coast. But it was yet another Spanish
navigator, Yñigo Ortíz de Retes who, in 1545, named the island Nueva Guinea.1
It took over three hundred years after the Spanish discovered the north coast of New
Guinea before the Sepik River itself was first explored.

It was Dr. Otto Finsch, a German scientist who had been commissioned by the German
Neu Guinea Compagnie to locate suitable settlement sites, who found the entrance to
the Sepik. It was mid-1885 and on this first occasion he was rowed in a whaleboat 30
miles upstream—to about the present position of Marienberg. (Townsend 1968: 75)

1. For a brief discussion of New Guinea’s first European discoverers, both at sea and inland with
a map of their exploits see Nelson (n.d.); a detailed exposition is provided by Jack-Hinton
(1972). For an interesting museum’s introduction to Papua New Guinea’s prehistory, replete
with color photos and maps, see Swadling (1981) and for a detailed scholarly appraisal see
Swadling (1990).

15
 A Witch’s Hand

Finsch named it the “Kaiserin Augusta Fluss” in honor of the Kaiser’s wife and empress.2
Earlier, the French explorer, Jules Dumont D’Urville (1790–1842) sailing along New
Guinea’s north coast, gave it another name on his chart based on observing an inordinate
amount of vegetative flotsam obviously emanating from a big river (Feldt 1967: 171):
“Landing at Kariru Island, he pointed enquiringly at the debris going by. The natives
answered Sepik, which is the name they gave to the current which runs past their island.”
Even in German times, the river’s more popular name became “der Sepik” so that by 1916,
the German geographer and explorer Dr. Walter Behrmann labeled his 12.5” x 11.5”
colored map DER SEPIK (Kaiserin-Augusta-Flusz) und sein Stromgebiet, “The Sepik and
its Basin.”3 This sprawling geographic area (see map 2) is often referred to as the “Sepik
area” but as Margaret Mead (1973: 2), one of its pioneering ethnographers, emphasized,
“The Sepik area is a geographically delimited area which does not correspond to any
cultural, linguistic or demographic actuality.”4 With the advent of colonialism, what was
once an expanse of primal terrain with primordial peoples living their own histories fell
into political and economic vassalage under successive colonial regimes—German, Aus-
tralian, Japanese, and Australian—as two World Wars decided their rulers.
The seven-hundred-mile Sepik River—PNG’s second longest but largest river sys-
tem—originates high in the Thurnwald and Victor Emanuel Ranges near Telefomin. It
flows northwest before swerving in and out of the old Dutch border (now the Indonesian
Province of Papua), enters the Sepik River Basin—one of Oceania’s largest freshwater
wetland systems—then continues its serpentine eastward flow to the Bismarck Sea free
of bridges, dams, and industry. “Six thousand years ago much of the Basin was a vast salt-
water embayment that, over the next 5000 years gradually infilled to create the contem-
porary coastline” (Roscoe 2005: 558). The Sepik increases in size as it collects the waters
and tropical debris of its many mountain tributaries then terminates in a great estuary
on New Guinea’s north coast spewing its brown, muddy waters and detritus far into the
Bismarck Sea. Here is my favorite, more picturesque description of the middle and lower
Sepik River by a former New Guinea patrol officer and leader of the famous World War
II New Guinea Coastwatchers, Commander Eric Feldt:

A coastal range, the Torricellis, runs along the northern side of New Guinea, leaving
a wide valley between it and the central massif, a hundred miles to the south. In this
lies the Sepik River, draining away the enormous amount of water precipitated in that
country of high rainfall.
And that describes the Sepik—a big, dirty drain, half to three-quarters of a mile
wide, and thirty to forty feet deep, winding sinuously through a swamp two hundred

2. Finsch (Calaby, 1972), whom the northeast coastal town Finschfaten was named for, was one
of the few towns not renamed after the Australians took control in World War I.
3. The map was published as a separate document to accompany his book (Behrmann 1917).
4. In spite of her comment, Mead (1978: 69) admits, “I myself have twice in the past attempted
to characterize salient features of the region.” The first time was in 1938, then thirty-five years
later in a paper she prepared for the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences (Mead 1938: 157–201; Mead 1973). Her third and last attempt was in
“The Sepik as a Culture Area: Comment” (Mead 1978), which is more of a critical reflection
on the “culture area” concept, originally devised as a way to order museum artifacts

16
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

miles long by twenty miles wide. Its mouth is low and flat, passing through islands of
black-trunked mangroves with poison green leaves, separated by still lagoons that were
riverbeds once. . . .
In March and April, at the end of the north-west monsoon, the river is in constant
flood, its marges covered except for slightly raised ridges on which the villages stand,
houses built on high stilts so that the worst flood waters will run beneath the floor. In
the center of the stream, which runs over three knots, the water hurries along. . . . It
bears a procession of trees, branches, dead sugar-cane and other flotsam, all hurrying
along in the brown water like traffic in a busy street. Sometimes an island of floating
grass which has broken away from its home in a lagoon goes by—thick, green grass,
sometimes an acre in area, so matted as to support small trees grown on water, without
the aid of land, for nature practiced hydropony before man did.
The waters fall during the south-east monsoon, baring cliffs of mud at the side of
the river. Mud banks appear on which crocodiles bask in the sun and on which birds
gather in the hundreds. . . . Mosquitoes are in millions, as the swamps provide unlim-
ited breeding grounds. By day they are a nuisance, swarming in the shadows, but by
night they are a curse and a menace, deterred by nothing. (Feldt 1967: 171–72)

The Lujere homeland, far upriver, is bisected by the now narrowed Sepik River about
three-fourths of the way up from its mouth. While there are a few small Lujere villages
on the Sepik’s south flank, most of the Lujere people live in the large area off the north
bank that is bisected by the Yellow River and its tributary, the Sand River, that converge
shortly before entering the Sepik.

The Colonial Cannibalism of New Guinea

The demands of nineteenth-century capitalism for new resources and wider markets re-
sulted in the rapacious colonial expansion of the powerhouse Western nations through-
out the world. The islands of the South Pacific were not excepted and became “part of the
imperial scramble of the late nineteenth century” (Keenan 2015: 198). As the more obvi-
ously lucrative islands of the Pacific were claimed and then politically and economically
dominated, New Guinea was coolly bypassed. Its reputation for aggressive inhabitants
and lack of any easy commercial potential labeled it as an island pariah. The Dutch were
the first to make a move; not that they saw any potential in the island for themselves,
but by claiming the western half of New Guinea to the 141° east longitude in 1828, their
neighboring commercially valuable “Spice Islands”—the Dutch East Indies—would be
protected from encroachment. With no initial intent to colonize their new acquisition,
they placed it under the jurisdiction of the Sultan of Tidore, whom they controlled. As-
serting his power over some of the coastal villages, he demanded levies, including bird-
of-paradise plumes and both male and female slaves.5

5. However, “In 1905 the legal fiction of Tidore’s rule ceased when the Sultanate of Tidore lost
its independence and was for the most part incorporated within the Dutch colonial state”
(Swadling 1996: 279). For a discussion of the early slave trade in New Guinea see Rowley’s
(1966: 53–62) chapter on “The Papuan Slave.”

17
 A Witch’s Hand

As the Netherlands had claimed the western half of New Guinea, in 1884, the Ger-
mans annexed the northeastern section of the island and England claimed the south-
eastern section. The actual process was not as neat as just implied and Langdon (1971)
gives a succinct account of the sometimes-awkward maneuvers of the competing colonial
powers.6 An exchange of notes between Germany and England fixed the boundary be-
tween their territories in April 1885. The British domain became British New Guinea, but
negotiations for its transfer to Australia began in 1898, were finalized in 1906, and the
territory renamed Papua (Mair 1970: 11).
Germany’s New Guinea colony included not only the northeastern portion of New
Guinea, named Kaiser Wilhelmsland after Emperor Wilhelm I, but also numerous is-
lands to the north including the Bismarck Archipelago named for the Kaiser’s powerful
chancellor.7 However, instead of directly administering the colony, the German Imperial
government gave the responsibility to the newly formed Neu Guinea Kompagnie, a con-
sortium of Berlin financiers interested in investing in the unexploited island and who had
campaigned for the annexation.
The company was granted an Imperial charter by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in
the name of the Emperor in May 1885.8 However, by 1896, inept administration, the dif-
ficult terrain and climate, tropical disease, personnel resignations and deaths, plantation
labor problems, natural disasters, and simply bad luck9 resulted in such large financial
losses that the company began negotiations with the Imperial government to rescind

6. For a scholarly account complete with cited sources of the complex political partition of New
Guinea, see Morrell (1960: 238–62).
7. See map in Buschmann (2009: 7). Germany’s main colonial possessions in the Pacific were di-
vided into two administrative units: (1) The “Old Protectorate” included Kaiser Wilhelmsland,
the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville, Buka, and the Admiralty Islands; and (2) the “Island
Territory” included Naru, and the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands. My discussion
here is primarily confined to Kaiser Wilhelmsland. There is an enormous literature on Ger-
man New Guinea, most of it in German but see Firth (1983), Griffin et al. (1979: 34–35),
and Jacobs (1972: 485–48) for historical summaries in English. For a view of Germany’s
international colonialism, see Conrad (2011). Ian Campbell’s book (1989: 1136–48) treats the
Pacific islands as a historic whole, and his chapters “Melanesia: Missionaries and Colonists,”
“The Politics of Annexation,” “Priorities in Colonial Policies,” and “Colonial Consolidation”
are especially helpful in placing New Guinea colonialism within a broader Pacific context.
8. See Moses (1969) for a translation of the charter and analysis of its inception as well as Biskup
(1969) who discusses the latter in more detail.
9. The Neu Guinea Kompagnie’s Annual Reports (Sack and Clark 1979) record in sober and
substantive detail, year by year, the disastrous events and intractable situations that sapped the
Kompagnie’s financial and physical resources. Souter (1963: 74) takes a journalist’s point of
view:
The Kompagnie was unpopular with its staff, and, worse still, its operations were un-
profitable. Its ships were wrecked in uncharted waters, its officers died of malaria and
smallpox, and the local natives could not be persuaded to work. Nor did the Chinese
coolies who were brought to the colony show much enthusiasm for manual labour;
they deserted, and when recaptured and flogged they were inclined to commit suicide.
One night six recaptured coolies who were confined on board a hulk in the harbour
hanged themselves en masse from the taffrail. (Souter 1963: 74)

18
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

its charter. Finally, in April 1899, the Neu Guinea Kompagnie accepted compensation
from the Imperial government and, in turn, surrendered its rights over the area. The
German Imperial government assumed the onerous administrative responsibilities for
Kaiser Wilhelmsland, freeing the Neu Guinea Kompagnie to concentrate exclusively on
its commercial activities.
During the brief term of the Neu Guinea Kompagnie’s control, the interior popula-
tions of the Sepik River Basin were scarcely impacted, and the Lujere not at all (Griffin
et al. 1979: 44; McCarthy 1963: 140). It was a different story for the people of the coast
and nearby islands. Lajos Biro, a Hungarian naturalist and ethnographer who lived and
traveled in the German colony from 1896 to 1902 wrote about the German colonial rela-
tionship. He is especially vivid in his accounts of the German harshness and their “punitive
expeditions” on local life and property after an attack by the local people.10 As far as the sci-
entific study of the Indigenous people was concerned, this was restricted almost exclusively
to the collection of Indigenous artifacts by vigorously competing German museums. Today
these artifacts form the basis of their great collections of precolonial New Guinea art.11
In 1886, the company’s first Administrator, Vice Admiral Baron Von Schleinitz, ex-
plored two hundred nautical miles up the Sepik (Sack and Clark 1979: 7). Then in 1887,
the Berlin directors of the Neu Guinea Kompagnie, influenced by the German banker
Adolph von Hansemann, launched a hugely ambitious expedition to explore the country
and collect scientific data. The leader was Dr. Carl Schrader, an astronomer, who was ac-
companied by a botanist and geographer with an ambitious plan of exploration to gradu-
ally open up the whole territory.

The expedition . . . went up the Sepik beyond the point reached by Von Schleinitz and
spent a few months on land near Malu, where the difficult terrain and the hostility
of the local people posed insuperable barriers to exploration on foot. Their departure
for Europe in 1887 put an end to von Hansemann’s grandiose designs. There was no
further exploration on the Sepik for twenty years. ( Jacobs 1972: 490)12

Campbell 1989: 163) further notes that the laborers imported from Asia and else-
where in Melanesia “were subject to such appalling living and working conditions and
such severe punishments that by the time the company period ended, up to half of
these imported labourers had died.”
10. See Biro’s (Vargyas 1986: 72–75) translated account of the brutal attack on little Ali Island
just off the coast of Eitape (then Berlinhafen) after a surveying party was attacked with arrows
injuring six of the party of ten who, as they escaped, shot and killed ten local men. The ship’s
crew returned in the afternoon, hacked to pieces the villager’s canoes, burned their houses
and chopped down their coconut trees. As the villagers fled in the night on makeshift rafts to
neighboring Tamara Island, over two hundred were drowned at sea. “When the next morning
the punitive expedition marched in there was not a soul on the island, except for a lad dying
from a fatal wound.”
11. For an enlightening discussion of the impact of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History
on the collection of New Guinea artifacts by Germany’s museums see Buschmann (2009); see
also Buschmann (2000) for an analysis of the tension between German ethnological museums
and artifact-collecting commercial companies.
12. See the Kompagnie’s Annual Report (Sack and Clark 1979: 7) for a fuller account of the ex-
pedition. The Kompagnie’s Administrator, Vice-Admiral Baron von Schleinitz, also returned

19
 A Witch’s Hand

In spite of their hasty return home, they did succeed in furthering the ascension of
the Sepik to 380 miles and made some valuable scientific collections. Exploring by the
Germans, however, was an end in itself, unlike the tradition in British New Guinea where
it was accompanied with attempts at pacification and administrative control of the Indig-
enous population (White 1965: 93; Joyce 1972: 385). Although “a new station had been
established at Eitape on the north coast in 1906 and during 1907 the first chiefs were
being appointed” (Rowley 1954b: 826), the German Administrator’s “Annual Report for
1907–08” states that in the northwest part of Kaiser Wilhelmsland from the mouths of
the Ramu and Sepik rivers west to the Dutch border,

There is no effective control whatever. In particular the powerful tribes in the two
river basins of the Ramu and Kaiserin Augusta Rivers are neither open for recruiting
nor under missionary influence or accessible to Government agents. It is not known
whether or to what degree the inhabitants fight among themselves. (Quoted in Sack
and Clark 1979: 277)13

In 1909 Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History Curator of Anthropology, Dr.

George A. Dorsey, while in German New Guinea was invited to accompany the New
Guinea Company’s chief administrator, Georg Heine, on an inspection tour seventy-
eight miles up the Sepik River in the company’s steamer Siar (Dawes 1936: 53). Al-
though Dorsey’s collecting was constrained by the administrator’s schedule, they went far
enough up the Sepik for him to make an important early American collection of Sepik
artifacts for the museum.14
The popularity and striking beauty of the Sepik artifacts engendered rivalry among
the world’s museums and stimulated any and all who found themselves on the Sepik
to collect “curios” easily sold for a nice profit. The Hamburgisches Südsee Expedition
was a large and ambitious scientific expedition from the Hamburgisches Museum für
Völkerkunde whose director was Professor G. C. Thilenius. Working mostly in the Bis-
marck Archipelago, in 1909 the expedition finally ascended the Sepik some 262 miles in
the Peiho. But the American Dorsey, “According to Thilenius, appears to have been bent
on obtaining as many ethnological specimens as possible, for which he paid such high
prices that people who came after him could get nothing at a reasonable value” (Dawes
1936: 53). Near the beginning of 1910, the expedition returned to Germany “with a rich

to Germany in June of 1887 on his regular leave and was sacked “at the wish of the Board
of Directors, because differences of opinion had arisen concerning the management of the
Company’s affairs and the scale of expenditure” (Sack and Clark 1979: 22). An official from
the German Post Office was granted temporary leave by Chancellor Bismarck to replace him.
13. Schindlbeck (1997: 35–36) describes a recruiter on the Sepik in 1910 who failed to attract
recruits on his way up the river and then, to compensate for it, collected two thousand artifacts
on the return trip to sell.
14. The Siar’s captain, Heinrich Voogdt, was also collecting artifacts. See Welsch (2000) for the
interesting story of Voogdt’s collection and how it eventually went to Chicago’s Field Mu-
seum. For a collection of Melanesian essays on the “ethnography of collecting,” see O’Hanlon
and Welsch (2000) and Kaufmann, Peltier, and Schindlbeck (2018) for essays focusing on the
“materiality” of Sepik societies.

20
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

scientific booty, including 6,667 items in its ethnographic collection and 1,700 photo-
graphs, together with recordings of languages” ( Jacobs 1972: 491). As German collectors
and explorers continued to ascend further up the Sepik River, it was only a matter of time
until they would reach the Lujere.
Later in 1910, a large government-sponsored German-Dutch expedition ascended
the river to establish their common boundary. Professor Leonard Schultze of Jena Uni-
versity (a.k.a. Schultz-Jena) led the German group and reached a point six hundred miles
upriver. Going and coming, the noisy motorized boats of these explorers, for the first
time, passed the mouth of the Yellow River and transected the Lujere people’s homeland
on both sides of the Sepik. They obviously saw and interacted with the Lujere living in
the vicinity of the mountain they called Mäanderberg on the south bank of the Sepik op-
posite the Yellow River. Kelm’s (1966) book on Sepik art shows several shields collected
by Schultz-Jena below the Mäanderberg in Lujere territory. It was a harbinger of the
inevitable continued European contact to come.

Richard Thurnwald, Pioneering Ethnographer and Explorer-Surveyor

The most extensive and scientifically significant early twentieth-century explorations on
the Sepik River were carried out in 1912 and 1913 by the Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss Ex-
pedition. Sponsored jointly by the Königliches Museum of Berlin and the Deutsche
Kolonialgesellschaft, this group of German scientists made a wide-ranging survey of
the Sepik River Basin, although publication of their results was hindered by World War
I.15 The geographer Dr. Walter Behrmann photographed and published the first known
picture of a Lujere man; he is striding in front of a typical house wearing a penis sheath
and carrying a dugout canoe paddle (Behrmann 1917: plate VII).
Besides surveying and mapping the terrain, collecting artifacts, botanical and zoologi-
cal specimens, and photographing the topography and people contacted, the two eth-
nographers Drs. Adolph Roesicke and Richard Thurnwald16 also collected rudimentary
ethnographic data necessarily limited by the number of unknown languages they encoun-
tered.17 Thurnwald, who later attained international renown, previously had completed

15. Kaufmann (1990: 592–93) describes the expedition’s sponsors in some detail and enumerates
the names and responsibilities of its members and problems with some of the scientific collec-
tions. Also see Behrmann (1917: 3) for his characterization of the expedition’s members and a
detailed treatise of the geology of the Sepik Basin based on their explorations, and Behrmann
(1922) for a popular account. It is unclear the extent of the problems the expedition had with
the local people but John Whiting, studying the Kwoma near Ambunti in 1936, writes (1941:
19), “The first contact was in 1913 when the Kwoma killed a police boy connected with the
Behrmann expedition, for raping one of their women. A Kwoma was shot in reprisal.”
16. For a more detailed account of Thurnwald’s Upper Sepik River explorations—from which
I have borrowed heavily—see Craig and Winter’s (2016) online paper, complete with many
maps and Thurnwald’s photos.
17. See Melk-Koch (1989: 321–22) for a list of Roesicke’s New Guinea publications and Melk-
Koch (1989: 326–51), Thurnwald’s biographer, for a comprehensive bibliography including
his New Guinea publications.

21
 A Witch’s Hand

successful research with Melanesians on Bougainville Island.18 His exploits with the
Sepik expedition included three pioneering treks from the lower and middle Sepik River
to the north coast through unexplored country with its primeval societies, accompanied
only by local men, without mishap.19 As the first White person to enter the Abelam area
and report on their astonishingly high ceremonial houses and lavishly decorated facades,
he was prompted to record in his diary, “The area I encountered on this excursion is the
most interesting I have ever seen” (Melk-Koch 2000: 63).
At the conclusion of the main expedition, after most of his colleagues returned to
their native Germany, Thurnwald remained in New Guinea to continue his research on
the Bánaro society on the Keram (Töpfer) River in the Lower Sepik Basin and to explore
the upper Sepik Basin. Besides being an experienced ethnographer, Thurnwald was an
intrepid explorer with superb mapping and organizational skills, and talented in relat-
ing peacefully to uncontacted people. He spent most of 1914 in unexplored areas of the
Upper Sepik that included cannibals and warring groups who had never seen a White
person, but he had no adverse experiences. He always offered new contacts—even when
faced with a drawn bow—trade goods like a coveted white glass ring that was especially
effective in making friends.
Beginning in December of 1913, he traveled without government police protection—
but with his own-armed men—up the Sepik with his machinist, Feodor Fiebig, the over-
seer of their motley array of motor-powered boats and dugout canoes that resembled
what Thurnwald called “a floating gypsy camp” (quoted in Melk-Koch 1989: 191) (see
fig. 1).
Thurnwald, an athletic forty-five—in Europe he skied, played tennis, and bicycled—
and his machinist were accompanied by a group of loyal Indigenous men from the lower
river, (including several with military-style caps and rifles), and others adept in man-
ning canoes and carrying supplies, in an audacious year of exploring the upper Sepik
River and its tributaries. This occurred in two forays. First, from December 1913 through
March 1914, Thurnwald explored the Sepik to the international border and ascended the
October, August, Green, and Yellow Rivers, mapping and collecting data on the way.20
In February he and his crew of helpers ascended the Green River, almost to the Dutch
border. “In contrast to the dullness of the inhabitants of the Upper Sepik [presumably
the Abau speakers] . . . the people on the Green River revealed a greater vivacity, curiosity

18. His first trip to German New Guinea was 1906–1909 when he was thirty-seven. See
Buschmann (2009: 97–117 passim) for data on his close relationship with the colony’s second
governor, Albert Hahl who, like Thurnwald, was not only interested in the colony’s material
culture, but in the natives’ mentalities behind its creation. Both disparaged pidgin, believing
that knowledge of indigenous languages was the only way to proceed. They both held doc-
torates in law and Hahl’s special concern was to bring native and German views of justice
into alignment. Thurnwald, because of the rigors of collecting artifacts including transporting
and packing them in primitive conditions and his conflicting relationship with his museum’s
administrators, at times was antagonistic towards his collecting responsibilities (Melk-Koch
2000).
19. For a map of his treks to the coast, see Melk-Koch (1989:176).
20. See Thurnwald (1914: 341) for his map of the mountains and rivers of the upper Sepik terri-
tory.

22
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

Figure 1. Richard Thurnwald amid his boats and assistants on the upper Sepik River, January
1914. Courtesy of Marion Melk-Koch.

and interest.”21 He was especially impressed with the women who, instead of hiding or
running away, always appeared together with the men. “The women initiate the conver-
sations, carry up the sago, yams and tobacco to exchange for the glass rings, with which
they decorate the little children.” He describes their sex roles as seemingly reversed from
traditional Western ones, prefiguring in an extreme way Margaret Mead’s (1935) descrip-
tion of the Tchambuli (Chambri) of the Middle Sepik.22
He then momentarily left New Guinea, sailing to Sydney, Australia to rest for several
months and to reprovision. Returning from Sydney in July 1914, he established a base
camp at Mäander Mountain opposite the mouth of the Yellow River; then, in his most
audacious exploring venture, ascended the Sepik to arrive near its source at Telefomin in
New Guinea’s Central Range on September 19 (Craig and Winter 2016; Melk-Koch
2000: 63). As he laboriously ascended the upper Sepik River mapping and naming its
physical attributes en route, he memorialized his accomplishment by placing his name

21. Thurnwald quotations are from Barry Craig’s research website, “Upper Sepik—Central New
Guinea Research Project,” with English translations of his two articles that pertain in passing
to the Lujere and annotated by Craig, viz., Thurnwald (1914), http://uscngp.com/papers/26,
and Thurnwald (1916a), http://uscngp.com/papers/27.
22. In the 1970s, Deborah Gewertz (1983) also studied the Tchambuli or Chambri people and
established in her insightful, historically oriented ethnography that the sex roles Mead de-
scribed were temporary artifacts at a time of great social turmoil.

23
 A Witch’s Hand

Map 3. The Sand and Yellow (Gelb) river basins during German control. Source: portion of
Behrmann’s (1924) foldout map, based on Thurnwald’s 1914 expedition.

24
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

on a last adjoining mountain range, the only anthropologist whose name lays astride
maps as well as books. Returning to his Mäanderberg base camp, he then explored up
the Sand and North Rivers to the foothills of the Bewani Range. Few, if any, pioneering
anthropologists have been as successful as an explorer and in New Guinea he is unique.

Thurnwald Encounters the Lujere, 1914

It was in the Mäanderberg area on the south side of the upper Sepik River opposite the
mouth of the Yellow River and on his explorations up the Yellow River in March and
the Sand River in November where Thurnwald would have seen and interacted with the
Lujere. Thurnwald was the first European to navigate into the Lujere’s heartland and to
subsequently map and name the two rivers, the Sand and the Yellow (Gelb), that bisect
their domain (see map 3). Thurnwald later described in detail how he proceeded in the
Upper Sepik region, especially when contacting Native peoples like those on the Yellow
and Sand Rivers who had never seen a White person:

Each time I went up the main river and its tributaries I used the motorboat as far as I
could, and from there on used the three canoes I had towed along. These were dugouts
about twenty to thirty feet long and one and a half to two feet wide. They could be
loaded with ample provisions and offered the advantage of a less conspicuous approach
than the noisy motorboat. When the currents, rocks, trees, and other obstacles ren-
dered the river impassable I left the canoes in the custody of one or two boys.23 Then I
climbed up to the crest of the nearest mountain range and proceeded along it for many
days finding small hamlets at considerable altitudes.
Unless we had been discovered by some chance meeting on the way, my arrival
in the settlements was always a surprise, which made for safety if the natives did not
become too much frightened. . . . Conditions were different on the middle and up-
per reaches of the river. . . . There the people never dreamed of meeting white men
and sometimes had not heard a word of their existence. . . . When I appeared in such
places, the first reaction was utter confusion and a wild flight not only of the women
and children but also of the young men. Only two or three older men would remain to
face me. I soon learned that it was best not to walk up to them but to stand still and
make signs to them to approach me; sometimes I had to wait for ten or fifteen minutes
before they would come.
The same simple method of invitation worked successfully with the various tribes.
I lured the men on by showing them beads or glass rings.24 At our first meeting they

23. Colonialists even into the early 1970s usually referred to a native man in German, English,
and Tok Pisin, as “boy,” (Ger. Junge).
24. Maria Wronska-Friend has written an interesting article detailing the colonial production of
these cheap glass and porcelain trade objects noting that,
Their manufacturers expended much effort in producing close replicas of indigenous
objects—usually personal ornaments—destined for customers in regions as diverse as
the Middle East, India, Africa, Oceania as well as North America. . . . In Melanesia,
the most common items seem to have been ceramic and, at a later stage, also plastic
shell rings and discs, of diverse sizes and colours. In addition, replicas of dog teeth, pig

25
 A Witch’s Hand

had no use for iron knives or ax blades, which they did not know and even refused to
accept. After they had come forward I would give them beads or glass rings and offer
some red powder, which I smeared on their forehead and cheeks. They liked this be-
cause of its magic association with the whiteman’s features [Thurnwald assumes] and
consequently his power—I was then sunburnt, and so looked red not “white.” Next
I showed them my watch and let them hear its ticking, and also used a small mirror
to turn the reflected sun’s rays on their eyes. These acts conveyed to the old men an
impression of my magical power and also signified my good intention. Then the men
would shout for the others, who were waiting near-by. The young bloods advanced
hesitantly and suspiciously but also full of curiosity. When I gave them some presents
too, the tension broke down into general merriment. The old men ordered some of the
youths to bring me yams, taros, bananas, or coconuts—whatever was available. These
not only added to my scanty store of provisions (rice and beans) and thus enabled me
to extend my trips, but taught me the social importance of these customs. . . .In these
encounters it was important to keep the people’s interest alert, attract their attention
to new phenomena, divert their suspicions, and not allow them too much time to talk
the situation over. Taking pictures was always a good move. Pulling apart the tripod
seemed to be the most impressive part of this proceeding. The camera itself did not
attract them. In order to get my pictures, I first requested them to look through the
camera at me and one of my boys, and then marked the spot where I had stood and
urged them to change places with me, as if it were a game.25
I hardly ever met difficulties when I intimated my intention to pass the night at a
certain place, although sometimes the people asked me as a foreigner to sleep in the
village, while others wanted me to stay outside. The pitching of the tents, the blankets,
the cooking utensils, the mosquito net, my washing and eating, and the lighting of
the kerosene lamp, caused endless wonder. I felt, indeed, like the elephant in the zoo.
When night came, I insisted, for safety, that visitors leave the camp. (Thurnwald 1936b,
319–20).

The Yellow and Sand River Excursions

In an early report in German, Thurnwald writes about his actual explorations up both the
Sand and Yellow Rivers but rarely with the ethnographic detail one is yearning for. Even
the pages of his diary that I consulted regarding these excursions were not as forthcom-
ing as I would have liked.26 Commenting on his trip up the Yellow River (see map 3),
Thurnwald writes,

tusks, dog whelks [small sea snails] and cowrie shells, as well as nose pins were manu-
factured. A popular item proved to be white buttons, perhaps because initially they
were produced from mother-of-pearl shell. (Wronska-Friend 2015: 50)
The amusing irony is that these colonial imitations sometimes became part of museum collec-
tions of authentic indigenous objects.
25. Unfortunately, although Thurnwald took some excellent photos of the tribal groups he en-
countered, many of these were lost or damaged, especially of the Lujere, as explained later.
26. I am indebted to Barry Craig, as I am for myriad other research courtesies, for providing the
relevant sections of Thurnwald’s field diary on his Yellow and Sand River explorations.

26
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

This river, with medium current, consists of limy yellow water, therefore I called it the
Yellow River. It flows in endless meanders through terraced land crossed by low hills
ten to forty meters high and sloping towards the Sepik. If you look northwards from
a height near the river, these hills are scarcely noticeable. . . . The journey upstream in
the canoes was monotonous. . . . The settlements have quite a different character here.
One comes across actual villages with houses built in groups in a defined area. There
are particular houses for the men, and the houses are not built in the unskilled manner
that I have described above [i.e., societies he visited further up the Sepik]. The build-
ings, erected on posts one or two metres high, are not particularly artistic but at least
they rest upon thick solid supports. The other cultural items are also richer and carved
wooden figures and large standing slit gongs are found.27 The villages do not always lie
accessible to the river but are frequently somewhat inland. (Thurnwald 1914: 18–19)

Later patrol officers often forced dispersed peoples like the Lujere to build villages,
but now we know from Thurnwald’s brief description that, even at initial contact, they
had villages with a separate men’s house, as well as their dispersed homesteads and camps.
Thurnwald saw slit gongs but there were none when the museum artifact collectors came
just before I arrived. The Lujere, I was told, had slit gongs in the past that were struck only
in celebration of an enemy killed; from Robinson’s patrol report (see chapter 2) we know
they still had them in the early 1930s. With the advent of the Pax Britannica, the slit
gongs, unused and uncared for, apparently succumbed to tropical rot. The Wape, however,
still used their slit gongs in the 1970s to send a roaring boom at curing festivals and for
signaling in code, especially a villager’s death or the approach of a patrol officer.
Thurnwald notes that the “upper village groupings” on the Yellow River spoke a dif-
ferent “dialect.” This was probably Maurom village whose Pouye (Bouye) language is dis-
tinctly different (not a dialect) but, as part of the Sepik language family, is related to
Namia, spoken by the Lujere. The Lujere had no tradition of carving wooden figures, so
these were probably seen in Maurom, where in 1971 I saw carvings in their men’s house.
The following day he started back down the river.
On Thurnwald’s return to the mouth of the Yellow River, he recorded little more about
the Lujere, only that “the natives were again numerous and brought breadfruit, yams and
sago.”28 At one point he was brought smoking tubes and gourds to trade for glass rings,
but he did not say what the people looked like and wear. As he was an acute observer,
there apparently was nothing unusual—like with the Green River people—that caught
his attention except the following:

I was never seriously attacked, although there were a few disturbing incidents. One
of these occurred when we went in the canoe up the Yellow River, a tributary of the
western Sepik. Warned by my boy, I noticed a [Lujere] man crouched in the wood with
his bow bent and his arrow aimed at me. Putting up my arms, I waved to show that we

27. There is no evidence that the Lujere ever carved wooden figures; he is obviously referencing
the Bouye speakers who did carve wooden figures, just north of the Lujere, where on his ex-
ploring trip up the Yellow River he apparently visited a single village, probably Maurom, and
took photos of some of the men in the riverbed.
28. http://uscngp.com/papers/26, p. 19; English translation of Thurnwald (1916a).

27
 A Witch’s Hand

had no wish to fight. The man understood, released the bow, and took out the arrow.
(Thurnwald 1931: 321)

After exploring and mapping the Yellow River, Thurnwald sailed to Australia in April,
as noted, to reprovision his expedition. As an Austrian, he would have been especially
sensitive to the news regarding Europe’s dangerous political disarray, including the June
assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo. Near the end of July 1914, he
returned to New Guinea with supplies for two years and established his Mäanderberg
base camp in Lujere territory on the south bank of the Sepik opposite the mouth of the
Yellow River. Thurnwald resumed his explorations, both logistically and physically more
challenging than before, to discover and map the headwaters of the Sepik, and would
not have known of Germany’s declarations of war on Russia, August 1, and on France,
August 3 or, more seriously for him as an enemy alien, that Australia began its occupation
of German New Guinea on September 11.
Having returned to his base camp after triumphantly ascending to the origin of the
Sepik River, he learned about the war and abandoned a plan to cross the Torricelli Moun-
tains to the coast, concerned that the Australians might take him into custody there and
separate him from his hard-won research records and artifacts stored at his Mäanderberg
base camp. As an alternative, he decided to continue his explorations in November up
the Sand River, the Yellow’s western tributary he had first seen and named in March
(Berhmann 1917: 54). Once again, he would be traversing Lujere territory and interact-
ing with the people.
On March 11, 1914, Thurnwald left his Mäanderberg camp with his noisy motorboat
towing several canoes with probably a dozen or more of his men. Crossing and ascending
the Sepik River slightly to enter the mouth of the Yellow River, they soon turned left into
the mouth of the smaller Sand River. For the next two weeks, Thurnwald and his crew
explored the river. Although it was the beginning of the rainy season, the Sand River soon
became worthy of its name.

In the beginning the water level was high and we proceeded comparatively quietly
and easily along the countless windings of the forested banks. . . Later the water level
dropped and our canoes kept running aground on sandbanks. We would punt forward
for several hundred metres without a hitch and suddenly jerk to a halt on sand again;
we couldn’t see the bottom through the muddy water. We went on for days like this.
We met only a few [Lujere] natives along the banks.29

However, at his first night’s camp on the Sand River (marked “11/12 XI 14” with a
small triangle on map 3), Thurnwald indicates in his diary that his heart isn’t in this trip
up the Sand, writing that he is tiring of the hardships of exploring and wants to go home.
The next morning he was awakened at 6:00 a.m. by voices calling. At some point, he was
visited by a group of unkempt local men who did not appear with their bows and arrows
and, from their demeanor, he assumes they must have heard about him from his trip up
the Yellow River earlier in March. He further assumes that there are probably a number
of villages in the area. Local people brought with them sago, betel nut, and coconuts; in

29. See http://uscngp.com/papers/27, p. 26; English translation of Thurnwald (1916a).

28
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

trade they wanted big porcelain rings, matches, tobacco, and colored beads. Trading easily
ensued and he again mentions their unkemptness. It was ironically serendipitous that the
land on which Thurnwald was encamped belonged to the grandfathers or great-grandfa-
thers of the Iwani villagers with whom I lived and who would have been his disheveled
visitors. As Thurnwald did not describe his callers beyond their state of grooming; it
would have been a boon if he had photographed them as he often was wont to do. But
for whatever reason, his tripod and camera lamentably remained unpacked.
Further up the river and out of Lujere territory, when the water became too shallow,
Thurnwald and his men left their canoes and proceeded up the river on foot toward the
hills. On November 19, at the serious start of the rugged hill country, he decided to end
his exploration of the Sand River and encamped for two nights. The next day he climbed
a small mountain just to the east of his river camp probably for surveying, named it
Schlucht Berg (Gore Mountain) and on the way down learned of a commotion in his
camp, but found it resolved by the time he arrived and boxed the ears of one of his men
who apparently was at fault. Craig continues the story:

He stayed a couple of days then turned back downstream where he was met at the
place where he had left his canoes (at his camp of 18/19 November [noted on map
3]) by about 20 men with bows and arrows and short spears. The nearest present-day
settlements are Pelama on the river about three kilometres north of this camp, and
Yakoma five kilometres to the north-east. These people speak Seta, one of the Torri-
celli Phylum languages that straddle the Torricelli Mountains almost to the north
coast. Among these men was one wearing a rattan cuirass and others, fight ornaments,
including cassowary feathers, as if they were mammoth tusks, turned upwards in the
nostrils. . . . Thurnwald made offers for string net bags, a cuirass and bows and arrows,
in exchange for glass beads and rings. (Craig 2016: 55–57)

As Thurnwald was setting up his camera for pictures, some of his men returned to
the camp frightening the visitors away. Thurnwald tried to lure them back but his diary
is inconclusive.30 Continuing down the river, Thurnwald and his men once again passed
through Lujere territory. As on the ascent, the sandbanks slowed their journey, but this
time people often appeared, undoubtedly well aware of these strangers in their midst.
Thurnwald notes in his article that,

Along the middle reaches of the river, large numbers of [Lujere] natives appeared, they
provided ample supplies of breadfruit and sago. There seemed to be extensive settlement
here. Undoubtedly among these people were some who knew of me from my journey up
the Yellow River last year31 and they treated me with friendliness. (Thurnwald 1961a)32

30. Craig (2016: 56–60) explains why he believes they returned and offers strong pictorial evi-
dence.
31. “Last year” (vorjährigen) is an apparent error that he makes twice in this article. His explo-
rations up the Yellow in March and the Sand in November were both in 1914. However,
between the trips he sailed to Australia for respite and to resupply his expedition, which prob-
ably accounts for his temporal misperception.
32. http://uscngp.com/papers/27, p. 27; English translation of Thurnwald (1916a).

29
 A Witch’s Hand

It is interesting that on this journey he paid more attention in his journal to nature,
including animals and birds, than to the people he saw. For example, he has a rather lyri-
cal description of a tall, black, beautiful cassowary with a red and blue neck and a green
crown that strolled out of the woods one afternoon then, even more majestically, strolled
back into the woods. But at a certain point he was so angered by one of his men that he
struck him in the back of his head like “cement,” knocking him to the ground. He was
personally alarmed that he had done this but later noted, that the next camp was set up
and broken down expeditiously.
I was singularly unsuccessful in discovering a single photograph of local people that
Thurnwald made of the Lujere during his trips up the Yellow and Sand Rivers or at his
Mäanderberg base camp. My colleague Barry Craig believes he has found one, albeit
damaged, as he explains:

There is an image in the Rodoni archives that we believe is Thurnwald’s, showing six
men and two boys standing on a pebble strand with a river behind. . . . The men are
wearing relatively straight gourd phallocrypts, their bows and arrows are quite long
and the man third from the left is holding a gourd lime container, all attributes of the
material culture of the upper reaches of the Sepik River. They are not Mountain-Ok
men who usually wear multiple loops of rattan around their waists and do not have
gourd lime containers. . . .
Nowhere since leaving Telefomin did Thurnwald come face-to-face with any local
people. On his journey up the Sand River in November, he reports that at the stage
where his canoes kept running aground on sandbanks, “we met only a few natives
along the banks but on the way back downstream, along the middle reaches of the
river, large numbers of natives appeared. . . . There seemed to be extensive settlement
here” (Thurnwald 1916: 91). (Craig 2015: 58)

Confirmation that this photograph (fig. 2) was most likely taken on November 25 on
the middle Sand River is found in Thurnwald’s diary (p. 239) where he remarks: “After I
had managed, before we departed the camp, to bring some natives in front of my lens, we
went off in our canoes.” He would have left it and any other photos he had taken on the
Sand River at his Mäanderberg base camp when he left for his North River explorations,
which would explain how it could have come into Rodoni’s possession.
Again, although Thurnwald saw and interacted with numerous Lujere, he does not
describe the people except noting there were a lot of them and that they were friendly. It
appears from his diary that he did not leave the river to visit villages that, like on the Yel-
low, were usually inland. Except for the Lujere on the Sepik River, they generally are not a
canoe people. Although Thurnwald’s canoes went up and down the Sand River filled with
his men and supplies, twice bisecting the Iwani villager’s land and even camping over-
night on it, fifty-nine years later when I lived with them, they had no cultural memory of
such an auspicious event. Thurnwald’s meager comments regarding the people indicate
that the lack of a “wow” response was apparently mutual. It is probable that the Lujere
he had the most interaction with were men from the hamlets on the Sepik’s south bank,
who would have visited his Mäanderberg base camp eager to trade.
Unlike the Abelam villagers’ remarkable architecture he so admired, the Lujere’s was
modestly plain and, in contrast to the Green River people, the Lujere had no surprising

30
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

Figure 2. Richard Thurnwald’s photo of Lujere men and boys on the Sand River, November 1914.
Courtesy of Rodoni Archive, University of Newcastle, Australia.

sex role reversal to attract his attention. But there was one obvious feature of Lujere
society that was impossible to ignore. While the Lujere, like many men of the upper
Sepik Basin societies, sported an erect gourd phallocrypt as their startling primary attire,
Thurnwald apparently viewed it as a ubiquitous regimental costume unworthy of com-
ment. Unfortunately, if Thurnwald wrote more about the people living along the Yellow
and Sand River than he recorded in his diary or published in his 1914 article, we will
never know because much of his packed and stored research material was either mali-
ciously destroyed, stolen, deteriorated, or lost in a sad saga of international administrative
mischief and farce.
His next exploit—which turns out to be his last—was to explore in December the
North River situated in the sprawling wet grasslands halfway between the Sand and
Green Rivers. In the middle reaches of the North River, he entered the Yagroner Hills
and found villages with houses similar to those of the Lujere but unlike the Lujere, the
men wore cuirasses covering their hips, chest, and back. On Christmas Day, the river
now too shallow, they pulled their canoes on shore and continued on foot in the riverbed
to the territory of the Fas speakers in the Bewani Range. Everywhere the people were
friendly and trading was easy.
By now the war in Europe was raging on three fronts, but on Christmas Day many
British and German soldiers on the Western Front famously ventured into no-man’s-land

31
 A Witch’s Hand

to spontaneously exchange greetings and gifts. It was an act of human nobility their com-
manders forbade repeating. On New Year’s Day, 1915, the Germans torpedoed and sank
the British battleship HMS Formidable in the English Channel, while in New Guinea,
a heavy rain fell on Thurnwald and his men causing them to turn back before the river
became too high to walk to their downriver, beached canoes. Once in their canoes, they
continued down the river to a food depot they had stashed on the way up, only to find
that it had vanished, a potent omen of a disaster yet to come.

The Trashing of Thurnwald’s Camp

Australia, entering the war as Britain’s ally, sent a military force, the Australian Naval
and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF) to New Guinea.33 It quickly assumed
power over the German colony and its capital of Rabaul on Neu Pommern (later New
Britain).34 In similar actions, New Zealand took possession of German Samoa and Japan
seized Germany’s Micronesian colonies. A contingent of the AN&MEF was sent up the
Sepik to find and take the German research scientist and his German engineer assistant
into custody. With bitter irony Thurnwald (1916a: 93) describes their “Krieg gegen meine
Expedition” [their war against my expedition].
While Thurnwald was exploring up the North River, Commander Claude L. Cum-
berlege and his military patrol arrived on December 23 aboard the HMAS Nusa to the
Mäander Mountain Base Camp (Townsend 1968: 238). Cumberlege writes approvingly
about his trip up the Sepik to Thurnwald’s base camp:

Our voyage continued mile after mile through gorgeous forest and mountain scenery,
until just before dusk one evening we descried a white boat some three miles ahead,
secured to the bank. . . . We found here the Engineer of the Expedition and about 30
or 40 boys. A large village had been built, the forest cleared on the mountain side, and
gardens planted. The professor, however, was further up the river in canoes, with the
remainder of the police some 25 or 30 natives. (Craig and Winter 2016: 21)

Cumberlege left the following day to return to the coast with Thurnwald’s engineer,
Feodor Fiebig, and his personal property in custody. Major Martin stayed to continue to
hunt for Thurnwald but after a week of no success, according to his own account (Craig
1997: 391), Martin and his men “loaded all the stores on the launch and two large flat-
bottomed river boats which were there” and returned to Angoram. When Thurnwald

33. Much of this section is based on Barry Craig’s (1997) exhaustive archival research tracing
the byzantine fate of Thurnwald’s research collections confiscated by the Australian military
authorities in 1914 as well as Marion Melk-Koch’s (1989, 2000) biographical writings on his
career. Both were generous with their time in answering my questions for which I am grateful.
34. Australia, which had administered British New Guinea since 1906, renamed it Papua, thus
solidifying control over the eastern half of the island. However, authority over the German
section remained provisional until 1920, when the final treaty with Germany was signed and
ratified. For an excellent early account of the Australian military occupation including the
expropriation of German properties and the Mandate system, see Official Handbook of the Ter-
ritory of New Guinea 1936: 59–76.

32
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

arrived back at his base camp on January 7, 1915, it was deserted and all of his boats,
supplies, photos, equipment, and collections were gone.
It was Martin, according to Thurnwald, who raided his food depot on the North River.
With undisguised sarcasm he adds,

This action at any rate showed “military acuteness and boldness.” His intention was to
cause me to disappear into the stomachs of the natives! A heroic undertaking! Well,
the natives had provided for me better than that and thanks to the provisions they of-
fered me, I arrived safely at the main camp at Mäander Mountain.
Here another surprise was in store for me . . . [the troops] had succeeded in storming
my camp; everything not considered worthwhile removing was chopped into small piec-
es. Thus I found myself robbed of my pinnace and boats and deprived of gifts of barter
and provisions. I had no choice now but to set out on my return journey down the Sepik
by canoe. By mid-January, 1915, I arrived at the mission at Marienberg and learned
there that my base camp at Katadjundo had suffered the same fate. . . that it had been
plundered and robbed by the Anglo-Australian troops. (Craig and Winter 2016: 30).35

Thurnwald, with his camp trashed and robbed of his research collections, supplies, and
boats and his own house on the hill pillaged and searched, was compelled to start down
“the river on canoes with only a small quantity of beans left for me” (Craig and Winter
2016: 63).36 His diary shows that his food plight was not as dire as his article indicated.
He still had twelve canoes made by local people, so these were lashed together in two
groups, and he and his twenty-nine men “set off adrift down the River on 8 January with
beans and rice enough for 76 days. He arrived at Angoram on the 17th and at Marien-
berg the next day” (Craig and Winter 2016: 63).
Later, his machinist Fiebig told him that the soldiers broke into the store at night
opening cases with axes and took seven or eight of them.37 The next day they opened the
store’s door, searched the remaining cases, “taking away whatever they found: provisions,
ethnological collections, skulls, knives and axes for trading, clothing, shoes, medicaments,
etc.” (Craig and Winter 2016: 63).38
On reaching Angoram, Thurnwald visited the British Police Station and was advised
to stay at the Marienberg Catholic Mission. There he learned that after the soldiers had
trashed his base camp on the lower Sepik River, local people had taken what was left but,
with the intervention of the police, some items were returned to him. By early March,

35. http://uscngp.com/papers/27, p.30; English translation of Thurnwald (1916a).

36. For more details on the trashing of Thurnwald’s camps, see Craig (1997).
37. Fiebig’s fate was a sad one. He left the Sepik in 1919, unsuccessfully prospected for gold in
Dutch New Guinea, and in December of 1923, committed suicide (Craig 1997: 399).
38. Thomas James Rodoni was a member of Cumberlege’s force and took numerous photographs.
His son donated his father’s photographs to the University of Newcastle Cultural Collections
and Barry Craig, with the help of Christine Winter (Craig and Winter 2016) translating
portions of Thurnwald’s field diary, has done some masterly sleuthing identifying a number
of Thurnwald’s photos within the Rodoni photo archive. How they got there is unknown, but
one can surmise that as Rodoni was there when the base camp was trashed, he must have
obtained them then.

33
 A Witch’s Hand

Thurnwald was in Madang and had an audience with the Administrator, Colonel Pether-
bridge, who was visiting there. The Administrator was sympathetic with Thurnwald’s
plight and wrote to the Minister of State for Defense, dated March 9, 1915,

Dr Thurnwald was in great distress when I saw him and was literally in rags and almost
bootless. I instructed the District Officer at Madang to attend to his immediate wants,
and procure for him a passage to Sydney by the next steamer. (Craig 1997: 392)

Thurnwald did not sail to Sydney just then but did before the year was out. Instead he
appealed to the Madang District Officer, Captain W. M. Balfour Ogilvy, for permission
to continue his ethnographic studies; this was granted with the caveat that he reside at
the Marienberg Catholic Mission. Ogilvy, in advising his superior in Rabaul of his deci-
sion, noted that, “Dr. Thurnwald was not anxious to return to civilization and I am of the
opinion that he is a perfectly genuine gentleman, wrapt up in scientific research work”
(Craig and Winter 2016: 392).
Thurnwald attempted to collect for the damages inflicted on his property but was
unsuccessful, although the Administrator allowed him £25 as rental for his pinnace. He
returned to Marienberg near Angoram to work with two Keram River informants on his
Bánaro ethnography.39 In the meantime, Thurnwald’s ethnographic collections that Ma-
jor Martin had appropriated were stored in a Madang waterfront shed. Thurnwald finally
left New Guinea, first sailing to Sydney, Australia, then on to San Francisco where he had
friends at the University of California in Berkeley.

Only 40 small boxes with field notes, phonographic recordings, equipment and some
artifacts were in his luggage when he was eventually able to leave New Guinea in De-
cember 1915; 52 boxes with collections had to be left behind. (Melk-Koch 2000: 63)

At the University of California, according to the anthropologist and Columbia Uni-

versity professor Robert Lowie, a friend and fellow Viennese, Thurnwald had a pleasant
stay after years of strenuous exploring, collecting, and fieldwork in New Guinea.40

For a year and a half he lingered in Berkeley, hobnobbing with [anthropology profes-
sors] Kroeber and Gifford, indulging his athletic urges on the Faculty Club’s tennis
court, and preparing a treatise on the Bánaro. (Lowie 1954: 863)41

39. The Australian authorities were inconsistent in their expulsion of Germanic nationals allow-
ing many planters and missionaries to remain. Malinowski, a Polish national, working in the
Trobriands stayed to collect his data as a participant observer in village life changing the way
anthropologists do field work.
40. In Thurnwald’s obituary, Lowie (1954: 863) writes, revealing as much about himself as Thurn-
wald, that as a student at the University of Vienna, Thurnwald “displayed marked individuality
in taking up bicycling and skiing. Even more aberrant was his advocacy of total abstinence [of
alcohol], to which he adhered throughout his life.”
41. Both Marion Melk-Koch (2010), Thurnwald’s biographer, and Bernard Juillerat (2000), who
worked in the upper Sepik area near the international border with the Yafar, have written
critically interesting commentaries on his Bánaro fieldwork.

34
 Germany, the Lujere’s Absentee Rulers

Thurnwald’s (1916b) Bánaro monograph was the first in a cascade of ethnographic

studies of Sepik River Basin societies of which this is, but yet, another.42 In 1917, the
United States joined the Allies in their war and Thurnwald, once again an enemy alien,
was forced to move, this time back to Germany. But there was more bad luck; parts of
his field notes were lost between Berkeley and New York (Melk-Koch 2000: 64). As his
biographer noted, “Lack of his notes is the reason why Thurnwald never gave more infor-
mation on the tribes” (email, M. Melk-Koch to W. Mitchell, August 28, 2014). So it was
not an ethnographer who wrote the first cultural report on the Lujere but, as recounted in
the next chapter, an Australian patrol officer. Nor did any of Thurnwald’s Lujere artifacts,
with perhaps two exceptions, ever reached a museum.43

42. Thurnwald (1921) later published in German a more extensive Bánaro monograph. German
New Guinea’s first ethnographer, however, was the twenty-five-year-old Russian scientist and
explorer, Nicolai Miklouho-Maclay who initiated the first ethnographic fieldwork in 1871 on
the north coast in the Astrolabe Bay area just over 100 miles east of the mouth of the Sepik
River. See Mikloucho-Maclay (1975) for the translated diaries of his three visits to the Ma-
clay Coast (now called Rai coast on most maps), and Webster (1984) for a detailed biography
of his adventuresome life. An earlier and less detailed biography is by F. Greenop (1944).
43. Craig makes a convincing case on circumstantial evidence that Thurnwald collected a Lujere
shield and hand drum now found in the Museum Victoria (Craig, Vanderwal, and Winter
2015: 135–39). For the tragic account of the fate of Thurnwald’s Sepik collections, see Craig
(1997).

35
chapter two

Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

This combination of judicial, administrative and police authority

in one office is typical of government . . . in primitive areas.
C. D. Rowley (1958: 24)

German exploration of the Sepik River Basin had established that there was no easy op-
portunity for commercialism; consequently, the authorities designated it an uncontrolled
area and then simply ignored it. Most of the commercial activity was on the islands of
the Bismarck Archipelago or along the coast of Kaiser Wilhelmsland where the Ger-
man settlers’ plantations needed large numbers of laborers. These men, mostly from the
Archipelago’s islands or the Dutch East Indies, were usually indentured workers on a
three-year contract. Laborers from the German held areas returned to their villages with
knowledge of the trade language Melanesian Pidgin and the ways, often oppressive, of
their White colonial masters. Flogging, with little administrative oversight, was a right
given to any person who held the laborer’s work contract.1

From Australian Occupation to the League of Nations Mandate

Australia governed German New Guinea from 1914 until 1920 as an occupational force
with a military regime, the AN&MEF mentioned previously.2 With the exception of

1. In 1915, Australia’s military regime forbade flogging by employers, but they were allowed to
impose fines and imprisonment for infractions. The courts, however, could order flogging until
1919, and hanging by the wrists was not forbidden until 1922 (White 1965: 96).
2. Rowley (1975b) discusses in interesting detail the transition from German supremacy to that
of the AN&MEF. For a single volume that treats all dimensions of Australia’s involvement
with New Guinea, see Mair (1970).

37
 A Witch’s Hand

recruiting laborers from up the great rivers like the Sepik and Markam, the Australian
occupation had little impact on Indigenous life. In terms of government patrolling in
the hinterlands, “There was no coherent policy of expansion: the government was far less
known away from the immediate vicinity of the district office than in German times. The
result was to leave the actual control of some important areas to enemy aliens” (Rowley
1958: 39).3
Although Richard Thurnwald was repatriated, some German planters and missionar-
ies were allowed to stay in place to carry on their work and the Upper Sepik, where the
Lujere lived, retained its “uncontrolled” status and remained closed to recruiters and pros-
pectors. Even before the Sepik River’s only police post at Marienberg on its lower reaches
was attacked by villagers and closed in 1915—later to be reopened as just indicated—it
was as irrelevant to their lives as was the closer and larger government station in coastal
Eitape. Eitape was established as a German station in 1906 amid Indigenous peoples
described as “completely uncivilized” and “extremely warlike.”4 It was taken over by the
AN&MEF and was the only station on New Guinea’s north coast between the mouth
of the Sepik and the Dutch border, one hundred miles to the west. But the Lujere were
separated from Eitape by a coastal mountain ridge, the Torricellis, and unexplored hostile
territory that isolated them from any governmental intervention. Later, Eitape, renamed
Aitape, became an important player in the Lujere’s colonial history.
With World War I over and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s German Reich defeated, the 1919
Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of her colonial possessions. In December 1920
the British government, on behalf of Australia, assumed a mandate from the League of
Nations to govern the former Kaiser Wilhelmsland and its associated islands.5 Its new
name was the Mandated Territory of New Guinea.6 Wasting no time, in 1921 Australia
began deporting most of the German settlers and planters they had initially allowed to

3. The occupiers, however, were not completely idle. In response to reports of native unrest on
the Sepik River including a massacre of several hundred villagers, the Australians sent a peace-
making patrol up the river from February 3 to March 7, 1919, in a show of force to discourage
fighting. It established an outpost at Marienberg on the lower Sepik consisting of “one soldier
and four native police”; a planned patrol from the river to the coast was abandoned because
of illnesses. The patrol’s 560-ton SS Sumatra went 270 miles upriver to Jambon, one of the
villages involved in a massacre, before turning back. The officer forwarding the reports to the
Department of Defense in Australia comments proudly that offenders and guilty villages were
punished but “without the loss of a drop of native blood, or the bodily injury of a single tribes-
man.” From these reports (“Pacific Islands - Sepik River Expedition, 1919”), it is obvious no
one knew that Thurnwald (1914) had explored the Sepik to its headwaters and published his
results in German.
4. To establish the station, “It was necessary to clear a large site, on which work has now com-
menced on the construction of the permanent station buildings (quarters for the district of-
ficer, the police sergeant and the medical orderly, storehouse, barracks for the coloured [Native
police] troop and a hospital)” (Sack and Clark 1979: 270).
5. The League of Nations gave another mandate to Japan to administer Germany’s “Island Ter-
ritory,” essentially the islands of Micronesia.
6. As Errington and Gewertz (1995: 18) note, “Technically, no part of what became Papua New
Guinea was a colony of Australia. However, practically speaking, Australia administered it as
a colony.”

38
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

stay who then suffered great economic losses when they were paid in devalued German
Marks for their expropriated holdings.7 Meanwhile, the Lujere were just as unaware that
they and their lands were now under the hegemonic authority of the Australians as they
were, thirty-eight years earlier, when the Kaiser assumed his rights over them. But this
would soon change. Just as the Germans were wary to enter the country’s hinterlands
with police patrols to subjugate the people in the uncontrolled areas, it became a major
objective of the Australians to establish the Pax Britannica throughout the Territory8.
With the Bismarck Archipelago islands and the coastal areas of New Guinea already
deeply influenced by the government, commerce, and the missions, the uncontacted in-
habitants of the Territory’s interior, often naked and wielding stone bladed axes, were the
new focus of intervention.9

Constructing a Colonial System of Administration

A favorite method of colonial powers to establish control over a subjected people was by
“indirect rule.” This was a governance system intended “to allow the native to retain all of
his traditional folkways which did not go contrary to the broad principles of nineteenth-
century European morality” (Reed 1943: 138). This assumed there would be chiefs or
other acknowledged cultural leaders with whom they could communicate. But many of
the New Guinea societies the Germans had to contend with were egalitarian, with no ob-
vious ranking leader to whom they could give orders or convey expectations. To facilitate
their interactions with villagers they invented the ‘luluai’ and ‘tutul’ system; the former
was appointed the village’s leader, and the second originally as an interpreter.10 Each was
given a distinct cap to wear when in the presence of officials and it was one of the organi-
zational programs retained by the Australians. With the ascendency of Tok Pisin during
the Australian regime, the need for an interpreter became less important and the ‘tutul’
became more an assistant or deputy to the ‘lululai.’

7. See Rowley (1958) for a detailed account of the years of Australian occupation. For his ac-
count of “Expropriation and Expulsion of the Germans,” see pp. 317–25.
8. For the Germans, “The district officer’s job was to make his district safe and profitable for
Europeans.” (Green et al. 1979: 40.)
9. This does not mean there were no labor recruiters entering this territory with armed assistants,
some who were notorious for using aggressive tactics to force village men to sign on (Scaglion
1990, passim).
10. Biskup (1969), in an article on the genesis of German native administration in New Guinea,
discusses the historical origins for the appointment of ‘lululais’ and the innovative role of the
Administrator, Albert Hahl, whom Campbell (1989: 164) notes “was a liberal humanitarian,
but he was still a servant of colonialism.” Also see Buschmann (2009: 109) who emphasizes
that Hahl invented the roles of ‘luluai’ and ‘tutul’ as a form of indirect rule by placing alleged
indigenous elites in those positions. While that might have succeeded in chiefly societies or
those with a ‘bikman’ tradition, it was less successful in the egalitarian West Sepik. See Rowley
(1954) for a detailed historical discussion of the place and problems of German native offi-
cials, and Vargyas (1986) for a revealing portrait of the German colonial culture by Lajos Biró,
a Hungarian naturalist and ethnographer who lived there from 1896 through 1902.

39
 A Witch’s Hand

The executive advantage of the ‘lululai’ system was that it designated specific village
individuals to whom directives could be given by administration field officers, usually
the patrol officer or ‘kiap’ in Tok Pisin, who could then hold them accountable for their
successful instigation. Unlike the ballyhooed doctrine of indirect rule by African colonial
apologists, Mair (1970: 66) observes, “Indeed, if the equally ambiguous label direct rule is
applicable anywhere, it is so in New Guinea. . . . The theoretical basis of the system was
the idea that natives should do as they were told; and . . . to explain to the people that the
orders given them were for their good.” Regarding indirect rule, “At best, it was promoted
as a seemingly convenient way to rule a large empire cheaply with only a handful of
British administrators at the top” (Beidelman 2012: 2). The New Guinea irony is that in
Australia’s indirect rule, instead of a single designated rajah, emir, or chief, with thousands
of subjects, each egalitarian village was its own “fiefdom,” hence the administration had
to appoint thousands of ‘luluais’ and ‘tutuls.’ But the direct power of the state remained
firmly in the hands of the ‘kiaps’ “who led patrols of native police and acted as policemen,
magistrates, government agents and gaolers” (Barnett 1972: 617).
The administration’s “Native Regulations” were legion, covering all aspects of local life,
and it was the responsibility of the ‘kiap’ to cite and punish violations. It was a fascist sys-
tem of compulsion, since at no level were villagers involved in the construction or review
of the regulations. As a colonial form of in loco parentis, the colonial state intruded with
its assumed civilizing regulations to act in the best interest of those it considered “primi-
tive.” It can also be phrased as “enforced cultural change.” Whatever it is called, it was
of singular importance in the construction of the colonial culture in which my fieldwork
was embedded.11
Beginning in the 1950s, the ‘luluai’ system was gradually replaced by democratically
elected local government councils but not in the Yellow River area. In more recently con-
tacted societies and remote areas like the Upper Sepik, it remained operative when I lived
with the Lujere.12 While each village had its own ‘luluai’ and ‘tutul,’ their authority was
mostly manifest only in the presence of the powerful visiting patrol office; at other times
for most purposes, they were just ordinary villagers.

The Trade in Bird-of-Paradise Plumes

Years before the Australian patrol officers penetrated the Sepik River Basin’s backcountry,
hunters from the islands of present Indonesia were making regular visits. These Muslim
men, “Malays,” were perhaps the first foreigners to enter the Lujere’s homeland. Their
quarry was the gorgeous plumage of the birds-of-paradise, the world’s most extrava-
gantly feathered birds, found only in New Guinea, the Moluccas, and the east coast of
Australia. Most of its forty-one species are found in New Guinea’s forests. An important

11. For a recent collection of articles that moves the discussion of White supremacy far beyond
colonialism, see the “Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy” in the recent issue
of American Anthropologist (2020: 65–162).
12. See Mair and Grosart (1972) for a detailed account of the development and history of intro-
duced local government in Papua New Guinea and (Griffin et al 1979: 201–4) for some of its
inherent problems.

40
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

luxury item of trade in the Far East, as early as the eighth century in Indonesia the Ma-
haraja of Srivijaya presented bird-of-paradise plumes as tribute to the Chinese Emperor
(Swadling 1996: 59).13
During German times, some administrative employees and settlers supplemented
their incomes by hunting the birds in the coastal forests but more frequently hired local
men to do the job. As the Government of German New Guinea’s “Annual Report for
1911–12” notes:

Hunting for birds-of-paradise has grown in importance. High prices and almost ef-
fortless profits have acted as powerful inducements to engage in this occupation, which
became associated with a whole series of unfortunate features, reminiscent of a kind of
gold fever on a small scale. On the other hand a number of small planters established
their plantation ventures on the basis of hunting for birds-of-paradise. The actual
hunting is usually done by coloured hunters in the employ of Europeans. In framing
regulations to control hunting operations, the Government has endeavoured to take
these various factors into account. A number of restrictions have been introduced.
(Sack and Clark 1979: 346)

Apparently, the “restrictions” imposed were not sufficient. The alarmed officials noted
in their report for the following year (Sack and Clark 1979: 366), “More stringent con-
ditions have been imposed on this type of hunting, for the protection of the birds. The
closed season has been extended from 1 November to 14 May, and three large reserves
established, so that the preservation of all species appears guaranteed.” What alarmed
the officials was that Kaiser Wilhelmsland’s major economic export in 1910–1911, was
the plumes of 5,706 birds-of-paradise worth 171,000 marks. This amounted to 2,438
more birds than the previous year (Sack and Clark 1979: 346–47). Then in 1912–1913,
the number rose to 9,800 birds killed and exported. But it wasn’t only birds-of-paradise
that were being killed; the hunters were too. Rowley (1954b: 826) notes, “The station at
Eitape was busy with police reprisals for the murder of bird-of-paradise hunters.”
Although the trade in bird-of-paradise plumes was centuries old, the impetus for this
great increase in the demand for exotic feathers was European women’s fashion.14 For
generations the hats and helmets of some European men of rank were bedecked with
plumes, but it was the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, who initiated the fashion
craze for women to decorate themselves, especially their heads, with plumes (Swadling

13. When trade skins of the birds-of-paradise first reached Europe in the sixteenth century, they
were without wings or legs prompting Carl Linnaeus, perhaps tongue in cheek, in 1758, to
classify the Greater Bird-of-Paradise as Paradisaea apoda. It was initially assumed by many
Europeans, since none had seen any live specimens, that the birds lived in the air, always turn-
ing towards the sun and never landing on earth until they died, for they had neither feet nor
wings. These scholarly speculations caught the imagination of the general public. As a result,
birds-of-paradise were painted by artists, sung about by poets and became the topic of edify-
ing contemplation by theologians (Swadling 1996: 64).
14. See Pamala Swadling’s masterly book (1996) with its numerous excellent maps and pho-
tographs that historically documents and discusses the bird-of-paradise trade, with special
attention to New Guinea. For a well-documented general discussion of “Malays” in New
Guinea, see Philsooph (1990).

41
 A Witch’s Hand

1996: 83). The fashion spread gradually among the aristocracy of Europe and England,
then to America and, finally, to any woman, regardless of rank, who could afford the
luxury of a hat decorated with glamorous plumes.15 And always, in an array of extravagant
plumage that included egrets, ostriches, Victoria crowned pigeons, sea birds and even
owls, the bird-of-paradise plumes were the most highly regarded and expensive.
The Malay bird-of-paradise hunters entering the Lujere’s land came from Hollandia,
the small Dutch settlement just across the border from Kaiser Wilhelmsland and the
tradition continued after Australia assumed control in 1914.16 From the 1890s until 193l,
when trading in birds-of-paradise became illegal in Hollandia, its main business was
exporting plumes from these birds; several Chinese stores facilitated in their export even
after it was forbidden. Jock Marshall, a young Australian zoologist who spent 1936 wan-
dering in the Sepik District behind Aitape, also visited Hollandia. He wrote:

On sunny days long trestle-tables were slung outside the Chinese stores, laden with
thousands of pounds’ worth of plumes airing in the sun. Most of the feathers were the
glorious sunset plumes of Paradisea minor, but there were also those of the exquisite
little “King-bird,” the famous blue-bird and other rare and less-known beauties. . .
White Men all over the island were engaged in the trade: everybody, government
officials, mission priests, planters and plain drifters, all dabbled in feathers and made
easy money. Malay shooters from the Dutch side crossed the border and went far into
alien territories, making friends with the natives, trading in beads and cloth and steel
in return for feathers. (Marshall 1938: 198)17

Evelyn Cheesman, an intrepid Englishwoman and entomologist met Marshall in

Hollandia and also wrote about the colonial town and the Malay hunters. Miss Chees-
man was one of the most remarkable personages of this pre–World War II assortment of
bold explorer-scientists.18 In 1940 she was again in Hollandia. Having just walked forty

15. In my Kansas childhood I recall in my mother’s wardrobe trunk of cherished sartorial items
was a hat enfolded by the striking feathered beauty of a local pheasant.
16. The Malay bird hunters went even as far east as Yilui. Ward Oakley (1932: 5) on a patrol
through uncontrolled territory reports that prior to 1921, Malays lived in the area for months
shooting birds-of-paradise, hence recognized the power of firearms his police carried.
17. Marshall’s (1938) book is the best one by a civilian on the early colonial West Sepik District.
As a zoologist and acute observer of both the resident colonialists and indigenous people, he
presents a vivid picture of the time and place.
18. Born in Kent in 1881, her ambition of being a veterinary surgeon was squelched when the
Royal Veterinary College rejected her because she was female. By happenchance she became
Keeper of the Insect House of London’s Regent’s Park Zoo, studied entomology for two years
at Imperial College and launched an adventurer’s career with eight remarkable solo expedi-
tions to the South Pacific between 1924 and 1952, collecting over 700,000 natural history
specimens mostly for the Natural History Museum including not only insects but reptiles,
amphibians, and plants, many named in her honor as the discoverer. She wrote prolifically
about her expeditions in an engaging, immediate style with an acute eye for important detail,
including the geography and the local people she encountered. She knew how to explore,
survive, and prosper under rugged circumstances and could write truthfully (Cheesman 1941:
183) after one adventure that the Native people “evidently ranked me as a true bushman.” She

42
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

rugged miles from Hollandia to the Mandated Territory’s first (then unstaffed) govern-
ment station in Vanimo established to thwart the smuggling of bird-of-paradise feathers,
she ventured inland on the plain toward the Bewani Mountains where she had promised
the trustees of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide that she would collect insects
for them. She worked from Krissa village where she met an old man and asked him if
Malay traders ever came there.

He was delighted to talk about the traders who came no more, only his generation
remembers them. They were trading of course in paradise birds. One man came every
year and stopped for a month at a time, while the villagers hunted birds for him, and
he paid in beads, knives, cloth, cowrie shells, and tobacco—things that would cost a
few shillings. I learnt that this was a regular trade route leading inland, and this same
trader went beyond the Bewani Mountains. I asked whether the villagers like the trad-
ers. The old man beamed, there was no doubt about his feelings: “Abidi wai-ail” (trad-
ers good) he repeated several times. The old trading road crossed the [coastal] plain to
the Bewani Mountains and beyond them to country inhabited by the Bendi tribe, a
race of small natives [perhaps the people that Gell (1975) studied] of whom not much
information is available. (Cheesman 1941: 184–185)

This undoubtedly was one of the main routes the Malay hunters took to reach the
Lujere and beyond.
G. W. L. Townsend was a young patrol officer in Aitape immediately after World
War I military rule was returned to civil administration. After recounting a story where
he “unwittingly took part in the last large shipment of contraband bird-of-paradise skins
from New Guinea to Hollandia” he adds,

For several years after this our patrols in the hinterland of Vanimo crossed the tracks
of Malay shooters from over the border and on two occasions Malays who were armed
with bird guns were arrested. The guns they used were long-barreled, muzzle-loaders
stamped on the stock with the Dutch Crown. They were the property of the Dutch
Government, and were leased to a shooter for a fee of five guilders for the season.
(Townsend 1968: 66)

As Marshall noted, the hunters entering the upper Sepik Basin spoke Malay, the
precursor of Indonesia’s official language, Bahasa Indonesia. A few Lujere men, as we
will see, knew enough Malay from contact with the foreign hunters that they could com-
municate with the first Australian patrols that contacted them. But the hunters ventured
far beyond the Lujere toward the east in the spreading wetlands, where the anthropolo-
gist Gilbert Lewis, on a patrol into the area, met local peoples who recalled that it was

treated with respect the native men she hired to help guide her and to collect, pack and carry
her specimens as the experts they were on the local flora, fauna, and culture. Never adequately
compensated, she lived frugally but in 1955 was awarded an OBE for her accomplishments
and a modest civil list pension that eased her retirement years. She died in 1969 and London’s
Museum of Natural History, where she worked as a volunteer, made a video honoring her as
one of their “heroes” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vne43Pjg-gs).

43
 A Witch’s Hand

in trade with Malay hunters when they tasted their first salt, saw their first matches, and
were given the meat from birds after the feathered skin was removed.19

The First Lujere Patrols

In 1920, the military occupation of German New Guinea was terminated by the League
of Nations and the area was mandated to Australia as the Territory of New Guinea.
The Australians, using their occupation experience as a guide, divided the Territory into
administrative districts and began the serious business of instituting civil authority. The
sprawling Aitape District, the Territory’s largest and named for its headquarters’ coastal
town, included the huge Sepik River Basin, then moved up and over the Prince Alexan-
der, Torricelli, and Bewani coastal mountains northwards to the Bismarck Sea. One of
the enthusiastic young men who came up from Australia to join the new civilian govern-
ment was “Kassa” Townsend. Recently discharged from the Australian Imperial Forces
as a lieutenant at the end of World War I, the 25-year-old Townsend came to Aitape in
1920 seeking new adventures. He rose from a patrol officer or ‘kiap’ to a District Officer
then was a Lieutenant Colonel in New Guinea during World War II. At the end of his
career, he writes in fascinating detail about how colonial Aitape looked and describes the
collection of unique individuals he met and befriended there, from Chinese storekeepers
and Indigenous policemen to various villagers and colonial officers (Townsend 1968).
It is one of the best books ever written on the colonial system of the Territory of New
Guinea.20
The sprawling size of the Aitape District was short-lived; in 1924, the area south
of the Sepik River was withdrawn and named the Sepik District with headquarters at
Ambunti, 250 miles upriver. In 1933, the two districts were rejoined as the Sepik District
but with headquarters, at Townsend’s suggestion, at Wiwiak, shortly changed to Wewak.
Finally, in 1967, the district was roughly separated along the 143° east meridian into the
West and East Sepik Districts with respective headquarters at Vanimo and Wewak. But
within eighteen months, the West Sepik District’s Ambunti Sub-District, was reassigned
to the East Sepik District, acknowledging the administrative significance of keeping the
major portion of the Sepik River within a single district (Lea 1972: 1030–1).21 After

19. Email, Gilbert A. Lewis to author, April 10, 2014, regarding data gleaned from a patrol into
the Wan-Wan area.
20. During World War II, Townsend (1896–1962) engaged largely upon intelligence and propa-
ganda work among native peoples, for which he was appointed OBE” (West 1972: 1141).
After the war he served from 1946 to 1956 at the UN in New York City in the Trusteeship
Division. He retired to Queensland in Australia and a draft of his memoir was completed,
except for his UN years, before his death. His editor Judy Tudor writes:
Kassa Townsend was, in the Australian idiom, something of a loner. . . . He was that
very rare thing in this century—a man of unblemished integrity, who put what he took
to be his duty first; who could decide what he believed to be right and act on it, no
matter what it cost. (Tudor 1968: 11–12)
21. Thus, those Lujere villages on the Sepik River, like Panewai, were in the East Sepik District
while all the others were in the West Sepik District.

44
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

independence in 1975, the two districts were renamed the West Sepik (or Sandaun Prov-
ince) and the East Sepik Province. No other administrative region in Papua New Guinea
has undergone so many administrative permutations.
The three forms of colonial intervention in New Guinea with the most compelling
impact on its Indigenous societies were: (1) labor recruitment; (2) government “pacifi-
cation” patrols; and (3) religious missions. They usually occur historically in that order
and the Lujere are not an exception. But it will take the 1929–1936 patrol reports of
E. D. Robinson and J. K. McCarthy, to piece together the beginnings of this story.22

Robinson’s Pioneering 1929–1932 Patrols

At this time the Sepik District was divided into two main subdistricts, namely, Ambunti
and Marienberg. The district office was at Ambunti, 230 miles upriver, and it was from
there that the Middle and Upper Sepik were administered. The only police post in the
district was located at Marienberg, forty miles from the mouth of the Sepik, and the
Lower Sepik and coastal area were administered from there. Keith McCarthy was the
patrol officer at the Marienberg Police Post when Robinson was his superior as the dis-
trict officer of the Sepik District. McCarthy, in another revealing book on colonial New
Guinea, relates how he first met his new boss on the Yuat River (called Dörfer by the
Germans), a tributary of the lower Sepik.

The Yuat got narrower as its navigable limits were approached and at length [the pin-
nace] Osprey pulled into a collection of palm huts. This was where Robinson was
camped with the gold prospectors. The District Officer was a Yorkshireman with a
cheerful manner. He greeted me with a grin and said, “I hope you’ve bwought the
gwog. We’re all dying for a dwink.” Because he could not pronounce the letter R, Rob-
inson was known far and wide as “Wobbie.” Luckily, I had brought the grog, so a case
of warm beer was opened without delay. (McCarthy 1963: 46)

In the early 1930s, Gregory Bateson also was on the Sepik studying the Iatmul at
the same time that Reo Fortune and Margaret Mead were studying the Mundugamor
(or Biwat) on the Yuat and then moved further up the Sepik to study the Tchambuli (or
Chambri).23 In Bateson’s foreword to Naven (1958: x), and Mead’s acknowledgments in
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1963: iv), both cite their indebtedness

22. The reports of patrol officers describing their visits to local communities have been a welcome
source of detailed historic data on the colonial context of Lujere society. For a culturally com-
parative view of patrols and patrol reports in a very different part of Papua New Guinea at
about the same time as my late-colonial fieldwork, see Errington and Gewertz (1995: chap. 1)
on Karavar Island in the Duke of York Islands.
23. Fortune was supposed to write up their Mundugumor materials, but when he didn’t, and
Lévi-Strauss (1976) showed a theoretical interest in the data by sharing an early copy of
his paper with her, Mead made plans for a Mundugumor monograph, however illness then
her death in 1978 interceded. Nancy McDowell (1991: 26) “did extensive field work in Bun,
the first group of people upriver from the Mundugumor,” and, with access to the field notes
of Fortune and Mead, plus her knowledge and insights into the region, wrote a compelling

45
 A Witch’s Hand

to Robinson who, as the district officer, was in a position to facilitate their work and offer
hospitality far from home.24 In a letter from Tchambuli to friends dated February 1, 1933,
Mead was even more expressive in her description of him:

At Ambunti we stayed with the wholly adorable District Officer, Robbie, who is loved
by and loves everyone. He had as a guest, chance-sent on a recruiter’s pinnace, a most
ambiguous female with a rattrap mouth, mascara eyes and a wholly suspicious and
deadly restraint of manner, who was, I think, pretending to pretend that she wasn’t
a reporter or a spy from the League of Nations. . . . There was a mad proud recruiter
and a slightly truculent little one and government officers—some good boy scouts and
some not. Altogether it made quite an odd party. We played bridge, Reo and Gregory
played chess, in between we discussed the functional method in anthropology or some
such remote topic and at intervals Robbie interjected: “Stop it, I say, stop it!” (Mead
1977: 140)25

Mead also writes (1972: 210), “At ten o’clock our much-loved, jovial, and alcoholic
host Sepik Robbie would say, “We have had dinner, haven’t we?” Ambunti, the small rus-
tic government station 230 miles from the Sepik’s mouth, was Robinson’s headquarters,
and it was there that Mead, Fortune, and Bateson were his guests. From here, he made
the first government patrol to contact the Lujere who, like the rest of the Upper Sepik
cultures, were not yet under either government influence or control. In fact, the vast ma-
jority of the Sepik District was, from a European viewpoint, unexplored. In Robinson’s
“Annual Report of Sepik District 1930–31” to the government secretary in the Territory’s
capitol of Rabaul, he notes that the unexplored area consists of 18,086 square miles,
while the areas under the government’s (1) complete control is 2,532 square miles; (2)
influence, 264 square miles; (3) partial influence, 1,110 square miles; and (4) penetration
by patrols, 708 square miles (Robinson 1931: 5). Regarding the last category, he writes
that seventy-one villages were visited on a recent patrol to the upper reaches of the Sepik
River, adding,

The patrol reached a point above the Haus River, then returned, visiting villages on the
Haus, Mai [May] and Yellow Rivers. All these villages were visited for the first time by
any Official of the Administration, [my emphasis] and friendly relations were established
with the natives. (Robinson 1931: 8)

In another section of the report called “New Areas,” he mentions that, regarding the
Haus, Yellow, and Mai Rivers, “Owing to their distance from Ambunti, it is not possible
to pay these people frequent visits” (Robinson 1931: 9). Then, regarding labor recruiting,

ethnography of the Mundugumor (McDowell: 1991), which also addressed the controversy
about the “rope” kinship system.
24. In 1936, Richard Thurnwald (1936a) was teaching at Yale and gave a mixed review to Mead’s
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies in the American Anthropologist. According to
Lutkehaus (2008: 141), a displeased Mead wrote a lengthy personal response to his criticisms.
25. Humorous stories abound about the good-natured Robinson. See also McCarthy (1963: 76,
136).

46
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

“Several Europeans have been engaged in recruiting throughout the District during the
year. No complaints of their activities have been received” (Robinson 1931: 11). Robin-
son’s comment was warranted as some recruiters were notorious for their labor abuses
including recruiting in government “closed” areas, and even kidnapping men and youths
by force to meet their plantation quotas.26 The Territory, as a colonial regime of Australia,
placed patrol officers in a politically sensitive situation. The government was obligated to
open up the Territory to economic entrepreneurs, providing for their safety and cheap
and obedient laborers. At the same time the patrol officer and district officer, while being
the government’s most strategic agents in accomplishing these goals, also were charged
with the welfare of the local population under them. The competing interests could be
difficult to navigate.

The government made sure that labourers were available in tens of thousands. The
number of New Guineans under indenture grew from 17,500 to over 41,000 between
1914 and 1939, as recruiters pressed further into the Sepik, Aitape and Morobe Dis-
tricts. . . . The district officer who encouraged village cash cropping or kept employers
to the strict letter of the labour laws could expect at best to be mocked by Europeans
as a kanaka man, at worst to be demoted. (Griffin et al. 1979: 54–55.)

From a later report, we know that Robinson’s first visit to the Lujere was in 1930 and
he made revisits in 1931, 1932, and 1934. But with no knowledge of the many differ-
ent languages or anyone to interpret for him, his first two visits were more “appearance”
patrols than active ones. Robinson was just as linguistically limited in collecting cultural
information as Thurnwald was seventeen years earlier when he first explored the Lujere’s
Yellow and Sand Rivers.
However, there was a groundbreaking difference when Robinson (1932) returned in
1932. Twenty-eight people, twenty-seven of them Lujere, had learned some Tok Pisin,
the colonial lingua franca, enabling Robinson to gather data about their culture.27 All
were recently returned from three-year labor contracts working for the Catholic Mission
of the Sacred Heart at Alexishafen, near present-day Madang.28
It is Robinson who gives us the first tentative account of Lujere culture. Because his
1932 patrol Report is so important in the Lujere’s colonial history, I will report on it at
length.29 The area of the patrol was up the Sepik River “From Ambunti to the Sepik -

26. For a discussion of early labor abuses in the Sepik Basin see Scaglion (1990).
27. The language “Tok Pisin” is described in chapter 8, and the Lujere’s Tok Pisin schools in chap-
ter 7.
28. This was a large mission from German times that earlier had a strong reputation for establish-
ing trade schools, teaching German, establishing health services, and planting large planta-
tions of coconuts and Ficus elastica (Sack and Clark 1979, passim). As Mary Huber (1990:
198) notes, it “had not only a church, a school, a printing press, and a hospital but a coconut
plantation, a copra factory, railway tracks, a timber mill, a carpentry, a machine shop, a tailor
shop, a boot factory, a dry dock, and warehouse as well.” Alexishafen is one of the few colonial
German towns that retained its original name.
29. E. W. Robinson, “Patrol Report, A.4/1932–33” to the Director of District Services and Na-
tive Affairs, Rabaul, Mandated Territory of New Guinea, dated October 19, 1932.

47
 A Witch’s Hand

Dutch Border and approximately ten miles of the Yellow River, and return to Ambunti.”
At that time he was the Acting District Officer for the Sepik District. The patrol lasted
from September 7 to October 16, 1932, and “3 Native Police” accompanied him. The
objects of the patrol were

1. To afford transport for patrol party of the Acting District Officer of Aitape [W.
Oakley].
2. To pay my third annual visit to the upper reaches of the Sepik River and establish
friendly relations with the natives, with a view to assist future patrols in bringing
them under Government control.
3. To select a suitable site for a Government Post with regard to possible future
operations. (Robinson 1932: 1)

Regarding Robinson’s first objective, the acting district officer in Aitape, Ward Oakley,
was accompanied by another European, Harry Eve, a surveyor with Oil Search Ltd., ever
eager to survey new territory for the company’s two local geologists, J. Montgomery and
G. A. V. Stanley (Eve and Stanley we meet again in the following chapter). The patrol’s
first object does not concern us, except to note two things; had Oakley and Eve’s patrol
from Aitape over the Torricelli Mountains southward to the mouth of the Yellow River
on the Sepik succeeded, it would have been the first overland government patrol into this
uncontacted area that included the Oni, Bouye, Yis and Namia (Lujere) language groups.
Second, because of the delay in waiting for the Aitape patrol that never appeared—this
was before radio contact was utilized—Robinson spent considerable time with the Lu-
jere villagers, enriching his understanding of their culture by talking with the recently
returned contract laborers who had learned some Tok Pisin while away.
His government pinnace, the Osprey, left Ambunti on September 7, arriving at the
mouth of the Yellow River on the tenth. As he was ahead of schedule and Oakley’s Aitape
patrol had not arrived, he proceeded upriver in a small, motorized boat to reinforce his
previous village visits, returning to the Yellow River on the fourteenth. The following day
he hiked the ten miles up the Yellow to the Lujere village of Mirijami (Miriyami), made
camp there and lit a signal fire each night for the Aitape patrol as previously planned. On
the nineteenth, he returned by raft to the mouth of the Yellow River and set up camp on
the south bank of the Sepik at the foot of a thousand-foot hill called Kojabu (Kociabu,
Kogiabu) that will continue to figure in the Lujere’s colonial history. Here he again set
signal fires to guide the missing patrol and continued to be visited by local peoples from
many villages intrigued and curious about the unprecedented nightly fires. But Oakley’s
patrol, or even word about it, did not appear. Finally, reasoning that the patrol somehow
had been aborted, he returned in the pinnace to Ambunti on October 2. Obviously con-
cerned about the fate of the expected patrol passing through uncontacted territory and
hearing nothing, he returned to the Yellow River and learned that the patrol had turned
back at Maurom, a village in the foothills above the Lujere villages.30 He then returned

30. The report that Oakley and Eve had turned back towards Aitape at Maurom village was in-
correct. As noted in Oakley’s detailed patrol report (Oakley 1932) his patrol purposely veered
to the southeast and had to abort its goal a few miles north of the Sepik when it encoun-
tered impassable swamps. During its sojourn, the patrol was attacked several times, tricked

48
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

to Ambunti, arriving on October 16, and completed his patrol report on the nineteenth.
A month had passed but Robinson used his attenuated waiting time well, as his report’s
ethnographic accounts on the “Upper Main Sepik Natives” and especially on the “Yellow
River Area Natives” clearly show.
After explaining at length why he was not able to transport the Aitape Patrol to Am-
bunti, Robinson focuses his report first on the “Upper Main Sepik Natives.” However,
with no Tok Pisin informant from these villages to interview, his report relies on his
visual observations that are mostly about weapons, clothing, and body decoration. Then
his Lujere informants gave him some ominous data about their Sepik neighbors. “The
Yellow River people tell me that these main river people are cannibals; I cannot vouch for
this as the only reason the Yellow River people give for this statement is that whenever
the main river people kill their enemies, they always take away the body.” As I learned
in fierce detail from my Lujere informants, their immediate neighbors across the Sepik
River were, indeed, recently cannibals, as were the nearby May River or Iwam people.31
Robinson’s patrol report is composed of four memoranda. Most germane is the one on
the people with two parts: “Upper Main Sepik Natives” and, “Yellow River Area Natives.”
It begins with a succinct picture of the degree of government control on the upper river
in October of 1932.

The Sepik River has now been patrolled from the mouth to the Sepik-Dutch Borders;
from the mouth to the village of Yessan, which is approximately 20 miles above Am-
bunti, the main river is now under complete Government control; from Yessan to the
Sepik-Dutch Border the natives are not yet under Government influence. (Robinson
1932: appendix 3, 1; my emphasis)

Here is Robinson’s verbatim report on “The Yellow River Area Natives”:

The Yellow River language [Namia] extends from Purami [village on south bank of the
Sepik River] through the bush to both Yellow and Sand Rivers. In this area there are
27 men and 1 woman who can all speak a little pidgin. All have just completed 3-years
contract at Alexishafen Mission. They are scattered amongst the following villages—
Purami 5 men 1 woman; Panuai 3 men; Iremauri 2 men; Abriami 3 men, Mirijami 3
men; Yuani [Iwani] 3 men, Pabei 5 men; and Ibari (Main Sepik language [Abau]) 3
men. Owing to these people I was able to gather much useful information.
As regards weapons, canoes, clothing, these people resemble the main river people,
already explained.
Here there are no Club Houses (house Tamboram) as on the lower main river;
[instead] they have a “house boy” [Tok Pisin for men’s house] where all married and
single men sleep. The women have their own houses, which their husbands may use

by guides, and also ran into severe problems when the lessening population hampered the
opportunity to buy supplementary food.
31. Phillip Guddemi’s ethnographic study (1992: 138–48 passim) further verifies the custom of
cannibalism by the Sawiyanō, the Lujere’s enemies. Their eastern cannibal neighbors, the May
River Iwam, were also Lujere enemies. See chapter 9 of the present volume for an account of
the the infamous “Yellow River Massacre” of 1956.

49
 A Witch’s Hand

during the day, and in which the women sleep at night; men and women do not sleep
in the same house.
The clothing, as previously mentioned, is the same as the main river people [i.e.,
men wear a penis gourd, women wear fore and aft string skirts]. Here when a man’s
wife or child dies the man takes off his penis box [gourd] and puts a small pus-pus32
around the top of the penis. This is worn until the man has killed pigs and made a feast
for his dead [relative], when this has been done he again wears his penis box.
Marriage is by sister exchange only; should a woman run away with a man without
the permission of her parents, both the man and the woman, when caught, are dealt
with in the following manner—the woman’s parents and relations assault the man with
sticks and clubs and administer a sound thrashing, then the woman is held and speared
with barbed arrows from the thighs down to her feet, neither of them are killed.
These people are not headhunters; when a man kills an enemy, he cuts off his vic-
tim’s left arm at the elbow joint, failing this he cuts off a finger from the left hand. It
was explained that the left hand or arm is always taken—never the right, because the
right is the bow pulling hand, and as they have already killed their victim and have no
desire to mutilate the body they only take the arm or finger as proof of their skill, they
leave the victim his good hand.33 This is then taken back to his village and hung up in
the men’s house and the men and women of the “killers” village visit and a big celebra-
tion follows; large wooden drums (Wei) [slit gongs] are fought with sticks, wooden
horns (Woniguani) are blown and the natives of other friendly villages hearing this, all
come to the dance and are shown the arm or finger as the case may be as proof that an
enemy has really been killed.
Upon a male reaching the age of puberty nothing is done to celebrate this, no skin
marking of any kind are practiced.
The men do all the hunting for game, all clearing of bush for gardens, build all
houses and canoes etc; the women do all planting of native foods, and catch fish in the
large round nets; fish are caught both inland lakes and rivers.
The following native foods are planted—taro, sugarcane, sago, native cabbage, ba-
nanas, and tobacco.
There are few coconut trees, and no paw-paws, in the whole of the area.
The following game is killed by the men—pig, cassowary, wallaby, opossum, croco-
dile, snake and various birds, all of which are eaten with relish by these people.
At my camps in both Mirijami and at the foot of the Kojabu mountain, 34 I was
visited by natives from the following villages—Ibare, Yuani [Iwani], Mirijami, Abri-
ami, Purami, Iremauri, Waiari, Pabei and Panuai, so that it can be easily seen that the
natives are a friendly people. They all expressed a desire that an officer be stationed
amongst them.
On my return visit I took up the following foodstuffs and distributed them amongst
the natives for planting—paw-paw, pineapple, corn, yams and kau-kau. I also took

32. This is a bit confusing as ‘puspus’ means sexual intercourse but ‘pus,’ according to Mihalic
(1971: 162), means “a sash, a scarf, a strip of cloth.”
33. I did not know of or obtain access to Robinson’s and McCarthy’s pioneering patrol reports
until long after I had returned to the US. The Lujere gave me the same data regarding a left-
arm war trophy and the same rationale that was indicative of their profound human decency.
34. It is quite probable the Kojabu camp was the same as Thurnwald’s “Mäanderberg” base camp.

50
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

6 coconuts, which I planted on the proposed site for a Post (Kreiwarr Mountain), I did
not give these to the natives to plant as they have little high ground which the floods
do not touch.
I brought a small monkey [boy] back with me to teach him pidgin. I intend to take
him with me on patrol, and he will then see the various customs of the lower river
people, and later he will be of great help in bringing his own people under control.35
(Robinson 1932: appendix 3, 2–4)

Before continuing, the racism inherent in the term “monkey” to denote a human boy
deserves comment. Michalic (1971: 130) argues that the pidgin term ‘monki’ was in-
troduced by Malaysian traders, who themselves were colonized by the British in the
eighteenth century. While no racist insult is intended when the Lujere use term (there
are no monkeys in New Guinea), nevertheless, the term was adopted into Tok Pisin from
“monkey,” a term used by the Australian colonizers. Their long history of blatant racism
toward non-White peoples, including the Australian Aboriginals, is amply documented,
as reflected in this and other terms, like ‘boi’ (“boy”) for an adult male, introduced into
Tok Pisin.
Unlike many of the headhunting villages on the middle Sepik River who deeply re-
sented the government’s visits and remained decidedly unfriendly, the Lujere, as Robin-
son notes, were actually welcoming. But it wasn’t just the young Lujere lad that Robinson
envisioned helping him bring the Upper Sepik under government control. He had a
grander plan that he submitted to the officials in Rabaul in another memorandum titled
“Recommendations for future activities Upper Sepik”:

All these time expired boys [contract laborers whose period of service had ended] are
young and keen and can only speak a little pidgin, and I consider that if the river is to
be opened up, now is the time to operate in the area, should it be left, then all these
boys will shortly lose all the teaching of the “White Man” and lapse into their old state
and so make the task of opening up the area doubly hard, in view of this I desire to
recommend as follows:
1. That the land known to the natives as KREIWARR MOUNTAIN, situated on
the right [south] bank of the Sepik River, opposite the mouth of the Yellow River,
and rising to a height of approximately 150 feet, be appropriated by the Admin-
istration under the Lands Ordinance 1022 Section 68 (12).
2. That one European Officer with 20 Native Constabulary and 8 indentured la-
bourers, or long service prisoners, be sent to establish a Post on Kreiwarr Moun-
tain. I have cut roads and thoroughly inspected this site and consider it satisfac-
tory in every way.
3. If I could be relieved of duties on the lower river for a few months I consider that
it would be to the advantage of the Administration if I personally established the
Post. My reason for thinking this is that I know the area fairly well, large numbers
of natives of both the Yellow River and the Main Sepik Areas remember me from

35. According to my successful Yellow River cell phone conversation with David Merau of
Yegarapi Village on January 24, 2015, the boy was Mamyowi from Ameni village. Later he
signed on as a plantation laborer with a group of other young Lujere men and taught them
Tok Pisin.

51
 A Witch’s Hand

my previous visits, and I consider that after spending a few months with these
people I should at least have a fair amount of their confidence and the Post could
then be taken over by a Patrol Officer.
4. The cost of such a Post would not be great, a small pinnace would be necessary,
as canoe work would be practically impossible owing to the strong [Sepik River]
currents experienced in the upper reaches. The benefits it would return would
amply repay any expenses incurred as it would be the means of opening a large
area of at present unknown and possibly valuable country, and would possibly be
the means of supplying an at present unknown quantity of labour. I shall be glad
of advice with regard to these recommendations. (Robinson 1932: appendix 2,
1–3)

In July of 1934, Robinson, now the Assistant District Officer in Wewak, was again on
patrol; this time to accomplish the first successful patrol from Aitape overland to the
Sepik River—the same one that Oakley and Eve attempted two years previously but
failed to complete. Crossing over the Torricelli ridge, he stopped to test and inspect an
alleged gold find on Wini Creek that he correctly suspected to be the origin of the Yellow
River. The prospector was Charlie Gough who was based in Aitape and owned the most
popular trade store. He also was a labor recruiter and, on August 31, 1936, was speared to
death over a recruiting incident in the Arapesh village of Ilihinga. Donald Tuzin (1976:
25–27) who worked in the nearby “enemy” village of Ilihita in the 1970s, reports this early
incident and its meaning to his fieldwork.36 Just then, Gough was hoping that the District
Officer would declare his find a Gold Field, but that was not to be. Robinson and his nine
policemen, medical orderly and thirty-four carriers continued down the Wini Creek to a
larger river, hopefully the Yellow.
When they came to the foothill village of Kelnom just before the Lujere grasslands,
one of the villagers who spoke Malay, as did one of Robinson’s policemen, assured them
that they were on the Yellow River. “Also, he told us that about five months ago two
Malays and a party of natives were in the vicinity shooting birds-of-paradise and he was
with them for two days” (Robinson 1934: 3). As noted earlier, although trading in bird-
of-paradise skins was outlawed in Hollandia in 1931, it was obvious that in 1934 and
1936, there was a vigorous smuggling market.
On the 22nd of July, Robinson’s patrol lunched in a hamlet of the Lujere village of
Eiderwok (Edwaki) where about fifty men and women greeted them in friendship. Con-
tinuing, they passed Wei-ari and Papei villages inland on the Yellow’s west flank arriving
at Marajami late afternoon. “Here, many of the natives remembered me from before and

36. Townsend, told by McCarthy of the murder, went to investigate and gives a detailed account.
Lehinga was deserted when he arrived, but he learned that nearby Ilahita village was harbor-
ing the murderers. “I called the Luluai of Illaheta in and told him that we would be moving
camp to his village and that he would be expected to feed the lot of us” (Townsend 1968:
229–30). As there was over forty in Townsend’s party, the culprits were soon apprehended.
Jock Marshall (1938: 281–92), a young Australian adventurer and writer was a good friend
of Gough’s also relates the story from his perspective as do I (Mitchell 2012: 89–90). When
I worked among the Wape in Taute village, the first men (thirteen of them) to leave the vil-
lage to work for White people walked over the Torricelli Mountains down to Aitape to be
recruited by Charlie Gough. Three were still alive during my initial fieldwork in 1970.

52
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

were very excited, patting me on the back saying, ‘Kiap, Kiap’” (Robinson 1934: 4). The
next day the patrol proceeded down the Yellow to the Sepik to meet the patrol officer
from Ambunti, but there is no mention of a new base camp as Robinson envisioned. In
1934, the government officials in Rabaul obviously were not impressed with the need of
establishing a new post in an area with little commercial potential.
Robinson became dangerously ill from a leech-induced internal abscess in his penis
and was hospitalized out of the district in Madang.

The narrow escape did not affect Robinson’s sense of humour. The nature of the wound
even appealed to his sense of the ludicrous and when he lay, bone thin and pallid,
awaiting the schooner for Madang, he insisted that he would raise the question (at “the
highest level”) of officers patrolling the leech-infested grass country being issued with
a “certain type of rubber goods” as standard equipment. (McCarthy 1963: 76)

Although Robinson was no longer the district officer, his scheme for a Yellow River
government post had been broached; now it would take some commercial pressure to
make it happen.
On February 10, 1936, “Kassa” Townsend returned from leave to New Guinea with
his wife and infant son; his five-year-old daughter remained at boarding school in Mel-
bourne. Docking in Rabaul, he met with the Administrator and the following day wrote
in his diary, “Submitted Yellow River Post plans to Administrator.”37 On the same ship
with the Townsends was PO James Hodgekiss.

He was to open up a post on the Yellow River, a tributary of the Upper Sepik, a couple
of hundred river miles beyond Ambunti, as Oil Search Ltd. had been pressing for years
for permission to get into the uncontrolled territory accessible from there. It was nec-
essary to have an experienced Government officer within reach of their activities and
for this class of work there was no one superior to Jimmy Hodgekiss. His understand-
ing of native thought and his acceptance of solitude and isolation were both absolute.
(Townsend 1968: 224)

Robinson’s October 1932 plan for a base camp at the mouth of the Yellow River was
to become a reality—at least for a while. But the base would not be built on the little hun-
dred-fifty-foot Kreiwar Hill as Robinson had suggested but atop the more commanding
thousand-foot Kojabu (Kogiabu) Hill, where Robinson had lit his nightly bonfires to
signal the wayward patrol of Aitape’s ADO Ward Oakley and Oil Search Ltd.’s surveyor,
Harry Eve. It is interesting to see the shift in purpose of the proposed base camp, from
Robinson’s acculturation goals for the local population, to Townsend’s facilitating geo-
graphic access for commercial entrepreneurs, two different but intimately related sides of
the colonial coin. Not only was the Yellow River (Kojabu) Base Camp opened in 1936
by Hodgekiss in part to facilitate Oil Search Ltd.’s quest for oil in uncontrolled territory,
in 1938 Hodgekiss similarly opened the Green River Base Camp (off the upper Sepik
River’s north coast) and the Maimai Base Camp (northeast of the Lujere). But oil to

37. Personal communication from Laurie Bragge, who has the Townsend diaries.

53
 A Witch’s Hand

warrant commercial production was never found; if it had been, the “development” of the
upper Sepik Basin would have been a very different story.

McCarthy’s 1936 Patrol

In June of 1936, Keith McCarthy, now the Assistant District Officer in Aitape, began a
thirty-day patrol from Aitape to the “Sepik-Yellow River Base Camp” for general explora-
tion and map-making, and to report on the possibility of a mail-running service between
Aitape and the base camp.38 As Molnar- Bagley (1980: 50) notes, “This base camp be-
came famous as the most isolated posting in the Territory of New Guinea.” Accompanied
by ten police, two of whom spoke “pidgin Malay,” and twenty-nine carriers, they followed
the pioneering route taken by Robinson in 1934.39 It was an uneventful patrol but Mc-
Carthy (1936) made the first detailed sketch map of the area between the coast and the
Sepik as part of his patrol report.40 He also notes that below the Wape villages Malay, as
with Robinson’s patrol, facilitated communication and “saved time for the people quickly
gathered around when they heard our police speak [it].” His eleven-page patrol diary is
that of a very observant person, and throughout it, he comments, like Robinson, on the
friendliness of the people, an obvious contrast to other parts of the Territory where he
had patrolled. Finally, after the patrol crossed the Sepik in local canoes lashed together,
on July 9 at 9:00 a.m., they reached the base camp atop Kojabu (Kogiabu, Kochiabu) hill
(1,000’) established by Hodgekiss. 41 McCarthy (1936: 6) recorded that the people of

38. In those areas of New Guinea where there was no waterway or road, the mail between the dis-
trict’s headquarters and sub-stations might be carried by local “runners”—no man could actu-
ally “run” on these root-bound, wet, and rugged mountain trails—not unlike the western US
pony express in the nineteenth century. McCarthy’s plan was to have two police start at each
end of the route—Aitape and Yellow River (Kogiabu) Base Camp— once every six weeks,
exchange mailbags near its center (Talu village), and return home. He did foresee problems
with men fearful to enter areas of their immediate enemies even when accompanied by two
policemen. In fact, the two local men he selected to accompany him to the midpoint village
turned back after two days, even though accompanied by the patrol officer and police, as they
knew the next village, Maurom, was an enemy.
39. Although McCarthy follows Robinson’s route and notes in his patrol diary Robinson’s camp
sites, in his book about his New Guinea years, he strangely writes, “On the southern side of
the coastal range between Aitape and Vanimo (which, incidentally, was only twenty miles
from the Dutch New Guinea border) the headwaters of the Yellow River had their rise, and
to the best of my knowledge nobody had yet followed this river from its source to where it
joined the Sepik” (McCarthy 1963: 161).
40. Robinson’s and McCarthy’s exploratory patrols of the area were indirectly recognized in the
first Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea (1936: 369).
In the interior, beyond the Torricelli Ranges, in the grass-covered country sloping into
the Sepik valley, are larger communities of bush people, numbering several thousands,
into whose territory patrols are now effecting penetration . . . and it is believed ere long
the area will be under complete control.
41. McCarthy’s (1936: 5) patrol report diary entry for July 9, 1936 says, “At 9 a/m/ we had reached
the base-camp that had been established by J. W. Hodgekiss, P.O., on the 6th instant.” Usually

54
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

Aidawok, Mariyami, Weari, and Pabei came with them to the base camp where Maraui
from neighboring Purami greeted him. In November 1935, Maraui had accompanied
McCarthy and the administrator, Brigadier General McNioll, on the latter’s patrol across
the Dutch border42. Hodgekiss had some local men at work clearing timber on Kojabu
and, luckily for them in a steel-starved region, paid them with steel knives and axes.
The most significant part of McCarthy’s patrol report is his “Notes on People, Cus-
toms, Etc.” In his “Introduction,” he distinguishes between “Two distinct types of natives
we met with on the patrol—one of which I call the Wipe [Wape] type for want of a better
name and the other the Yuan (or Yellow River people [Lujere].)” In this first identifica-
tion of the Lujere as a people, McCarthy writes,

The country further south from Talu and Maurel [Maurom] as far south as the Sepik
River is inhabited by the folk of the Yellow River, or as I prefer to call them, the YUAN
tribes. They know the Yellow River as the Yuan and in the absence of their tribal name
I propose to call them the Yuan people. (McCarthy 1936: 12)43

He notes that the Yuan have a working knowledge of Malay Pidgin and, in his experi-
ence, “they are distinctive in being the only inland people who have adopted the tongue
of the foreigners as a trade talk.”44 He further hypothesizes that the contact is ancient.

For a Papuan people to know even such a simple language as Malay pidgin, which is
at base Melanesian, means that long and constant contact has taken place between
the two peoples. The visits of the Malayan bird-shooters are merely recent incidents
of a trade route that has operated for probably centuries past. Long before the Malays
entered the Sepik Basin the people of the Yuan had trading communication with those
of the coastal areas north-west (Hollandia). (McCarthy 1936: 14)

There is no evidence that foreign traders entered the upper Sepik Basin for anything
other than the plumes of the bird-of-paradise but as Swadling notes (1996: 51–63) the
plume trade with Asia is ancient and could have commenced hundreds of years before the

this would mean the present or current month, i.e., “July 6,” but in his book (1963:163), he
says Hodgekiss “told us he had been waiting at his base camp for us for the last three weeks.
His normal station was at Ambunti, and this base camp did not have an officer posted to it.”
This would indicate the base camp was established on June sixth. But there is further confu-
sion when he (1936: 6) records in his diary “6th instant” again on July 14: “The Thetis [a gov-
ernment boat] had arrived on the 6th inst. [instant] and was expected to return from Ambunti
on the 13th.” (It actually arrived at the base camp around 3:00 pm on July 14).
42. See McCarthy (1963: 139–49) for a detailed account of this trip to the upper Sepik with the
Administrator including an early description of Wagu village and two watery misadventures
by McCarthy.
43. Had I been aware of McCarthy’s patrol report while in the field, I might have been persuaded
to follow his lead and called them the “Yuan” people.
44. Danilyn Rutherford (2012: 129), who worked on Biak Island in West Papua, Indonesia, em-
phasizes and documents the local blurring of linguistic boundaries within the country, noting
“a dizzying variety of ‘low Malay registers” from which the national language, Indonesian,
emerged.

55
 A Witch’s Hand

modern craze of feathers in European women’s fashion.45 McCarthy has no discussion of

the Lujere’s own language, Namia, except to identify it as Papuan, for in 1936, none of the
upper Sepik River languages were specifically identified. It would be another fifty years
and after my fieldwork was completed before their language was actually studied in the
field by linguists Tom and Becky Feldpausch. What follows are McCarthy’s verbatim an-
thropological notes on the Yuan (Lujere) that complement and extend Robinson’s 1932
observations. McCarthy usually puts Tok Pisin terms followed by “p.” in parentheses. My
occasional comments are interjected in brackets.

Physical Characteristics: The people are of a dark-brown skin and generally well-
formed. The men are slim and average about 5 feet 2 inches in height and are muscular
although not heavily built.46 Features of both sexes are not unpleasing although the
practices of piercing the septum of the nose as well as slitting the tip does not enhance
their appearance. A piece of bamboo or bone is generally worn in the septum while the
slits in the nose sometimes hold an ornamental feather. The lobe and helix of both ears
are usually pierced and small ornaments or trophies such as part of a pig’s tail worn
in them. Some of the men and women bore irregular scars on shoulders and back but
cicatrisation is not generally practiced. Skin diseases were not common although some
of the men were suffering from girili (tinea) [TP].
Dress: The women wore small skirts of woven grass [corded string], short in the
front but longer at the back. They were attached by a narrow cord and the flanks of the
wearer were bare. Necklaces of red and white seeds threaded together and shell orna-
ments were worn by the younger girls. Large string bags (bilum p.) were carried and
when heavily loaded were carried with the cord across the forehead and the bag slung
behind.
The dress of the men was the unusual type as worn by the people of the upper Sepik
River. The penis is inserted in a gourd (kambang p.) which is sometimes carved. The
shapes of the gourd vary and they are worn attached to a string around the waist. Both
men and male children generally wear this peculiar covering.47
Sometimes a belt of hollow cassowary bones, about 6 inches in length were thread-
ed on cords with large seeds and worn around the waist. The bones are worn in threes
and fours and are sometimes those of a crocodile. A headdress consisting of a forehead
band of white threaded seeds was common and the younger men had the skin of the
possum (kapul p.) on their heads. Small string bags were carried by the men. A pipe
was usually carried. It consisted of the decorated gourd sometimes carved and covered
with the skin of an iguana (pilei p.) with a short length of detachable bamboo inserted
in the larger hole at the end. The tobacco is smoked green after a cursory drying over
a fire and is rolled like a cigar and stuck in the end of the bamboo tube. The tube is

45. Mead (1938: 181), after a comment that the domestic fowl of the middle Sepik “are said to
resemble Malay fowls,” adds, “It must be remembered in this connection that there was once
a Malay trade route from Dutch New Guinea over the Torricelli Mountains to the Yellow
River.”
46. In chapter 10 the height and weight of the Wakau villagers is reported; the average height of
the males was five feet, four inches.
47. Village men explained to me that two small holes were made toward the bottom of the gourd
and a cord was passed around the scrotum and another around the hips.

56
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

then held in the gourd and the smoker draws from a smaller hole at the other end of
the gourd. Very often the cigar is smoked from the bamboo holder – the gourd is more
common on the Sepik River villages.
Weapons: Bows and arrows are the principal arms of the men. The usual broad-
bladed bamboo arrow is used for hunting pigs and cassowaries. The well-carved arrows
used in warfare are barbed and painted red, black and white. The better carved arrows
are sometimes wrapped with dried leaves to protect them. Bows are of hardwood and
are about 5 feet in length. The arrow-heads are of hardwood . . . . At Aidawok [Ed-
waki] I noticed some of the men carrying unusually slender spears. They were of plain
hardwood, pointed at both ends, some 4’ 6” in length and about ¾ inch through at their
thickest part.48
Houses: Houses are well-built rectangular affairs and are built on piles. Gable roofs
are common but often a quarter-circle veranda is built in over the small doorways. A
house at Kelnom [Yis lang.] was about 20 feet by 30 feet and was built on piles about
4 feet from the ground. The thatched roof was of sago palm while sides were of the
same material. Flooring was of the limbong [PE] palmwood and the only decoration
on the building was on the front. The palmwood and pankal [PE] planks were roughly
painted in various designs in red, white, and yellow and black paint.49 A larger house,
evidently the house of the men, was noticed in a deserted [Lujere] village on 7.7.36.
The houses were all extremely well-built.
Food: The staple diet of the Yuan people is sago and bananas [as it is today]. Small
food plots are worked and in the Aidawok sweet-potatoes, pith, manioc and a little
taro were seen. The gardens are situated on the hills near the villages or on the banks
of the Yellow River. Game is plentiful in the area and all the streams contain fish. The
smaller creeks are dammed and the fish caught in the shallow water.
Villages: There are no large villages although a considerable population in the plain
lands nearing the Sepik River. The houses are in groups of a dozen or so and are built
near the sago swamps. These hamlets are connected by foot-pads.
Large split gongs (garamut p.) were seen in all the villages. They varied in length
and height from 3’ x 1’ to huge things of 10’ x 3.’50 At Aidawok I noticed the wooden
hand-drums (kundu p.). They were of plain, uncarved wood and they had no hand-
pieces worked on them. The tops of several were painted in red and white.
Disposal of Dead: A platform supported by poles about 18 feet in height is erected
outside the house of the deceased. The body is placed on the top of the platform with
certain belongings, such as bows and arrows, etc. No covering is made and the body is
left to decompose in the open air. These platforms were seen at Aidawok and Pabwei
hamlets. The stench from the decaying corpses was awful but the people of the places
seemed surprised when we hurried from the vicinity—they did not seem to notice the
smell. After the body has decomposed the bones are taken into the houses by the rela-
tives of the deceased. At Aidawok I saw the skull of a man hanging on the wall near
the door of a house – his former dwelling.
On 17.7.36, at a deserted [Lujere] village I noticed a heap of human bones on the
ground outside one of the houses; they had evidently been discarded when the people

48. I did not observe these or see any among the Basel museum’s artifacts.
49. In 1971–72, I did not see these painted planks in Kelnom or in any Lujere village.
50. In 1971–72, there were no ‘garamuts’ nor had any been collected earlier.

57
 A Witch’s Hand

had evacuated the village some weeks previously. Such a frightful custom must spread
disease and it must be one of the first practices to be abolished when the people come
under some degree of control.51 The ground on which the villages are built is firm soil
and except for the peoples’ present lack of tools there is no reason why burial (or cre-
mation) should not take place.
Tools: I would earnestly recommend the free issue of a certain number of steel axes and
knives to these people [my emphasis]. A few broken steel blades are jealously owned at
some of the hamlets but the majority of the work of clearing and building houses has
to be done by their primitive stone adzes. Trading will naturally ensue between the
base camp and the various hamlets; food will be sold but it will be some time before
the people learn to bring large amounts. They prefer to bring small individual portions
of sago, etc. and these can be purchased for cheap (and for the most part economically
useless) trade goods such as mirrors, beads, rings, etc. Steel tools should be introduced
as soon as possible. But the people have not an abundance of food and for them to
purchase an axe for its actual value in food is at the present stage an impossibility. De-
liberately opposing the axioms of “never give a native something for nothing,” etc, etc,
I would recommend that half-a-dozen axes and knives be given to every village in the
area. The population is not great and cost would be very small.
We endeavor to improve the position of a primitive people as soon as possible. They
should not be denied a few knives and axes in order to support a doubtful principle—-
-because the requisite number of pounds of sago is not available in exchange. With
a few steel tools in the villages, future implements would have to be purchased. The
natives must not be spoilt.52 The system of flooding the native villages with rings, kauri
shells, etc. should be avoided regardless of the value of such articles in the eyes of the
people.
GENERAL: The population as seen by the patrol was not large. Patrols working
from the Base camp will probably discover greater numbers of people to the west;
towards the Sand River. I do not think that there are many villages east of the Yellow
River [more than he imagined]. A large population will probably be found near the
North River [it wasn’t].
The people are the most peaceful that I have ever met. Patrols are welcomed as op-
portunities for trading and in fact they are more traders than warriors. The villages are
all friendly towards one another. There was no mention of tribal fighting and in some
cases men traveled without arms for two days outside the limits of their villages; an
indication of general peace. They should quickly come under the control of the Base
camp. (McCarthy 1936: 12–20)

51. Authorities demanded they switch to earthen burials. See chapter 19 for a discussion of their
adaption of their traditional scaffold to the earthen burial.
52. This cold comment is out of character for McCarthy, whose reports and book otherwise indi-
cate an official who was compassionate and respectful of the local people. The statement seems
more a ploy to defuse the negative response to his request that he anticipated (and received)
from some of his bureaucratic superiors. Still, the pioneer anthropologist Seligman (1910:
ix) wrote that his main Koita informant, Ahuia Ova, “without becoming spoilt, has learnt to
speak English and to write Motu extremely well.”

58
 Australia, the Lujere’s New Rulers

McCarthy had reason to be impressed with the villagers’ peacefulness. In 1933, he was
in the eastern highlands west of the Bulolo goldfields when legendarily fierce Kukukuku
warriors ambushed his patrol. “Seven Kukukukus were killed, a number of New Guinea
police were wounded (one mortally) and McCarthy was struck by arrows in the thigh and
stomach” (Nelson 2000). As to his compassionate plea to his superiors for some iron tools
for the trade isolated Lujere, it fell on deaf ears:

I felt that the trade or cash to buy steel goods would never be available to the people of
the Yellow River and that the principle [“never give a native something for nothing”]
was harsh when it applied to them, as to other equally isolated or desperately poor
communities . . . In time the authorities thanked me for my exploratory work which
was pleasing. On my appeal for iron implements they maintained a steadfast silence.
The Yellow River was to remain as it was. (McCarthy 1963: 164)

And it more or less did. The transformation from stone and bone to metal tools did
eventually occur but, as we will see, it was an ironic felicity of World War II.
Robinson and McCarthy both had extensive experience working with various New
Guinea societies and their pioneering cultural observations on the Lujere are insightful as
far as they go. Largely missing, however, is information on the Lujere’s belief systems and
social and ceremonial lives. ‘Sanguma,’ one of the problems that brought me to this wet
grassland and for which the Lujere were regionally famous was, not surprisingly, never
mentioned. A government patrol with multiple purposes moving quickly under arduous
conditions from village to village amid a recently contacted people with no access to their
language, is limited in what it can discover. In chapter 10, I reflect back on these first
descriptions of Lujere culture by Robinson and McCarthy in light of what I later learned
living among them.

59
chapter three

The Japanese Invasion

Whatever the tide of the war in New Guinea . . . it was

in the end the native people who were most affected.
J. K. McCarthy (1963: 214)

On December 7th, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Malaya,
launching an unprecedented colonial conquest of the Pacific region. While World War
I had little effect on the Indigenous population of New Guinea, World War II, or ‘taim
bilong pait,’ had a devastating impact on numerous local regions. Peter Ryan, the Austral-
ian journalist who both fought against the Japanese in New Guinea and later wrote about
the war, notes that

For Papua New Guinea itself the war was the most cataclysmic event in the country’s
whole history. Between December 1941 when the Japanese struck and August 1945
when they surrendered, changes occurred or were set in motion which far exceeded in
their effects the original coming of the white man (which had been local and gradual)
or the results of any natural catastrophe of disease or volcanic activity. Hunger, hard-
ship, captivity and violent death were the lot of many of the indigenous people. (Ryan
1972a: 1211)

Allen (1992: 55) also tells us that about 55,000 New Guinea men were employed or
pressed into service by the enemy armies as carriers and laborers and that “between 1941
and 1945 over 170,00 Japanese died in Papua New Guinea, 14,500 Australians, 166 Pap-
uan New Guinea soldiers and police, and an unknown number of Americans.”

61
 A Witch’s Hand

The Fall of Rabaul, 1942

Japanese forces swept swiftly through the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia and in De-
cember of 1942, began their invasion of New Guinea.1 “The Japanese came in with little
violence, and the Europeans fled before them—or were taken, and sometimes butchered
if they failed to get away” (Brookfield 1972: 93). Historians debate why the Australians
were so woefully unprepared but one major factor was that New Guinea was a League of
Nations Mandated Territory and under those provisions was not to be fortified or have a
defensive force. Another factor was that many of Australia’s armed forces were serving far
away with the European Allied forces fighting the Germans and Italians. But there was
another perhaps even more important factor. “Kassa” Townsend, who served in the war,
writes scathingly about the shortsightedness and irresponsibility of Australia’s prewar
government:

Ostrich-like, it buried its head in the sand although it could not possibly have believed
that our potential enemies would respect New Guinea’s [neutral] status. . . . As a result
of this shilly-shallying no one, civilian or soldier, ever really knew the score; no one
had any clear idea what to do in the event of an invasion; and, even when the Japanese
bombs began to fall in January of 1942, no effort was ever made to get civilians out or
to get military reinforcements in. (Townsend 1968: 250)2

What did not become clear until historians began writing about the invasion of Ra-
baul was that it was not just Australia’s “shilly-shallying” but that a cold decision had been
made to sacrifice the Rabaul garrison.

In other words, the government wanted to preserve the illusion that Australia was
capable of defending itself, and was prepared to expend the garrison for that purpose.
As a result, no contingency plans were made to rescue any soldiers who might survive
the pending invasion. . . There would be no relief, no miraculous Dunkirk. (Gamble
2014: 56)

The first bombs dropped were on New Britain in the poorly defended capitol of Ra-
baul. Then on January 23, the Japanese began an invasion with overwhelming military
and naval might. The defense of Rabaul was short-lived and fell to the enemy in a matter
of hours.

Those in action escaped with what they stood up in—shorts and boots mostly, and a
rifle. . . . The first impulse of all was to get away into the bush. But none of these men
had been trained in jungle craft, few knew the kind of terrain they would meet outside
the town limits of Rabaul and Kopopo. With the majority, the impulse to escape soon

1. For an overall picture of how the war impacted the Aitape-Lumi area, see Duggan (1979:
41–71). For a view of the Japanese occupation throughout the Melanesian area see Brookfield
(1972: 88–97) and especially Allen (1982), whose article includes an excellent colored map.
2. Earlier, in late December 1941, White women and children had been evacuated from New
Britain (Asian and local women were excluded) (Gamble 2014: 58–59).

62
 The Japanese Invasion

gave way to despair and 900 to 1,000 surrendered or were eventually recaptured by the
Japanese.
Probably 400 others continued their headlong flight into the New Britain bush. Of
these a handful escaped under their own steam, but the majority were soon victims of
hunger, dysentery, malaria, exposure and the unaccustomed roughness of the country.
(Townsend 1968: 253)3

The men who did survive were helped to escape through the heroic actions of Keith
McCarthy who, no longer assigned to the Sepik, was the Assistant District Officer
at Talasea, three-quarters the way down New Britain’s north coast from Rabaul. Like
Townsend, McCarthy was highly critical of the administration’s non-performance. In a
letter of December 5, 1973, answering my queries regarding early administration records,
he wrote:

You know, I’ve often cursed the stupidity of the officials at Rabaul who lost all these
valuable documents, including land records, when the Japs landed there in Jan, 1942.
They had at least 6 weeks warning that the Japanese would eventually arrive; ample
time to have shipped or hidden these records, but they did nothing. Knowing their love
of Bumph4 I would have thought they would have looked after papers better. I wish
I could help you more and I regret not having all copies of my own patrol reports—
however, the work of managing the escape of the 2/22 battalion from Rabaul made
it essential that one had to move swiftly and only the bare essentials could be carried.
I left them locked in the safe at Talasea and with a bit of luck the papers might have
survived but a bomb landed dead on the house and nothing remained. (Letter from
K. McCarthy to W. Mitchell, December 5, 1973)

Although McCarthy’s personal papers were gone, by his bravery and enterprise he
succeeded in rescuing more than two hundred soldiers and expatriates trapped on the
island and leading them safely to Australia.5 In recognition of his war deeds he was made
a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1943. It was not
long, however, until he was back in New Guinea in a war role that directly affected the
Lujere.

3. The infamous Tol massacre occurred at the Tol plantation where around 160 Australian men,
mostly soldiers, unarmed and miserable, on 4 February 1942, had their hands tied by Japanese
then were repeatedly bayoneted, slashed and shot, and left for dead. A few survived to tell
their story. See Ryan (1972a: 1214) and especially Gamble (2006: 146–60) who also chroni-
cles the successful escapes from New Britain. Rabaul became a Japanese bastion of strength
and terror and one of the longest battles of World War II (Gamble 2010: 2014).
4. Bumph: “Useless printed instructions and manuals. Originated in England during World War
II when English soldiers were overwhelmed with unnecessary printed materials and used
them as they would toilet tissue or ‘bum fodder.’” 50 cent crack dealer, UrbanDictionary.com,
accessed July 31, 2003.
5. See McCarthy (1963: 189–213) for his personal account of this harrowing escape but see
Gamble (2014) for his comprehensive history of the Japanese invasion of Rabaul based on
both Allied and Japanese documents.

63
 A Witch’s Hand

Guerrilla Warfare in the Upper Sepik Basin, 1943

After the fall of Rabaul and the rapid Japanese conquest of New Britain, all of the islands
in the Bismarck Archipelago were in Japanese hands by the end of February. The invaders
then moved towards New Guinea itself and eventually controlled much of the island’s
north coast.6 The Japanese easily occupied Aitape on April 1, 1942 and set men to work
building Tadji airstrip while Wewak became the strategic base for the operations of the
one hundred thousand soldiers of Japan’s 18th Army in mainland New Guinea under
the command of Lieutenant General Hatazō Adachi.7 The widespread social disruption
caused by the Japanese invasion resulted in the collapse of civilian government in both
Papua and The Mandated Territory of New Guinea. To restore order facilitating the
war’s objectives, they were merged into the single territory “Australian New Guinea” and
a military government formed in April 1942, the Australian New Guinea Administra-
tive Unit (ANGAU).8 Although ANGAU’s operational, administrative and production
responsibilities were enormous, “It did not have access to government at high policy level,
but remained a subordinate unit under command of New Guinea Force [i.e., the mili-
tary]” (Ryan 1972b: 23). As the wartime organization with responsibility for the govern-
ance and welfare of the Indigenous population, it was essentially a military unit and has
been accused as more concerned with the exploitation of Indigenous labor to advance the
war against the Japanese than in addressing the needs of a population in wartime distress
(Barry 1945).
While the Wewak to Aitape coastal area and the lower to middle part of the Sepik
Basin were occupied by the Japanese entrapping some Europeans, the major fighting
with the Allies was far to the east.9

6. The Japanese never succeeded in occupying New Guinea’s south coast by sea or by successfully
advancing over the central mountain range. See Campbell (2007) for a detailed account of
the US 32nd Division’s grueling campaign moving north over these mountains to engage and
finally defeat the enemy on the north coast at Buna.
7. Santa Anna Mission operated Tadji Plantation, just east of Aitape. The copra plantation is no
more but Santa Anna, now a Franciscan mission, is still active and the airstrip remains in use.
8. Even earlier in May 1941, the Australian military forces stationed in both territories were
placed under a single command (Fulton 2005: 142.) See Ryan (1972) for a short authoritative
account of ANGAU’s purpose and organization, Powell (2003) for an account of its wartime
exploits in New Guinea and Powell (1996) for the significant role of the Allied Intelligence
Bureau.
9. Although some of the Europeans trapped in New Guinea joined ANGAU in the fight
against the Japanese, others tried to make it back to Australia. One small group of six gold
miners, a government clerk and a government medical assistant, escaped up the Sepik River
then overland and down the Fly River to safety in the south coastal town of Daru. Led by one
of the miners, J. A. Thurston, it was the first trip (April to September 1942) from the Sepik
to the South coast of New Guinea. Clerk L. Odgers (1942) prepared the patrol report with
its detailed diary. Also see Townsend (1968: 227–28) for a shocking account of the suicide
of Assistant District Officer George Ellis at Angoram on the lower Sepik in 1942 and his
rampaging policemen “who set out to kill every European still living on the River.” First they
shot and killed Patrol Officer R. B. Strudwick in Timbunke while he was eating, then further
upriver killed a party of three miners and a Chinese carpenter before they were captured.

64
 The Japanese Invasion

It was not until early 1943 that the people in the inland foothills villages had direct
contact with Japanese troops. . . . Coastal men appointed as civilian officials by the
Japanese, came inland and informed the foothills people that they were required to
come out to the coast, to hand over their badges of office given to them by the Aus-
tralians, to accept the rules of the Japanese administration and, above all, to contribute
labour to the building of the coastal airstrips at But and Dagua. They moved back and
forth to the coast until an outbreak of severe dysentery in mid-1943. (Allen 2006: 12)

The Japanese told the laborers to return home and stay there, but the epidemic of
bloody diarrhea then spread from the coastal hills and into the mountains by the return-
ing laborers killing hundreds of inhabitants and seriously depopulating some villages. In
a detailed study of the epidemic and its population implications, Bryant Allen (1983:
234) believes that “The severe form of dysentery seems to have entered the inland from
the Tadji area, near Aitape.” While it seriously affected the mountainous Wape villages
where I worked (Mitchell 1978b: 8) as well as in the mountains just to the east where
Gilbert Lewis (1977: 230) worked in Rauit village, there is no evidence that it reached
the swampy grasslands of the Lujere.
In 1943, the Japanese were in firm control of much of New Guinea’s north coast
as well and up past the middle Sepik River and were unsparing in their internment
of international residents. An uncontested example of wartime Japanese brutality was
the execution of foreign nationals aboard the Japanese destroyer Akikaze on March 18,
1943. Although Japan and Germany were allies, the ship’s crew killed over sixty individu-
als, mostly German Catholic and Evangelical missionaries serving in the Sepik area, as
they sailed from Manus to Rabaul. The Catholic missionaries killed were Bishop Joseph
Loerks, ten fathers, and fifteen brothers. The adults, hung one by one by their wrists at
the ship’s stern, were then killed by gunfire and dropped overboard; the three infants were
simply thrown into the sea. The Australian War Crimes Section in Tokyo investigated the
atrocity, but no further action was taken.10
With tens of thousands of Japanese troops occupying New Guinea’s north coast, it
was the coastal villages that initially suffered the greatest exploitation for labor and dep-
rivation. But it was not only the Japanese who demanded that the Indigenous population
work for them; ANGAU also impressed thousands of local men as carriers and laborers
in the areas they controlled to aid their fight. In the words of a New Zealand reporter
who was there,

The objective now, of course, was no longer the extension of civilization but the maxi-
mum exploitation of native population for the purpose of waging war against the Japa-
nese. All available males were conscripted for labour on military works, or for service
as carriers, stretcher-bearers or workers on coconut and rubber plantations which had
assumed new importance. (White 1965: 125)

So pervasive was the war in New Guinea that the Lujere, although far inland and far
up the Sepik River, were eventually affected by the fighting. It was not over the coastal
mountains that the war came to them but up the Japanese controlled Sepik. When I lived

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_destroyer_Akikaze. Accessed March 2, 2016.

65
 A Witch’s Hand

with the Wape who were nearer the Aitape coast, I heard many stories about the Japanese
and the war. But while living with the more remote Lujere, I heard only a few war stories,
as the Japanese never entered their villages. What little I did hear was as hard for me to
make sense of as it was for them; it was only when I began this book and researched the
World War II in New Guinea by delving into reports, books, and archives that I under-
stood why and how the war found its way into their isolated domain.

The Lujere and the Mosstroops Guerrillas

An essential responsibility of ANGAU, the one that concerns us, “was to carry out patrols
and organize the support and cooperation of the New Guinea people to assist the Army
against the Japanese” (Fulton 2005: 140–141).11 But there were other patrolling units,
such as the Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB) and Far Eastern Liaison Office (FELO),
also working along enemy lines in all the occupied parts of New Guinea’s north coast.
They, like ANGAU operatives, were mostly Australian men with unique experience in
New Guinea. The AIB men gathered intelligence on the enemy’s activities from cooper-
ating villagers or by stealth while FELO men as purveyors of propaganda were attempt-
ing to influence villagers to side with them against the Japanese. The distinction was
sometimes more on paper than in practice. Common to all Allied patrols was that the
Japanese knew they were out there somewhere and had the superior numbers to send out
numerous patrols to find and engage them. Some lost their lives in guerrilla skirmishes
with Japanese soldiers or in surprise attacks from villagers working for the enemy.
In 1943 the Allies’ Joint Chiefs were eyeing an eventual offensive under the direction
of General Douglas MacArthur against Japan’s north coast New Guinea bases. Because
the Japanese wielded power over large swaths of New Guinea and its residents, often
extending far inland, there was interest in creating a stronger guerrilla-intelligence-prop-
aganda presence in the extensive Sepik Basin that lay behind Japan’s Wewak and Aitape
coastal bases. A guerrilla force, code-named “Mosstroops,” was the strategic outcome and
it eventually materialized directly in the heart of the Lujere’s homeland.12
Phillip Guddemi (1992: 37) mentions the “Mosstroops” in his dissertation on the
Sawiyanō, the Lujere’s cannibal enemies just across the Sepik. But it was not until my
Australian colleague Bryant Allen alerted me to the hundreds of pages online, includ-
ing twenty-seven field photographs in the National Australian Archives about the plan-
ning, operation, and termination of “Mosstroops,” that I understood their significance in
the Lujere’s colonial history. Rather suddenly, my Wakau informants’ cryptic comments
about World War II began to make sense.

11. While ANGAU accomplished much in the war, some of Australia’s goals and officers, espe-
cially General Sir Thomas Blamey, commander-in-chief of the Australian Military Forces,
were strongly criticized (Grey 2008: 190). Peter Charlton (1983: 89) even titled his book, The
Unnecessary War, noting, “The operations on Bougainville and around Aitape–Wewak were
the very models of modern unnecessary campaigns.” For an overview of the basic organization
of ANGAU and its unique field services, including the expropriation of local labor, see Powell
(2003). For a more succinct account, see Ryan (1972b).
12. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original Mosstroopers were groups of ma-
rauding bands operating in the English-Scottish border area in the mid-seventeenth century.

66
 The Japanese Invasion

One of the first documents outlining the “Mosstroops” operation is dated April
29, 1943, marked “MOST SECRET” and titled “NEW GUINEA GUERRILLA
FORCE.” “Kassa” Townsend and Keith McCarthy, having put their pique against the
Australian government behind them, were now both majors and, as undisputed Sepik
experts, among the plan’s architects and advisors, Townsend for FELO and McCarthy
for AIB. It begins:

As a result of discussions between Commander Proud and Lieut. Colonel Chapman-

Walker, Major Townsend and Major Mccarthy (sic), the following points have been
agreed and subsequently approved by the C-in-C [Commander in Chief of Australian
Forces, General Sir Thomas Blamey]:
1. The creation of Guerrilla Patrols to operate in Japanese occupied territory is es-
sential for the protection of Intelligence and F.E.L. Parties operating on the New
Guinea mainland.
2. The organization, training and preparation of these patrols should be conducted
by N.G.F. [New Guinea Force, i.e., the military].13 As a preliminary estimate, it
appears that it will be necessary to transport into the Upper Sepik River area a
force of approximately 120 men with 100,000 lbs. of stores and equipment. In
preparing detailed plans of this operation every effort will be made to reduce this
number of men and weight of stores.14

Continuing, the document notes that the only practical wartime method of transport
to the Sepik River is by “Flying Boat” (i.e., Catalina seaplanes); that Major H. M. Farlow
should command the Force and, with the C-in-C’s approval, he proceed to Brisbane,
Australia to examine the detailed plans in preparation and agree on the personnel to be
recruited. Farlow was with ANGAU and a former Assistant District Officer in Rabaul
but with no Sepik experience.
The “Intelligence parties” the document alludes to were five small forward patrols op-
erating along and, occasionally, within, the Japanese lines in the Sepik area. Their princi-
pal task, like the Coastwatchers, who were specifically interested in Japanese movements
at sea and in the harbors, was to gather intelligence data on the enemy’s land movements
while other groups were more propaganda-oriented toward the villagers. Each patrol had
a movable base with a wireless to send relevant information to their headquarters. Ac-
cording to the diary of the leader of one party, G. A. V. Stanley15, the geologist with Oil
Search Ltd. before the war but now a FELO agent, had his base for a time among the

13. In 1942, MacArthur placed all of the US and Australian units in New Guinea under the
control of the New Guinea Force. See https://www.wikiwand.com/en/New_Guinea_Force.
14. Memorandum, “New Guinea Guerilla Force,” 29 April 1943. World War II, Mosstroops
Papers, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
15. On September 20, 1935, the Wape area of the Torricelli Mountains had a devastating earth-
quake that Stanley personally experienced and published an account of (Stanley et al. 1935).
So memorable was the severity of the ’35 earthquake to the inhabitants that it was one of
the few solid events by which I could correlate the time with a European calendar. Also see
Cheesman (1949: 241) for her brief account of the quake related to her by another geologist
who, like Stanley, was employed by Oil Search, Ltd.

67
 A Witch’s Hand

Lujere at Edwaki (Edawok, Edawaki, Edoaki); both the name of the 705-foot hilltop and
a Lujere village. In some areas, but not among the Lujere, these patrols faced villagers’
hostility or attempts to capture them for the Japanese, who boasted to the locals that they
would castrate any European captive.

By 13th July [1943] a memorandum was produced in MacArthur’s headquarters rec-

ommending the establishment of a base on Lake Kuvanmas in the Sepik area for the
purpose of obtaining Intelligence, gaining meteorological information, favourably in-
fluencing the natives, reconnoitering for possible airfields, and protecting Intelligence
parties operating in uncontrolled areas. (Dexter 1961: 260)

Although there was some strong opposition to the plan (Powell 2003: 60) it was
adopted and ANGAU was designated as the supervising agency for all such intelligence-
gathering groups. Keith McCarthy was appointed to the planning staff and ANGAU’s
Major H. M. Farlow was placed in command of the on-the-ground operations. Seventy-
one men were recruited in Australia to help staff the operation. A Catalina seaplane be-
gan flying in men and by early August the Mosstroop’s Lake Kuvanmas base camp on the
middle Sepik was established. But as ANGAU’s historian Alan Powell (2003: 61) writes,
“From the beginning Operation Mosstroops went wrong.” Two large and well-armed
Japanese patrols came up the Sepik and attacked the camp. After an initial skirmish,
the Mosstroops party retreated to a sago swamp but in the melee, some of the men were
separated. Following a six-week arduous trek they eventually found safety at Wabag in
the Highlands. In September, another Mosstroops group landed on Lake Yimas, just east
of Lake Kuvanmas, and was attacked the same day. Local people had led the Japanese to
them and in the resulting fight they killed or wounded nine of their attackers. Abandon-
ing their stores, they also made the long trek to Wabag arriving the end of October. Here,
the historian of the war in New Guinea, David Dexter, takes up the story:

In spite of the unfortunate start and although the enemy was now aware that something
was happening along the Sepik, it was decided to insert the balance of Mosstroops
into the Sepik-Yellow River area. On 10th September Captain Milligan landed from
a Catalina and established a base on the Sepik [near the mouth of the Yellow River]
but on the same day the river became swollen making Catalina landings dangerous. A
temporary base was then established at Lake Panawai, [a Sepik River oxbow] and the
remainder of Mosstroops and stores were flown in. By the beginning of October, the
movement was complete and the work of establishing a line of communication up the
Yellow River and staging camps at Makeme, Birin and Abrau was begun. Advanced
headquarters moved early in October from Lake Panawai to Pinnace Head [the limit
of navigation up the Yellow River]. The Catalina unloading point for supplies was at
Kochiabu [Kojabu] just downstream from the Sepik-Yellow River junction. Thus for a
few weeks after their disastrous start Mosstroops had a chance to establish themselves.
(Dexter 1961: 262–63)

By unloading supplies at Kojabu (Kochiabu), the site of the prewar Yellow River Base
Camp, the Mosstroops sustained the government’s importance of that area. But the exact
history of the Yellow River (Kojabu) Base Camp after McCarthy’s 1936 visit is as murky

68
 The Japanese Invasion

as the Sepik’s waters. It does not even appear in a listing of all the government’s stations
opened from 1883 to 1963 compiled by McCarthy’s (1964) own office when, much later,
he was the Director of the Department of Native Affairs.16 On Jack Fryer’s World War
II 1943 sketch map a defunct “Yellow River Police Post” appears atop Kojabu Hill so it
is likely that the original Base Camp was down-graded to a “Police Post” when its ‘kiap,’
Jim Hodgekiss, moved on to follow the explorations of Oil Search Ltd.’s field staff. In
1942 the Police Post was closed when the Japanese occupied the North coastal area of the
Territory and all of the government’s alienated posts were abandoned.
All place names in Dexter’s quoted text are in the Lujere area, with the exception of
Abrau village, a traditional enemy whose villagers speak Awun. East Post, on the Sepik
River below the Yellow River, was designated a “watching post” for the encroachment
of the Japanese from down river. Ted Fulton, one of the men recruited for Mosstroops,
has written about the experience (Fulton 2005: 209–14). A volunteer in the Australian
Army, he was selected because of his long experience in New Guinea, first in government
administration then as a successful gold prospector. In his words,

Mosstroops were to collect information about Japanese operations, to help downed

Allied aircrew, to bolster the morale of villagers by showing them we were still there in
numbers and to arm and encourage selected village men to attack Japanese patrols in
guerrilla warfare. (Fulton 2005: 211)

In hindsight, it was an ambitious agenda for a small group of men dependent on

continual aerial supply support (see fig. 3) set against the sprawling Japanese army whose
ruthlessness against non-cooperating villagers was well known.

Figure 3. A Mosstroops photo of the Sepik River, marked up to show the seaplane landing area
where men and supplies could be off-loaded. Courtesy of National Archives of Australia.

The several hundred Mosstroops documents I have examined, while filled with logis-
tic data, give little information regarding the troops’ relations with or perceptions of the
Lujere, a topic germane to my interests. One indicator of their thinking, however, lies in a
“Mosstroops” report by their leader, Major Farlow. Here are extracts from a section titled
“Handling of Natives” that reads like a guide to his officers:

16. I am indebted to Laurie Bragge for this information.

69
 A Witch’s Hand

The native, never mind how primitive he is, sizes you up very quickly and your de-
meanour and every action is noted.
Before you can get him to assist you, you must first gain his confidence by showing
him you do not want to cause him any inconvenience by your presence in his area and
that you do not wish to interfere with his property.
If you wish his assistence you must pay him for it and it is always a good principle
at first to be liberal with your payments. Once you have established values in the area
do not alter them.
It must at all times be remembered that it is practically impossible to work in New
Guinea without the natives’ assistance. Therefore your dealings with him must be such
as to impress on him that he will at all times be given a fair deal.
He is timid in most cases and will show no hostility to you. In fact he is quick to
make friends. Do not treat him as an equal as he does not expect it.
Do not, on any account, have anything to do with his womenfolk, in fact, ignore
them and discourage them from visiting your camp.
Learn Pidgin English. (Farlow 1944b)

The major’s behavioral protocol succeeded as there are no recorded incidents of mis-
treatment of the Lujere by Mosstroops Europeans during their stay among them nor did
I hear of any during my fieldwork. But Farlow, apparently comparing the Yellow River
people to other populations where he previously was a patrol officer, found they did not
measure up.

The natives living in this area are not many in number and are a very poor type of
native. They are friendly but are very timid. They are nomadic and do not live in set-
tled villages.17 Hamlets are scattered throughout the surrounding bush where family
groups live. They are without steel and very anxious to obtain tomahawks and knives.
They will come into work but after a few days disappear. It is necessary to treat them
patiently and wait for them to return and generally you will find that they have been
away obtaining sac sac [sago].18

Steel tools at last

Fortunately for the Lujere, it was impossible for the Mosstroops’s operation to go for-
ward without the aid of local men to help relay their gear and supplies from camp to
camp up the Yellow River and to provide food, especially sago, for the many New Guinea
men, mostly police, they brought with them. This necessitated a big influx of trade goods
flown in to secure the local food and labor they were dependent upon, an operational fact
Farlow made explicit in his report:

TRADE. This is one of the most important items that a party should carry. Owing to
the enemy having been in occupation of parts of New Guinea for some considerable

17. This, of course, is incorrect. “Nomadic” implies that a group has no fixed residence. The Lujere
are best characterized as semisedentary.
18. “Mosstroops Report on Food Packs, Equipment, Weapons, Etc. by Major R. M. Farlow,” n.d.,
p. 4, World War II Mosstroops Papers, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

70
 The Japanese Invasion

time the natives have become “trade hungry” and as trade is at present the only means
of obtaining the natives’ services, in the hinterland, large quantities should be carried.
The items most sort [sic] after in the SEPIK area were: Tomahawks, Knives (all sizes),
Beads, Mirrors, Plane Blades, Fish Hooks, China Beads. 19

One actual drop of parachuted supplies towards the end of the operation from AN-
GAU headquarters to G. A. V. Stanley’s camp recorded in the Mosstroops radio mes-
sage log gives an indication of the amount and kind of trade goods that entered into
the Lujere’s region. The message in military parlance is from Farlow’s Advance Base to
ANGAU headquarters:

Stanley reports completed drop as follows (.) 3 btys, 1500 rds shot-gun can, 2 tins
tropical spread each 3 lbs, 120 yards lap-lap [cloth], 1 gross matches, 1 gross mirrors,
36 hatchets, 2 gross small knives, 80 machettes, 100 plane blades, 2000 razor blades,
3500 buttons, 900 rings, bundles of stationery, 3 drums benzine, 1 drum oil, 3 drums
sugar, 2 drums salt, 1 35 lb tin lifebouy soap, BOYS [Native police] soap, ditto mos-
quito net, 13 tins “C” rations, 50 Army packs, 1 OWEN gun, 4 globes, 4 topography
SEPIK maps, l bottle herbs, 2 plaster.20 [my inserted commas]

Remember, it was just seven years earlier that McCarthy made his compassionate plea
to the government—a rare occurrence in a patrol report—for “half-a-dozen axes and
knives be given to every village in the area.” His superiors didn’t bother to reply but now,
in the name of warfare, the Australian government was finally giving the Lujere access to
metal tools to replace their ancient labor-intensive stone ones, in trade for sago and labor.
I like to think that McCarthy got as much ironic pleasure knowing this back then as I do
now. It would take World War II and a Japanese invasion to accomplish it, but the Lujere
finally had metal tools.
On October 6, Colonel Kenneth Wills, deputy director of military intelligence at
Advanced Land Headquarters, landed on the Sepik at Kopiagu from Port Moresby for
a progress report on the guerrilla operation from its leader, Colonel Farlow. He returned
to Moresby the next day. While we don’t have a record of his report, we do know that he
carried with him a small collection of Lujere artifacts from Miriyami village consisting of
two bows, two engraved bamboo-smoking tubes, and fourteen arrows, the barbed arrows
for war, the plain blades for hunting. In March 1946, now a retired brigadier, he gave the
collection to the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, his hometown. It is the oldest
documented museum collection of Lujere artifacts.
Wills also had observed the people and a few comments are included in the artifact
register, e. g., “Av.[average] Male height 5’ 3,” “Av. Female height 4’ 6”; “Physique poor.”21
He added:

19. “Mosstroops Report on Food Packs, Equipment, Weapons, Etc. by Major R. M. Farlow,” n.d.,
p. 3, World War II Mosstroops Papers, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
20. Mosstroops Message Log, 0900 hrs, 11 Dec 1943, World War II Mosstroops Papers, National
Archives of Australia, Canberra.
21. See chapter 10 for Betty Gilliam’s statistics on the height and weight of Wakau villagers.

71
 A Witch’s Hand

The males pierce the septum of the nose and wear a short bamboo therein, and punc-
ture the front of each nasal passage so that a guria [Victoria crowned pigeon] plume or
grass plume can be worn in upright position from each side of the nose.22

When I arrived to live with the Lujere in 1971, this decorative custom was passé, but
the nasal holes among older men were clearly visible. Finally, there were a number of
photographs among the NAA’s Mosstroops documents, but most concerned the mem-
bers of the force. There was, however, one of a headman (fig. 4), who probably helped the
Mosstroops recruit carriers.

Figure 4. A Lujere headman with a traditional pipe, as photographed by a Mosstroops member.

Courtesy of the National Archives of Australia.

Information from the Mosstroops documents and my Wakau informants show the
gradual establishment of their staging and patrol camps from the Sepik up the Yellow
and Sand Rivers then easterly over the grass plains to Abrau and finally up to Mellip just
before the hills begin. Some indication regarding the nature and extent of the patrols by
the Mosstroops “and the intelligence groups” already active in the area, can be gleaned
from the detailed daily radio log of messages sent and received. For the large number
of men in the operation, my overall conclusion was that not a lot was happening on the
ground.
Captain Bob Cole, whose group appeared to be more peripatetic than some, also kept
a diary23 of his whereabouts, for instance, on October 12 he was at Birin [a staging camp]
and noted that Lieutenant G. A. V. Stanley was camped in the vicinity and met with him
several times; on November 6 he was in the vicinity of Yilui village [not Lujere] and vis-
ited a bush camp where three other officers were camped and received supplies dropped
by US bombers; and on December 6, he was at a bush camp when some of his men “came
in with part of a drop [of supplies] which had been broken into and 4 of the 13 shutes

22. Artifact Register, “Brig. Gen. Kenneth Wills,” South Australian Museum, Adelaide.
23. The following data are from a copy of a diary kept by R. R. “Bob” Cole, November 14, 1938–
November 24, 1945, in the possession of Bryant Allen, who kindly gave me access to the
quoted material.

72
 The Japanese Invasion

recovered.”24 He then set out to recover the stolen cargo, inspecting the drop site on his
way and in Makeme village recovered a rucksack, a knife and a bottle of herbs. Moving
on to Yegaupi (Yegerapi) on December 10 in a three-and-three-quarter hour hike via
Yaru and two other villages, he found each village deserted and all the houses closed. At
six different places, the track was barred but he and his men broke through and moved
on. Cole writes:

It is apparent the kanakas realised their trouble. In YEGUAPI I found pilfered boxes
and tins lying about. We camped in village and sent 2 local boys to EDAWOK hamlet
for news. They returned with a little of the cargo and news that kanakas are scared
of our reaction to the pilfering. Heard planes, appear to be Catalinas at Round Water
[Panawai].
Dec 11th Sat Remained at YEGUAPI and sent out locals and they returned with
the headman and news that the rest may turn up tomorrow.
Dec 12th Sun Sent 2 locals out and they returned late with the whole village and a
little more of pilfered cargo—all slept the night there.
Dec 13th Mon I calaboosed [locked up] all the marys [women] and children and
sent kanakas back to get the stolen cargo. John Beatty [Mosstrooper] arrived from
Advanced Base—gave us the local news—visited drop site and found broken drums
and some cargo—marys and children escaped during the night by burning a hole in
the limboom25 floor. (R. R. Cole, unpublished diary)

While appreciative of Cole’s dependency on the supplies dropped for him and his
men, I was pleased when I read that the captive women and children burned a hole in
the floor of the house and escaped. Then I learned that the locals involved had a slightly
different version of this story. Tom Feldpausch, the American SIL-linguist who lived
and worked among the Lujere from 1985 to 2008, emailed me this reply (September
10, 2014) when I asked him what the people in Yaru village where he lived remembered
about World War II:

They told us a story of how some Aussie soldiers were in the area and had arranged
for an airdrop of supplies. But the drop was slightly off as far as location, and by the
time the soldiers got there all the stuff was gone. So they rounded up all the villagers
nearby and locked them in a house until they told the soldiers where the stuff was. The

24. There is strong evidence that some of the indigenous FELO agents working for Stanley used
their status to exploit and sexually abuse the local population. In January of 1971, Ron Kitson,
the Lumi recruiter and trader, gave me access to the first Aotei (Otei) Village Book, given
to the village (located just north of Lumi) by PO Ray Stephen on September 2, 1939. These
village books were kept by the ‘luluai’ and then consulted by visiting patrol officers who, in
turn, left a brief report of their visits. (My typed verbatim copy of their comments is in WN,
481–82.) It is unclear when or how Kitson got possession of the book. The longest entry was
by ANGAU Captain Donnell dated August 17, 1944. In it he alerts visiting officers that
“Stanley’s Felo agents” were “pulling” women of Sienam, Biem, Aueianak, Yankok and Yemnu
villages. ‘Pulim meri’ is a Tok Pisin expression for the abduction or raping of women. None of
the mentioned villages were Lujere.
25. Or ‘limbum,’ a type of palm bark used in strips for flooring of houses on stilts like the Lujere’s.

73
 A Witch’s Hand

shamans who were part of the group did magic that night to make it rain, and it did.
Under the cover of the noise of the rain they pulled up part of the limbum flooring and
all the people escaped. The next morning when the soldiers opened the door there was
no one there! They realized they would have to do something else so they made some
deals with the people; they got to keep so much for returning so much. This worked
and the people returned some of the cargo, but got to keep some of the prized metal
tools and machetes. (Email from T. Feldpausch to W. Mitchell, September 10, 2014)

Lujere memories of the war

During my fieldwork, I knew nothing about the Yellow River’s Mosstroops or of their
namesake, the seventeenth-century Scottish marauders on the English border. My
Wakau informants indicated they were Australian soldiers of some kind but, as to why
they were there and what they were doing, they were as mystified as I was. The Japanese,
Australia’s enemy, were fighting the war on the coast or far down the Sepik River, not in
the Lujere’s swamplands. As the Japanese were either on the north coast or far downriver,
it was obvious to my informants that all of these young White men must be hiding from
the enemy. It was a local understanding of the Mosstroops’s purpose that might have
vexed the planners back at the ANGAU headquarters.26
Below is a note I typed in the field on November 22, 1971, titled, “Early Contacts with
Europeans.” You will meet some of the men mentioned in more detail later.

Most of this data from Arakwaki [the boss for building my house in Wakau] with
added details by Oria [my best informant]. Arakwaki was telling the stories but he
would look to Oria for details although the latter is younger. This was last night at my
house; Arie and Nauwen [Oria’s younger brother and my household helper] plus some
. . . boys were there too. Masta Mak: 27
At the time of the war the Wakau people lived on two small hills not too far from
the present site of the village that in turn, had been occupied at an earlier date. A Eu-
ropean they called Masta Mak [surveyor, TP] lived with a long line of polis [police,
TP] or soldiers near Iwani village atop Maui hill for a time; then they moved down to
the bush on the Sand River near Wakau’s kunai [grass plain]. For Wakau it was a mo-
mentous time: it was when the Wakau people got their first metal tools; the European
traded these for sago for his men. The European’s own supplies were dropped on the
kunai by airplanes. First a fire was made on the kunai to show the area for the drop.
The natives never helped with these drops; the polis collected everything. They were
probably there about 5 months.

26. Allen’s (2006) article makes an insightful summary of the war’s impact on local life and in-
cludes the war memories of other Sepik area men. See White and Lindstrom (1989) for local
representations of World War II on some of the other Pacific islands the war impacted.
27. “Masta” was the ubiquitous Tok Pisin term of colonial address and reference for a White man
used by many New Guineans that both created and validated a class, almost “caste,” difference.
By the time I first came to New Guinea in 1967, younger male anthropologists preferred to
be on a first-name basis with villagers and discouraged this practice. However, it could take
months to accomplish and, while no one I knew would address me as ‘masta,’ I often over-
heard references to me with that term.

74
 The Japanese Invasion

The Japanese were never in the area [i.e., in the villages] but they, the locals, de-
scribe the Europeans as hiding from them. . .The women were afraid of the foreign
group and never went near them; only the men would occasionally go to them to
trade. At this time, of course, none [of the Wakau men] had been to plantation [as
indentured workers]. They still lived mostly in the bush in what appear to be isolated
homesteads. . . Certainly, they say, they were more nomadic than today for they were
hunters and sago eaters; gardens insignificant, even as they are today. (WN420)

“Masta Mak” was probably the thirty-three-year-old engineer and surveyor, Captain
H. A. J. Fryer from Canterbury, Victoria, Australia, one of the men working in forward
intelligence before the Mosstroops arrived and with long experience as a surveyor for Oil
Search, Ltd. in New Guinea.28 Considerate, fair, and well-liked by local men, Fryer wrote
in his field diary:

It was humbling to realise that our new friends [Lujere carriers and laborers] had little
or no vice, greed and lust, and no shame as we know it. Fear and anger, yes. What I
particularly liked was their sense of humour. (Allen 1990: 189)

Fryer made a map I found amid the Mosstroops papers that shows he was encamped
for a while at his clearly marked “D Base” near Yuani (Iwani) village atop Mauwi hill.
The ‘kunai’ “drop site” where he received his supplies is also shown, as are the places on
the Sepik and the two oxbow lakes near Purami village where the Catalinas could land.
When Fryer and his men were in Wakau’s area, either camping by the ‘kunai’ or living
atop the hill at D Base, according to my Wakau friends, there were two men up in Iwani
village, Kaiera and Yuwari, who knew Tok Pisin with whom Fryer visited.29 They were
probably two of the three men that Robinson had identified as Tok Pisin speakers from
“Yuani” in his 1932 patrol report, recently returned from a three-year contract as laborers
at the Alexishafen Mission. I was told that Wakau’s old Leno had been one of his carriers.
The Wakau men, none who then knew Tok Pisin, indicated there was considerable move-
ment of the Whites and their men, mostly New Guinea policemen, frequently changing
camps. Aiyuk told me that ‘masta mak’ (Fryer) finally left the area in a ‘kanu’ [dugout]
with about ten men, some of them with reddish skins like some Papuans and, indeed,
the Mosstroop records show they had a group of local men from the Royal Papuan Con-
stabulary. Before Fryer left, one of his men got lost while hunting and somehow emerged
near Wagu, an enemy village east of the Sand River and across the Sepik.30 A Lujere man

28. Fryer’s 1910–1993 papers, including extensive files of his years in New Guinea, are archived
at the Australian National Archives. For a brief but penetrating discussion of the role and
manner of Oil Search Limited’s field staff see Allen (1990: 188–89).
29. This is not the same “Kaiera” you will meet in later chapters who was a sight-challenged, im-
portant informant.
30. The Wagu villagers spoke Abau. At contact the Abau people lived in large and rickety elevated
community houses amid the trees some as high as forty feet, cool and mosquito-free. They
ascended by ladder but could descend by long bamboo poles. See Behrmann (1917: 85, plate
5) for a photo, McCarthy (1963, 144–145) for a description of Wagu, and Craig (2008) for an
interesting paper on Abau sorcery, healing, and sorcery death divination.

75
 A Witch’s Hand

who had married a woman from there escorted him back to the ‘kunai’ and the ‘masta,’ in
gratitude for guiding his lost policeman back, gave him a metal tool.
Menetjua, Wakau’s oldest man, also had memories of the ‘taim bilong pait.’ He recalled
three young White men coming up the Sand River in canoes when he was a youngster
and watching them apprehensively from the shore. The people thought they were aokwae
(spirits of the dead). His father and some of the other men traded sago with them for
knives and rings. One of the men said his name was Wiski and that his companions were
Markowa and Ari (possibly Harry Aitken, an AIB officer frequently with Fryer).31 The
strangers went on up the river to Gwidami village, where they spent the night and then
returned down the river the following day, but the villagers did not know the purpose of
their trip. Later, Wiski returned but this time came up the Yellow River, leaving canoes at
the mouth of the Inarlit River and made a camp on the top of Mauwi hill (D Base). He
and his policemen had guns and killed many wild pigs, cassowaries and Victoria crowned
pigeons. Although Wiski and his men did not visit Wakau village, the Wakau men and
youths were occasional visitors to their camp, usually bringing sago processed by the
women to trade. Menetjua had a vivid memory of watching the strangers cook. They first
put sago in a large drum, covered the sago with heated stones and then alternated layers
of meat and stones to the top where it was capped.
Oria also remembered a story his father told him about Wiski. We were at one of the
ancient axe-blade grinding stones where the old men more confined to the village, used
to sit astride the stone to laboriously hand grind the villagers’ stone tools. His father had
brought some of his wife’s sago to trade with Wiski and his men and received a prized
adze metal blade for it. Later he showed me the old adze he inherited from his father
with Wiski’s piece of metal still intact within it that replaced the stone blade.
Like other Wakau men, Menetjua emphasized that the White strangers never caused
trouble or bothered their women, adding that the Wakau women called these White men
“mo ‘bilong mipella,’” that is, “our mother” (in Namia, “mother” is mo). Menetjua could
offer no further explanation, but I assume that like a generous and loving mother, these
strange men provided the women with coveted knives and fishhooks plus “luxury” items
like mirrors, rings, cloth, and colored beads for the first time. Although the Wakau men
perceived this large peripatetic troop of young White men and their armed Black police-
men living in their midst as frightened men hiding from the Japanese, their wives might
have interpreted the presence of so many armed friendly men as protecting them from
the encroaching enemy.
Then two days later I typed up another note titled “More on Early Times.” I had been
talking with four Wakau men, but it was Aiyuk, a rather slow, sickly man, and blind in
one eye, who knew the most. Although he had worked in the goldfields of Wau in the
Highlands for a year, he never learned Tok Pisin so Eine translated. He also reported that
there were a number of Whites in the area during the war hiding from the Japanese. He
mentioned “Masta Mak” then also remembered “Masta Waisan” [probably Mosstroop

31. I had access to only partial lists of Mosstroops names so have not determined the identity of
these men. Most are identified in records only by their initials and last name. For example, the
Mosstroops documents mentioning H. A. J. Fryer refer to him in that way or, more frequently,
as “Fryer.” Consulting his archived papers at the Australian National Archives I learned his
full name was “Herbert Albinus Jackson Fryer” and that he was called “Jack.”

76
 The Japanese Invasion

officer Lieutenant Ray Watson] who was based on the Sepik, and remembered the name
of another Tok Pisin speaker, “Meauwi,” of Tipas village. According to Aiyuk, the first
recruiter came up the Sepik River in a “lik lik sip” (small boat).

The Japanese Peril

While the Mosstroops units limited their patrols mostly to the Lujere’s immediate region,
the forward intelligence groups who preceded them into the area patrolled much farther
afield to the east and to the north. One small group met with several violent deaths.

A party led by Lieutenant Fryer and accompanied by a Dutchman, Sergeant H. N.

Staverman of the Netherlands Navy, and an Australian radio operator [of Dutch de-
scent], Sergeant [Leonard] Siffleet, arrived in the well-populated Lumi area south of
the Torricellis in July. After reaching Lumi, Fryer and Staverman parted, Fryer to re-
main in the general Sepik area and Staverman to penetrate across the [Dutch] border
into the hills behind Hollandia. Once again the unreliability of the [Wape] natives led
to failure. Fryer’s party was trapped [in Seinem village] by apparently friendly natives
a few miles south of Lumi. The Australians managed to beat off the attack, but in the
process their carriers deserted and seven weapons were lost. (Dexter 1961: 261)32

Fryer’s party retreated south towards G. A. V. Stanley’s camp off the Wagama (Yula)
River just east of the Lujere’s area. Staverman and Siffleet with two Ambonese privates,
H. Pattwal and M. Reharing, and a line of carriers proceeded west towards the border.
They had reached Wama, south of Vanimo, when Japanese, guided by unfriendly local
people, ambushed Staverman and Pattwal on a reconnaissance patrol. After Siffleet
radioed that Staverman was killed, he was instructed to take his party southward and
proceed to Stanley’s camp. Keenly aware that Siffleet and his companions were un-
familiar with the region, Fryer and twenty-nine- year-old Lieutenant Guy B. Black,
from Queensland, Australia, set out to find and guide them to safety. Unsuccessful,
they returned on November 23. Unbeknownst to them, their wandering allies had been
captured by local men and given to the Japanese who imprisoned them in Aitape. At
that time, the estimated strength of the Japanese army was Aitape 200, Vanimo 500,
Hollandia 500, Wewak, 20,000, and 500 covering the Middle Sepik Area (Brown 2011:
125).
On October 24, 1943, Siffleet and Privates Pattwal and Reharung were taken to the
Aitape beach and beheaded before a group of soldiers and New Guineans. Siffleet was
buried on the beach below tide level and his body never recovered. The event is memo-
rialized in a Japanese soldier’s photograph of Siffleet later found on the body of a dead
Japanese major when the war moved on to Hollandia in April 1944. The iconic photo-
graph of Siffleet, moments before his death, blindfolded and kneeling in the sand with

32. Fryer’s AIB group’s code name was “Locust” and Staverman’s “Whiting;” the latter Dutch
group was under the direction of the Netherlands East Indies part of AIB later known as the
Netherlands Forces Intelligence Services. See Richmond (2004a) for a more detailed discus-
sion of this tragic patrol.

77
 A Witch’s Hand

a Japanese officer holding his sword aloft, appeared in Life Magazine and elsewhere as
evidence of Japanese brutality.33

Japanese attacks in Lujereland

Shortly before the coastal beheadings, the Japanese made their first attack against the
Yellow River Mosstroops. The Japanese, obviously aware of the Allies’ active aerial activ-
ity regularly flying supplies to the Yellow River area in their big Catalina seaplanes, sent
two armed pinnaces up the Sepik on October 20, 1943, and attacked the Mosstroops’s
East Post. Major Farlow’s account in his final report to ANGAU details the assault in
dry military prose:

At 1750 hrs, a party of the enemy in two pinnaces attempted to land at EAST POST.
They were fired on by Lieut DOWNIE’s party. The occupants of one pinnace were
severely dealt with and it is estimated that 10 casualties were inflicted. The second pin-
nace landed a party of 15 and attacked the post from the land. Lieut DOWNIE and
his 4 men were forced to withdraw. [The following day] Capt FIENBERG and party
arrived from PANAWAI and proceeded to retake EAST POST.34 The enemy had left
taking with them the wireless set, 20 tins of ration and all personal gear. No 2 Fighting
Patrol, under Capt GLUTH, were withdrawn from the L of C [line of communica-
tion] and dispatched to EAST POST. A further post TOKIO was established 2 miles
further east [downstream] on the SEPIK RIVER. (Farlow 1944a: 4)

Lieutenant Downie and his men, outnumbered when the Japanese stormed their
post, escaped through the swamps guided by one of the Native policemen. Although
they lost equipment and supplies, there were no Mosstroops casualties and no Lujere
were involved. But the attack clearly troubled ANGAU authorities. Two weeks later, on
November 3, reinforcements—two officers and nineteen soldiers—called “Stop Troops,”
were flown in to relieve Captain Gluth’s men at East and Tokio Posts. Heavy rains then
raised the Sepik River forcing the abandonment of Tokio Post and withdrawal to nearby
Purami village. The Panawai Camp on Lake Panawai was cleared of all stores and person-
nel thus eliminating one link in the laborious on-transfer of stores and supplies. A new
initial staging area on the Sepik itself near the Iwani hamlet of Kociabu (one of Wakau’s
sister Iwani hamlets) was established and Gluth’s “No. 2 Fighting Patrol” proceeded up

33. From a Japanese perspective, Siffleet and his comrades were honorably beheaded as enemies
under the military’s code of Bushido. The execution officer, Yasuno Chikao, was later tried for
war crimes and his sentence of hanging was commuted to ten years imprisonment whereupon
he returned to Japan. www.wikiwand.com/ov/Leonard_Siffleet. Accessed 24 May 2018.
34. D. M Fienberg (1916–1976), a native of Perth who later changed his name to Fenbury, led
one of the most successful patrol groups in the Torricelli Mountains behind Aitape and was
awarded the Military Cross. A forward-looking man like McCarthy, sensitive to the indi-
gene’s plight, he championed village courts and was openly critical of the government’s poli-
cies. Consequently, in 1969 he was removed as head of the politically sensitive Department
of the Administrator and appointed secretary of the new Department of Social Development
and Home Affairs, a post he held until his retirement in 1973. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biogra-
phy/fenbury-david-maxwell-10164/text17955, accessed online 10 May 2014.

78
 The Japanese Invasion

the Yellow River to Pinnace Head, Farlow’s headquarters, for onward movement up to
Mellip, the terminal camp. Now there were twenty-one more men to feed, equip, and
house.
The recruited Lujere carriers, earning coveted trade goods and steel tools in return for
their labor and their wives’ sago, were gradually moving the Mosstroops’s gear and rations
northward to Mellip via their camps at Makeme, Birin and Abrau. Then there was more
enemy action November 11.

On 11 Nov 43, Capt Ellis was in charge of Tokyo Post with two Ors and two native
police. Three Japanese were met about 200 yards from the post and when sighted
opened fire with automatic weapons and withdrew. Two days later a fairly large force
of Japanese landed below Tokyo and also sent an additional force up river in launches.
The Japanese attempted to cut off Tokyo, from East Post but the party at Tokyo man-
aged to get through to East Post against which the Japanese again launched an attack.
They were driven off and withdrew under cover of darkness taking their casualties with
them. (Brown 2011: 127)

Then two days later the Japanese returned in force and mounted a new attack.

Four (4) boat loads of the enemy landed at TOKIO [POST] at 1600 hours and at-
tacked EAST POST just before dark. They were unsuccessful and it is thought suf-
fered numerous casualties. Two canoes with Japs and natives were blown out of the
water and at least 7 casualties were inflicted. (Farlow 1944a)

It was dark when the Japanese retreated with their casualties; one Mosstroop soldier
was wounded. On November 21, Farlow received a radio message from ANGAU’s head-
quarters ordering all field parties to stay in place and halting all patrols until further in-
structions. The same day, three more officers and twenty-one more soldiers were flown to
the Sepik from Port Moresby to reinforce the Stop Troops. They were posted to Purami
and to assist the East Post men patrolling downstream for the presence of Japanese activ-
ity. Across the river from East Post a new smaller post named North Post was established
to prevent the Japanese from landing and establishing mortar positions. River patrols
already had seen signs that the Japanese were trying to penetrate the swampy area just
four miles below. The little war in the Upper Sepik was accelerating and it was obvious to
all—except perhaps the Lujere who consistently read the presence of the Australians as
“hiding” from the Japanese—that ANGAU’s central command was concerned about the
viability of its Yellow River guerrilla operation.
Farlow was recalled on November 23 to ANGAU Headquarters in Port Moresby for
a personal report on the Mosstroop situation then returned the twenty-fifth to await the
decision regarding further action. Compounding the Japanese–Sepik problem was that on
December 2, Lieutenant Watson at the terminal Mellip camp had learned from friendly
locals that the Japanese had occupied Lumi and that two White men had been seized by
locals and handed over to the Japanese at Aitape. That both Staverman and Siffleet were
already long dead indicates the paucity of ANGAU’s coastal intelligence. But the implied
threat that the Japanese might be planning to move a strong force down to the Sepik
from Aitape into Lujereland was a real possibility. The Kelms (1980: 14) report in their

79
 A Witch’s Hand

book on Kwieftim and Abrau, both northern enemy villages bordering Lujere territory,
that the Japanese once patrolled down as far as Kwieftim and then moved on to the west.
During the early planning of the Mosstroops guerrilla operation, a major concern of
General Blamey was that too large an operation in the Sepik would bring attention from
the Japanese and threaten the viability of the strategically valuable intelligence patrols.
Writing to General Herring on June 28, Blamey wrote:

The Japanese have very considerable forces along the coast in the area in which they
will be working. Small patrols of ours, essential for the purpose of getting informa-
tion, may get away with it, but if we make a show of force at all, say 20 or 30 men, the
enemy could very easily and quickly bring a force of several hundreds or more against
them. This would not only make it difficult for us to maintain observation in that area,
but it could, with the superior force of the enemy, have the very effect on the natives
that we want to avoid, and that is, that they would give allegiance to the stronger force.
(Dexter 1961: 260)

It was a germane and prescient concern: the Yellow River Mosstroops operation now
numbered over two hundred men. This necessitated a significant increase in the original
supply plan that was dependent on air transport to the Sepik River and easily monitored
by the enemy. General Blamey, in spite of his earlier view and the discussion by some
authorities of a Mosstroops withdrawal, wrote on December 6 to General MacArthur
that he was not willing to withdraw his men unless so ordered (Dexter 1961: 263). In the
meantime, supplies and rations continued to be transferred along the camps with over
one hundred tins of food moved to Mellip during the last week of November. At the
same time, Farlow already had made evacuation plans if the Japanese invaded over land
or up the Sepik:

Lieut WATSON had been successful in recruiting labour and up to 100 labourers
were being used. An emergency dump was established at WAGAU [Wagu], approx 10
miles upstream from KOCIABU. Two (2) good [water] landing strips were tested at
YIBIRI and WAGAU.
WAGAU dump comprised of 100 tins of ration, oil, benzine. In the event of the
[Mosstroops] parties being forced back and A/C [air transport] not available, WA-
GAU was selected as a starting point for the party [to] move [on foot] towards TEL-
EFOMIN. (Farlow 1944a: 5)

The flight of the Mosstroops

On December 5 at 5:30 p.m., a Japanese reconnaissance plane flying at fifteen hundred

feet circled the main supply base at Kociabu on the Sepik. The following evening at 4:15,
an enemy plane again circled the supply base completing six revolutions before with-
drawing. The next event signaled the end of the ambitious Mosstroops guerrilla operation
amid the Lujere in the upper Sepik Basin. Two days later, on December 8,

At 1730 hours, two (2) enemy planes bombed and strafed KOCIABU. The attack
lasted 40 minutes. Incendiary and HE bombs were dropped, destroying the camp

80
 The Japanese Invasion

building and contents, which consisted mainly of personal gear of officers and Ors [or-
derlies] stationed at Stop Posts. One (1) [Chimbu] native belonging to Lieut AIKEN’s
line was killed. Lieut WATSON reported that enemy patrols had left Lumi and were
within two (2) days journey to MELLIP.35 He had destroyed the store’s dump and
withdrawn to BIRIN. (Farlow 1944a: 5)

That is the terse official account in Farlow’s final report on the Mosstroops operation.
Although a number of my older informants in Wakau village remembered the bomb-
ing—it was a first experience for them—Aiyuk was the most expressive in his memories
of that night. He recalled four very loud bombs dropped—official record says five—and
he imitated the terrifying sound of the strafing of the base that he could hear, but not see.
He also noted that there was only one fatality, a policeman killed in the bombing, but
another comment he made was inexplicable. He said that the ‘namba wan kiap’ or top
officer shot at one of the two Japanese planes circling low over the area, then the other
plane went under it and carried it away! I still remember expressing my amazement at
hearing this account but the other men listening all agreed that was what happened. My
typed notes say, “All give this version but seems impossible to me . . . So who knows what
really happened. It was all new to them, and 25 [actually 28] years ago.” Because of the
Mosstroops documents in the National Archives of Australia, I have a better understand-
ing today of what did happen; but as for Aiyuk’s departing piggyback Japanese planes,
that remains an enigma.
The day after Mosstroops main supply base at Kociabu was strafed, bombed, and
destroyed, an official from Moresby flew down to assess the situation and inform the of-
ficers that air transport for future supply maintenance could not be guaranteed. Further,
in the case of a Japanese invasion, air evacuation would be unlikely. Already known was
the dangerous alternative of a long difficult retreat from Wagu, mostly on foot through
rugged mountain terrain, towards Telefomin. Farlow, asked for his opinion, replied that
under those circumstances there was only one course of action: recommendation for an
immediate and complete evacuation.
This meant that the forward intelligence/propaganda groups in the area that head-
quarters relied upon exclusively before the Mosstroops arrived also would be pulled out.
Fryer and Black went on leave just before the bombing and now Stanley, Cole and Aiken,
all active patrollers and their men totaling fifty-two, were to be evacuated as well. Later
Stanley would write,

From the standpoint of a local Native person, the effect of the bombing was astound-
ing. One and all, the white men throughout the area abandoned their camps and stores
and fled. It was quite impossible to reconcile the evacuation with the general propa-
ganda which had been used by Lieuts. Fryer and Stanley from July to November.
(Powell 2003: 63)

35. From notes kindly shared by Bryant Allen on Stanley’s papers archived in the Library of the
University of Papua New Guinea, there is reason to believe that the reported “enemy patrols”
were fictitious to discourage the Mosstroops from moving north into the Wape area.

81
 A Witch’s Hand

What Stanley didn’t know was that the Lujere had the Mosstroops men figured
out long before they fled the area. They were simply hiding from the Japanese and,
when the Japanese found them, ‘ol I ranawe.’ But the running away wasn’t logistically
easy. On December 16, Farlow got his instructions that the evacuation was approved
and the first planes would land at Lake Panawai. All parties were instructed to begin
withdrawal to the Advance Base (Pinnace Head) for further movement down the Yel-
low River to Kociabu across the Sepik. On the sixteenth, three planes arrived, two at
Panawai Village and one to Purami to begin the evacuation. On the seventeenth and
eighteenth, three seaplanes were used each day, and on the nineteenth, four planes
were allocated for the landings at Kociabu to complete the evacuation. It took twenty
planeloads to transport the Mosstroops’s 102 Whites and 127 New Guineans to safety
in Port Moresby.
From the perspective of its goals, the Mosstroops guerrilla operation was a dismal
failure. Here are the conclusions of Farlow’s Mosstroops Report:

The objects for which MOSSTROOPS were inserted were not attained for the fol-
lowing reasons:
The enemy had located the general area of activity. It now became necessary to in-
sert STOP TROOPS necessitating further A/C [air-lifts] being required to maintain
them. These A/C were not available. Loss of security.
Establishment of L of C [line of communication] between KOCIABU and ADV
BASE had absorbed a third of MOSSTROOPS in the area.
Pressure by the enemy necessitating a further party of MOSSTROOPS having to
reinforce STOP TROOPS, leaving only one-third available to carry out the original
plan.
Lack of sufficient police and carriers. (Farlow 1944a: 8)

Lieutenant Ted Fulton, as an on-the-ground Mosstroops officer, was more direct in

his assessment of the operation:

The force carried out token patrols without achieving anything of importance. We
were too far from any enemy action and the force was too large and had a severe sup-
ply problem. To supply the base it was necessary for Catalinas to come and go all the
time. This constant air activity quickly drew attention. In addition, a high powered
radio was on the air to Port Moresby most of the time. . . It would have been a matter
of time before the slow Catalinas were shot down and the Mosstroops stranded, so it
was fortunate that only equipment and no personnel was lost. (Fulton 2005: 211–12)

Fulton, expressing a Eurocentric colonial view, failed to note that one Mosstrooper
New Guinean was killed in the bombing. There also may have been an unreported Moss-
trooper fatality. While I was on a reconnaissance patrol visiting some Lujere villages east
of the Yellow River before moving to Wakau, two local men, Manwai of Yegerapi and
Nakaki of Alai accompanied me. Visiting as we hiked, Nakaki said that during the war
when he was just a boy, there were five White men living along the Yellow River with po-
licemen. One of the policemen had sex with a local woman and he was killed with a bow
and arrow. After that, there was no more trouble. Interestingly, when I once mentioned

82
 The Japanese Invasion

Nakaki’s comment to some Wakau men while talking about the war, they were puzzled
that they had not heard about the incident.
For ANGAU, the Yellow River Mosstroops’s 1943 guerrilla operation was undoubt-
edly an expensive blunder. It is telling that neither Townsend (1968) nor McCarthy
(1963) discuss or even mention the Mosstroops debacle in the war sections of their au-
tobiographies, while Fulton (2005) derisively does. For the Lujere, however, it was a brief
historic time—just over five months—when their tools went from stone to steel.36

Operation Persecution: The Aitape Coast Recaptured

Although the war in the Sepik didn’t go well for the Allies in 1943, elsewhere in New
Guinea it did. The Australians easily recaptured the north coast town of Lae by Septem-
ber 16 and then Finschhafen on October 2. But it was another six months before the next
important Allied assault inaugurated General MacArthur’s western New Guinea cam-
paign. Strategically cartwheeling over Wewak to box in the Japanese Eighteenth Army,
the Americans made simultaneous successful amphibious landings at Aitape and Hol-
landia on April 22, 1943. (Dexter 1961: 801–805). The immense two-headed invasion—
a classic deception operation—termed Operation Persecution (Aitape) and Operation
Reckless (Hollandia) consisted of 217 ships carrying 8,000 men with their equipment
and supplies.37 Brookfield comments about the massive scale of the Allied incursion into
New Guinea and other regional islands.

When war came back it came massively, swiftly and with great destruction. Material
goods and men were hurled into the fray in unbelievable quantity and with seemingly
reckless abandon. . . . The very numbers of men were startling. In 1941, the whole
European population of Melanesia was not more than 30,000, half of these in New
Caledonia. By the end of 1943 the USA had some 500,000 troops, probably more,
deployed in Melanesia. (Brookfield 1972: 93)

The main troops making the amphibious invasion at Aitape were a United States
Montana National Guard Regiment, the 163rd Infantry Regiment of the 41st Infantry
Division. Also on board was “the ANGAU detachment that landed with them and they
took up their familiar role; bringing villagers from the hills into the American perimeter,
recruiting and supervising labour, leading patrols” (Powell 2003: 71). Not surprisingly, a
number of the men who were a part of the Mosstroops operation were now part of the

36. The formal Mosstroops contingent was there from September to December 19, but logs and
diaries show that other military patrols were already in the Lujere’s area by July, e.g., Stanley
arrived by a Catalina amphibian plane July 4 and others soon followed, which supports the
five-month stay my Wakau informants remember. See Brown (2011) for the official history,
acknowledged as possibly flawed, of the Mosstroops’s guerrilla operations among the Lujere.
37. The “deception operation” by the Allies was the staging of strategic actions that led General
Adachi to believe that the invasion would be in the Wewak or, further to the east, Hansa Bay
areas. These strategies are detailed in Gailey’s (2004) chapter titled, “Hollandia: The Great
Leap Forward.”

83
 A Witch’s Hand

invasion detachment including David Fienberg, Harry Aiken, Ted Fulton and Jack Mil-
ligan, its leader. Earlier Fulton, who had walked the 90-mile Wewak-Aitape coast on
prospecting and labor recruiting trips, was queried by United States intelligence officers
at Finschhafen about the depth of the coastal waters around Aitape. Their information
was that the waters were flat and shallow, but he assured them they were deep, speculating
correctly that the planned invasion would be Aitape. Fulton describes the Aitape landing
including a sighting of General McArthur:

Daylight on 20 April revealed the sea full of ships with Navy planes overhead, a mag-
nificent spectacle beyond description. The water was like glass and the weather hot
with light cloud. . . On 21 April . . . In the evening officers and men were chatting,
playing cards or smoking. It was the calm before the storm. There was a quiet confi-
dence supported by the array of aircraft carriers and warships with Navy planes in the
air all day.
Next morning at 3.30 a.m. we moved into the ship’s hold in the dark to wait the
dawn. At 7.00 a.m. the warships commenced shelling the shore and Navy planes were
bombing and raking the beach with machine gun fire. When we clambered down
into a landing barge the din was terrific. Milligan and I, with the two NCOs, were in
the first wave from our ship and the fifth wave of the invasion. . . The township and
airstrip were occupied before noon and the beach became a scene of intense activity as
the big landing ships dropped their ramps at the water’s edge. The flow of the vehicles
and DWKS (Ducks’) [an amphibious truck] continued all day. . . Next day more ships
carrying troops and equipment anchored. I saw a five-star general dressed in United
States green service dress on the beach and recognised General McArthur. (Fulton
2005: 216–18)

The principal goal of the Aitape invasion was to capture Japan’s Tadji Airstrips for
the use of fighter planes to give support to the large base MacArthur wanted to build in
Hollandia as he moved his armies north towards the Philippines. Expecting an attack
on Wewak, the Japanese force at Aitape was less than a thousand. As the overwhelming
number of American soldiers continued to come ashore at Aitape, the defense collapsed
and the surprised Japanese retreated along the coast toward Wewak. In forty-eight hours
of non-stop work including under lights at night, Tadji was ready on the twenty-fourth
of April for planes to land.
In the Torricelli Mountains behind the Aitape coast, small patrols of the Allies and
Japanese pursued one another in a grim guerrilla war gathering intelligence on each other
and making surprise attacks. Both sides created intelligence networks using local peoples
and demanded allegiance from those they contacted, thereby forcing them to participate
in a conflict not of their own making.38 “Traitors” who reported their positions or found
to be disloyal were often summarily executed. The villagers “were pawns in the game and
had to take their line from the party in the local ascendant” (Feldt 1967: 284). Fulton
(2005: 226–38), in a chapter entitled “116 Days Behind Enemy Lines in the Torricelli
Mountains,” recalls patrols stalking the enemy and enlisting the locals’ help. On one
patrol he met a small ANGAU patrol led by Captain Jack Fryer (Wakau’s ‘masta mak’),

38. Richmond (2004b) describes the Japanese intelligence practices in New Guinea.

84
 The Japanese Invasion

recently returned from leave, who earlier had liaised with the Mosstroops. Some of the
jungle-savvy ANGAU officers like Fulton (2005: 229, 236–37), however, resented patrol-
ling with the recently arrived American soldiers who, unschooled in the ways of the New
Guinea bush and with no local language facility, made these large patrol groups slow,
unwieldy, and to him, useless. Allen (2006: 22) gives an account of a patrol on June 5,
1944, when Fulton, accompanying an American Lieutenant, Ben Pascoe and his fifteen-
man patrol, ordered the summary execution of a local man he thought was cooperating
with the Japanese. Pascoe confronted Fulton with what he considered an unprovoked
killing but Fulton, as an ANGAU officer, alone was responsible for all dealings with the
“native people.” Pascoe radioed a complaint against Fulton and submitted a report of the
execution to his superiors, but no action was taken against him. Although Fulton (2005:
227) mentions the patrol led by Pascoe, he does not refer to his execution of a local man.
G. A. V. Stanley was another of the men evacuated with the Mosstroops who was
back in action doing propaganda and intelligence work in the Sepik region as before.
Originally scheduled to land with his party of Native police and agents on the upper
Sepik River at the mouth of the Hauser River near the Dutch border, he discovered,
during a flight dropping propaganda pamphlets over villages, that the Japanese had not
occupied the Yellow River and Upper Sepik areas after the Mosstroops evacuated. Alter-
ing his plans, Stanley and his party were flown into a point about three miles below the
Yellow River junction a few weeks before the Americans recaptured Aitape. His diary39,
however, indicates that his focus of attention was not the Lujere but the people to their
east and the Wape to their north. Mosstroops had left a considerable amount of supplies
in a number of dumps or supply-caches throughout the Lujere area, each booby-trapped
with a loaded gun pointed towards the door. From Stanley’s information, it is known that
the Japanese raided some of these, but it is presumed that the Lujere successfully raided
those that remained in their vicinity. Stanley’s supplies were dropped or parachuted to
him as before.

The End of the War in New Guinea

Two days after the Americans landed at Aitape and Hollandia, the Australians landed
at Madang followed by Alexishafen on the twenty-fourth of April. Then on May 27, the
Americans landed on Biak Island off the coast of Dutch New Guinea far to the west
of Hollandia in a bloody campaign that lasted into August. Hollandia, however, was
to be transformed into a major base to facilitate MacArthur’s push northward towards
the Philippines and Japan. Hollandia, once the little trading post for bird-of-paradise
feathers that Jock Marshall visited in 1936, was quickly transformed into a military city
of 140,000 men with a field hospital of 3,650 beds and a deep-water harbor that could
accommodate an entire fleet. (Gailey 2004: 188–89).40

39. Stanley’s wartime diary (box 1/6) is archived with his other papers at the University of Papua
New Guinea Library. I am grateful to Bryant Allen for sharing with me his copious notes on
Stanley’s papers.
40. The folio-size World War II photo book (Bridges, 1945) presents a sweeping and, at times,
stunning panorama of the war’s violent progress with photos of both New Guineans and

85
 A Witch’s Hand

Although the frontal thrust of the war had moved west and away from PNG, the
fighting had not ended. General Adachi’s 18th Army, hemmed in to the east and west
and unable to receive supplies by land, air, or sea, was still strong enough to launch a
desperate major attack against the Americans in Aitape from his garrisons in Wewak.
The jungle engagement lasted a month and known in military annals as the Battle of
Driniumor River, a small river about twenty miles east of Aitape, that was central in
the bitter fighting. It was the last important offensive campaign mounted by Adachi’s
Army.41

[Adachi] was not the man to let the Aitape landing go unchallenged. He could spare
no more than 20,000 men, only 800 of them infantry, for his attack. He had no source
of supply and could only move his troops on foot through the rugged coastal hills
or up the inland route via the Sepik River and the harsh wilderness of the Torricelli
Mountains. Not until the night of 10–11 July were his starved and disease-ridden
troops ready to attack the American perimeter on the Driniumoor [sic] River. To get
them there at all was a remarkable feat: to expect them to defeat superior numbers
of well-armed, fresh American troops was too much. They fought magnificently, but
were decimated. Starving bands of predatory stragglers wandered the mountains for
months. The lucky ones reached Wewak. Thereafter, the 18th Army had no power to
strike a major blow at the Allies anywhere on the north coast of New Guinea. (Powell
2003: 71)

The Japanese suffered 8,800 casualties while “The Driniumor River operation cost the
Americans 597 killed, 1,691 wounded and 85 missing” (Taaffe 1998: 208).42 For General
MacArthur, in terms of the war’s trajectory, PNG was now of slight importance as the
remaining Japanese troops were in a miserable state in terms of health, troop strength
and military options. With no supplies available by either land or sea and refusing to
surrender, thousands of Japanese died gruesomely in the months to come. Ragged and
starving—endocannibalism was not unknown—Japanese soldiers were forced to retreat

the liberating armies with accompanying maps. The photos of the north New Guinea coast
include pictures in the Madang, Wewak, Aitape, and Hollandia areas including seven near-
naked young Japanese prisoners at Aitape, troops fording the shallow Driniumor River on
foot and in their armored vehicles, and Irving Berlin playing an upright piano to entertain a
group of WACs and war correspondents at a Christmas party in Hollandia. The explanatory
texts and picture captions were written by Professor A. P. Elkin, head of the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Sydney and the ethnologist F. D. McCarthy of the Aus-
tralian Museum. Also see Ryan’s (1969: 185–98) insightful account of how after the war the
Dutch attempted to build on the Americans’ and Australians’ elaborate wartime infrastruc-
tures to facilitate their influence—ultimately unsuccessful—in West New Guinea.
41. Edward Drea’s (1984) account of the Driniumor Battle is especially accomplished as he con-
sulted both English and Japanese accounts of the fighting as well as interviews with Japanese
and Australian soldiers who participated in the fight.
42. According to Dexter (1961: 807) 450 Americans were killed and an estimated 8,800 Japanese
killed from April 22 to August 25.

86
 The Japanese Invasion

into the coastal hinterlands ravaging the villagers’ gardens even as many died of starva-
tion.43 Ryan writes:

[MacArthur] was prepared to let the impotent Japanese garrisons there wither on the
vine, self-interned prisoners of war until ordered to surrender by their Emperor, and he
gave no orders for major offensives to be mounted against them. General Blamey and
the Australian government thought otherwise. (Ryan 1972a, 1222)

Because of Blamey’s new campaigns against the decimated Japanese, it is this final
epoch of the New Guinea war, controversial then, that remains controversial in Australia
even today. After the Japanese defeat in the Driniumor Battle, the US Army command
at Aitape was content to mount only defensive reconnaissance patrols and did not pursue
the retreating enemy towards Wewak. Then beginning in September through October
1944, the American troops in Aitape were moved out to fight in the Philippine cam-
paigns and replaced by the Australian Sixth Army, who had fought in the battles of East-
ern New Guinea. 44 Australian forces also relieved the American Army on Bougainville
Island and in both areas, the Australian command mounted offensive campaigns that,
at best, were “mopping-up” actions.45 The Australian journalist Peter Charlton, a caustic
critic of General Blamey and the Australian government, writes regarding these actions
that

They were fought against an enemy already defeated, reluctant to fight, incapable of
being evacuated or reinforced, forced to live off the land—’self-supporting prisoners of
war,’ one bitter veteran called them. The Japanese in the islands fought only when they
were forced to. The Australians forced them to fight. (Charleton 1983: 1)

In doing so, these final offensives took over a thousand Australian lives via combat and
disease before Emperor Hirohito’s vinyl recording of his Imperial Rescript of Surrender
was broadcast on August 15, 1945. Obeying his Emperor’s edict, General Adachi handed
his sword in surrender to Major General Horace Robertson on September 13, 1945,
at Wewak’s Wom Airstrip. Adachi was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes

43. Charlton (1983: 69) gives several first-hand reports of the starving Japanese eating their own
dead, for example, “On one occasion a Japanese who had run from a hut was killed. In the hut
was a frying pan in which meat was cooking. Under a white cloth was a dead Japanese from
whom the meat had been recently cut.” Earlier in the war when the Japanese were forced to
retreat without adequate supplies across the Owen Stanley Mountains after their failed at-
tempt to take Port Moresby, Ryan (1972a: 1218) reports that “cases began to be found where
they were butchering both their own and Australian corpses for food.” Tuzin (1983: 61–71)
discusses the cannibalism of Ilahita Arapesh villagers in the Sepik River Basin by the trapped
Japanese cut off from their supplies.
44. See Charlton (1983: 64–65) for Australian soldiers’ comments on the “filthy state” of the
Americans’ camp, lack of aggressive patrolling and problems in their take-over from the
American Army. But Charlton (1983: 66) gets it wrong when he writes “The Sepik rises in
the Torricellis.”
45. Gavin Long (1963) beginning with chapter 11, “Taking Over at Aitape,” describes at some
length the Australians’ final skirmishes with the Japanese in the Aitape-Wewak-Sepik area.

87
 A Witch’s Hand

performed by men under his command, including the killing of prisoners. While still
held in Rabaul, on September 10, 1947, General Adachi committed ritual suicide with
a paring knife.46 Commenting on the final New Guinea campaigns, the war’s Australian
historian Gavin Long (1963: 387) summarizes that, “In both Australian and Japanese
history the offensives of 1945 will endure as examples of splendid fortitude, but whether
they should have happened seems likely always to be in dispute.” Fortuitously for the
Lujere, it was for only five months in 1943, that they became part of the historic saga of
World War II.

46. Adachi left a letter to his surviving troops that Ryan (1972a: 1222) finds “is at once a moving
document of soldierly loyalty and eloquent condemnation of the futility of war.” It can be ac-
cessed on Wikipedia under Adachi’s biography or in Long (1963: 387).

88
chapter four

Australian Hegemony Restored

It was an amazing adventure. But now with hindsight and a maturity of age
I cringe at the arrogance and ineptitude of many of our actions.1
Former PO Ric Hutchins, 2015

The catastrophic war was over and the New Guineans were rid of the would-be coloniz-
ing Japanese but their former masters, the colonial Australians, were very much back in
power and the cold fact that “The essence of the colonial system was despotism” (Mwaky-
embe 1986: 19) had not changed.2 Initially this was irrelevant to the Lujere. They were
left alone as the government reorganized itself in 1946 on a peacetime footing with the
restoration of civil administration that responded to the devastation that many other
New Guineans had suffered. One coastal patrol officer after the war reported,

After the Japanese occupation of the Aitape Sub-District the people were included in
a programme of supplying food and labour to the troops stationed on the beach. These
demands told seriously upon gardens and man-power. . . [resulting in] Sickness, food
shortages, declining population, lethargic condition of the native mind, lack of vil-
lage organisation and leaders, migratory problems and, in general, an almost complete

1. Email, Ric Hutchings to author, March 29, 2015. In a later email, after some thoughtful
comments about what the colonial personnel did and didn’t do, he wrote, “Anyway enough of
that. I saw my time there as an amazing experience and adventure for a kid of 21” (email, Ric
Hutchings to author, March 31, 2016).
2. It is interesting that Australians, like Americans, tend not to see themselves as imperialists, as
colonialists. Further, as the historian W. J. Hudson (1971: 1) notes, “Apart from small minori-
ties alive to opportunities in the territory for economic exploitation and religious evangelism,
Australians until recently have shown very little consciousness of Papua and New Guinea.”

89
 A Witch’s Hand

breakdown of prewar government influence upon villages and villagers. (Young-Whit-

fords 1946: 5)

As Roscoe (2005: 577) has observed, the events surrounding World War II devastated
some local populations. The Lujere however, having never known government control of
their villages by the Germans, Australians, or Japanese, simply continued living as they
had for centuries; the major exception was they now had some metal tools and no longer
depended exclusively on their stone, bamboo, and wooden implements to feed, house,
and defend themselves. But some societal changes were in the offing; patrol officers were
returning to visit and census the villages, Christian missionaries eventually found their
way to the Lujere and, finally, the anthropologists arrived.
The only absent player in colonialism’s intrusive panoply among the Lujere was the
avid foreign entrepreneur. Once exotic feathers lost their fashionable allure, there was lit-
tle in the Lujere fens the world’s markets desired. In global terms—even in New Guinea
terms—the Lujere like many of their remote upriver neighbors without roads, airstrips,
and a modern infrastructure, remained in a cultural backwater. Politically, however, PNG
was in the twilight phase of colonialism. Faster than most of the locals could appreciate
or even know, the country was lurching awkwardly towards independence.

Return of the Patrol Officers

The New Guinea war made both the Australian government and the Australians them-
selves much more cognizant of the big island to their north and its inhabitants. Tens of
thousands of Australians fought the Japanese on the beaches and in the jungles of New
Guinea and their families had a shared intimacy with their experiences. New Guineans
were no longer faceless “savages” but the men who performed the daunting labor (under
ANGAU’s enforcement) facilitating the Army’s advance. The Australians’ raised con-
sciousness regarding New Guinea was constructively reflected in the Territory’s postwar
organization by the Australian government.

War had shattered the perfunctory operation of the unenterprising peacetime De-
partment of External Territories in Canberra [responsible for Native Affairs] . . . The
inanition of the External Territories Department and the incapacity of Angau to cope
with anything more than day-to-day administration left a policy vacuum. It was filled
by a remarkable army unit, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (DORCA). . .
This unit advised . . . on all matters concerned with civil government in Papua New
Guinea. It introduced a dynamism so far unheard of in Australian colonial affairs, and
all the more astonishing because it was sponsored by the military. Not all its schemes
were practicable and some were harebrained, but it assembled an impressive body of
experts whose work wholly transformed the quality of Australian thinking on Papua
New Guinea. (Ryan 1972a: 1223)

Three of the influential experts were the accomplished anthropologists Ian Hogbin,
Camilla Wedgwood, and Lucy Mair, each with extensive fieldwork experience in the Ter-
ritory. They, together with their colleagues that included among others a noted geographer,

90
 Australian Hegemony Restored

lawyers, and the agricultural scientist J. K. Murray—the first post war administrator of
the combined territories—were instrumental in providing compensation to Native peo-
ples for war losses, the consolidation of the two territories’ laws, and innovative studies in,
for example, education, forestry, Native labor, and administration. One eventual outcome
of their work for DORCA was the Australian School of Pacific Administration that pro-
vided a higher level of training for officials, especially ‘kiaps,’ whose supervisory role had
the most direct impact on the lives and well-being of local peoples.3
It was several years after the war’s end in 1945 before an Australian ‘kiap’ on a census
patrol visited the Iwani villagers. The Wakau story is that he came up the Sepik from
Ambunti, disembarked at Tipas village, then walked to Bapei and on up to Yegerape
where some visiting Wakau villagers brought home the news of his impending visit. After
spending the night in Yegerape, he proceeded to Edwaki then, moving on, hiked up the
656-foot Mauwi hill to Iwani village with its sweeping views. There the ‘kiap’ lined up the
Iwani men and women, including some from Wakau hamlet, to obtain a census count,
but he did not visit Wakau itself. What mystified my Wakau informants—as it still does
me—was that he read their names from a book and they couldn’t imagine how he had
obtained their names. A local man from Edwaki who spoke Tok Pisin accompanied the
‘kiap’ and they wondered if he had given their names to him. My notes (MN: 420) read,
“They are still amazed at this but don’t think he really could know their names ‘nating’
[without prior knowledge].” They recalled still being in traditional dress and that the
‘kiap’ walked back to the Sepik that same day, a very fast trip. I have been unsuccessful in
locating the ‘kiap’s patrol report of this Iwani village census.4
While we don’t know the year this Ambunti ‘kiap’ visited the Lujere after World War
II, we do know that a ‘kiap’ and priest in tandem patrolled from Lumi through Lujere
territory down to the banks of the Sepik River and back in September of 1949. This was
PO Geoffrey B. Gilbert and the Franciscan priest, Fr. James O’Meara.
In May of 1949, Gilbert established the Lumi Patrol Post that later became the head-
quarters for the Lumi Sub-District as a part of the Sepik District with its post World
War II headquarters still in Wewak. Now it was the Lumi ‘kiap,’ not Aitape’s, who had
administrative jurisdiction over the Lujere, the largest cultural group in the South Wapei
Census Division. As explained in the next chapter, the Lumi Sub-District was divided
into Census Divisions to facilitate the management and patrolling of a dispersed popula-
tion in a tropical setting. But regardless of the district’s bureaucratic structure, from the
administration’s perspective the Lujere were both a distant geographical and supervisory
concern. Like the Wape, it was missionaries, not the government, who first established a
resident base among them.
Before the war, Catholic priests and brothers of the Divine Word’s mission in Aitape
had penetrated over the Torricelli Mountains into the upper Wape area, making occa-
sional visits. Then after the war, the Franciscans assumed responsibility for the Divine
Word’s Aitape mission work and established a new mission in the populous Lumi area.

3. Beginning in 1970, with independence imminent, the training of Australians was phased
out and the training emphasis was directed toward New Guineans. See Grosart (1972a) and
Campbell (2000).
4. I searched in both the Australian National Archives and the Melanesian PNG Patrol Report
Archives at the University of California, San Diego.

91
 A Witch’s Hand

Fathers James O’Meara and Denis Dobson were chosen to establish the new mountain
mission but first their superior, Fr. Ignatius Doggett, made a visit with Fr. James. This was
almost two years before the Lumi Patrol Post was established. Fr. Denis writes that

In early November 1947, the Catholic mission plane from Madang (a Dragon Rapide)
came to Aitape. It was piloted by Fr Glover (who later crashed and died in that same
plane). The plane took Father Ignatius and Fr. James into Lumi. It made up its load
with some essential supplies, including an all-important shot-gun and a case of car-
tridges, because Fr. James and I would be living to a large extent off the land and the
game we could shoot.
The airstrip proved disappointing.5 It was hardly more than a clearing in the jungle
and was extremely rough. But the plane managed to land safely and take off again
without incident. It did not return to Aitape but headed straight back to Wewak on its
way to Madang. (Dobson n.d.: n.p.)

Patrol Officer Gilbert and Father James’s Patrol to the Sepik, 1949
The Franciscan mission had been built located on the south side of the Lumi airstrip
and PO Gilbert established the Australian government’s Lumi station on its north side.6
Although Fr. James was not the first missionary to visit the Wapei, he was the first to
visit the Lujere. I was still living in the Wape village of Taute in August 1971, when the
Lumi priest, Fr. Gerald Walsh, kindly gave me access to a folder of the mission’s historical
papers. In it was Fr. James’s diary of his Yellow River Patrol with PO Gilbert. Aware of its
historical importance and still unaware of Robinson’s and McCarthy’s pioneering patrols,
I typed a verbatim copy for my files (MN: 339–41), prefacing it with this comment:

Note: This is a 5 page document, written in ink on separate sheets of tablet paper, in
diary form of Fr. James’s—the first priest to settle in the Lumi area—first trip to the
tais [swamps]. It was also the first time a priest [or any missionary] had entered the
area. Perhaps there had been government patrols there before—he was accompanied
by Lumi’s first kiap—but I do not know. Although there is no date on the diary as to
year, from my earlier talks [in Lumi] with Fr. James, I know he made this patrol with
the kiap in 1949. (MN: 339)

As Gilbert’s patrol was a fairly long one (September 5–20, 1949), my guess is that
Fr. James went along to survey the possibilities of establishing a new Franciscan mission
station and I imagine Gilbert appreciated the priest’s genial company. But, regardless of
intent, it does evoke an especially strident form of sixteenth-century colonialism when
Spanish conquistadors and priests proceeded in tandem to subdue, exploit, and convert
an American heathen world.

5. According to the Franciscans’ historian Stephen J. Duggan (1989: 73) “The airstrip cleared
by European miners in the late 1930s offered the only safe landing ground for light aircraft
throughout most of the Torricellis in 1947.”
6. The history of the Franciscans in the West Sepik District, including the opening of their first
station in the Wape area, is told by Stephen J. Duggan (1983).

92
 Australian Hegemony Restored

The patrol began in Lumi with several police and about seventy carriers. They pro-
ceeded south toward the Sepik via Telote, Bulawa and Abrau before reaching Lujere
territory. At most villages the ‘kiap’ lined up the villagers to make a census count and
Fr. James said Mass.7 They arrived in Abrau on September 10 at 1:00 p.m. “Old grass-
covered village. Strong opposition to taking us to Nami [a Lujere village]—at war.” The
following morning, Sunday, he wrote:

Mass in open for all to attend. Catechist leads the prayers. Kiap lines natives [for vil-
lage census] while I say office. Get boys to work on [air] strip. Buy plenty of sassak
[sic] [sago for carriers]. Abrau, 160 [people]. Very hot afternoon. 7 gurias [Victoria
crowned pigeons] brought in by police-boy. Decided to push down to Edawaki [Lu-
jere] on Tuesday.8
Monday, Sept. 12th
Mass and breakfast. With help of catechist give school to about a dozen young
lads, few of whom can scarcely talk Pidgin. Visit village and work on [air]strip. Police
boy brings in a pig. Buy a few pulpuls [Native skirts in TP]. More sacsac [sago in TP]
comes in and ensures our setting off for Edwaki tomorrow.
Tuesday, Sept. 13th
Mass, breakfast. Set off about 8:15 for Edwaki, kunai [grass plains in TP] and bush
[forest in TP]9 alternately. Cross Yellow River at midday. Up and on after boys have a
wash in the river. Many natives waiting at first group of houses, owing to fact that one
man had been in Abrau and went on ahead to make ready about 2 p.m. On further to
village about 3 p.m. Fortunately two houses in construction suitable for our accommo-
dations. Seem to be a willing crowd, but real bush-kanakas, unable to speak Pidgin10.
Settle in, dine and into bed about 7:30 (terrific headache).
Wednesday, Sept. 14th
[Still in Edwaki village] Rise about 8 a.m., Mass, breakfast. Rain last night but fine
today. P. O. [Patrol Officer Gilbert] lines village. Long impressive line. See practice of
all in putting dead upon bed or scaffolding. Give a little school to young lads. Edawaki
160 (prob.[ably] 300 when all in [village]). (Fr. James O’Mera, unpublished diary, cited
in MN: 339–41)

The next day the patrol left Edwaki, crossed the Yellow River to Pabei, saw “scattered
houses,” and continued on to the Sepik River. “No village, but a few houses about. Set-
tle in under rough shelter. Enjoyable swim.” In the morning they counted about eighty
men and a few women, many from “back in bush. A pretty wild, unintelligent crowd.

7. Based on figures in Oakes’s (1956) patrol report’s “Village Population Register,” the only vil-
lages that Gilbert made an initial census was in Wokien, Abrau, and Yukilo.
8. The fact that Fr. James had help from a catechist and got the Abrau men to work on the
airstrip indicates that he and/or Fr. Dobson, his co-Lumi priest, had made previous visits to
Abrau and counted it as a Catholic village. The airstrip was eventually completed and used
by the Franciscan pilots and government charters, especially for maternal and child welfare
patrols.
9. PNG’s Australian expats generally used the term “bush” to refer to a forested (jungle) or wil-
derness area. In TP it is written ‘bus.’ See Mihalic (1971: 79) or Volker (2008: 14).
10. Mihalic (1971: 71) defines “buskanaka = a wild, uncivilized man (an abusive term)”

93
 A Witch’s Hand

Kiap lines them but not adequate to take census. Take a few photos. Very hot.” On the
seventeenth, the patrol was back in Edwaki and by the nineteenth, Fr. James was out of
wine—“no wine, no Mass”—then passing through Galgatu and Kamnum villages, he ar-
rived home in Lumi on the twentieth.11
The patrol’s camaraderie expressed between the government and the church Is inter-
esting but not unusual. One of the obligations of the colonial government’s field staff
was to facilitate the work of visitors, be it missionary, miner, petroleum geologist, or an-
thropologist, approved to enter the country or particular area. There also is nothing in Fr.
James’s diary to indicate he found the Lujere to be a particularly appealing population or
would recommend Franciscan proselytizing to his superiors.12
In the late 1950s, members of two Lujere villages, Akwom and Worokori, built air-
strips for the Catholic mission’s plane, but it never landed at either one. It did, however,
periodically land at the Abrau airstrip Father James mentions during his 1949 visit. Re-
tired Franciscan priests whom I contacted while writing this book said they were unaware
of any early intent of their order to proselytize among the Lujere. It remains a puzzle what
motivated the men to expend such tremendous effort to build airstrips by hand with no
assurance of their being used unless they misconstrued the mission’s intent. “Cargo-cult”
thinking, of course, comes immediately to mind as a motivation, but there is no recorded
evidence of cargo-cult attitudes in the area. It is certain, however, that Fr. James returned
to Lumi with a deep appreciation of the Lujere’s oppressive climate. While the Catholic
and Protestant missionaries competed among the mountainous Wape, sometimes ruth-
lessly, for their souls, this would not be the case among the Lujere.

Seeking a Yellow River Airstrip Site, 1951

Late in 1950, the Sepik District’s Acting District Commissioner, J. R. Higby, sent CPO
R. Orwin on an extended patrol from Lumi Patrol Post south towards the Sepik with
two objectives: attempt to find a direct route from Lumi to Green River Patrol Post far
to the west, and locate and inspect possible airstrip sites in the Yellow River area. Higby
was considering opening a Yellow River patrol post to be serviced as a short extension
flight by Lumi’s weekly plane. This could avoid the logistic hassles of servicing such a
Post by long boat trips up and down the Sepik as for the prewar Yellow River Police Post.

11. Although Gilbert was, at least in part, conducting a census-taking patrol and would have
filed a patrol report with his superior in Wewak at the Sepik District Office, again, as in the
Ambunti patrol to Iwani village mentioned earlier, no archived report has been located al-
though Gilbert’s patrol reports exist for 1948 when he was assigned to Ambunti. According
to George Oakes’s 1956 patrol to the Lujere villages, he notes that he made the first censuses
of their villages, with the exception of Edawaki. Although Fr. James writes that Gilbert lined
up the Edawaki locals, Oakes’s (1956: 2) report cites their first census by the Green River
patrol officer W. Crellin who “passed through part of the Edawaki area in 195l.” Gilbert also
attempted to line up the people living at the Sepik—probably Tipas village—for censusing
but eventually gave up.
12. According to Duggan (1989: 71–72) the Franciscans’ leader, Fr. Doggett intended to establish
numerous Franciscan missions south of the Torricellis. It is interesting that none were estab-
lished south of Lumi but were placed to its East and Southeast.

94
 Australian Hegemony Restored

As Orwin’s patrol fortunately was recalled before he could explore a land route to Green
River,13 his main task was to locate a favorable area for an airstrip and, by implication, ad-
jacent land for a possible Post. It was a big assignment for a rookie patrol officer; besides,
he would be in the bush for New Year’s Eve.
On December 28, 1950, he left the Lumi Patrol Post at 9:40 a.m. with an unusually
large contingent of police, eleven constables in all. Apparently the DC in distant Wewak
wished to assure the safety of a patrol led by a junior officer in an area where most villages
had never been visited by a patrol officer. It’s of interest that Orwin’s Patrol Report indi-
cates that he was unaware of Gilbert’s 1949 patrol from Lumi or McCarthy’s 1936 patrol
from Aitape, both through the Yellow River area to the Sepik, and cites only Robinson’s
pioneering 1934 patrol down the Wini, Sibi and Yellow Rivers to the Sepik (Orwin 1951:
2). By New Year’s Eve, a Sunday, the patrol was in Maurom but it was just another day.
“Prepared cargo for move-off in morning. Heavy rain fell during the day. Slept night.”
(Orwin 1951: 3)
By January 7 they had reached the Lujere village of Dauwo (from his map, probably
a hamlet of present-day Norambalip) where he counted fifty residents and bought food
with trade goods. The following morning, he

Left DAUWO Village at 8:30 and with a native guide from MAUWI [hamlet],
IWANI group, followed a native track through dense jungle. Small settlement of
MAUWI natives seen and visited. Reach southern extremity of small mountain at
11:30. Followed track North West up along the mountain. Passed through old set-
tlement of MAUWI and finally reached MAUWI.14 Fair sized village and about 70
natives seen here. Patrol rested for a short time and then proceeded along a track on
top of the mountain in a North West direction. [Descending the mountain,] Followed
a jungle track for about two hours until the SAND river reached. Numerous houses of
the IWANI people seen along river banks. (Orwin 1951: 4)

When I lived in Wakau, there were no houses along the Sand River. One thing I
learned about the Lujere from reading patrol reports covering a forty-year span of their
history from 1932 to 1973 was the extent of their labile settlement patterns: over time,
families abandoned hamlets and hunting camps, moving on, to make new ones, then
sometimes, years later, returning. When I was walking along a bush track with an alert
and knowledgeable Lujere informant, the seemingly static tangled jungle became socially
alive as he recalled the old hamlets, camps, and gardens, unseen by my I eyes, that in his

13. The area between the Yellow River area and the Green River Patrol Post is a vast sparsely in-
habited wetlands roughly forty miles wide and fifty miles long from the Sepik to the Bewani
Mountains. I’m guessing that bush pilots clued the Sepik Acting District Commissioner that
a long, arduous trek through wetlands by a large patrol with little access to local food might
not pay off with a viable track, so he jettisoned the idea.
14. The terminology can get confusing here. This little mountain or hill is called Mauwi by the
locals and the hamlet on top, is also sometimes referred to as Mauwi as well as Iwani, while
the government administration sometimes uses “Iwani” to refer to all of “Iwani’s” hamlets.
There is no consistency of usage at all. It was on top of this hill where the Mosstroops had one
of their bases.

95
 A Witch’s Hand

memory lay all around us. Orwin’s patrol report especially names numerous hamlets or
villages, for example, Dauwo and Wagabu, that were unknown to me.
At one of the Iwani’s riverside houses on the Sand, Orwin met a man, Kawi, who
spoke Tok Pisin and whom he obviously liked as he persuaded him to join the patrol
as interpreter and guide. Later commenting on the paucity of “native” dugout canoes,
he noted that Kawi had a canoe and took regular trips down the Sand to the Sepik, un-
doubtedly to fish or visit relatives. The patrol would have traversed the ‘kunai’ where one
of the Mosstroops groups camped that lay between an abandoned Wakau village site and
the Sand River. Then after sloshing through a sago swamp for about an hour, they came
to a hamlet, Wagabu, on the edge of a small kunai where the patrol spent the night. The
next morning, the ninth of January, Orwin and two of the police found a larger ‘kunai’
about an hour’s walk away with possibilities for an airstrip. The patrol moved to the new
‘kunai’, erected temporary quarters, and luckily the following day, fourteen men from
Iwani presented themselves for work, were hired, and began cutting the grass for an
airstrip.
During the next few days, Lujere residents from Iwani, Wagabu, Dauwo, Arami, and
Karami settlements brought food to be purchased for trade goods, including metal tools.
On the twelfth, Orwin recorded in the patrol diary that he was troubled with two bad
“leg sores” or tropical ulcers, the painful and flesh-damaging bane of tropical inhabit-
ants. He also sent a message with two of the police to the ‘kiap’ in Lumi advising him of
his movements and to be passed on to the DC in Wewak. Day after day, the Iwani men
continued the laborious cutting of grass with their indispensable bush knives while tor-
rential rains came and went, as did an airplane that was heard passing over to the north
of the campsite probably looking for the patrol. Aiendami villagers brought food to trade
for the first time. Another day, two Tok Pisin speakers from Edwaki visited and said they
would return with villagers bringing food. It is obvious in Orwin’s report that in 1950
there were not many good Tok Pisin speakers in the area as he emphasizes that facility.
On the seventeenth, his workers burned off part of the ‘kunai’ revealing the soggy con-
sequence of the heavy rains and were unsuccessful in draining off the surplus water. This
waterlogged ‘kunai’ could never be an airstrip; after ten days of concentrated labor, Orwin
abandoned it for a large ‘kunai’ that he and four of the police, whose superior grasp of the
tropical conditions he would have appreciated, had located to the northeast. Natives from
Abliami to the north visited his camp for the first time, and on January 20, he records,

Line of natives sent to new camp site to build temporary quarters. Another line also
sent to commence cutting the grass on the proposed airstrip site. Constable KOMBO
reported that an aircraft, presumed to be an Auster, was seen to the East of the new
camp site. Did not see the natives working on the airstrip. EDWAKI natives returned
as promised and brought in a plentiful supply of all types of native foods. Of their
number four or five spoke reasonably good Pidgin. These natives very enthusiastic over
our being in the area. Showery afternoon. (Orwin 1951: 5)

Orwin’s patrol with his eleven police would have been big news throughout Lujere-
land and probably beyond. The Edawaki men were able to articulate clearly to Orwin in
Tok Pisin what most of the Lujere probably felt. It was the first time since the Moss-
troops and FELO and AIB operatives were airlifted out of the Lujere’s homeland at

96
 Australian Hegemony Restored

the end of 1943 that a European officer with his armed Black police had settled down
among them. After a seven-year hiatus, their sago, labor, and talent were once again
valued and needed providing them, in return, with coveted goods and tools otherwise
generally unobtainable.
Work continued on the new quarters and grass cutting for the new airstrip site while
individuals from three new settlements (Moukam, Megoindam, and Eilam) made initial
visits with food to trade. However, Orwin writes, “Trade goods, especially small knives,
razor blades, etc., in short supply. Still experiencing some trouble with leg sore” (Orwin
1951: 5). For the tropical ulcers of a ‘kiap’ to appear twice in a patrol report was now a
serious problem.
On Tuesday the twenty-third, Pabei villagers brought in sago; in the afternoon, his
two police returned from Lumi with a letter from its ‘kiap’ requesting that “three fires be
lit and be kept smoking to enable planes leaving Lumi to fly direct to present camp site
without the necessity of making wide sweeps over other kunais to locate camp site” (Or-
win 1951: 5). Recalling the superior planning in 1932 by the OIC requesting Robinson
to light a nightly fire to guide the Aitape patrol to the Sepik, one senses some slippage in
professional acumen by Orwin’s Acting District Commissioner of the Sepik District who
ordered the patrol. The Lumi ‘kiap’ was only a conduit for messages between the two as
this was before Lumi became a subdistrict with its own ADC and patrols.
The following day Orwin moved his camp to the new campsite and lit the requested
smoking fires. Late that morning a Norseman plane was seen east of the camp that, cir-
cling once, flew towards the camp where it circled several more times before dropping
a bag of rice, with a note saying a drop of rations would be arranged as soon as possible,
and some precious penicillin, with which he immediately commenced treating his bad leg
sores. Work intensified on the airstrip and, on the twenty-fifth, he bought two pigs and
the Karami villagers brought in sago. Shortly after noon the Norseman plane returned
and began dropping rations. Especially welcome was more rice and meat for the police
and labor lines as well as some personal mail for himself. He must have been both startled
and elated when he read the District Commissioner’s message to him:

A memorandum from the District Commissioner instructed me to abandon the at-

tempt to walk through to Green River and to return to Lumi by the shortest route.
Natives from MIRIYAMI passed through camp on their way to a native “sing-sing”
[festival], at one of the villages to the north of the camp. Paid off the local natives who
had been employed at the camp. Also paid, by medium of axes and knives, the natives
on whose ground the camp had been made. Satisfactory arrangements reached over
this payment to the natives concerned. (Orwin 1951: 6)

The next day he spent readying the cargo for the patrol’s return to Lumi, recorded that
his leg sores showed considerable improvement, and paid Kawi, his Iwani interpreter.
Apparently eager to get back to Lumi, on the twenty-sixth, a Sunday and usually a rest
day for patrols, he struck out for Lumi with three police, ten carriers and a guide; the rest
of the patrol were to follow with the bulk cargo. After four full days of arduous trekking,
he arrived back in Lumi on January 31 at 6:30 p.m. He had succeeded in locating a pos-
sible site for an airstrip and his labor line already had cleared a width of 150 by 800 feet.
We never learn why DC Higby jettisoned the Lumi-Green River exploratory trek or

97
 A Witch’s Hand

terminated Orwin’s patrol when work was just beginning on the best airstrip site his pa-
trol had located. Was it concern for the young cadet’s health? Did he have a more urgent
assignment for him? Whatever the reason, in retrospect, Higby’s setting two such major
patrol goals for a very junior officer seemed overly ambitious.
Orwin’s report is of ethnographic importance as he gives us an interesting early pic-
ture of the Lujere in 1950–51, some twenty years before I arrived. They were predomi-
nately in traditional dress, not unlike McCarthy’s 1936 description except the men wore
more feathers.

The males wear a gourd affixed to the penis and fastened around the stomach with a
cord. The females wear a short grass skirt.15 It was noticed that some of the males were
not wearing a gourd but had their penis fastened with only a cord. Enquiries revealed
that this was done as a mark of mourning for the death of the man’s wife.16 The feath-
ers of the gouria and bird-of-paradise adorned the hair of most of the males. In some
instances they also daub themselves with a red clay paint. The teeth of various animals
as well as strings of shells are worn either round the neck or stomach. Apart from a few
strings of shells the females wear very few ornaments. (Orwin 1951: 9)

However, there had been important cultural changes. From Orwin’s perspective, the
administration’s emphasis on peaceful intervillage relationships appeared especially effec-
tive between the Lujere and the enemy villages to their north but not to the west across
the Sand River.

There is a good deal of intermingling with the natives from the North, around MAU-
WWUL [Maurom] and YEFDIN [Kwieftim], and some of these natives, more es-
pecially the EDWAKIS, visit LUMI on infrequent occasions. . . . As far as could be
ascertained they do not have much to do with the natives towards the West and appear
to be frightened of the natives from here. (Orwin 1951: 9)

Orwin established good relations with the Lujere and obviously liked them, especially
his interpreter, Kawi, and had no adverse complaints about them as some other ‘kiaps,’ we
soon see, had regarding them.

These natives are a particularly friendly type and rendered the patrol a great deal of
assistance in the supplying of native foods, work on the station and carrying cargo at
various times. There are a quite a number of light-skinned natives scattered through
the area.
In a number of cases, especially with the EDWAKI natives, pleasure was expressed
that the Government was in their area and these natives stated that they would do
anything in their power to render assistance to the patrol. No acts of hostility were met
with during the time that the patrol was in the area.

15. In 1971–72, their fore and aft string skirts reached to about the knees.
16. As reported earlier, McCarthy first observed this custom in 1936. In 1971, I did not observe
it as most men wore cloth shorts. Whether it was continued out of sight I do not know.

98
 Australian Hegemony Restored

At least ten of the native males seen had been away to work prewar. They had been
taken out by pinnace from the Yellow along the Sepik. Of particular note was one
KAWI of IWANI who was employed as interpreter. He understands practically all
the local dialects and has a good knowledge of local conditions. It would not be a very
hard job to bring these natives under full Governmental control with the minimum of
effort. (Orwin 1951: 9)

In spite of his patrol’s recall, Orwin completed his report as if a Yellow River area
airstrip were a serious concern to the administration or, at least, his DC, by present-
ing detailed data on the viability of the activated site. In addition, he wrote that “Mr.
R. H. Gibbes of Gibbes Sepik Airways has inspected the site from the air and has in-
formed me that, in his opinion, it is one of the best sites for a future airstrip that he
has seen so far” (Orwin 1951: 11). He was referring to Bobby Gibbes, the most highly
decorated World War II ace in the RAAF.17 After an inordinately long and unexplained
delay, on June 15 DC Higby forwarded Orwin’s Patrol Report to the DDS’s Director
with a covering memo that is noteworthy for its two-sentence brevity. After indicating
the attached report, he writes, “It is hoped that, eventually, we will be able to construct
a D.D.3 aerodrome in the area covered by the patrol” (Orwin 1951: 13). Somewhere in
the colonial hierarchy his hope was vetted then abandoned. There would be no airstrip.
Orwin’s search, finding, and work on an airstrip site was in vain. Again, the Yellow River
area would remain more or less as it was.

Wakau’s First Indentured Laborers

While the world still was not beating a path to the Lujere’s domain, the Australian colo-
nial economy had kicked back into gear after the war and indentured workers again were
in demand. Lujere men were leaving home for the first time in increasing numbers to sign
on as laborers. The major labor recruiter in the Lumi Sub-District was Ron Kitson, based
in Lumi and an acquaintance of mine in 1970–72, who traveled throughout the district
seeking men for specific labor assignments, e.g., on copra plantations or in the gold fields.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Wau goldfields in Morobe Province were a main destina-
tion for Australians coming to New Guinea to get rich (Healy 1972). But gold produc-
tion was thwarted by World War II and in 1943, the same year that the Mosstroops
were based among the Lujere and the Japanese raided their East Post, the Battle of Wau
was fought. Again, it was the soldiers of General Adachi’s Eighteenth Army, this time
advancing inland from Lae attempting to capture Wau, a strategic base. In January they
were successfully repulsed by the Australian Army, and then again in June in a final failed
attempt. After the war, gold mining never attained its prewar level of production. It was
sometime after the war, probably in the early 1950s, when recruiter Kitson signed on
Wakau’s first indentured laborers. Their destination was the Wau goldfields in the Mo-
robe District.
There were three Wakau men still alive during my fieldwork from that indentured
group: Aiyuk, who then lived in Mauwi, Eine, and Luritsao. Aiyuk remembered the

17. See www.wikiwand.com/en/Bobby_Gibbes, for more information about Gibbes’s successful

postwar career in aviation and hostelry in New Guinea.

99
 A Witch’s Hand

names of all the others who left with him including four men still alive—two in Mau-
wi—and five who had died. The twelve men walked up to Lumi wearing little more than
their penis sheaths, where Kitson signed them on and gave each a ‘laplap’ or waistcloth
to wear.18 From Lumi they flew to Wewak, then Lae and by land up to Wau where they
worked in the goldfields for one year.19 Aiyuk explained that they worked dredging boxes
in the brooks looking for gold. It was, he said, hard work that they didn’t like, especially
as Christmas Day was their one and only holiday. For the year of strenuous labor, they
received one ‘fuse’ and one ‘paun.’20 From that time on, some Wakau men have always
been away from home, usually for several years at a time.

The First Official Census of the Lujere, 1956

Although Wakau men recalled a ‘kiap’ coming up the Sepik River just after the war and
lining some of them in Maui hamlet to be enrolled and counted, the first hard evidence
for a census of the Lujere villages was by PO George Oakes in June and July of 1956
coming down from Lumi to the Lujere lowlands. Oakes, born in the Territory on the
island of New Britain and the son of Methodist missionaries, was evacuated in 1941 as
a boy of seven with his mother and younger brother before the Japanese attacked and
invaded New Britain in 1942. His father, the Rev. Dan Oakes, died on the Japanese
prison ship Montevideo Maru when it was torpedoed in July 1942. As a youth Oakes
was a survey draftsman in Sydney then, returning to the Territory, became a patrol officer
in 1954. He patrolled extensively in the Southern Highlands when in 1956 at the age of
twenty-two, he was transferred to the relatively new Lumi Sub-District.21
A number of the Lujere villages had never been visited by a ‘kiap’ and none appear
to have been lined up and formally censused. Other than Robinson and McCarthy’s
1930s pioneering patrol reports and Orwin’s 1951 “airstrip” patrol, they remained admin-
istratively unknown. Although the Lujere were the largest linguistic group in the South
Wapei Census Division’s humid swamps, they were easily overlooked because their popu-
lation was sparse, dispersed, and far from Lumi compared to the administrative needs of
the subdistrict’s sizable population in the Torricelli Mountains. The South Wapei Census
District had its first census in 1956, and Oakes was charged by Lumi’s ADC Frank D.
Jones to carry it out. Map 4 shows Oakes’s map of the South Census Division villages,

18. It was similar with the first Taute villagers who worked as indentured laborers. This was before
World War II and the creation of the Lumi Patrol Post, so to sign on they had to walk over
the Torricelli Mountains to the coastal town of Aitape. Wape men were traditionally naked
and my informant, Tongol, laughingly recalled how they had to pick up a big ‘kapiok’ leaf to
shield their genitalia from the view of the town’s two or three White women. Thus began their
acculturation to Western notions of shame.
19. Several retired ‘kiaps’ told me that contracts were usually for three years; it is unclear why the
one for Wakau men was for a single year.
20. A ‘fuse’ was one hundred shillings (five pounds) wrapped tightly in paper. The ‘paun’ (pound)
in 1955 was valued at A$2.
21. The biographical data comes from W. T. Brown (2012) and from George Oakes (email to
author, March 11, 2012), who had contacted me from Sydney via the University of Vermont
after reading my book about the Wape, The Bamboo Fire.

100
 Australian Hegemony Restored

including the part of his larger map of the Lumi Sub-District. Note that Wakau is west
of the Sand River.

Map 4. PO George Oakes’s patrol map of villages in South Wapei Census Division, 1957.

To maximize access to villages, Oakes’s patrol began purposely in the dry season on
June 13, 1956. In his “Introduction” to his patrol report Oakes (1956a: 2) cites PO Gil-
bert’s “Aitape Patrol Report of 1949/50” (with Fr. James) but tells us no more, only adding
that “Since this patrol, PO Mr. W. Crellin of Green River [Patrol Post] passed through
part of the Edawaki area in 1951, E.M.A. [European Medical Assistant] Mr. G. Blythe
of Lumi, did a medical patrol through part of the Edawaki area and Abrau in 1952. . .”
but again, the relevant records, like that of Gilbert’s, could not be located. Oakes also
mentioned that two Europeans recently had been in the Edawaki area, viz., Ron Kitson,
the Lumi labor recruiter and Mr. K. Knight, who had a mission station in the Torricelli
foothills by Kamnum village.
Oakes’s patrol lasted over a month as he also was instructed to census the villages in
both the South and the South East Wapei Census Divisions.22 Because of the size of his

22. T. G. Aitchison, DO of the Sepik District, comments in his cover letter with the patrol report
(Oakes 1952a) sent to the Director of the Department of Native Affairs that, “All of the vil-
lages with the exception of those on the Sepik River were visited and censused during 1940.”

101
 A Witch’s Hand

assignment, he was kept on the move through what he characterized as “leech-infested

forest” so there is a paucity of cultural information either in his daily diary or summariz-
ing comments; we learn little about the Lujere or their villages compared to a patrol he
did later in October in the Torricellis where he was able to spend one night in each village.
However, for the first time we do learn interesting population figures for the different
Lujere communities. He also carried an altimeter so the altitudes of some, but not all, of
the villages are given. Oakes was accompanied by four police officers, one Native medical
orderly, and about twenty-five carriers recruited from village to village. No translator was
needed because all of the villages, including those not previously visited by the adminis-
tration, had returned laborers speaking Tok Pisin. He also noticed that it was not unusual
for young boys to have picked up some Tok Pisin from their “older traveled brothers.”
Moving south into Lujere territory from Abrau he first visited the villages east of the
Yellow River including Nami, Naum, Worukori, and Akwom, then Pabei on the lower
Yellow and was impressed with the extent of the wild game, for example, “Saw numerous
Goura [sic] Pigeons, Birds-of-paradise, and other tropical birds, wild pigs and cassowary
on the trip” (Oakes 1956a: 4).
In Pabei a large contingent of villagers had gathered including from the Sepik River
villages of Tipar (Tipas) and Irimui, plus Panewai from across the Sepik. The Sepik vil-
lages had come on their own volition as they had heard the patrol would not visit them.
The next day the patrol moved to Tipas and encamped while Oakes hiked an hour
and five minutes to inspect a hamlet and then returned. This was the first census of these
Sepik River villagers, and many would never be counted again. Six weeks later toward
the end of August they were killed and eaten in a cannibal massacre, described in chapter
9, by their deceitful May River neighbors. Oakes, by then patrolling up in the Torricelli
Mountains, once again would make the long and swampy trek down to Tipas, this time
to join the administration’s investigation of the massacre. But on Thursday, June 28, 1956,
Oakes reports,

Broke camp from TIPAR and in light rain, proceeded mainly through sago swamps
towards MIRIYAMI (altitude 300 ft.) Forded the YELLOW RIVER at MIRIY-
AMI, inspected MIRIYAMI hamlet then proceeded to IWANI. After inspecting the
IWANI hamlet of DWORIDO climbed steeply to IWANI village [Mauwi hamlet]
where camp was made. (altitude 800 ft.)23 During afternoon sent two policemen out
to tell the natives of IWANI, who were in sago swamps nearby, to assemble tomorrow
at IWANI for recording of census. (Oakes 1956a: 5)

The next morning it rained heavily but “Rain finally eased off after lunch when in-
habitants of IWANI (IWANI, DWORIDO and MIRIYAMI Hamlets) and WAKAU
(WAKAU, LEUBANAGI and UWALAMU Hamlets) were lined up and censused.

My search of the early patrol report archives did not find such a census or even a 1940 patrol
and Oakes’s (1956) “Village Population Register” cites each Lujere village as an “Initial Cen-
sus” except Edawaki that he cites as “First Census since 1951.” These data, plus my fieldwork,
makes it possible that DO Aitchison misspoke.
23. The 1974 Papua New Guinea 1:100,000 Topographic Survey (Yellow Sheet) Map shows
Mauwi as 656’.

102
 Australian Hegemony Restored

IWANI village inspected” (Oakes 1956a: 6). He mentions seeing Wakau’s old site—the
site where I lived with them—and then wading across the Sand River, obviously shallow,
and continuing to walk northwestward to Wakau’s 1956 village site comprised of two of
the hamlets, viz., Leubanagi and Uwalamu.24

Departed IWANI and descended down the north-west side of the IWANI Hill. Three
quarters of an hour later we entered a patch of kunai grassland which was crossed in
15 minutes. [an old Mosstroops camp area] Passed the old site of WAKAU Village
[on his right]. Ten minutes after leaving the grassland we forded the SAND River. The
western bank of the river was then followed upstream for 25 minutes when we head-
ed westward to WAKAU over a track passing through rain forest and sago swamps.
Inspected WAKAU. Then proceeded to GWIDAMI (altitude 400 ft.), a hamlet of
AIENDAMI, along a similar type of track. (Oakes 1956a: 6)

His walking time from Iwani to the 1956 Wakau site was two hours. Having already
censused the Wakau villagers in Iwani, he had only to inspect what must have been an
almost empty village for the state of its houses and latrines. In 2012, I was startled to re-
ceive an email forwarded by my university from George Oakes, then retired in Australia,
introducing himself and noting he had read my book, The Bamboo Fire, about the Wape.
When I learned that he had made the first census of the Lujere villages I had hopes that
he might remember his visit to Wakau village from the dozens of villages he had visited
on that patrol so long ago. Not surprisingly, nothing came to mind. After all, he had
lined up and censused the Wakau villagers in Iwani then, crossing the Sand River, just
walked through the village for an official “inspection” and continued right on to Gwidami
(Mokadami).
As in his “inspections” of the other villages, we learn nothing specific about Wakau
as a physical place (not even its height). But the census figures of the villages in his re-
port’s “Village Population Register” are statistically helpful as shown in Table 1.25 Nine
Wakau men were away as indentured laborers, far under the one-third of adult males the
administration tried to limit as a way to minimize a village’s social disruption while still
providing cheap labor for the Territory’s entrepreneurs. The fact that Wakau already had
a rest house on the administration’s first visit indicates the villagers’ ready accommodation
to the administration’s learned wishes, so perhaps more than just a handful of men had
been away to work.26

24. The names of the two hamlets as pronounced by Oria were Lubanaki and Yoluamu.
25. His “Village Population Register” shows that he visited eleven Lujere villages but not Yawari
and Montopai in the northwest corner of Lujereland. Yawari, the northernmost village was
a twelve-hour walk away from centrally located Yegerapi and he probably was unaware of its
existence.
26. “I was surprised to find that every village visited was equipped with a Rest House” (Oakes
1956a:14) This is the strongest evidence possible that these Lujere villagers, some never vis-
ited by an Administration patrol, were positively oriented to the presence of the Australian
‘kiaps’ and their New Guinean policemen, and the influential impact that returned laborers
could have on their fellows. That was the Administration’s hoped-for consequence of the
indentured labor experience for men in areas not under their complete control but, as we will

103
 A Witch’s Hand

Eine, one of the men who first left Wakau to work in the goldfields, told me a brief
side story about their men’s house that I found scribbled on a kinship chart. Before any
of them had gone away to work and were still wearing penis sheaths, but after Lumi sta-
tion was established in 1949, Leno (in 1971, one of Wakau’s oldest males and a man of
arguments) set fire to their men’s house and to the houses of Newai and Mitchaki’s wives
and everyone “ran away into the forest,” obviously to their camps. This clearly demands a
follow-up story but, in lieu of that, it is relevant to Leno’s rampaging response to Tsaime’s
attempt to elope with his daughter Nemiai during my stay, as reported in chapter 12.
From table 1, we learn that slightly over one-third of the adult Lujere males were away
as indentured laborers. All of the other figures probably err on the side of under repre-
sentation as the initial census of a dispersed population. Regarding the Lujere’s overall
population, the figure of 2,318 is at best an estimate as the Lujere villages across the
Sepik were not included nor Yawari on the upper Sand River. Oakes (1956a: 13) writes,
“Inhabitants of two villages, Irimuri and Panyewei, which are on the north and south side
of the Sepik River respectively were censused at Pabei where they were waiting for me.”
Although he included the Irumuri census in his report, he did not include Panyewei’s.27
It is also interesting that Oakes’s population tally shows that the number of males is
significantly higher than the number of females, a finding that is explored in chapter 8.
Writing generally, Oakes notes that most of the villages did not have cemeteries and
instructions were given to make them. The instruction must have paid off because Oria,
then a boy, remembers the cemetery. While Oakes did not report seeing any decaying
bodies aloft on scaffolds, Oria recalled seeing a funerary scaffold with a woman’s body at
a camp, but not in the village. As it was the dry season, Oakes found that “the drinking
water for these people was mostly foul and stagnant,” but also observed that few mos-
quitoes were seen (Oakes 1956: 13). But “In nearly all villages visited, the environs of
hamlets were cluttered with rubbish and overgrown by bush. It was stated that in future
all rubbish must be collected and placed in a clearing near the village and burnt” (Oakes
1956a: 12). He found the general health of villagers to be less than favorable, not surpris-
ingly for a people with no modern medical facilities. The patrol saw numerous bad cases
of yaws, tropical ulcers, scabies, malaria, and pneumonia as well as many sores. His medi-
cal orderly did what he could, but they soon ran out of penicillin and other medicines,
as the fresh supplies anticipated had not arrived before the patrol set out. Oakes’s report
recommended that aid post orderlies be posted in Aiendami, Edawaki and Pabei know-
ing, like McCarthy’s plea for metal tools, that recommendations were often just that and
were dead on arrival. But no patrol report was complete without lamentations regarding

see in chapter 9, for the Iwan on the May River, their indentured labor experience did not alter
their traditions of headhunting and cannibalism.
27. Oakes rightly believed that Panyewei was in the Ambunti Sub-District and that perhaps was
the reason he didn’t include it. He unsuccessfully recommended that Panyewei and other
villages, e.g., Purami, on the river in that immediate area “be incorporated with those of the
Edawaki area” noting that they will not travel to Ambunti as they must pass through enemy
territory. Although he also correctly assumed that the southern side of the Sepik was uncon-
trolled territory and out of bounds for labor recruiters, he noted that some men already had
been recruited as laborers “as all the inhabitants of Panyewei, that were seen, were clothed in
‘laplaps’” (Oakes 1956a: 13).

104
 Australian Hegemony Restored

Table 1. PO Oakes’s Lujere village census data, 1956

Children Adults
Name of Male Female Male Female Total village
village Resident Absentee* population
Nami 43 28 57 24 60 212
Worukori 37 23 50 20 62 192
Naum 33 26 57 25 65 206
Akwom 32 13 32 17 38 132
Pabei 30 24 62 18 62 196
Ameni 11 13 35 12 42 113
Irimui 13 9 23 1 26 72
Iwani 33 28 77 13 74 225
Wakau 20 13 35 9 33 110
Aiendami 83 80 128 40 123 454
Edawaki 10 57 131 24 184 406
Demographic 345 314 687 203 769 2,318
total
* Absentee men were away working as indentured laborers for colonial enterprises.

the construction and use of latrines (six feet deep). “Most of the villages in the South Wa-
pei area did not have latrines, and in the few that did, I strongly suspect that the females’
latrines are seldom used. All villages without latrines were told to construct them and it
was stressed over and over again that they must use them” (Oakes 1956: 12). His survey
of their food supply was more positive.

Sago is the staple food for these people. Other vegetable foods of these natives in-
clude sweet potato, yams, taro, mami, pawpaws, bananas, tapioca, and breadfruit but in
smaller quantities. Cocoanuts also give variety to their diet.
There is no shortage of animal foods as the bush abounds in game such as wild pigs,
cassowary, possum, wild fowl and a variety of wallaby. Fish also supplement the na-
tives’ diet. These are caught on pronged spears, in nets, or in baskets set in timber dams
across the streams. (Oakes 1956: 13)

And what were the Lujere wearing in 1956? In answer to my email, Oakes replied, “In
1956 many of the Yellow River people still wore traditional dress. It was interesting that
when I came to do a census everyone had a lap-lap on!” (email, April 3, 2015). Men, espe-
cially those who had worked several years for Europeans, sported their modern attire, that
is, ‘laplaps’ or shorts, however shabby, when confronted with administration formalities.
On the fourth of July, Oakes visited his last two Lujere villages, Yaru and Norambalip.
The following day his patrol preceded across grasslands to the Yellow River where they
forded it up to their waists and, leaving the swamp villagers behind, headed north to the
Torricelli Mountains.

105
 A Witch’s Hand

A Patrol Officer’s Assessment of the Lujere Colonial Predicament, 1962

Just six years later, a patrol by PO Treutlain in June and July 1962 to the South West
Wapei and South Wapei Census Divisions found that there was “an unsatisfactory state
of affairs in the Native Situation notably in aspects of village maintenance, census attend-
ance, and settlement patterns” (Trollope 1962: 1). This necessitated a follow-up patrol
from November 4 to December 7, 1962, by PO C. A. Trollope, based in Lumi, with four
police and a medical assistant to provide smallpox and antiyaws vaccinations. Trollope’s
initial evaluation was that:

The South Wapei communities [primarily Lujere] had in most instances carried out
the instructions issued by Mr. Treutlain. However, it is quite noticeable that villages
are only partly lived in. Token effort prior to impending patrols presents usually a good
picture. The people of this region are essentially hunters and not gardeners which of
course lends itself to the nomadic habit. Sago is the staple and in most cases is worked
from natural stands. There is evidence however, in a number of cases, of attempts at
taro planting and subsidiary crops on a garden basis but the inevitable complaint is
that pigs root these out whilst the owner is away on some hunting expedition. . . . The
people in each instance were addressed on the advantages of living in permanent and
collective settlements and strongly urged to attain this condition. (Trollope 1962: 1)

Village absenteeism for a census patrol is always a vexing circumstance for the patrol
officer as it is, in a reverse way, to the family away in a bush camp working sago and fish-
ing or hunting who must walk several hours to the patrolling site, often not their own
village. Some of the Lujere villages were especially culpable in this respect.

For years certain communities, more notably, YAWARI, AIENDAMI, IWANI, and
AMENI (TIPAS), have had as much as 50% absenteeism at census taking. . .villagers
were asked in each of the above villages to locate these absentees and present them
to the patrol. Within no more than 24 hours all but a few had been brought to the
patrol. . . Deliberate evasion was obvious and a number of convictions [were] made
contra census regulations. The people of these groups are perhaps more primitive in
habit than the remaining South Wapei communities and no doubt their persistence in
this condition is due to the lack of [European] contact. (Trollope 1962: 2)

PO Trollope then commented on the positive impact the missionary Johansen family
who established the CMML Yellow River mission in 1961 were having on the central
Lujere villages, discussed in the following section. He ends his patrol report with an in-
teresting summation of the Lujere people and their environment nine years prior to my
fieldwork and before the imminence of self-government and independence overshad-
owed all administration officers’ thinking.

The South Wapei people vary in state from primitive to semi sophisticated. TIPAS
village adjacent to the SEPIK River for instance is a strange mixture of men anxious
to build up business ventures through copra production and selling crocodile skins and
others in the same age group still in traditional dress and unable to converse in ‘pidg-
in.’ Whole groups of essentially primitive natives contrast with other communities

106
 Australian Hegemony Restored

influenced by repatriated labourers and consequently showing some signs of change in

outlook. The reason for this continuing primitivity [sic] is isolation. Small communities
in vast areas of flat swamp country make inter group contact difficult . . . The region
is nearly impassable during the wet season. Sorcery pervades thought throughout and
will be a major obstacle in cultivating new outlooks. The immediate solution to this re-
gion is raising the people from their present state is regular Administration patrolling,
endeavoring particularly to gather them into central settlements. (Trollope 1962: 2)

It was a thoughtful assessment of the current situation, but herding the people to-
gether in bigger settlements as a mode of modernizing them was far off the mark. It
seems that “development” in the Western mind is often associated with creating larger
social units and, when governing wayward small groups, always is. However, the Lujere’s
evolved residential arrangement of small villages plus satellite family bush camps was
a perfect fit for their ecological zone; it provided both a community for sociality and
defense as well as dispersed work camps to facilitate subsistence. The tragic mistake Aus-
tralia made centralizing the Aborigines in villages was not one they would repeat in the
Upper Sepik wet grasslands.

Here Come the Missionaries!

Nine years after Father James’s Lujere visit, the first Protestant evangelical missionar-
ies came to live and proselytize among them.28 The Lujere, having only one religious
domination seeking to convert them to Christianity, were spared from the Wape experi-
ence of witnessing the initial rancorous contention between the Catholic Franciscans and
Protestant Christian Brethren over village exclusivity. Also, unlike Oceania’s Polynesian
cultures where the arrival of “Europeans were taken as envoys of the gods” (Strathern
2017: 226), among the animistic Lujere, Europeans were seen pragmatically as potential
sources of work and wealth.

The Sola Fida Mission and the First Regional Airstrip, 1958

The Lujere’s first residential missionaries were a young Australian couple John and Val
Watkins of the Sola Fide (Latin, by faith alone) Mission, a tiny poorly-funded independ-
ent Evangelical group. They brought their ministry to the Lujere in 1958 where they built
a house and bush material church by the sago swamp near Yegerapi village and where
their baby was born.29 Earlier they had joined Ken and Norma Knight, Baptists from

28. For information about the Protestant missionaries who have worked among the Lujere I
am indebted to Ces Parish, Betty Gillam, and Kay Liddle, all New Zealanders and pioneer
CMML missionaries in the West Sepik District. Kay Liddle also contacted several former
missionaries, including Mary Parish, Lyn Wark Murray, and Dan Anderson, then shared
their information to him with me. I also consulted the Thorp’s (2004) informative history of
Christian Brethren missionaries in Papua New Guinea. A few of the dates obtained from the
different sources are conflicting and I have done my best to be as accurate as possible.
29. The dates for the Sola Fida Mission are primarily from Ces Parish, WN660–1.

107
 A Witch’s Hand

Sydney, Australia, in Kamnum village (Autu language)—located between the Wape and
Lujere—then briefly worked in the isolated village of Guriaso (Autu lang.) to the west on
a tributary of the North River, before deciding to establish their missionary work among
the Lujere.
The Sola Fida missionary couple’s major and lasting contribution to the Lujere, how-
ever, was not their evangelical message, but John Watkins’s construction with local men
of the area’s first airstrip. It was symptomatic of the Administration’s back-burner view
of the swamplands people that it was a mission that successfully built the first airstrip,
although initially few planes landed. Six years after DC Higby’s aspirations for an airstrip
in the Yellow River area and CPO Orwin’s search for a suitable site, Watkins located his
site just east of Edwaki Hill. Lacking documentation of its construction, one assumes be-
cause of the mission’s poverty that the local men volunteered their labor for its construc-
tion, as did the men of Worikori and Akwom for their airstrips also built in the 1950s.
Although there is no record of the date when the first plane landed at Yellow River, early
on, a one-engine Cessna 182 piloted by Sepik Robie flew in with oil and flipped over,
severely damaging one wing. A new wing was transported up the Sepik to Tipas village
where local men carried it to the crash site for the plane’s repair. The strip, albeit enlarged,
still serves the area providing the Lujere with access to the global world.30
After the airstrip was completed, Valerie Auwardt, a nurse from Sri Lanka, who trained
in England and then went to Australia, joined the Watkins to provide the first medical
services to the mission’s immediate area. But the Sola Fide Mission’s stay was short-lived;
faith alone was not enough to sustain their work. With insufficient funds to even provide
themselves with adequate food, after eighteen months the Watkins were forced to leave
in December 1959 because of his serious heart condition. The Knights came down from
Kamnum to fill-in for four months, then they, too, left. Auwardt remained for a time to
run the mission where she also had a Pidgin Literacy and Bible School.

The Christian Brethren Arrive, 1961

Another evangelical Protestant mission was ready to step in and provide the continu-
ity the Sola Fide Mission couldn’t. This was the Christian Missions to Many Lands
(CMML), a Christian Brethren group with members mostly from New Zealand.31 The
CMML already had a mission in Lumi and in several other ostensibly ‘Popi’ (Roman
Catholic) Wape villages, spiritual incursions unappreciated by the Franciscan Catholics.
The Lujere’s first CMML missionaries were Roland and Margaret Johansen who ar-
rived with their small children towards the end of 1961. The extension of the airstrip in
1962 was a major physical accomplishment as was relocating the mission atop breezy

30. That is to say, “access” when the planes fly. In 2000, for example, my charted plane was delayed
three days in coastal Vanimo while we waited for the radio to be repaired and returned from
Goroko in the Highlands. Today, I am told, there still are no scheduled flights to or from
Yellow River and chartered flights are rare. A Lujere villager wanting to visit the coastal pro-
vincial capital of Vanimo must first take a motorized canoe up the Sepik to Green River, then
go by foot and truck via Amanab to the coast involving several days travel.
31. See Fountain (1999: 3–20) for an overview of the CMML’s work in the 1960s. For a more
detailed account of the Edwaki missionaries see Thorp (2004: 30–32).

108
 Australian Hegemony Restored

Edwaki Hill just west of the airstrip, the latter for reasons of Margaret’s health. But with
her health problems persisting—they had left PNG in 1959 because of them—in Janu-
ary 1963 they moved to Rabaul. Roland had found work there with the Department of
Forests, but the move was initiated to improve Margaret’s health condition and so their
children could attend the International School. Ces and Mary Parish, already seasoned
missionaries among the Wape, came to replace them. Sickness, it seemed, was a hazard of
mission work in the Yellow River area.
It was not until the Parish’s arrival with their two small daughters in January 1963
that a mission presence was firmly established among the Lujere. Jack McNab, another
New Zealander, joined them and helped build the mission relocated atop the hill. Mary,
a nurse, provided health services and Ces was a strong and energetic patroller carrying his
pastoral message to many villages.
Bruce and Margaret Crowther joined them for part of 1963, built a house, and stayed
until the end of 1965, when they returned to Australia with an ill son. In the meantime,
in September 1964, Violet Goff, a nurse, joined the mission staff and the Parishes had a
years’ furlough in Madang, where Ces was helping with the Tok Pisin translation of the
New Testament. In 1966, Betty Gillam, a New Zealand nurse and another strong and
energetic patroller, helped pioneer the maternal and infant welfare patrols among the
Lujere, as did nurses Heather McIntosh, Olive Westerman, and Shirley Stevens from
other CMML missions. On occasion, they were helped by Lumi Hospital’s only physi-
cian, Dr. Lyn Wark, an Australian who had befriended Joyce and me while we worked
among the Wape.
The Parishes returned to the mission in July 1966 and, finally, in November 1969,
a young New Zealand couple, Rosemary and Phillip Ace and their two small children,
joined the Parishes. Both families, as noted earlier, were serving the Lujere community
when I arrived in 1971. The frequent staff changes and transitions just described are more
typical of the Evangelical mission stations staffed by families with their more unpredict-
able familial circumstances, than a Franciscan mission staffed variously by single priests,
brothers, and nuns.

Wakau Village Makes a Move

PO Treutlein’s patrol map shows Wakau still west of the Sand River in July 1962, so it
was probably later in 1962 or 1963 that the Wakau villagers returned to their old village
site just east of the Sand River where I lived with them. Arakwake told me it was he who
initiated the move. He first learned of the mission’s arrival while walking back home from
Lumi after being returned from Dylup Plantation as an indentured worker.32 Stopping in
Edwaki, he first learned about the new missionary ‘masta.’ Back in his village, many were
dying of ‘sotwin,’ probably pneumonia or flu, but ‘sanguma’ was blamed and Arakwaki

32. Dylup Plantation, located near Madang, was established in 1904 by the German New Guinea
Company and was where many Sepik men like Arakwaki were indentured as copra work-
ers. More recently the old coconut trees were used to make furniture, and now the Madang
Provincial Government has purchased the property for a vocational school. See http://asopa.
typepad.com/asopa_people/2010/10/big-future-for-coconut-timber-in-png.html (site ac-
cessed May 18, 2016, but later discontinued.)

109
 A Witch’s Hand

decided to move back to Wakau’s old site near Iwani. Some of the men who came with
him were Eine, Yaope’s and Tsaime’s fathers, and Kwoien. The site had returned to for-
est, but the towering old coconuts were still there. They cleared the area, built houses and
gradually the rest of the villagers joined them.
My Wakau neighbors mostly ignored the CMML mission, while it was of varying
importance to villagers nearer to it. It appeared that the disregard was mutual. I had the
distinct impression that the mission viewed the Iwani hamlets as especially driven by
Satanic forces and even as frightening places. Visits by the mission men were infrequent
and only after I moved into the village did a maternal and infant welfare nurse visit it. As
one nurse explained to me, they did not visit because of fear after hearing “such horrible
stories about the place”—stories of ‘sanguma’ atrocities—told by their villager friends
near the mission. There were no committed Christians in Wakau during my stay; their
visits to the mission were limited to its health services and its small trade store for es-
sentials like salt.

110
chapter five

Colonial Twilight

In the end we shed our colonial burden with almost indecent haste.
The Honorable L. W. Johnson (1983: 264), the Territory’s last administrator

Establishing the Yellow River (Edwaki) Base Camp

Eight years after the Japanese departed New Guinea in defeat, Patrol Officer P. B. Wenke
lamented in his report on a patrol from Ambunti to between the Maimai area and the
Sepik River that

Ambunti is too far away and inaccessible to provide a good base camp for patrolling
and administration [of this area]. Undoubtedly the MAI-MAI and Yellow River Posts
will be re-opened again some day but until then these people will remain more or less
as they have been for centuries. (Wenke 1953: 9)

A Failed Attempt, 1968

Fifteen years later in June 1968, the first postwar action was taken to open a new Yel-
low River government post in the South Wapei Census Division (SWCD)1. It proved,
however, to be a colonial calamity of misunderstandings and misplaced hubris, with the
Lujere the most deeply affected. The initiation for the new government station would
not come from Ambunti, but from the Lumi ADC, J. E. Fowke. The paper chase begins
with his May 27 to June 14, 1968, patrol (Fowke 1968: 31) whose objects were “General
familiarization and assessment of area potential. Assist with seting [sic] out and location
of Yellow River camp site.” Fowke visited most of the Lujere villages including Tipas,

1. Lumi Sub-District was divided into discrete areas to facilitate the taking of administrative
censuses of each village. The SWCD is discussed more fully in chapter 7.

111
 A Witch’s Hand

located on an island in the Sepik, and even Panewai village on the opposite side of the
river, formerly in close contact with the Mosstroops men. While they did not leave their
opinion of Panewai village, Fowke disparagingly did: “The most depressing, filthy and
fear ridden village on the whole patrol” (Fowke1968: 24).2
For the new camp, Fowke had selected Edwaki Hill, rising dramatically from the
soggy grasslands, on a saddle about 1,000 yards south of CMML’s mission station (1,100
feet high) while the government’s site was about 400 feet lower. He marked out the
dimensions for both the ‘haus kiap’ and ‘kalabus’ [jail] to be built of bush materials and,
meeting with the villagers, explained to them their construction obligations if the base
camp were to be a reality.3 Down the hill and just to the east was the airstrip. Although
the government could use the mission’s airstrip, the mission’s motorbike track to the
airstrip was on mission-eased land, thus necessitating a separate motorbike track for the
government to access the airstrip and for general ingress and egress.
Immediately upon return from his patrol, Fowke gave written instructions to the
young CPO Ric Hutchings, indicating he would be accompanied by three police officers
of the Royal Papua and New Guinea Constabulary.4 He added,

The objective of this patrol is to assist the local people in the planning and erection of a
set of buildings in the Yegerapi-Yellow River area which will be in the nature of a Base
Camp and Rural Police Post. All adult male residents of the mentioned [South Wapei]
census district have voluntarily donated one month of their time to the completion

2. On October 7, 1970, PO John White (1970) visited Panewai; when he ordered some houses
in disrepair to be pulled down the villagers refused. White had no police back up so had to
retreat without carriers. ADC Laurie Bragge’s patrol report comment stated that he, White,
and six policemen would visit Panewai first week of December to settle the villager’s dispute
with the Administration. Panewei, being on the south side of the Sepik was not in Fowke’s
Census Division, although linguistically and culturally it is a Lujere village. There was talk of
placing Panewai in the SWCD, but a May River Patrol Post officer, M. E. Tomlinson (1969:
14) who visited Panewai on April 14–15, 1969, wrote, “Discussions with people as to whether
area be administered from May River or Lumi—adamant in wish to remain in Ambunti Sub-
District.” Their wish prevailed.
3. His Patrol Diary notes that in each village he had “lengthy discussions” with villager leaders
and, while he does not mention the nature of their discussions, this obviously was when he
explained the new base camp and sought and received their cooperation in its building.
4. During World War II, the previously separate police forces of the Territories of Papua and
New Guinea were combined in 1942 under the title Royal Papua Constabulary and New
Guinea Police Force. In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II approved the name Royal Papua and New
Guinea Constabulary. In 1964 the uniform was approved that was worn during my fieldwork.
It consisted of a light blue shirt, dark blue shorts, dark blue knee stockings with red garter
flashes, black boots with puttees, a black belt and a distinctive dark blue beret with the affixed
Constabulary badge of chrome with the bird of paradise depicted on a red enameled back-
ground. Non-commissioned ranks were also issued a .303 short Lee-Enfield rifle they carried
on patrol. In a cultural environment where the locals wore little clothing and the expatriates
wore nondescript tropical clothing, the members of the police force were a striking sartorial
contrast that commanded, and was given, attention and respect by all. For an extended discus-
sion of the New Guinea police see Grimshaw (1972).

112
 Colonial Twilight

of this task. It will be your job to co-ordinate the periods of voluntary labour so that
at any one time there is not an excess of volunteers with a resultant lack of efficiency.
Buildings to be constructed include a secure Lock-up, two native materials Police
Houses, a cargo shed, two intransient houses, and a good Rest House. (Hutchings
1968: 20)

Besides the station’s buildings, Hutchings was instructed to build a motorbike track
from the CMML airstrip up to the new station. He also was told to conduct a “Problem
Census,” explained later.
Hutchings’s patrol report diary begins with Friday, June 21, 1968, and records the
project’s daily progress and the number of men volunteering their labor each day. His
summarizing table shows the number of men available by village and the number of
volunteer laborers per week for June and July (Hutchings 1968: 14). Iwani village, and
by implication Wakau as one of its hamlets, was not a big contributor. By comparison
Magaleri, as one of the most distant villages with a similar number of available men as
relatively nearby Iwani, volunteered twice as many men, 31 to 16. Hutchings’s workday
for the volunteers was a long one, 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. By July 1, work on the ‘kiap’s
house was going very well, and the men completed thatching on one side. His diary then
notes,

In p.m. I spoke with the A.D.C. Lumi via the mission radio concerning the situation
regarding K____ as the local people were becoming a little concerned for their safety. I
was instructed to sit tight and only act if further trouble arose, and then to send K____
and the interested parties to Lumi. (Hutchings 1968: 5)

K____ was a notorious ‘sangumaman’ from Iwani village. Remember his name.5 You
will eventually come to know him well. The next day the men covered the house’s other
side with thatch, but,

In the afternoon while twenty odd men were on top of the house, the house collapsed,
several injuries were received. The three worst cases were treated at the mission aid
post and entered the house sick for observation. Work ceased for the day at 3.30 p.m.
(Hutchings 1968: 5)

When Hutchings later checked the injured, he found them “comfortable.” The most
seriously injured man was Kwolyen (Kwoien) of Iwani village (Wakau hamlet) who broke
an arm and two ribs; the other two men suffered badly bruised hips and had difficulty
walking for several days. The following morning Hutchings was surprised to see all the
men show up for work except those injured; the ‘haus kiap’ was dismantled and work
began on the ‘haus kalabus.’ Then that night at 1:30 a.m., one of the two constables with
Hutchings was awakened in the ‘haus polis’ by a small fire that was quickly extinguished.
The work continued on the ‘haus kalabus’ and without explanation, he writes, “Today a

5. In public records his name is spelled in various ways. Since accusations of being a ‘sanguma’
can be inflammatory, I have replaced the names of some of the most infamous ones with ini-
tials, as in the case of K____

113
 A Witch’s Hand

marked difference was noted in the attitude of the men. They are now much happier and
working well” (1968: 5).
Sunday, July 7 was not a workday so Hutchings walked up to Norambalip village to
watch a curing ceremony for a sick man but provides no details. He also spent a lot of
time talking with the locals, obviously seeking data for his “Problem Census” and it was
almost midnight before he returned to the Yegerapi ‘haus kiap.’ On Tuesday he had his
gear moved up the hill to the nearly finished ‘haus kalabus’; by Wednesday it was com-
pleted and on Thursday work began on the reconstruction of the ‘haus kiap.’ However, the
design was changed, and he planned to build it as a very large A-frame house similar to
the design of the Lujere’s men’s houses, whether on his own initiative or with the permis-
sion of the Lumi ‘kiap,’ he doesn’t say.
One of the research delights of the digital age is the ability to access information and
people all over the world almost instantly. This book could not have happened otherwise.
I had luckily located Hutchings in Australia and in a March 20, 2016 email, I got my
answer.

I started building a normal style house and it was while the men were putting the
morita on the roof that the whole thing toppled. The result of that failure, led me to
build the A-frame design with its inherent stability, so the debris was cleared and con-
struction resumed on the original platform. The man and meri post were erected as in
their building style . . . With the variation of the lifted portion of the roof to give that
million dollar view of the Sepik plains. No doubt that is where you drank many beers
with Ray! (Email from R. Hutchings to W. Mitchell, March 20, 2016)

We’ll catch up with PO Ray Lanaghan and those beers later. Right now, with the
men’s help, he planted nine support posts, six that were twenty feet long, and three that
were thirty-one feet long. In the meantime, at the beginning of the third week he and a
work crew began work on the motorbike track earlier laid out by the government inter-
preter from Magaleri, Makau Papkai, a knowledgeable, energetic and controversial (with
the expats) political advocate for the area who also had supervised clearing the track’s
brush. This was the project that gave Hutchings the most trouble; first the heavily rooted
trees had to be removed then the planned track built.

Work of removing the large trees for a width of 40 feet the length of the road was a
large job as many of the trees exceeded 80 feet in height. This occupied a line of 35
men for three weeks, and appeared to be the only job the locals had any aptitude for,
or interest in. (Hutchings 1968: 10)

After that backhanded compliment, when the actual cutting of the track began,
Hutchings was even less generous in his comments.

This [track] started at the station end. I realized that there is only one other road in the
area and that the people are not used to road work, however I feel that the standard
of work was very poor. The men claiming they did not know how to make a road. It is
more probable that because it involved some hard work they naturally were unable to
gain any knowledge of how to do it. In one week of six days 20 men managed to half

114
 Colonial Twilight

complete 150 yards of motor bike track. An average of 3 ½ feet per man per day. The
second week was just the same, so a total of 240 yards has been completed. (Hutchings
1968:10)

Evaluating the men’s work overall, Hutchings emphasized it was voluntary labor not-
ing that village men between the ages of sixteen and forty-five had volunteered to work
for one month. While acknowledging that there were good workers and poor workers,
“On the whole I would say that the quality and quantity of the work was poor” (Hutch-
ings 1968: 13). Then he makes his most damming criticism colored by a common colonial
complaint.

Road work appears to be there [sic] greatest dislike and they seem incapable of gaining
any understanding of how to work a road. This could be due to the fact that it involves
a little hard work, which is against their nature. (Hutchings 1968: 13)

Finally, as indicated earlier, his report was obliged to contain an answer to the “Prob-
lem Census” his ADC set for him regarding the local view regarding the area’s lack of
development. One of his most telling comments follows, “On many occasions during my
talks I gained a definite feeling that these people do not wish to develop economically, or
rather they can not be bothered to make the effort” (Hutchings 1968: 15).
He begins, however, with a reference to a World Bank survey that “suggested that eco-
nomic development of the May River and adjacent similar areas be forgotten, due to the
lack of prospects” (Hutchings 1968: 15).6 The Lujere knew that their soils wouldn’t suc-
cessfully grow crops like coffee or rice and, even if they did have a commodity the world
wanted, the expense of getting it to market in their isolated domain probably would be
prohibitive. He reports that the Lujere saw the answer to their economic woes as the
establishment of a Yellow River government station. Why else would they have worked
so hard for such long hours in such crushing heat for no pay?

Again and again in answer to my leading questions as to why the people did not pursue
various methods in attempting to help themselves economically I was met with the
answer, that first of all they must work to build the station up and then when this is
finished they will grow food etc, and sell it to the station. Also I gained the impression
that many men think there will be ample work available for them as labourers. This
combined with their therories [sic] concerning the Govt school [they felt would follow
the Base Camp] led me to think that they expect a ready made “Lumi” to evolve and
bring with it its economic wealth.
If this is so, it again shows that the people expect development to come easily to
them without much hard work on their part. This was also apparent in the standard of
work done by the men and the quantity put out by them, during their week of volun-
tary service.

6. I searched for this “survey” online but was unsuccessful in locating it. That does not nullify the
sentiment in the Territory at the time of my field work that, as Hutchings indicates, the Upper
Sepik area had little economic potential, hardly surprising as the first colonial occupiers made
that decision in the early nineteenth century.

115
 A Witch’s Hand

It is apparent that the people are aware of the fact that there is no possibility of
great economic development to this area and that they are waiting for the Govt to
enter the area to solve this problem. This hope has been fulfilled by the establishment
of a base camp at Yellow River, however I consider the people are going to be greatly
disappointed, for they are expecting to [sic] much. (Hutchings 1968: 16)

The Lujere were “greatly disappointed” but for quite another reason as we soon learn.
In Hutchings’s other comments on the potential economic development of the area, he
criticized them for not fencing their gardens against marauding pigs and not seriously
hunting crocodiles for their valuable skins. Hutchings’s station-building patrol was an
especially onerous one. I cannot help but think that this young inexperienced cadet patrol
officer was elated when it was over and he returned to Lumi to write up his report, after
which he had a leave of three months in Australia.
One of the interesting aspects of patrol reports for the researcher is that the submit-
ted report is but the first of several steps with each successive step collecting further
information on the relationship between the Native populace and their colonizers. In
this instance, we not only get an especially intimate glimpse of the hierarchy between
the colonized and colonizers, but also of the internal hierarchy of the colonizers them-
selves. CPO Hutchings submitted his report to his immediate superior, ADC Fowke in
Lumi, who, adding his generally favorable comments, forwarded it to his superior, Dis-
trict Commissioner J. E. Wakeford in Vanimo, who then forwarded the report with his
comments to Mr. Tom Ellis, Director of District Administration in the Department of
the Administrator, in Konedobu (Port Moresby).
ADC Fowke approved of his cadet patrol officer’s work, writing, “All objectives were
achieved, and Mr. Hutchings has done an excellent job in furthering the establishment
of Yellow River as a Base Camp” (Hutchings 1968: 26). He also comments on the role of
‘sanguma’ in the camp’s establishment and on the men’s volunteered labor.

Sorcery or “sanguma” is rife throughout this area and would be the greatest single hin-
derance [sic] to the areas development as a knit society. In most cases allegations can
not be substantiated due to the indefineable [sic] nature of the complaint.
The problem is real and one of the main reasons for the seting [sic] up of the Yellow
River as a Base Camp. Regular staffing of the Camp will considerably break down the
sorcery element . . . A total of 418 men donated one week of their time over a period
of six weeks. It is very gratifying to know that the Administrations [sic] presence in the
area is desired by the people. (Hutchings 1968: 26)

However, the response by the District Commissioner to Hutchings’s report and

Fowke’s forwarding comments was hardened indignation. Acting within a tight bureau-
cratic structure more military than civil, the ADC apparently had stepped out of line.
Directing his memorandum to the ADC, on point after point, he chastised Fowke. But
his clincher was that, during a meeting of the House of Assembly in early June 1968,
Tom Ellis, the powerful and experienced director of district administration and thus
where the buck stopped, replied to a question by Jakob Talis, house member for the Lumi
and Yellow River area, by saying that the administration would not give consideration to
establishing a patrol post or base camp in the Yellow River area. The reason given was,

116
 Colonial Twilight

“The Yellow River area is sparsely populated and with the present shortage of field staff,
establishment of a patrol post there cannot be considered for the near future. The area
is not too far from Lumi and is adequately patrolled from there” (Hutchings 1968: 21).
Continuing, the district commissioner unreservedly laid down the law.

Because of this categorical answer from the Director and in conformity with instruc-
tions . . . all construction work at Yegarapi [he means Edwaki] will cease immediately.
The new Rest House will remain as such and the building which you term a “detention”
house will become the barracks fro [for] patrol personnel. Furthermore the terms Base
Camp or Patrol Post will no longer be used . . . It was, is and will be only a Rest House
centre and must be referred to as such. (Hutchings 1968: 21)

Then his syntax begins to falter:

It is obvious . . . that both Mr. Hutchings and the local population anticipate this
centre to be manned by Field Officers. Your remarks regarding the effect that regular
staffing of the camp will have on the practice of sorcery confirms this I fail to see how
this could be effected without prior approval from this Office being received. As stated
above there will be no regular staff based at Yegerapi [he means Edwaki]. You must
inform the village officials and people of this. It must be done promptly and the expla-
nation must not embarrass the Administration otherwise there could well be a loss of
confidence in the Administration and its officers. (Hutchings 1968: 24)

Finally, speaking more directly about Hutchings’s report, DC Wakeford writes that,

Despite the fact that the objectives of the Patrol are no longer valid the patrol was not
entirely wasted as Mr. Hutchings should have gained valuable experience in the han-
dling of large groups of relatively primitive people.
(ii) Mr. Hutchings should pay more attention to the manner in which he presents
future reports. In this report there were:
(a) Some untidy erasers;
(b) Some incorrect word usage. For example “sight” for site, “to” for too.
(c) Some spelling mistakes. For example “therories” for theories, “azette” for eco-
nomic. (Hutchings 1968: 23)

A further paragraph censures Hutchings on the use of abbreviations like “Govt,” and
instructs him to avoid the use of words like, “House Kiap” [‘haus kiap’] or “House Kala-
bose” [‘haus kalabus’] and, finally, “it would pay Mr. Hutchings to obtain a book on Pidg-
in English in order that he knows the correct spelling of Pidgin English words should it
ever be necessary for him to use them in the future” (Hutchings 1968: 23). It is sobering,
however, to know that patrol officers usually typed their own reports in the field under
difficult circumstances on manual typewriters with several carbon paper duplicate cop-
ies long before computers and the brilliant “spellcheck” were available.7 A ‘kiap’ friend of

7. While an ADC and certainly a DC had access to secretarial help, a patrol officer usually
didn’t. When the acting director of the Department of District Services and Native Affairs

117
 A Witch’s Hand

mine who knew Wakeford before he died in 1987, recalled him as “an efficient but ‘crusty’
individual” (email, Laurie Bragge to W. Mitchell, October 8, 2014). If queried, Hutchings
might have chosen more pointedly impolite adjectives.
As I learned more details about the history of the creation of Yellow River Base Camp
while writing this book, I better understood the sometimes bitter and unyielding views
some of the Wakau men had of the government administration. Sixteen Iwani men had
volunteered their labor to build the base camp including Kwolyen (Kwoien) of Wakau
hamlet who sustained the most injuries when the ‘haus kiap’ collapsed, breaking his arm
and two ribs. Now there would be no Yellow River Base Camp. How could that possibly
be locally explained without embarrassing the administration or ‘govman’ when the Lumi
‘kiap’ himself publicly arranged for the men’s volunteered labor and personally pegged the
dimensions of its major buildings? ‘Ol I giaman mipela’ [they lie to us] was a phrase I oc-
casionally heard in reference to the administration during my stay; this unfortunate, but
farcical “undoing” incident, I now understood, must have been an important component
of that mistrust.8

Success, a Triumph of Local Politics, 1971

Even jungle bureaucracies, like their urban counterparts, have a way of morphing hard
policy into new, often reverse directions. More than two years after Ric Hutchings com-
pleted his patrol to supervise building the abruptly aborted Yellow River Base Camp, on
October 7, 1970, Hutchings, now a full patrol officer, began another patrol to the South
Wapei Census Division, the Lujere’s home. It would have resounding implications for the
future of the seemingly irrevocably canceled base camp that both District Commissioner
Wakeford and Director Ellis of the Department of District Administration had earlier
abandoned with dogged resolution. But there was a new officer in the bureaucratic mix:
ADC Fowke was gone and the present Lumi ADC was Peter J. K. Broadhurst.9
Broadhurst’s instructions for Hutchings’s three-week patrol indicated that a hospi-
tal orderly, an interpreter, and a constable, all New Guineans, would accompany him.
Among the written tasks he was specifically charged to carry out were to take a census
of each village and spend at least one night at each village rest house, investigate villag-
ers’ complaints, check all shotgun licenses, promulgate political education, inspect for the

chastised a patrol officer for smudged copies of his patrol report, his superior, ADC Rigby of
the Sepik District, replied back to the acting director in his defense.
The reason for the smudged copies is that Mr. Feinberg cannot be supplied with an
office typewriter. The only one available for issue to him is a rather ancient portable
which can only take two copies at a time. . . . More typewriters are still required. Green
River has none, Telefomin and Vanimo have only portables, and several typewriters in
this District sadly need overhauled by a technician. (Feinberg 1951)
8. The topics of trust and mistrust have a long and important history in the analysis of humans
and their social institutions. See Carey 2017 for a recent pithy analysis.
9. Peter Broadhurst was the Lumi ADC from January 1969 until December 1971; during my
fieldwork among the Wape in the Lumi Sub-District, he and his wife Helen—who also had
two preschool children—were helpful friends to Joyce and me as he was when I lived alone
with the Lujere and then in the writing of this book.

118
 Colonial Twilight

medical condition of yaws, and collect service data on the villages’ ‘lululais’ and ‘tutuls.’ He
also was charged to prepare a “Situation Report,” a document that was especially help-
ful to my understanding of the area in 1970, the year before I began my Lujere research.
Hutchings was further ordered to

Pay particular attention to any manifestations of cargo cult and sorcery you may dis-
cover and report fully thereon. Vague reports that sorcery is rife throughout the area
has been reported to this office by C.M.M.L. personnel. Nothing definite is known and
I want you to undertake a thorough investigation of this aspect and discuss the problem
with the various Mission personnel stationed in the area. (Hutchings 1970: 55)

There also was a growing concern regarding which subdistrict should administer the
area that is indicated by this unusual charge:

At each village conduct a survey to ascertain whether the people of each village wish to
remain in the LUMI Sub-District or be transferred to the Ambunti Sub-District and
be administered by the May River Patrol Post. Until a road is built from Lumi to the
C.M.M.L. station Yellow River. . . it is doubtful that the people of the South Wapei
will be allowed to join the Wapei Local Government Council. (Hutchings 1970: 2)

Showing his preference Broadhurst adds, “It would appear to me that their natural
communications are towards the Sepik River and by boat up and down that river for sup-
plies. By joining an Ambunti Local Government Council, equipment for projects could
be brought to them by river” (Hutchings 1970: 54).
To initiate the patrol, Broadhurst arranged for two flights chartered by MAF flights
to transport Hutchings, his personnel, and their gear from Lumi to Kwieftim, the airstrip
nearest to the northernmost Lujere villages. After a fifteen-minute midday flight on
October 1, they were greeted on landing with heavy rainfall and insufficient local men
to carry their gear onward. The next morning, having secured enough carriers, the patrol
began a three-hour rugged walk in more heavy rain to the Lujere village of Yawari. Hav-
ing sent word for the Montopai villagers to come to Yawari, Hutchings lined them up for
a census count and then counted the Yawari villagers the next morning. Once the patrol’s
tasks were completed, they set out at 10:00 a.m. for Aiendami village, moving southward
just east of the Sand River. But the village’s rest house was in poor condition, so they
continued fifteen minutes more to Gwidami (Mokadami) village where the patrol finally
dropped its gear after a seven-hour rain-soaking hike.
The next day, October 4, the hospital orderly found his first cases of yaws. Antiyaws
medication was given to each villager necessitating the patrol’s personnel to work until
long after dark. Yaws, a bacterial infection, thrives in moist climates and is easily trans-
mitted by the fluid of an infected person’s lesion. If not treated, it may lead to chronic
disfigurement and disability, especially if the feet are affected.
Aiendami and Gwidami are both located just north of Wakau village along the Sand
River, so we will have reason to revisit them in parts 2 and 3. Leaving Gwidami the
following morning at 8:00 a.m., the patrol most likely, although unmentioned, passed
through Wakau en route to Iwani village atop its imposing hill. In his patrol diary,
Hutchings writes,

119
 A Witch’s Hand

8000 Departed for IWANI, arriving at 1000 p.m. [sic; a.m.] Place in shambles, [only]
1/10 of population in village. House [for] police fell over when used, so supervised
removal and began constructing of new house. Walking time – 2 hours. Slept IWANI.
(Hutchings 1970: 2)

Hutchings found Iwani village such a challenge to his patrol that he wryly queried if it
even should be azette as a “village.” Consequently he kept his patrol there for three nights
to attempt constructive changes. The second day he notes that more people had returned
to the village and, undoubtedly, some were from Wakau; as an official Iwani hamlet they
went there to be counted.

7th October
Still at IWANI. It was considered worthwhile to spend 3 nights in this (village?) as
they are the least contacted in the area. The whole time work was in progress [rebuild-
ing the rest house for police] the 3 officers furthered the education of these people by
merely talking on many and varied topics. I doubt if they have ever been together for
such a length of time doing something as a village project.10 Slept IWANI. (Hutchings
1970: 3)

The following morning after Hutchings completed his census, he hiked down Iwani’s
hill and over to and up its higher sister hill where he examined the old base camp site and
stopped for a visit at the mission station. He then continued his patrol visiting the other
Lujere villages and to several non-Lujere villages also in the South Wapei Census Divi-
sion, spending a night in each and seeking the information he was charged to collect. The
patrol, ending at Abrau, made a short flight back to Lumi on October 22. Hutchings had
a similar impression of the Abrau villagers as he had of the Iwanis.

Inspected the village, very poor, similar people to IWANI (very primitive). . . . Aware-
ness of people similar to that of IWANI. So time spent in general conversations and
demonstrating better way of construction re[garding] houses etc. (Hutchings 1970: 4)

While Hutchings had an adverse view of the Iwani villagers with their village “in
shambles” and absence of knowledge on the workings of government beyond the visit of
a ‘kiap,’ his overall opinion of the Lujere people after visiting most of their villages on this
patrol was highly favorable. It also was quite at odds with his initial view of the Lujere
two years earlier, based on his sometimes-trying experience with them in the building of
the Yellow River Base Camp. Now, based on his more extensive experience in the Lumi
Sub-District he found them intelligent, strong, diligent workers. “The I.Q. of these peo-
ple is by far, greater than their neighbours in the Lumi Local Area” (Hutchings 1970: 12).
“By their nature and physical stamina these people are a better type of worker than is to
be found in the remainder of the Sub-District” (Hutchings 1970: 9).
While it is interesting to see how Hutchings’s view of the Lujere changed, what is
most immediately germane in his report are his comments regarding a new Yellow River

10. He was unaware that socially crucial events, such as funerals or a curing festival, could quickly
bring the villagers together.

120
 Colonial Twilight

base camp. He cites the villagers’ feeling of governmental neglect as validation of a need
for one and writes at length to explain this to his superiors.

A peculiar political situation exists throughout the South Wapei where approximately
90% of the adult male population has worked for two or more years in other parts of
the Territory where the indigenous population enjoys a much higher standard of living
and has achieved more general political awareness. . . . On returning to their home
area which is particularly isolated and lacks any immediate economic development,
they find it difficult to correlate in their minds the Administration policy of general
advancement of all indigenous people of the Territory to their home area. As a result
of this a certain feeling of neglect by the Administration exists with the people. . . .
No real solution exists to this feeling of neglect other than through more intensive
patrolling, construction of a Base Camp at Yellow River, and the implementation of
any feasible economic development scheme regardless of how small the project or
return might be. . . . The people demonstrated their willingness to work and faith in
the Administration in July, 1968, when they donated some 22,500 man hours of work
in the construction of a base camp at Yellow River. They received no pay for this work
and even after the project ceasing in view of departmental policy they still do not want
pay if a base camp is established.
If a base camp is not established in the area, rumors were heard that the people
would no longer have anything to do with the Administration and that they would go
back to their traditional ways and culture—a threat which I feel is a probability as they
are not so far removed from this stage at the present time. Sanguma is rife throughout
the area and many persons expressed the view they wanted a Kiap to help them protect
them from themselves. (Hutchings 1970: 5–6)

He also wanted to make it abundantly clear to his superiors the extent of the villagers’
lack of political awareness in a country that was being pushed rapidly toward independ-
ence and the importance of the administration’s positive intervention.

Radios and newspapers are non-existent, information of the outside world minimal.
As such, the awareness of political matters is practically negligible. No person knew
who the M.H.A. [Member of the House of Assembly] for his area was.
Generally there is no political awareness among the people on the central or local
government level, and only a limited understanding and appreciation of the Admin-
istration in the village, however this will not always remain so. Discontent is growing
with the return of indentured labourers and stories of developments in other areas. . .It
is now an opportune time for the Administration to step in and cultivate the present
good will of these people before it turns bitter; which is within the foreseeable future.
(Hutchings 1970: 7)

Hutchings then moves his argument into the national political level by critically dis-
cussing one of the Wapei-Nuku open electorate’s two elected Members to the House of
Assembly.

Apparently Mr. Jacob Talis, M.H.A., canvassed this area to gain support for his pro-
posed personal Patrol Post at Anguganak [a major CMML mission station east of

121
 A Witch’s Hand

Lumi]. Violent reaction was received against this proposal by all persons in this area.
(Hutchings 1970: 7)

If such a post were approved for Anguganak, Hutchings avers that the administration,
by “satisfying one person, has gained the distrust of 4,664 frustrated and more deserving
people” (Hutchings 1970: 8).11 Finally, he asserts the Yellow River missionaries are avidly
in favor of establishing a government station.

The Mission at Yellow River has come to realise its limitations as far as providing
services and assisting the people to develop. They are keen for the Patrol Post to be
established at Yellow River as they feel the lack of law and order in the area warrants
it. Incidences of Sanguma are numerous, thus acting as a barrier to development in any
sphere. (Hutchings 1970: 12)

Hutchings submitted his report to Broadhurst who, in turn, forwarded it to DC Wak-

eford along with his comments to Hutchings. Broadhurst’s document is missing in the
archives but is alluded to as commenting incisively on the issues raised by Hutchings,
especially regarding a Yellow River Base Camp. Wakeford’s comments, while seemingly
in favor of a base camp, suggest a procedural disagreement with his boss Tom Ellis.

The Departmental Head [Tom Ellis] made it clear to a question by Mr. Brere Awol,
M.H.A., recently that a Post at Yellow River would not be established. However this
is a matter for the Administrator’s Executive Council to decide, not an individual. I
suggest that you make a case and I will see that it goes before the Council during their
visit to this District in January [1971]. (Hutchings 1970: 4)

With Ellis away, the Acting Departmental Director, S. J. Pearson, “a very senior and
competent officer” (email from P. Broadhurst to W. Mitchell, February 4, 2015), replied
to Wakeford on December 10 with copies to Hutchings and Broadhurst. After acknowl-
edging receipt of the documents, Pearson strongly compliments Hutchings’s detailed
report then emphasizes that a Yellow River station is “a Departmental matter” and, by
inference, not the concern of the Administrator’s Executive Council. Then he comments
on Hutchings’s report.

An Informative and well presented report documenting local problems and attitudes,
as well as giving a thoughtful account of the present situation in the area.
Submissions by the A.D.C. [Broadhurst] or yourself [Wakeford] will be considered
by the Departmental Head.
Please let me have your submissions under separate memorandum. (Hutchings
1970: memorandum, n.p.)

The memoranda the acting department head requested, ostensibly championing a

Yellow River government station, were forthcoming from Broadhurst and Hutchings

11. The population figure Hutchings cites was for the South Wapei Census Division of which the
Lujere were the largest group.

122
 Colonial Twilight

but lost as they are not archived as part of Hutchings’s patrol file.12 Fortunately, Peter
Broadhurst, now retired from a second career in Australia, and I were in communication.
Although he could not locate his missing memorandum among his New Guinea papers,
in reviewing his field officer’s journal and personal papers, he remembers the approval for
the Edwaki Base Camp this way.

I am sure that the change of heart for the establishment of the Base [Camp] was
because Jacob Talis, the local member [of the House of Assembly] was agitating for
its establishment. At this time the Administration was bending over backwards to ac-
commodate the wishes of the Legislative Assembly and local members. (Email from
P. Broadhurst to W. Mitchell, January 31, 2015)

Thus, both of the area’s members in the House of Assembly, Jacob Talis and Brere
Awol, were advocating for a Yellow River government station. With the country rac-
ing towards self-government in 1973, Broadhurst writes, “I think the department want-
ed as many areas as possible under control and contact” (email from P. Broadhurst to
W. Mitchell, January 24, 2015). Eventually, “The hot potato was left to me to make a
decision and I recommended that a Post be established at Yellow River and this was ac-
cepted, in that it would start as a Base Camp so it really wasn’t a Patrol Post. . . . Pearsall
was the Acting Head and . . . Ellis approved of the action taken to establish Yellow River
on his return” (email from P. Broadhurst to W. Mitchell, February 4, 2015).13
Member Talis not only achieved his desire for an Anguganak (Yangkok) patrol post
but a base camp for Yellow River as well, thus retaining his large pool of South Wapei
Census Division voters. Ironically, by the time of the next election in 1972, although the
Lujere remained within the South Wapei Census Division, for elections to the House
of Assembly they were transferred from the Wapei-Nuku electorate to the Upper Sepik
Electorate and Member Talis could no longer represent them. This was a point of confu-
sion for some, including me, considered later in the chapter. Regardless of the adminis-
trative details, it was significant to the Lujere that after an earlier bitter disappointment,
they finally would have a government station with its own resident police and patrol
officer.
By 1963, expatriate patrol officers were no longer recruited on a career basis but on a
six-year contract and, with the increased emphasis on the localization of public service
positions, by 1970, an Indigenous ‘kiap’ was not a novelty. On April 10, Broadhurst sent
Patrol Officer Charlie Ali, a Native New Guinean, to begin establishing the newly ap-
proved base camp. Broadhurst recorded in his field officer’s journal on April 20, “Packed
my own patrol gear for departure tomorrow for Yellow River for inspection of Edwaki

12. In a memorandum that is part of the file from DC Wakeford to the Departmental Direc-
tor referencing Hutchings’s patrol report and dated January 29, 1971, he writes, “Forwarded
herewith please find the following: Copy of memorandum of 17/12/70 from the Assistant
District Commissioner at Lumi [Broadhurst] together with copy of memo from Mr. Hutch-
ings,” apparently making the case for a Yellow River government station.
13. The new Edwaki (Yellow River) Base Camp was similar in status to the administration’s
pre–World War II Yellow River police post on the Sepik River, which also never achieved the
status of a “Patrol Post.”

123
 A Witch’s Hand

Base Camp,” using the term it eventually would be called. Then, “22.4.71 [I] departed
Lumi 1:30 p.m. with CPO W. Swan per Helio aircraft for Yellow River CMML air-
strip. Met by PO Ali who has been establishing the Base Camp at Edwaki” (email from
P. Broadhurst to W. Mitchell, January 20, 2015). But there were to be more bureaucratic
stratagems before this newest of government stations was firmly staffed.
While still at the base camp helping Ali in its establishment, Broadhurst received
radioed instructions on the twenty-fourth from the deputy district commissioner in Van-
imo that he and Ali should proceed to Lumi then on to Vanimo. Broadhurst notes that,
“Apparently the Departmental secretary [Ellis] in Port Moresby instructed [Vanimo]
that he wanted an Overseas Officer [a White man] and not a Local Officer [a Black man]
at Yellow River. (I recall that there was nothing sinister in this move and that it was done
to protect the Local Officer.)” However, there was a complicating incident related to the
proposed staff change. Broadhurst writes,

On the removal of Patrol Officer Charlie Ali on Saturday 24.4.71, we were met at the
airstrip by a group of 30 rather hostile and frustrated natives who demanded that Mr.
Ali remain at Yellow River as their “Kiap.” Informed them that this matter was out of
my hands, however I stated that I would leave Mr. Swan at Edwaki to continue on with
the work undertaken by Mr. Ali. The people accepted this but requested that Mr. Ali be
returned to Yellow River. (Email from P. Broadhurst to W. Mitchell, January 31, 2015)

While in a Vanimo meeting with District Commissioner Wakeford and his deputy,
Broadhurst learned of the decision that Ali was to be transferred to the Green River Pa-
trol Post further up the Sepik River and its present officer in charge, PO Ray Lanaghan,
transferred to Edwaki Base Camp. It was a decision that piqued District Commissioner
Wakeford, who later wrote,

I still think it was a mistake to have taken Mr. Ali away from the area. I doubt if the
communication between the people and the present officer will be as effective as it was
with Mr. Ali, although he was only there a short time. (Broadhurst 1971: 17)

On the twenty-seventh, Broadhurst and Ali flew to the Green River Patrol Post where
Broadhurst picked up Lanaghan for the return flight to Vanimo then on to Lumi. Finally,
on April 13, the new base camp’s new ‘kiap,’ Ray Lanaghan, flew down from Lumi to take
charge of the camp’s further completion.14 The Edwaki Base Camp, complete with police
and a ‘kiap,’ thanks to some grassroots maneuvering in a colonial bureaucracy knowingly
soon to end, was at last a staffed reality.

Here Come the Anthropologists!

The anthropologist, wherever she or he works in the field, is a very different creature
from the ‘kiap’ or missionary who has entered the bush to intervene as a change agent or
enforcer in the lives of the local people. These ‘kiaps’ and missionaries enter an unknown

14. This paragraph is based on an email, Peter Broadhurst to author, January 31, 2015.

124
 Colonial Twilight

environment, often unfriendly, committed to their interventionist role as a civilizing in-

fluence in transforming the society into a version of their own Western one. It is not easy
work, and they frequently spend their entire career dedicated to the task. The anthropolo-
gists of my generation were seldom activists in the field; we came to learn, not to change.
Although I was the first and only anthropologist to settle down and live with the Lujere,
I was preceded by a distinguished succession of anthropologists including the pioneering
Richard Thurnwald and a later group of both female and male anthropologists making
collections of cultural objects for the world’s museums.15
After Thurnwald made his cursory “first contact” exploring visits to the Lujere up the
Yellow and Sand Rivers in March and November of 1914, it was almost forty-five years
before another anthropologist visited them. Between the late 1950s and my 1971 arrival,
several anthropologists, namely Alfred Bühler and Meinhard and Gisela Schuster from
Switzerland, Barry Craig from Australia, and Antje and Heinz Kelm from Germany,
made brief artifact-collecting patrols among the Lujere. In 1959, Alfred Bühler was on
the Sepik River collecting for Basel’s Museum für Völkerkunde. Low water prevented
him from entering the Yellow River, but he collected at the Lujere village of “old” Tipas
(Sipas, Sipat, Ameni) inland from “new” Tipas on the north coast of the Sepik and just
east of the Yellow River’s mouth (Fyfe 2006: 2–3). There he collected 186 items plus
shields he apparently bought from a trader further down river, probably in Ambunti.
In 1965, Meinhard and Gisela Schuster, also from Basel’s museum, now renamed
Museum der Kulturen, traversed the Sepik River on a small houseboat extensively col-
lecting Sepik artifacts (Schuster 1967). They visited the Lujere villages of Bapi, Yegerapi,
and Iwani and purchased 197 items. During a 2017 trip to Basel, I received from the
museum’s retired director Meinhard Schuster and retired curator Christian Kaufmann, a
copy of the recent catalogue of their Lujere objects and the present curator, Dr. Beatrice
Voirol, kindly showed me the Lujere artifacts collected by the Schusters and Bühler, all
expertly stored off-site.16
Antje and Heinz Kelm who, as noted earlier, worked in Kwieftim and Abrau villages
in 1969–70, made a collection for Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde. Both of their field
site villages bordered traditional enemy Lujere villages to the south. The Kelms collected
in Yegerapi, Norambalip, and Ali (letter from H. Kelm to W. Mitchell, September 20,
1972). Dr. Antje Kelm, in an email message to the author, September 17, 2014, mentions
their trek from Abrau to Norambalip village: “From Abrau we only once visited the vil-
lage of Norambalip along the Yellow River to see their material culture and to buy, if pos-
sible, some of their items. We were able to get some shields there.” They were, however of
recent origin made in the 1960s with iron tools. “Older shields from colonial times were
not to be had among the Yellow River villages when we were there.” Other than collect-
ing for the Berlin museum, they also gave some Lujere artifacts to the PNG National
Museum and Art Gallery in Port Moresby.17

15. For an anthropologist’s perception of the critical views of anthropological fieldwork in their
country expressed by Papua New Guinea university students, see Gordon (1981).
16. In 1984, the museum was the site for the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s international Sepik
symposium (Lutkehaus et. al. 1990) organized in part by Schuster, Kaufmann, and me.
17. Since the Germans first went up the Sepik River in the late nineteenth century, the art and
crafts of the local people have been collected and then taken abroad to be displayed and stored

125
 A Witch’s Hand

Barry Craig, today the doyen of Sepik art, was a Sydney University graduate student in
anthropology when he made his second artifact-collecting trip to the Sepik region, having
just finished his master’s thesis on the Mountain Ok (Craig 1969). On June 30, 1969, he
flew to Yellow River in a six-seater Cessna 185 plane, the largest plane that could land there,
and for the next seven days assiduously collected Lujere ethnographic data and artifacts. The
CMML missionary Bruce Crowther, who had returned from Australia, met Craig’s plane
and helped orient him to the culture. He also gave him information about how long it took
to walk between villages, which was especially useful when one’s time was limited and en-
ergy might be flagging. He camped in Yegerapi’s ‘haus kiap’ then next morning climbed the
steep motorbike trail to the mission atop Edwaki Hill to get A$40 in coins to facilitate his
buying. Craig, a dedicated trekker, visited Yegerapi, Alai, Naum, Nami, Walakori (Worikori),
Akwom, Bapi (Pabei), Iwani, Wakau, Mukudami, Yaru and Norambalip (see map 5).18
Twenty-two pages of his collecting expedition’s report (Craig 1972) are concerned
with the Lujere and is the first publication about them. As their language had no analysis
other than its classification until 1986, when Tom and Becky Feldpausch of the Summer
Institute of Linguistics (SIL) came to live in Yaru village, Craig collected Namia word
lists as well as cultural and social data. While of importance, his most original data are
those he collected on Lujere designs via shields and men’s designs painted for him. While
in Bapi he photographed eight Lujere shields and also made a detailed sketch of each one
noting its timber source and identifying the symbolic meaning of its component designs
(Craig 1972: 10). In both Naum and Iwani, where he spent the night, he gave men mark-
ing pens to draw their shield designs on paper and his notes follow their work, including
their mistakes made in a non-correctible medium.19 Several men might begin working
on a single design, hoping to access Craig’s monetary reward. His conclusion in Iwani on
their aptitude to work with this new medium was this:

Despite the tentative marks to guide the application of colour in the left hand end
of the second design, it was done incorrectly and attempts to correct it were not suc-
cessful. It is evident that most of the men are not competent artists at all – probably
only a few men are sufficiently aware of what they are doing to do a really good job.
Identification of such men is difficult without knowing the language and it would be
necessary to overcome the inappropriate motives [being paid] for everyone claiming
he was a good artist. (Craig 1972: 31)

in the world’s museums, great and small. In 1982, Michael Somare, born and raised in the
Sepik River Basin and Papua New Guinea’s first Premier, was in New York City to address
the United Nations and to receive the first Pacific Man of the Year award in a ceremony at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his comments accepting the award, he said he would use the
$10,000 accompanying it towards establishing a museum on the Sepik River. It didn’t hap-
pen, but the National Museum and Art Gallery contains collections of the Sepik River Basin
artifacts and, since 1986, the Michael Somare Gallery for temporary exhibits.
18. Craig’s excellent map shows all of the Lujere villages during my fieldwork except Yawari and
Montopai up high on the Sand River, and Purami and Panawai on the south side of the Sepik
River.
19. The “lapse-time” progress of the joint painting by men of three shield designs, one in Naum
and two in Iwani, is shown in illuminating detail in Craig (1975: 431–37).

126
 Colonial Twilight

Map 5. Lujere villages visited by Barry Craig on his 1969 collecting trip. Courtesy of Barry Craig.

127
 A Witch’s Hand

Although not entranced with some of the Iwani male’s artistic prowess,20 Craig (1972:
27) was captivated, as Joyce and I were later, with Iwani’s locale on Mauwi hill: “Wonder-
ful view to all points of the compass. . . . Smoke rising from a bush camp below. . . the
sunset emphasized the deep blue silhouette of the jagged Yagroni Hills.” After buying
about fifty objects and having lunch, he and his carriers started the hike down Mauwi hill
towards Mukudami at 2:35 p.m. At 3:10, they stopped at Iwop Creek, about six feet wide,
so the carriers could take a five-minute bath and arrived at Wakau at 3:35 p.m. Singularly
unimpressed after Iwani’s panoramic views, he matter-of-factly notes: “Purchased several
objects at Wakau, including a shield and departed at 3.55 p.m.” With the equator’s short
afternoons, he wanted to reach Mukudami long before dark so he could pay off his carri-
ers, set up his camp, wash and eat before the sun dropped out of sight. For Craig, twenty
minutes in Wakau was just right and it was time well spent. His feat was collecting a rare
old Lujere shield made in the 1920s by Weima for Sydney’s Australian Museum (Beran
and Craig 2005: 77).21
By the time he returned to Yegerapi he needed seven carriers for his purchases. The
last villages he visited were Yaru and Norambalip. Craig, hiking back down to Yegerapi
on Sunday, July 6, his last full day with the Lujere, stopped in Yaru for a half hour to
purchase artifacts before arriving in Yegerapi at 4:20 p.m. He writes:

Got artifacts ready for flying out tomorrow and departed at 5.30 p.m. for the Mis-
sion, arriving 6.10 p.m. Had been invited for a meal and had a warm bath – delicious!
I found out later that a ‘tumbuan’ ceremony [probably na wowi] had been organized
at Norambalip for this evening but I was not told about it whilst I was there. . . Rose
6.50 a.m. Had everything carried down to the airstrip shed: ten shields, two ‘tum-
buan’ [masks] . . . four small rice-bags full of objects, two patrol boxes, two rucsacs,
a bundle of fish nets, a bundle of sago-pounders, two bundles of arrows and one of
bows. . . . Waited for plane from 9.20 a.m. to 11.30 a.m. Loaded and took off at 12
noon (AMAF Cessna 185); arrived Green River c. [circa] 12.20 p.m. (Craig 1972: 34)

After collecting in villages further up the Sepik River near the international border,
he traveled back down the river, stopping in Aukwom and Tipas in mid-July to make his
final purchases of Lujere artifacts. In all, Craig collected 499 Lujere objects.22

20. Lujere’s artistic concerns, compared to the societies of the middle Sepik, e.g., the Kwoma’s
(Bowden 1983) elaborate carvings and painted art creations, were relatively slight. I kept in
my ‘ofis’ [office] while living with both the Wape and the Lujere, paper and a box of crayons
that were available to anyone who wanted to draw or make pictures. The Wape, unlike the
Lujere, tended to be avid amateur artists with a strong sense of design and color. Only four
Wakau youths and two adults, Oria and Samaun, made any drawings, just twenty-one in all.
Usually only a single or at most two crayons were used in making repetitive marks or simple
drawings covering the page.
21. See chapter 9 for a photograph of the shield and more information on the Lujere fight shield.
22. Craig’s collecting expedition was financed by the Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin; the Rijks-
museum voor Volkenkendek, Leiden; and the Australian Museum, Sydney. The objects were
distributed to these museums and Port Moresby’s National Museum and Art Gallery.

128
 Colonial Twilight

The Fast Track to Independence

While the remote Lujere seemed light years away from the political ferment in the Ter-
ritory’s national scene, this time marked “the closing of the colonial frontier” (Bracken
2007: 206), a nationwide period of tremendous governmental turmoil that rarely, if ever,
entered into the consciousness of men and women like the Lujere located on the fringe
of national life. But the changes underway would, sooner than later, impact the lives of
New Guineans living in the country’s rural backwaters as sure as they would the lives of
the urban dwellers. We already have seen a suggestion of it in the saga of the Yellow River
Base Camp.
Following World War II, many of the world’s colonial dependencies began to seek
independence from their current rulers, but not the Territory of Papua and New Guinea
(with the two prewar territories now combined and administered as one). With the Japa-
nese gone, the Australians were back in force, both politically and commercially. When I
began my Lujere study, the expatriate population reached its peak of over 50,00 in 1971
(Lipscom, McKinnon, and Murray 1998: 19). The road to the country’s independence
was initiated by neither the Australian rulers nor their Indigenous subjects but by exter-
nal world opinion, especially from the UN. “A visiting UN mission in 1962 stressed that
if the people weren’t pushing for independence, then it was Australia’s responsibility to
do the pushing” (1998: 19).
Knowing that self-government and then independence were inevitable, the tenor and
active concern of the Australian government towards their colonial territory gradually
shifted as the establishment of the Edwaki Base Camp demonstrates.23 “Nativisation”
(Rowley 1966: 9) or “localization”24 of the expats’ public service roles became an over-
riding concern as not only the government, but the missions began to train and prepare
local men and woman to assume new authoritative positions even as the expats debated
whether to remain in New Guinea or explored new lives back home or elsewhere.25 The
inevitable project of decolonization was clumsily underway.
The sixties were a time of social turbulence felt most acutely in the areas where towns
had grown, and lawlessness was on the increase.26 Some rural young men with a rudimen-
tary education but few marketable skills migrated to the towns seeking work that was
unavailable and fell into marauding gangs that coalesced at night to rob and rape. Com-
monly referred to as ‘raskols’ in both Tok Pisin and English, they continue even today
as a community threat and social problem indicating the persistent disjuncture between
the country’s economic and educational infrastructures. But the Lujere, with no towns or

23. Wolfers (1971) discusses in detail the Territory’s political development from World War II to
1970, focusing on the process and problems of decolonization as does Rowley (1966), whose
time frame for the impact of colonial rule is more sweeping.
24. By the time of my 1970s fieldwork, “localization” had become the preferred term to use, and
“natives” was gradually being replaced by “locals.”
25. Papua New Guinea’s national newspapers, e.g., the Papua New Guinea Post Courier “Letters to
the Editors,” often decried a rush to independence that the editors headlined in the June 18,
1970, edition, as “Territory is still not ready for independence.”
26. L. W. Johnson (1983), the Territory’s last Administrator, ruefully reflects back upon these
changes.

129
 A Witch’s Hand

roads, a single small elementary school, and little connection to national media, remained
peaceful and as quietly unaware of impending “self-government” and “independence,”
just as, over a hundred years earlier, they had been unaware of the Kaiser’s suzerainty over
them.
To appreciate the lack of the Indigenous population’s political influence in the colo-
nial government and the rapid rate of political change envisioned, a look at the role of the
Territory’s Legislative Council established after World War II is helpful.

Throughout the 1950s the Legislature Council had consisted of 29 members: 16 of-
ficials, plus the Administrator as chairman; 3 Europeans elected by an exceedingly
apathetic expatriate population; 6 other non-indigenous, nominated non-officials (in-
cluding three mission representatives to look after Indigenous interests); and 3 nomi-
nated indigenes [my emphasis] (by custom, one each from Papua, the New Guinea
mainland, and the New Guinea islands). The indigenous nominees were comparatively
quiet, moderate, progovernment men, accepted as leaders of their people probably by
no more than a few villages in each of their vast “constituencies.” The Australian gov-
ernment was pledged to change this structure only in accordance with indigenous
demands, and then only in the direction of increasing the indigenous component in
the legislature. (Wolfers 1971: 147)

While slight changes in the Legislative Council were made, the administration’s ma-
jor preoccupation was with the “grassroots” development of local government councils
throughout the Territory that brought groups of villages together into a democratic local
government with the power of taxation. The administration toyed with the idea of devel-
oping a local council for the Lujere but were convinced the Lujere were too remote and
economically disadvantaged to sustain the financial obligations. It is significant that the
Lujere themselves resisted this progressive change, preferring the prewar system of direct
rule, a legacy of the Germans’ nineteenth-century regime, with the ‘kiap’s appointment of
‘luluais’ and ‘tutuls’ who were usually blithely ignored except during the ‘kiap’s rare visits.
But, as we have seen, they did want a local government station that, to them, offered the
possibility of local jobs, and policing of the perceived rampant ‘sanguma’ scourge.
In 1964 the Territory’s first House of Assembly replaced the Legislative Council as
the country’s legislature. Like the previous Legislative Council, it was subordinate to the
Australian government and, within the country, subordinate to the Administrator, a non-
elected executive appointed by Australia’s Governor General who, in turn, was appointed
by the Queen on advice of the Australian Prime Minister. Despite the House of As-
sembly’s royal colonial trappings, its composition was a major step towards a democratic
legislature.27 Ten of its sixty-four members were nominated by the Administrator and ap-
pointed by the Governor General. The remaining members were elected, thus providing a
majority of Indigenous women and men. Membership in the 1968 House was increased

27. Grosart (1972b) provides a full account of the establishment and composition of the 1964 and
1968 House of Assembly. For a sympathetic but wry account of the struggles with the idea
of a representational government by House Members and their constituents see Mair (1970:
44–57).

130
 Colonial Twilight

to ninety-four, of whom Jacob Talis was one, with ten appointees. During my fieldwork
in Wakau, there was another national election in April 1972, reported on in chapter 11.
In 1965 the House of Assembly created a “Select Committee on Constitutional De-
velopment” and in 1971 they recommended, many thought rashly, that the Territory pre-
pare for self-government. In the towns and larger stations like Lumi, locals and expats
alike were acutely aware of this accelerated thrust towards self-government and discussed
and argued exactly how and when it should be accomplished. However, when the Lujere’s
aspiration for a government station was achieved early in 1971, their political concerns
appeared to shrink back to the social affairs of everyday village life and to most the idea
of self-government was just an abstract, even meaningless, foreign phrase. That was the
local situation while I lived among the Lujere.
Regardless of the Lujere’s lack of attentiveness to their country hurtling towards na-
tionhood, on the first of December 1973 the Territory became self-governing followed
by independence on September 16, 1975. To mark the latter occasion, the Queen sent
her son, His Royal Highness Prince Charles, to represent her and he was joined in the
main ceremony in Port Moresby by Sir John Kerr, governor general of Australia, Aus-
tralian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, and Michael Somare, chief minister of Papua
New Guinea, who was born and raised in a village on the lower Sepik River and became
the country’s first prime minister. As a constitutional monarchy with membership in
the British Commonwealth, the new nation of Papua New Guinea joined the United
Nations on October 10, 1975. While many of the local citizens of Port Moresby, towns,
and larger stations were undoubtedly aware of these historic events, with few radios or
newspaper readers among the Lujere, even had they known, these events were as relevant
to their daily activities as snow is to making sago jelly.28

28. The lack of any form of modern media was one of the defining characteristics of Lujere soci-
ety during my tenure among them. The observant patrol officer Ric Hutchings (1970: 13) who
made several patrols to Lujere villages wrote, “Radios and newspapers have no role to play
in the lives of these people. At present this social structure is basically as it was traditionally,
therefore not requiring such aids to entertainment.”

131
chapter six

The Search for a Village

It is best to choose for the first centre of study a locality well

removed from the main focus of foreign influence.
Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 1951

Scientifically, it is one thing to have museum collections of a society’s material culture, but
quite another to have an ethnographic account of its way of life. Both are important but
obviously very different. The former is usually done expeditiously, moving quickly from
village to village as we saw in the last chapter, while the latter demands the anthropolo-
gist to stop, settle down, and smell the smoking fires. I too made a collection of Lujere
artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History in New York1 just before I re-
turned home, but in June of 1971, the Lujere were still unknown to me. I was living with
the Wape in the Torricelli Mountains knowing only that I soon wanted to study one of
the undocumented cultures south of them toward the Sepik River. I could only discover
which one by scouting their villages to find a welcoming one that was compatible to my
research. Having found my Wape field site village comparatively easily, this would be a
tougher undertaking than I expected. But I was not the first ethnographer to explore the
Yellow River area for a research site.

Gilbert Lewis’s Lujere Experience

In November of 1967, Gilbert Lewis arrived in Lumi from London for two years of
research and in need of an appropriate village. Lewis already had a medical degree from

1. Photos of the Lujere objects I collected for the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City, may be accessed online from their website. I also gave objects to the Papua New
Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery, and University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum.

133
 A Witch’s Hand

Oxford, but his study of a Sepik society would be the basis for his doctoral thesis in social
anthropology at the London School of Economics; his supervisor would be Anthony
Forge, who had worked with the Abelam of the Middle Sepik Region. Lewis was still
new to Lumi when he had a felicitous opportunity to fly down to Yellow River on an
MAF plane. Some of his gear had not arrived in Lumi but the CMML missionary Ces
Parish, who welcomed him, loaned him a mosquito net and daypack, and then found two
guides to accompany him. Lewis recalls,

I spent a few days in the Yellow River area when I was an absolute beginner . . . I
couldn’t speak pidgin. . . . It was my first trip [to find a village] just after introduction
to Lumi. Yellow River is to me a slightly dream-like sudden jump into Sepik fieldwork,
the noise of a flock of hornbills . . . Sepik faces saying things to me but I couldn’t un-
derstand. And I remember big stripey-legged mosquitoes. (Email from G. Lewis to
W. Mitchell, April 10, 2014)

He visited Iwani’s Mauwi hamlet, then Akwom and Naum villages east of the Yellow
River. He also remembered

walking in sometimes water logged bush, pulling off leeches, stopping in at least two
villages overnight, the rectangular square ended houses, rather empty villages, people
a bit shy but coming with curiosity, not understanding what they said, picking up bits
of pidgin, trying saksak [sago] for the first time, sharing [my] tinpis [canned fish] and
rais [rice]. (Email from G. Lewis to W. Mitchell, May 2, 2014)

Leaving the sweltering grasslands, Lewis returned to mountainous Lumi and, like
Fr. James before him, never came back. Within weeks he had located a village in the
southern foothills of the Torricelli Mountains east of Lumi where he settled among the
Gnau. His village of Rauit sat atop Anguganak Bluff with both views and breezes and
no leeches or “stripey-legged mosquitoes.” The following May his wife Ariane and tod-
dler son Jerome joined him.2 The family remained based in Rauit until mid-November
of 1969, when, with his two years of productive fieldwork completed that included his
mastery of both Tok Pisin and a challenging unrecorded Papuan language, they returned
to London.
In early March of 1969, I was planning my grant submissions for fieldwork and,
learning from the Man in New Guinea Newsletter of Lewis’s presence in the Lumi Sub-
District where I hoped to work, I wrote him a page-and-a-half single-spaced letter filled
with searching questions, as the area was anthropologically unknown. To my elation, in
early May I received a six-page single-spaced letter complete with a small sketch map of

2. Dr. Gilbert A. Lewis and I remained in correspondence until shortly before his lamented
death in 2020; his son Jerome Lewis continues the anthropological tradition with a 2002 PhD
in anthropology from London School of Economics, research on the hunter-gatherer people
of Central Africa, and as a lecturer at University College London where he is co-director of
the Extreme Citizen Science Research group, co-director of UCL’s Environment Institute,
and Director of Anthroscape Ltd.

134
 The Search for a Village

Lumi Sub-District for orienting his detailed remarks—a nascent fieldworker’s treasure.3
It was a meticulous introduction to the sprawling area, replete with historic, geographic,
climatic, environmental, ethnographic, missionary and administration data—a precious
document of strategic facts gleaned from his many months of on-the-ground experience.
I spent hours poring over its contents trying to absorb its knowledge and becoming fa-
miliar with its exotic names, places, and ideas. For example, his letter was probably the
first time I had seen a definition for the occult word ‘sanguma,’ a concept I focus on in
chapters 16 and 17 of this book and is a conspicuous thread of inquiry throughout the
text.
Knowing that Lewis also was a physician and in the field with his wife and toddler
son, I again prevailed on his kindness with questions on how to keep a family healthy in
a tropical environment and for any tropical housekeeping advice he and his wife could
give Joyce and me. As if his encyclopedic letter was not a sufficient gift to a fieldworker
colleague, shortly after they had returned to London in early January 1970, I received an-
other superbly detailed letter regarding health hazards and how to hopefully avoid them
or treat them, with special medical concerns regarding children and an addendum by his
wife Ariane, with astute comments on the care of her little son and advice on ordering
supplies from Wewak, local food available, lighting, cooking, and keeping clean in a forest
village with no modern infrastructures.

The Search
Eventually, to our great relief and jubilation, we learned that our research grant was fund-
ed, and we could begin to actively benefit from the Lewis’s generous help. On April 1,
1970 (April Fools’ Day), Joyce, Ned, Elizabeth, and I flew to London from Montreal on
the first leg of our journey to PNG. We were delighted to spend a day with Gilbert and
Ariane Lewis and their young sons in their London home to personally thank them for
their diligent help and learn in even more astute depth about the encounter before us.
At that meeting I had no idea that I would be studying the Lujere. But, as Gilbert
talked about the different cultural groups he knew, he touched upon his brief visit to the
“Yellow River people,” apologizing for his lack of cultural information about them as
he was just learning pidgin. I scribbled in my notebook that they were long, tall people,
probably sorcery-ridden, were famous for their now rare but beautiful shields, women
even at the mission station wore traditional string skirts, and that one missionary told
him the Iwani villagers were the “wild” ones. This was the first information I learned
about the Lujere, all substantiated by my research except that I found the Lujere much
shorter than he recalled. Lewis’s research among the Gnau was primarily on illness and
ritual. Like the acclaimed English anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, also a physician, Lewis
was a prodigious fieldworker and talented linguist who learned the language and had a
physician’s critically nuanced eye that is abundantly evident in his richly detailed books
(1975, 1980, 2000, 2021) and articles on the Gnau.

3. Among others to whom I wrote for information who worked, or had worked, in the West
Sepik District and were generous with helpful information were Drs. Jared Diamond, Leo
Hoy, John Sturt, and Lynette Wark.

135
 A Witch’s Hand

A Hasty Flight to Edwaki Base Camp

In early June 1971, Lumi’s ADC Peter Broadhurst asked if I would like to accompany
him and the Acting District Commissioner from Aitape, Trevor Bergin, on a govern-
ment-chartered inspection flight to the Edwaki Base Camp (see fig. 5) and then to the
Yankok Patrol Post near the Anguganak airstrip, both recently approved and constructed
administrative bases. Also aboard were Police Inspector MacDonald and H. Muller, the
latter from the Department of Agriculture, Stock, and Fisheries (DASF). They had of-
ficial business to pursue, but Peter knew I was planning to make my next research village
somewhere in the area south of the Wape and this would give me a chance, for free, to
have a whirlwind fly-over look at the Yellow River area and visit the new base camp. This
thoughtfulness of Peter was typical; he was a good friend and a good ‘kiap.’
On June 10 at 10:13 a.m., we took off and landed thirty minutes later at Yellow River.
While they conducted their business, I visited the CMML mission and, fortunately, both
resident missionary couples were there. First I had a cold drink with Rosemary and Phil-
lip Ace at their house, then coffee with Mary and Ces Parish at theirs. I also had a chance
to visit the new base camp and briefly meet the resident patrol officer, Ray Lanaghan, a
tall red-haired young Australian I immediately liked. Lanaghan had interrupted an initial
patrol (Lanaghan 1971) of the villages he was now responsible for to return to the base
camp to meet with Broadhurst and the other administration officials. Although we later
became good friends, it is ironic that he does not mention meeting me that day in his
patrol report and, in my field diary, I note meeting him but couldn’t recall his name.
At 12:30 p.m. we left the base camp for the airstrip, and at 1:00, we took off for An-
guganak, landing twenty minutes later, where we visited the Yangkok Patrol Post, and
by 3:30, we had returned to Lumi. It had been a very important day. Although I had
previously met the missionaries in Lumi, if I decided to move to this area, I had now es-
tablished friendly relations with the five strategic people I might need to call on if health
or other problems arose. Yet, I had scarcely interacted with any Yellow River locals except
for the ‘tultul’ from Yegerapi, with whom I visited while hiking up to the mission from
the airstrip. The single note in my notebook verifies this dearth of contact: “YR people:
(a) thin mouths (b) more open faces (c) thin faces.” Pathetically meager as this was for an
initial observation, it stood the test of time.

Visiting Multiple Lujere Villages

In the months following I made two patrols to the Lujere villages to search for a suitable
research site. From July 19 to 23, Joyce and I visited seven villages. Then, in a solo patrol
October 21–25, I visited four new villages and revisited two I had seen. Joyce’s brother
John Slayton was visiting us from the Netherlands where he was teaching so Joyce and
I, leaving Ned and Elizabeth in John’s care, flew from Lumi on July 19 to Magaleri (see
map 5) in MAF’s Cessna, landing at 5:30 p.m. We should have arrived earlier but the
pilot, having flown there but once, couldn’t locate the isolated village’s airstrip in the
flat-fens countryside, even though Joyce and I also searched out our windows for it. This
necessitated flying south to the Sepik River, then back north toward Abrau, before he
finally spotted it. I wrote in my notebook, “Magaleri is really in the middle of nowhere.”
It is not a Lujere village and is the only village that speaks the Amal language. Because of

136
 The Search for a Village

its large size, linguistic singularity, and geographic isolation, I wanted to start our patrol
from here just in case it was the “perfect” village. Fortunately, it wasn’t.
We toured the large village of approximately six hundred people, and later I spent over
an hour at the ‘sutboi’ [shotgun hunter] Yuwi’s house getting cultural information from
him and others who came in. Twenty-two men were away as contract laborers and the
mission’s influence was surprisingly strong for such a distant village, both negative factors
as a research site. Ces Parish, the CMML missionary, had convinced them to destroy
their large men’s house where curing rites and feasting occurred and hunting trophies, for
example, pig and crocodile skulls, had been displayed. Whereas before all males except
babies and small boys lived in the men’s house and women had their own houses, mar-
ried men now lived with their wives and single males lived together in a ‘hausboi.’ While
interesting as a large endogamous village with only one woman married in from a Sepik
(Lujere) village, male initiation seemed to be abandoned and they claimed they never
had ‘sangumamen.’ However, they assured me that Worikori village, a traditional enemy,
where Joyce and I were to trek the following morning, had plenty of them.
The long tedious walk to Worikori was reason enough not to live in Magaleri. We
left with four young men, each to get five shillings, who took turns carrying our two
backpacks. We started at around 8:30 a.m., stopping only for a brief lunch, and it was
after three before we arrived, very tired and dripping sweat. In an emergency, it would be
an even longer hike on to the base camp. Instead of bringing my canvas golf shoes with
sharp cleats to hike in, as I had done in the mountains, I unwisely brought my untried
tropical boots. All day we walked through forests and swamps. I wrote,

The walk, however, was flat but through a long stretch of sago swamp walking on logs.
Several of the many log bridges (single logs!) were very high above the water and slip-
pery. On two I got half way and had to finish on my hands and knees! Rather igno-
minious to be sure! But JM [ Joyce] with her cleats, trotted over them all. (MN: 287)

Worikori, a Lujere village, was situated park-like on both sides of a winding creek.
Several boys grabbed our dirty shoes and socks to wash in the creek and we began
a conversation with Au’uro, a young single man who welcomed us and was my main
informant. As usual, other men joined in. We were, after all, a novel distraction in an
otherwise very predictable day. I hired Wario, another young man, as our personal as-
sistant—later I learned he and Au’uro were brothers—who brought water so we could
take much-needed sponge baths. The village had a bush material church that apparently
was originally Catholic but now overseen by a man placed there by CMML who was
from Amanab near the Indonesian border. There were just two houses in the old style
with ‘limbum’ (palm bark) slats, tied together with ‘kanda’ (rattan) allowing breezes into
the house; others all had a ‘pangal’ (sago palm stem) front and back. Only four men were
away as contract laborers. From Au’uro and the others, I collected a lot of detailed ethno-
graphic information—my first on the Lujere—but was too wiped out from the long hike
to take notes. At 8:00 p.m., the ‘lululai’ paid us a call, but Joyce and I were in our sleeping
bags and asleep before 9:00.
The next morning, I was up early and at 6:30 a.m. energetically writing in my note-
book as much of the precious ethnographic data I could remember from yesterday even-
ing. I would need it when I began a book like this and wanted to compare Lujere village

137
 A Witch’s Hand

customs and ideas. The most important thing I learned was that the Lujere villages, that
is, all Namia speakers, have always been on friendly terms and never fought each other
but, it was not until I had returned to Vermont and read McCarthy’s 1936 patrol report
that this was historically verified. Their traditional enemies were Magaleri, Yilui, Yawo,
and Bulawa villages. Several villages would join in an enemy raid; the forearm of the dead
was taken as a trophy for a victory celebration. However, neither they nor their imme-
diate neighbors were cannibals. It was also interesting that they claimed ‘sanguma’ was
new; now they have a lot: “Not traditional, old men did not do it, nau tasol” (MN: 288),
but it was a view of ‘sanguma’ not replicated elsewhere in my Lujere research. Regard-
ing sorcery, if you wanted to make a person sick, you took the ground where they had
stepped, wrapped it in leaves, then hung it where branches of two separate trees touched
and rubbed in the wind making a noise.
All of the Namia speakers were said to be descendants from Iwani village and mar-
riage was by both sister exchange and bride wealth, usually thirty or forty Australian
dollars. Wario, who had just returned as a contract laborer, paid four ‘stik,’4 or forty Aus-
tralian dollars, for his new wife. Traditionally a corpse was placed on a raised platform in
front of the house; the body was covered with sago palm leaves, but the head was kept
exposed to the elements. Later the bones were collected, placed in a net bag and brought
into the house where the spirit of the deceased watched over the occupants. They had no
menstrual huts, as menstruating women slept in a corner of their house. Sago was the
main food, but gardens were not important as the pigs always dug them up. The village
had three shotguns and lots of game; one would not eat sago unless there was a bit of
game to go with it. For luck in hunting with a bow, the hunter rubs ginger on his face
then talks out to his ancestors. Neither they nor, as I would learn, any of the Lujere ever
made pottery or imported it. Regarding puberty rites, they had none now and but incon-
clusive data, as I would get for a couple other villages, regarding the past—very vague
data that in the distant past boys were brought into the men’s house and later emerged
decorated with feathers and danced in the plaza—but I couldn’t discern if this was actual
history or part of a myth. As for clans, they just had two. Au’uro and his brother belonged
to the ‘wail kokonas’ (wild coconuts) clan through their father.5
After I finished my notes and had breakfast, we started for Tipas, walking via Naum
and Akwom villages. The brothers Au’uro and Werio were our congenial guides and car-
riers. The first Naum hamlet, totally empty, had only four houses and a small but beautiful
men’s house in which were stored ceremonial paraphernalia, just some shell rings and
a few bows and arrows. Then we entered Naum, a rather strung-out ramshackle place
scorched under a blazing sun. Its only inhabitants appeared to be some children at the far
end of the village; my guides said the other villagers were probably hunting or making
sago and that fourteen men were away as contract laborers. In the center of the village a
large men’s house was being built, its framework mostly in place and the ‘morota’ (thatch
shingles) piled on the building’s ‘limbum’ floor waiting to be attached. Later, living in
Wakau, I became accustomed to, if not pleased with, an empty daytime village with

4. One stik is a role of one hundred shillings.

5. I later learned that clan membership, which I describe in chapter 12, was more complicated
than this.

138
 The Search for a Village

Figure 5. The Aukwom aid post orderly on the porch with some patients below.

everyone away in the bush working or hunting—so different from most Wape villages
where there were always some adults around that I could talk to and children playing.
With no one to talk to in Naum, we moved on, passing a big garden that Au’uro said
was made by the people of two hamlets. It had many bananas, some manioc, ‘kaukau’
(sweet potato), taro, and lots of ‘pit pit’ (wild sugarcane). It was strictly slash-and-burn
gardening, no fences or weeding, with pillaging pigs always a problem. Shortly we arrived
at Akwom’s aid post, a comparative beehive of activity, where I met the CMML male
appointee for the Worikori church, and the friendly orderly who showed us around (see
fig. 5). Entering the aid post, I took pictures where the ‘doktaboi’ or orderly sees and treats
outpatients, then we visited his little ‘haus sik’ or “hospital” where we saw several mal-
nourished babies who were languishing because he had no powered milk to give them.
It was oppressively hot, and someone kindly brought Joyce and me ‘kulaus’ (green
coconuts) to drink, filled with cool, refreshing coconut milk. Then after a short thirty-
minute walk we were in Akwom proper, a small, scruffy-looking village with no tradi-
tional houses but whose house facades were assembled from pongal (sago palm stems).
Thirteen men were away as contract laborers. Perhaps it was the heat, but I immediately
eliminated Akwom as a possible village and we moved on.
Like Worikori, Akwom had an unused airstrip the villagers made, I later learned, un-
der the planning direction of the ‘Popis.’ After all of that arduous village labor, no plane
had ever landed at either one, a fact that initially puzzled me enough to wonder if they
were part of a cargo cult and the airstrips were for flying in riches from the ancestors. But
when that was also ruled out by various conversations with those who knew the Lujere’s

139
 A Witch’s Hand

immediate history, I really forgot about them. After starting this book, I contacted pio-
neer Catholic and Protestant missionaries and administrators who might have informa-
tion about their origins. Other than being constructed in the late 1950s, I have not been
able to discover the name of the person who laid them out or exactly why.
At 12:30 p.m., we stopped for lunch in a new little hamlet our carriers had not known
about. We ate in an open-sided ‘hausboi’ while two men, four women, and fourteen chil-
dren climbed in to watch us. Heavily conditioned by our long stay with the Wape, we
turned our backs to them, eating our food privately so as not to embarrass them by seeing
us with our mouths full, chewing. They must have thought our behavior very peculiar
because the Lujere, I would learn, have no mannerly restrictions on eating in front of
others like the Wape do.
After our thirty-minute luncheon break, we struck out, and by 2:00 p.m., we were on
the north banks of the great, muddy, legendary Sepik River. Tipas, our destination, was on
a small island so some nearby men called over to the island to bring a canoe. There were
some dugout canoes around with carved traditional crocodile prow heads, but one had
an unusual fish head prow that I photographed. Joyce settled down on a house veranda
near the river’s bank with the carriers for an hour until two older women finally arrived
in a dugout to ferry us across. Tipas was a bushy, odd place with about ten good houses
and only very young coconut trees. There were lots of women and children about but very
few men. Near each house was a rude platform for smoking fish over a smoldering fire.
Everyone seemed to be eating fish and sago; so much fish! Still, we saw two of the most
malnourished children we had ever seen. Joyce ( JN 80) wrote they were “about 4 years
old with red thin hair, no buttocks, huge stomachs (spleen) and hardly able to stand up.”
We also saw some really fat babies but there was a lot of tinea, a common tropical fungal
skin infection exacerbated by warmth and high humidity, that is easy to get but often
hard to eradicate.6
Joyce and I camped in the ‘haus kiap’ that was about ten feet from the Sepik with a
cool breeze. then suddenly, a legion of mosquitoes arrived. We quickly applied some in-
sect repellant and ate in the open. After dinner I had an interview next door that Au’uro
had arranged for me on his own initiative in the ‘haus polis’ (police resthouse). Just then
his village of Worikori seemed a likely candidate for my new research, as he was the
kind of bright, interesting, and resourceful researchm assistant one hopes for. The men I
interviewed included Kanauwi, the licensed shotgun hunter, two older men, a man who
had tagged along with us from Akwom, and several boys. We squatted around a clay
hearth with a fire of dried ‘pit pit’ of which there was a lot on the island. Real firewood
and drinking water had to be ferried over. Although I obtained a lot of solid data, the
interview was sometimes difficult as they had trouble with what are usually simple things.
When I asked about clans and who belonged to what, they would have discussions before
they would come up with an answer. I also had to give them a lot of examples of the Wape
to get them talking on things.
Kanauwi finally said he was of the ‘banana’ clan, and the others were ‘kapiok’ and
‘banana,’ but since it took an inordinate amount of discussion to reach these decisions,

6. Serjeantson, Board, and Bhatia (1992: 218) note that “Tinea imbricata is common in the low-
lying and coastal areas of Papua New Guinea, where it may affect 10–20 % of the population,
but is rarely seen in the highlands.”

140
 The Search for a Village

which at best seemed tentative, I knew I did not begin to understand their descent group
system. Part of the problem, I thought, might be that some of the men had never left the
village so they had very poor Tok Pisin, but in the other Lujere village interviews, I also
had trouble getting any clan data that I felt was solid and dependable. The Tipas men
were far more articulate when describing their former cannibalistic enemies in the moun-
tains across the Sepik, the Sawiyanō, where Phillip Guddemi (1992) did field work in the
1980s. They gave me graphic, imaginary descriptions of how their enemies would cut up
their victims, throwing the parts on a fire to be cooked and eaten. But the verbal clarity
vanished when I asked about male initiation. Like in Worikori, boys apparently had been
secluded in the men’s house then brought out wearing a headdress of many feathers, such
as bird-of-paradise, Victoria crowned pigeon, and white cockatoo, for the women to see.
But I was unable, as in Worikori, to elicit further clarification as a discussion ensued re-
garding whether women were allowed in the men’s house as Kanauwi had alleged. When
the man who came with us from Akwom voiced an emphatic “no” to the idea, Kanauwi
seemed to change his view. I was, however, left again with a very vague notion of Lujere
male initiation. (Unfortunately, I had not seen Robinson’s 1932 patrol report where he
unequivocally reports they had no male initiation.) So it was rewarding to write in my
notebook something as concrete as seeing three large newly carved shields in a little shed
belonging to an Ambunti man who had bought them to sell downriver in Ambunti to
artifact dealers and collectors who don’t venture up to the remote upper Sepik Basin.
Kanauwi had agreed to take Joyce and me by canoe the following morning to Aukom,
an Iwani hamlet, on the south bank of the Sepik just above the mouth of the Yellow
River. There we would get someone to take us on to Iwani. We were all ready to leave at
7:40 a.m. when a storm came up with heavy rain and a cold wind. Finally, when the storm
had subsided, with much persuasion by me to Kanauwi who seemed to be wondering
how he had agreed to this venture, Joyce and I waded into the Sepik to climb into a typi-
cal Sepik canoe, a long, slender, and tippy dugout with an elegantly simple crocodile head
prow. Kanauwi had recruited two teenage youths to help him paddle the canoe upstream
against the current and at 9:45 we were on our way. It was not a pleasant morning, cloudy
and misting on the river. Unknowing, we passed the old locations of Richard Thurnwald’s
base camp that the Australian soldiers had raided in 1914, and the old Yellow River Po-
lice Post Hodgkiss had opened in 1936 that became the Mosstroops’s Kociabu base the
Japanese bombed in 1943.
After a little over an hour and a half we were at the mouth of the Yellow River and
in five or ten minutes more we were disembarking at Aukom. It sat on a little hill ris-
ing steeply from the south bank and consisted of six houses; only one family was home.
Kanauwi led the boys and me into the house—Joyce by choice stayed outside—where
the family was eating cooked bananas that they generously shared with us. The hamlet,
we learned, was almost empty because everyone else had gone by canoe up the Yellow
and Sand Rivers to Iwani to bury a man who died yesterday. There apparently was some
discussion in Namia about his death because I heard the Tok Pisin term ‘poisin’ (sorcery)
mentioned but not ‘sanguma.’
I now had a problem. Kanauwi had brought us to Aukwom but there was no one here
to take us on to Iwani. Kanauwi and his young helpers were stuck with us, and it was
clear they, especially Kanauwi, didn’t like it. He was insistent on taking us to the Sepik’s
north shore across from Tipas, and from there Joyce and I could start the long solo walk

141
 A Witch’s Hand

to find Iwani. Not bloody likely, I thought. I was just as insistent, maybe slightly bully-
ing, that we had to reach Iwani today, which was true. I don’t recall what I offered him,
but we left Aukom hamlet at 12:10 p.m. After a shaky crossing of the Sepik, with water
slopping into the narrow tippy canoe and his yelling can we swim or not, we proceeded
up the Yellow River. Joyce broke out some sardines and crackers with lime juice—from
a US plastic lime-shaped container—that were delicious. We shared our treat with our
three companions, hoping this would bring Kanauwi into a better humor. The storm was
long gone and the sun was blazing.
Eventually Kanauwi decided to leave the boat on the shore, and we struck out on a
path next to the river. As no one knew the path, there were several false leads before we
hit the main one. All of this indecision was making Joyce anxious. We traveled very fast
as it was midafternoon, and Kanauwi and I were also getting anxious, afraid we would be
caught hiking after dark on an unfamiliar and very narrow winding trail. At last, we came
to the Sand River, a good sign of progress, and must wade or swim across. Kanauwi sug-
gested I go first but knowing the danger of crocodiles lurking under the water and not ex-
perienced enough to read the depth, I demurred. After a pause and a close perusal of the
area he started across and we all trailed behind him wading just thigh deep. From then
on, we slogged through sago swamps until late in the afternoon when we heard wailing.
To my relief, Kanauwi said we were near the Iwani hamlet just beneath the mountain
and where the dead man lay. He then explained as a way of warning, it was their custom
for men and women to take off their clothes when mourning. As we approached the
hamlet a woman saw us and ran off. By the time we arrived at the impressive men’s house,
the largest one I had seen, everyone was wearing a bit of Western clothing and cordially
welcomed us; the most cordial welcome we had had. The old men were smiling, there was
much shaking of our hands, and children crowded about taking it all in.
To our surprise, it turned out they were expecting us. Ray, the Yellow River ‘kiap’ who
knew of our plan to be in Iwani tonight and fly back to Lumi tomorrow, had sent ‘mulis’
(oranges) and onions over to Iwani for us and the word spread that a White couple was
coming. Joyce, they said, was the first White woman to enter the hamlet. Joyce and our
boat crew climbed on up the hill to the main Iwani hamlet, but I stopped to visit with
the people. This lower hamlet, (Iwariyo), had only four houses. The body was in the men’s
house and I was told women were in there too. Then I started getting conflicting reports;
some said he was buried, others said not until tomorrow morning. This wasn’t helpful;
feeling tactfully aware of my alienage, I decided to join Joyce on top, all the while think-
ing this might be the only funeral I will see during my fieldwork, and planning to return
after I had dinner.
The trail was steep and the red claylike soil slippery but on finally reaching the top I
found Joyce standing in the hamlet’s plaza; it was like being on top of the world. There
were fabulous views in every direction. It was sunset and the sky was aflame; we had never
seen anything quite like it and we both agreed—this is it. The immensely tall coconuts
defined Iwani’s antiquity; it was later confirmed by others as the original ancestral home
to all the Lujere villages. But there was no men’s house, just the old worn house poles that
outlined a former one. We saw some wildflowers in bloom and the setting was almost
alpine with occasional stone outcroppings.
It was a spectacular spot, certainly the most desirable place physically I had seen
on the patrol for my new fieldwork. The ‘haus kiap,’ our camp for the night, was very

142
 The Search for a Village

removed from the hamlet so we descended the ridge a bit then walked along the trail
until we found it. Writing today, I imagine the Mosstroops’s Iwani camp was probably
located in the same area, but back then, I did not have the knowledge to ask. Our new
Iwani assistant, Bie, and his sidekick, Arian, were already there, both from Iwani and
recently married. After a dinner with Ray’s cooked onions to enliven our dreary canned
fish and his exotic oranges for dessert, we went out to look at the stars and found the
Southern Cross. I decided not to return to the funeral; I couldn’t overcome my feelings
that I was an insensitive intrusive stranger just barging in. Then there was that slippery
trail down and the climb back up in the dark. We crawled into our sleeping bags and eas-
ily fell asleep after a day, for us, of high adventure.
After breakfast I interviewed Bie while he was cleaning up, but did not feel that he
was a reliable informant—not in the sense that he was intentionally dishonest, but in the
sense that he seemed to paint a more modern picture of his people that was in line with
his own personal aspirations. A projection of personality to a culture, you might say. On
male initiation he drew a total blank and had no details on curing rites or clans. Joyce
and I walked through the hamlet a couple of times to take photos, then headed for Ed-
waki, the Yellow River Base Camp, arriving in just under two hours. We had an animated
lunch with Ray, thanked him for his gustatory gifts, then Joyce visited Mary Parish and
Rosemary Ace at the CMML mission while their husbands, Ces and Phillip, came over
to visit with Ray and me. When it was nearing time for our plane to Lumi, the men, who
would be meeting it on their motorbikes, gave us an easy lift down the hill.
On our flight back to Lumi on the administration’s scheduled charter, Vince, the pilot,
kindly circled our Wape village of Taute twice so I could photograph it. That evening I
had a chance to chat with Father James, ever gracious, at the expat’s clubhouse. The fol-
lowing morning before returning to Taute I interviewed him at the Catholic Mission
about his early years in Lumi with the Wape, unaware that in 1949, he was also the first
missionary to visit the Lujere.

Narrowing the Options

On October 21, I flew in the CMML plane to Yellow River to continue my search for
a research site. Ray was away on patrol, but had offered me the hospitality of the base
camp. The base’s two policemen, Tabinum and Wai (the latter from Tambunam village
on the middle Sepik, where I had worked the summer of 1967) welcomed me, as did
Makau, the base’s interpreter from Mageleri village. Ray had appointed Manwai from
nearby Yegerapi as my assistant and carrier/guide. New voting boundaries had placed
the Yellow River area into the Ambunti election precinct (not in Lumi) for choosing its
member to the national House of Assembly and the present member, Nauwi Saunmabi
from Ambunti, was there to meet some of his new constituents. Men had gathered in the
dirt plaza between the base camp’s office and the policemen’s building for a meeting that
began around 5:30 p.m. and continued for several hours.
After the talk by the House of Assembly member, he asked to hear the people’s con-
cerns. Makau was the first to speak and among his comments he voiced the need for a
‘dittiman’ (agriculture officer) to help resolve the area’s economic plight and the need for
more schools, teachers and teaching supplies. Litabagi, the aid post orderly in Yegera-
pi and a Lujere resident, had some strong thoughts about the deadly assaults of the

143
 A Witch’s Hand

‘sangumamen’ and wanted them all thrown into prison until they died. He also com-
plained that the locals did not help supply his family with food or keep the grass cut
around the aid post, both nominal expectations of villagers with a resident orderly. This
aroused the member to say he would report this concern to the health authorities and,
if the villagers didn’t give more support to the orderly, he personally would place him in
a village that would. Of course, he didn’t have that power, but the locals did not know
this so there was more discussion and rehashing the same topics over and over. Hungry,
I went up the ladder into the base camp and continued to listen while I ate. There were
about twenty-five men at the meeting, which finally ended at 8:15 p.m., when someone,
I couldn’t see who, made a single loud clap. The only woman present was the wife of the
aid post orderly. Later I learned that she was one of his several wives, a very unusual cir-
cumstance among the Lujere.
Earlier Makau, a locally knowledgeable and helpful man, and I looked at some of
Ray’s local maps, and I decided to cross the Yellow River near Alai village the next day,
then continue on via Naum, which I had already visited with Joyce, to Nami village
where I would spend the night. The next morning before breakfast, I had coffee with the
two policemen and Member Nauwi where there was more conversation condemning the
‘sangumamen.’ Nakaki, originally from Alai and now living in Naum, joined Manwai
and me to be my volunteer guide for the day. By 8:45 a.m., we were underway. For some
reason I decided to bring only my Leica camera dedicated to Kodachrome film. We did
not stop in Alai as it was not a research site candidate, being too close to the mission and
government stations. At 10:00 a.m., we crossed the very brown Yellow River in a canoe
and at 11:40 a.m. entered Naum village. En route there was more talk about ‘sanguma’ as
the scourge of the area. One of the men had a bamboo jaw harp that he said was tradi-
tional, not new.7 I also asked about marriage and other customs, but it seemed that every
topic inevitably returned to ‘sanguma.’ I photographed the large newly completed men’s
house I had photographed in its initial stages in July. Inside there were bloodstains on the
center pole. Someone gave me a refreshing ‘kulau’ to drink and I visited with the ‘luluai’
while we waited for Nakaki’s mother to bring us some sago. The village had about fifteen
houses, mostly old style and a few with no sides, scattered randomly along and around
the large open area.
It was here that I first heard about the small groups of White men with Native po-
licemen—the Mosstroops, I much later learned—during World War II, and the locals’
killing one of their policemen who had sex with a village woman; this then morphed into
a story of a ‘masta’ being killed and eaten in the mountains across the Sepik. There were
more remembrances of ‘masta mak’ during the war and seeing their first White men. Af-
ter the war, a recruiter came down from Lumi to recruit laborers, the first to leave from
the Lujere villages northeast of the Yellow River.
As we talked, I was aware of many annoying flies, the first I had experienced in such
numbers, and that several of the men had a type of aquiline noses I couldn’t recall seeing
among the Wape. The sago arrived and, because it had been cooked on a stone, tasted
delicious, at least in comparison with to the large gelatinous boluses or ‘hatwara’ sago

7. I also collected several for the American Museum of Natural History, but see the jaw harps
from Papua New Guinea on display at the National Music Museum: http://collections.nm-
musd.org/Oceania/1438PapuaNewGuineaJewsHarp/JewsHarps1438-1442.html.

144
 The Search for a Village

Figure 6. A Lujere man stands on the porch of a traditional-style men’s house (iron), one of two
in Nami village.

that are preferred by many Wape but that I find, groping for a polite term, unacceptable.
Our conversation continued and I was delighted to see the men eating openly together,
not turning away Wape-style to eat unseen. Like other New Guinea men who have
adopted cloth clothing but without money for the luxury of soap, their dingy shorts and
‘laplaps’ (waistcloth) bore stains and grime that water alone couldn’t remove. While cloth
clothing, regardless how shabby, identified them as modern men, it was not necessarily
an improvement in style, hygiene, or simplicity over their forefathers’ jauntily elegant
phallocrypts.8
Leaving Naum at 12:25 p.m., we arrived in Nami, named for its creek, and at 2:00
we headed for the ‘haus kiap’ where I would sleep, and we appreciatively drank a ‘kulau.’
Nami was one of the newest Lujere villages and its founder came from Alai. Apai, a
strong and humorous man, greeted me and had his pregnant wife Bodtwai, bring two
‘limbums’ (shallow buckets made from a palm’s flower sheath) of water so that I could
wash up. But I was more interested in seeing the village than getting cleaned up—there
were two large, well-constructed men’s houses (fig. 6)—besides, with the sweaty heat, it

8. “In 1971–1972 the Indonesian government [in New Guinea] launched Operation Koteka
(“Operation Penis Gourd”) which consisted primarily of trying to encourage people to wear
shorts and shirts because such clothes were considered more “modern,” but the people did not
have changes of clothing, did not have soap and were unfamiliar with the care of such clothes
so the unwashed clothing caused skin diseases.”

145
 A Witch’s Hand

was too early. As we rested Nakaki joked with Apai, obviously his friend, and as others
came in the conversation (all in Tok Pisin) was about work and wondering when the ‘kiap’
would return, with the implication that when he did, there would be paying jobs at Ed-
waki complete with a local boss who would oversee the work. It was the perennial dream
of these men: a money-making job near home with family and friends.
Nami village was similar to Naum, with its flat Kansas-like surroundings and its hous-
es generally spaced far apart in a relaxed spaciousness, unlike Wape houses, which were
tightly clustered together around a small central plaza on a narrow mountain ridge. The
Wape-type village, while crowded, makes fieldwork easier as one is privy to much that is
happening without even trying. It was becoming clear to me that collecting data among
the Lujere could be more of a challenge, what with the dispersed village layout and the
villagers’ prolonged absences in the bush.
Throughout the afternoon I informally interviewed the men with me and listened
to the ‘luluai,’ a big, pleasant, and “old-fashioned” man, tell me about his people’s origin,
hunting lore, fight lore and garden lore, but I especially enjoyed my more animated con-
versations with Apai and Mitahki, a young short man, and Talakebluwa, middle-aged,
the latter two from the same men’s house. Finally, after 5:00 p.m., I had a much-needed
sponge bath with Bodtwai’s water, had something to eat, then Nakati and Manwai joined
me for their gobbled-down dinner of ‘hotwawa’ and smoked pork. We joined the men
gathered on the house’s veranda, and I mostly listened as they recalled their experiences
as indentured laborers far from home, discussed problems with shotguns, and debated
village councils (they didn’t have them), among other topics I didn’t write down. Ener-
getic and articulate, seeming to delight in conversing in Tok Pisin, they kept bringing up
new topics mostly related to their common experiences with work and the government.
‘Sanguma,’ to my surprise, was never mentioned. By 9:45 p.m., this Lujere “male bond-
ing” session ended, and the men departed. I had collected more basic data here than in all
other places combined. I began to write down some summary notes about this interesting
and productive day, at 10:30 p.m., I could still hear an occasional voice from the nearby
men’s house speaking in Tok Pisin.
Writing from what I knew right then about the Lujere, I hypothesized that it was a
relatively “new” culture when compared to with the Iatmul (on the middle Sepik River)
and Wape (in the Torricelli Mountains) with whom I had lived, basing my hypothesis,
rather precariously, on the data that the Lujere appeared to have far fewer rituals regard-
ing hunting and curing and, overall, the culture seemed less complex. Regarding the
Lujere men, I wrote,

Men are more expansive and humorous. Not as cool as the Wape, more spontane-
ous. . . . Boys are quiet but big men talk and play, e.g., Nakate funniest and wittiest
kanaka [local man] I have ever met. Like an American; he called me “Kanaka Bill”!
Very fast on the uptake and a straight man, droll humor; I love it! (MN: 667)

The following morning, I was up at 6:30 a.m., and at 7:45, Nakate, Manwai, and I left
Nami to return to Edwaki. As we walked, Nakate gave me a much more nuanced view of
Lujere curing rites and its Namia vocabulary, especially regarding wowi, their only curing
‘singsing.’ At 10:30 a.m., we paddled across the Yellow River (fig. 7) and at 12:15 we were
atop Edwaki Hill at the base camp.

146
 The Search for a Village

Figure 7. Nakate and Manwai ready a canoe to cross the Yellow River.

It was hot, but there were clear views of all the mountains. I went over to the CMML
Mission and Rosemary Ace, always friendly, offered me two cold drinks and two teas and
cookies. Then she generously gave me bananas and a pineapple. While we visited, I met
the Norambalip store-keeper and the Iwani ‘tultul.’ The latter’s wife and baby were in
the ‘haus sik’ and the mother had worn out Rosemary by sitting on her doorstep asking
for food. Neither the mission nor government hospitals had funds for a food budget, so
patient’s families had to bring them their food and provide care. At first I was surprised
that Rosemary did not know that the local member of the House of Assembly had been
on the station for two days, but it is easy to see how treating the sick, teaching a pidgin
literacy class, and caring for a husband and two small children kept her mission bound.
Returning to the base camp, I took advantage of my access to the government’s patrol
reports and spent the rest of the day and the following morning busily reading them and
taking notes. The only reports available were recent ones for 1970–71, but they were es-
pecially helpful for statistical village data. It was not until I left the field that I learned of
the existence of Robinson’s and McCarthy’s pioneering patrol reports, and it was another
year before I obtained copies from Australian archives and read with excitement the valu-
able “first contact” Lujere cultural data they had recorded.9

9. Stopping in Port Moresby en route home in 1972, I visited the government’s new National
Archives Office and, in lieu of actual patrol reports they did not have, I was shown a refer-
ence guide to patrol reports dated to 1941. Once home, I wrote to the director of the Com-
monwealth Archives Office (now the Australian National Archives) in Australia and later to

147
 A Witch’s Hand

With the patrol reports safely returned to Ray’s files, at 10:00 a.m. Manwai and I
started for Iwani’s Mauwi hamlet where I planned to spend the night then return to the
base camp for my flight back to Lumi—hopefully having decided about my Lujere field-
work site. But before I hiked up the hill to Mauwi, I intended to stop in Wakau, the only
Iwani hamlet I had not visited. It was a clear sunny day and in about an hour we came to
a creek with a downed tree for a bridge that was about a foot and a half under water in
the middle. Somehow in crossing the underwater bridge I lost one shoe, but Naminum of
Mauwi, who was bathing there with a little girl and boy, rescued it before it disappeared
downstream. Then he and the children joined us as we proceeded to Wakau. At 11:50
a.m., we walked into the hamlet.
Wakau is situated in the forest on a rise at the edge of a wide-open ‘kunai’ plain that
almost abuts the hidden Sand River (shown in fig. 13 in Part 2). I admired the old co-
conut trees towering above the hamlet and made a rough count of twelve houses plus a
men’s house and another much larger one recently abandoned. Although not high like
Mauwi hamlet, there still was a beautiful view of the distant mountains, savanna, and for-
est (see fig. 11). I wrote in my notebook, “Really a good spot.” Other than Mauwi, it was
the only place I had visited where I felt an immediate physical connection to the locale.
It was midday and the hamlet was mostly empty except for a few men who came out to
greet our group, including a boy who brought the inevitable kulaus to refresh us. I then
walked the length of the hamlet visiting and asking questions of whoever was around.
Kunai was the only unforgettable Wakau man I met that day, both slight and slightly
goofy and pop-eyed; it makes me smile to recall him even now.
However, like Barry Craig on his collecting trip to Wakau, I too was eager to move
on. I wanted to get up to Mauwi to spend the rest of the day in hope of finding some
village enthusiasm for my moving there and access more closely the quality of informants
necessary to instruct me in their customs. Before 1:30 p.m., Manwai and I were on our
way. In fifty minutes, we were on top and at the ‘haus kiap’ where I would sleep. I walked
over to the almost empty hamlet, admired the stunning views as I had with Joyce in July,
and surveyed the village as a place to work and talked to whom I could. I took a number
of photos of the houses, a man with several children, even a shot of Wakau’s ‘kunai’ plain,
and settled on a place to build a house if it were agreeable with the villagers. It was not a
good omen when Manwai and I had trouble getting enough water to wash up and cook
dinner. Before dinner I visited with the ‘luluai’ and Dian, a strong young man who had
returned to the village five months earlier after plantation work. Nanum, another man,
was holding a barbering session as we sat around watching and talking. I talked about
my coming to live in Mauwi but was offered no encouragement and even had difficulty
in getting the names of enough men to carry my camp cargo to Mauwi if and when it
arrived.

the National Archives of Papua New Guinea requesting copies of over a dozen reports that
I thought could be relevant to my research with the Iatmul, Wape, and Lujere groups. Thus
began an oft-tortuous correspondence with both archives that continued over twelve years
before I received the last requested report. (Later all of the patrol reports became available
through the University of California Library in Santa Cruz, which was my always-helpful
source for reports while writing this book.)

148
 The Search for a Village

Neither the ‘lululai,’ while pleasant enough in a remote way, or Dian, while an intel-
ligent and attractive young man, appeared to have sufficient interest in his customs to be a
good informant. After dinner I was in a pessimistic mood. I wrote, “Having 2nd thoughts
about this place. Enough men here to make a house, to be informants? I wonder. Maybe
Nami is better. Don’t see a single good informant in the place!” (NB #21). It was raining
slightly when Manwai left at 8:40; no one had come during the evening to talk with me.
Before turning out my light I made a final note, “I’m a bit disarrayed; not quite the recep-
tion I’d expected. Not like Taute, anyway. They seem to care less!” (NB #21).
I spent a miserable and spooky night inside my insect net listening to the mosquitoes’
incessant hum then, finally falling asleep, awakened frequently by pigs rooting around
under the house. The rain slashed noisily against the ‘morota’ roof, the wind howled, and
I dozed with ridiculous thoughts of ‘sanguma,’ as if I were eight years old again remem-
bering a scary ghost story we children might tell one another on a hot Kansas summer’s
night. I was glad to hear Manwai’s morning arrival as he carried a big stick to threaten
the two marauding Mauwi pigs that didn’t hesitate to attack humans. But it was a quiet
morning. One boy came to see me and a man called out a greeting as he went by on
his way to Aiendami village. Breakfast finished with a hot cup of tea at hand, I began
scribbling down my thoughts, thinking out loud as I was finding the present situation
insupportable.

People talking in the houses, slight [rain] shower, ‘lululai’ gone to the bush—What a
place; I think I will have to give it up—just not tuned into me enough. Not unfriendly,
but just don’t give a damn!
And these pigs that are after you all the time, I just can’t take—at least two every-
one is afraid of. Crazy. How could the kids [Ned and Elizabeth] cope with that?
Man-eating pigs and Sanguma, what a hellish combination.
9 [a.m.]—Rain has stopped now or just about. Sun trying to shine. Think I must
see Pabei [village] and maybe settle on Nami although it is a 4 hour walk away [from
base camp]. Nami seems relatively untouched by the mission and some literate people
there anyway.
Also little Alai [village]—might try it for a while, then move on. But who for . . .
[an assistant]? Change all the time? [ Just] live in haus kiaps? A rugged life, I fear.
But [I] could carry a little tent but no refrig[erator] or could I? Maybe here [Mauwi]
awhile, then Alai and Bapei—or just stay on the plains, that’s probably better.
And certainly, the kunai hamlet [Wakau] is more promising than this place. That
might be a possibility. I think this place is hopeless. . . . Two months there then on to
Nami for a few months or a month or 2 in each place. Problem here is getting enough
decent informants to tell me what is going on. (NB #21)

Those notes make clear that, in spite of my energetic ruminations, I returned to the
base camp without a final decision about my next fieldwork site. This was not an entirely
new experience as I had patrolled extensively before I settled in Taute. What was new was
selecting a field site—the Iwani hamlet of Mauwi—only to discover it was a bad choice.
Back at the base camp, Rosemary Ace and Mary Parish invited me to lunch with them
and their children, providing a needed and pleasing change of pace. Then in the afternoon
the policeman Tubiman told me in considerable detail about a lurid Mauwi ‘sanguma’

149
 A Witch’s Hand

killing, and Manwai, who was listening, followed with a related update he had heard just
yesterday regarding a planned payback killing in a village on the Sepik. Late Monday
afternoon after paying Manwai for his help, my mission plane arrived and I returned to
Lumi, eager to ready my gear and move to the Yellow River ’tais.’ Exactly where, I still
didn’t know.

The Choice

The next morning, I hiked out to Taute and for the next three days did little else but or-
ganize and pack up my supplies and equipment. Kumoi, my main informant and major
domo, organized the carrying and by Wednesday the men we had selected began moving
my cargo to Lumi. On Thursday evening I was finally finished, and I gave out presents to
my best friends who had stood by me the year and a half I lived there and helped when
the going was rough. Friday, my Taute fieldwork with the Wape finished, I joyously hiked
into Lumi. After greeting Joyce and the children I washed up and we went to the Broad-
hurst’s to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate my exit and impending move to Yellow
River. Perhaps that helps to explain the over-the-top note I typed in my diary that night.

Finished packing cargo; closed up the house and departed Taute. WHOOPEEEEEE!!!
A few tears were shed by the women; men shook their heads and wondered how soon
the masalais [bush demons] would move in on them now that I’m gone. Sad, really. But
I am thrilled to GET OUT and start something NEW. (MD: 55)

Their rationale for assuming a swift return of the bush demons to the village after I
left was their belief that the strange smell of my families’ bodies—I like to think it was
from the soap we showered with daily that they could not afford—frightened away the
demons and accounted for so few village deaths while we lived among them.

A temporary move to Edwaki Base Camp

The Taute men were to bring the last of my cargo to Lumi on Saturday but by Sunday
afternoon they had not arrived. I was seriously concerned as my MAF charter flights to
Yellow River were for Monday morning. It was very unusual and worrisome that no word
was sent telling why they hadn’t come. Then late in the afternoon when I was about to
cancel my chartered flights, the Taute men came trudging into Lumi. Included in their
cargo was the small but heavy kerosene refrigerator, our most precious camp possession
that kept food from spoiling and could even freeze two tiny, treasured trays of ice cubes
or, on special occasions, make ice cream for the children. It wasn’t Ben and Jerry’s, but in
the jungle it was a tasty cool treat. The men said they were delayed because old Taolefe
had died, and they stayed in the village to mourn his death. No one blamed me outright
for Taolefe’s death, but it was unpleasantly ironic that the day after I moved out of the
village the last survivor of Taute’s oldest patrilineal clan died.
Most of my cargo for Yellow River was already locked in the ‘kiap’ storage shed on
the airstrip, but this new load needed extensive reorganization. Joyce had invited the
Broadhursts for dinner, but they left early so we could start working. Even then we were
up at 5:30 a.m. working feverishly in case Colin’s plane arrived early in the morning. By

150
 The Search for a Village

7:30 we had loaded the hospital’s pickup and were starting off to the airstrip when we
got word that the charters would be in the afternoon. I chucked away the banana I was
having for breakfast and Joyce and I returned home for a relaxed breakfast.
There were to be three charters: two were mine and the other one Peter’s to replace the
two policemen at the Edwaki Base Camp. Twice during the day Colin landed, we loaded
the plane, and then he soared away. It was around 6:00 when he landed to get the last load
of cargo and me. But he quickly apologized that my charter was canceled because the
MAF inspector had landed on the airstrip and closed the field because of the wet condi-
tions. It would be Wednesday at the earliest before he could come back for me. My first
concern was about my two planeloads of equipment and supplies already unloaded but
he assured me the policemen had taken care of them. Instead of being disappointed, the
delay delighted me; I was worn out from the work and tension that a major bush move
entails, and landing on an isolated grass airstrip at dusk with my gear dumped around me
was a depressing thought. Now I would have a mini-bonus holiday with Joyce, Ned, and
Elizabeth before my move.
I was pleased that the new base camp had been approved and I looked forward to
the occasional companionship and help of its young and, I speculated, iconoclastic ‘kiap.’
While the two Yellow River missionary families were generous and quick to provide a
meal or meet any perceived need, they appeared to be weighed with work and responsi-
bility. I doubted that they appreciated the ridiculousness of our intrusive roles with the
Lujere who, until we arrived, were quietly minding their own business.
A primary difference among those who intrude into the lives of the colonized is often
the motive that brings them there, varying from seeking wealth, power, knowledge, souls,
or adventure, to providing healing or learning. But regardless of motive, the common
bond among them—and it is an immensely strong one—is the touch of nuttiness, you
might even call it “colonial madness,” that they all share—trader, miner, patrol officer,
missionary, anthropologist—of forsaking the “known” for the “unknown” in a remote
land. It is a strange kind of bond.
When Colin and I landed Wednesday afternoon on the Yellow River airstrip, I found
all of my cargo safely stored in a nearby locked shed. Ray was away on patrol but had
invited me to stay in the base camp ‘haus kiap’ until I settled on a village. Phillip Ace,
ever helpful, met me on the airstrip and helped arrange to get all my cargo carried up the
steep hill to the base camp. The carriers were local men who had volunteered to repair the
airstrip, and some of Phillip’s youths in his Tok Pisin school, all pleased to earn a few shil-
lings where such opportunities were rare. Later I joined the Aces for dinner with another
New Zealand missionary couple from Anguganak who were soon leaving the Territory
for good. I wrote, “Pleasant evening but there is little humour in these CMML New
Zealand missionaries; pretty heavy going” (MD: 55). Fortunately, many New Guineans
have a wonderful sense of the absurd so I knew my life in the village would have its share
of laughs.
Makau, the administration’s interpreter, found me a personal assistant named Towi,
a man from nearby Yegerapi who had worked for Ces Parish. The two of us set to work
organizing my stuff in Ray’s big, somewhat jumbled A-frame ‘haus kiap.’ I previously had
told the Iwanis that I was interested in living in one of their hamlets, but we needed more
discussion and if interested, to meet my plane. When I didn’t arrive on the day expected,
I had hoped that on hearing the plane land today they might have assumed my arrival

151
 A Witch’s Hand

and try to contact me. But it was obvious that the Lujere, especially the Iwanis, were not
standing in line competing for the residence of this odd ‘waitskin’ who wasn’t going to
open a trade store in their village, but just wanted to learn about their way of life.
Towi and I organized a credible temporary camp within the sprawling A-frame and I
erected a small umbrella tent I had brought for the children and, very tired and ready for
sleep, crawled into it for protection from the mosquitoes. I was sleeping soundly when
one of the worst storms I have experienced in New Guinea or anywhere began about
midnight.10 It obviously was the thundering start of the rainy season. The howling wind
and savage rain swept through the houses’ large openings, I supposed for viewing sun-
sets, tossing the ‘kiap’s gear hither and yon and drenching some of my boxes and trunks.
I escaped from the dripping tent and in the flashes of brilliant lightning and booming
claps of thunder I raced around trying to rescue the most vulnerable items. The only dry
place I could find was Ray’s little personal office and, finally surrendering to the disarray,
I collapsed into a damp sleep as the rolling thunder echoed further and further away.11
It took Towi and me most of the next day to dry things and restore some livable order
after the storm. I was eager to decide where I was going to live, so Sunday morning Towi
and I headed for the two Iwani hamlets, Mauwi, atop its long hill, and Wakau, down
below near the ‘kunai’ plain. The hike from the base camp to Mauwi’s ‘haus kiap’ was a
short hour and fifteen minutes. There was only one man in the hamlet and he explained
that everyone was in the bush hunting or finding food, not unlike the situation when
Hutchins’s patrol visited the previous year. He also said the Iwani men had gone to meet
my plane Monday but when I didn’t arrive, decided that it must be next Monday. I walked
around the hamlet and noticed that two new houses had been started but the area Joyce
and I had selected for my house, if I moved there, was still empty. Nevertheless, as much
as I delighted in the hamlet’s beautiful and breezy location, I was convinced that Mauwi
was not for me. There were too many young men working away at plantations and there
was no genuine enthusiasm for me to live there. Now everything depended on my visit
to Wakau. With some trepidation, I, with Towi leading the way, started down the hill
towards Wakau and its ‘kunai’ plain, where the Mosstroops Lieutenant Fryer and his men
had camped.
As we walked on a well-trod path through the ‘kunai,’ I saw men gathering in the
hamlet and walking to its edge to greet us. I relaxed. I knew this was the place. What
a relief ! There were at least twelve men in the hamlet, most of them young and very
friendly to me, insisting, in a nice way, that I come live with them. They had, in fact, sent
three men to Edwaki just that morning to contact me but we missed them when we went
up to Mauwi. (We did meet them on the way back, however, in the camp by the river.) It
seemed as if all of the women and children were watching and smiling at me; not timid

10. Once in Wakau, I would learn that the wind was called waweli and some men knew the magic
spell to create a fierce wind; in Wakau it was Meyawali.
11. Thurnwald (1914) provides a hair-raising, accurate picture of the Sepik Basin’s rainy season
storms. For a translation in English see USCngp.com/paper/26 ‘Discoveries in the Basin of
the Upper Sepik.” But my favorite description of a tropical rainstorm is by Rodney Needham
(1967: 281) that echoes my experiences. Thus, “Thunder, both in Malaya and Borneo, is an ap-
palling natural phenomenon, seeming to crack and reverberate menacingly on the very surface
of the forest canopy and shaking the guts of the human beings cowering underneath.”

152
 The Search for a Village

but apparently pleased and interested in my presence. I saw only one woman wearing
a Native skirt, and she had thrown on a blouse. Everyone, as during my previous visit,
seemed to have jumped into cloth.
I visited the drinking water spring just a few minutes’ walk from the village, a shallow
spring—about a foot or a bit over deep—but perhaps ample. It could, of course, be dug
out larger as was the one in Taute. The water where the people bathe and wash clothing
was a creek crossed on a log about ten minutes or so before you enter the village. Presum-
ably my clothes would be taken there to be washed. It certainly wasn’t a clear creek, quite
muddy but no darker than the Sepik.
I walked through the village a couple of times, talking with the men; I was especially
interested in the big old abandoned men’s house as a temporary dwelling while my house
was being built. The village was laid out on a more or less northeast-southwest axis with
the ‘kunai’ to the southwest, then the unseen Sand River hidden behind a narrow band
of forest between the ‘kunai’ and the river with the serpentine Sepik River beyond. On
the horizon lay the West Range, actually a northern spur of the Central Highlands that
the Sepik wrapped around at the Indonesian border in its descent to its great west to east
flow to the coast. The village’s first house sat out on the ‘kunai,’ the next three were on a
rise above the ‘kunai,’ then about fifteen or so feet higher was a long, level, L-shaped rise
with the rest of the houses scattered on both sides along an open central plaza. At the far
end, the rise disappeared into forested swampland; there were a few towering coconuts
(a sure indication of an old village site), and many younger ones. In all, there were about
sixteen houses including two being built.
I had a meeting with the men at the new men’s house in the upper village and told
them I would come to live with them. They agreed to fix up the old men’s house so I could
move the following Friday when they would come with the Mauwi men to carry in my
cargo, adding that the women would also come to carry the smaller articles. Interestingly,
they said they would need only two men to carry a trunk; this was some different from
the Wapei who insisted on four men rotating in twos to carry a trunk. We set no pay. I
made a point, however, that I was not a businessman and explained how they would have
to teach me their ways.
The only tok about my bringing money to them came from Kunai, a peculiar man with
intense poppy eyes I immediately recognized from my first visit and, I surmised, a bit
addled. Draped around his waist was an old orange ‘laplap’ topped with an old orangeish
shirt. On his head was an odd cloche hat with guria [Victoria crowned pigeon] feathers
in it. And, as before, he clung closely to me and did a lot of the talking.
It was he who mentioned his poor clothes and that with me there he would be able
to buy new trousers and a shirt. He was probably saying what was on every one else’s
mind. He had, it seems, no censor and in that way he might be a good informant to get
leads about what is going on. But I would find him difficult to work with regularly. A bit
too nutty. He also had the habit of frequently gripping my upper right arm between his
thumb and fingers when he was talking. No one else did this. Tautes did this sometimes
but what was different was how he gripped gently then released and then kept repeating
this that was odd. I am sure that he is an odd ball. What I didn’t like was that in his en-
thusiasm to convince me regarding the charms of Wakau, some of the more stable young
men were reluctant to compete with him so I heard a bit too much from him. But I did
like the men, the directness of their gaze, their smiles, and handshakes. They genuinely

153
 A Witch’s Hand

made me feel welcome and you must have that if you want to live happily among a for-
eign people (MN: 410).
While I was in the village, two men entered, one bearing a small pig that had been
killed by his dog, not with a bow or gun! One of the men was from Gwidami and his
face was painted black. Towi told me later that he probably was in mourning although he
did not know the details. Towi was greeted by the villagers, some shook hands with him
as with me, and he was given a small package of gelatinous sago dumplings12 and a piece
of smoked pig. They had killed a pig just the day before. When Towi and I returned to
Edwaki, Makau, the interpreter, had a wild pig he had shot laid out and was butchering
it. Never had I seen so much wild pig in one day, plus all of the wild birds the police were
boiling and a rack of wild pig they were smoking.
The two police assigned to the base camp were from the Lumi police detachment and
they rotated monthly in pairs. When the ‘kiap’ was away on patrol, as he often was, they
supervised the building of the road to the airstrip and heard villagers’ complaints. The
older was from Manus Island where Margaret Mead had earlier worked and the other,
whom I knew best, was William, a Tolai from New Britain Island. One morning they
came over to the ‘haus kiap’ to visit in Tok Pisin as they looked through my field glasses;
it was the first time while in the bush that New Guineans had initiated a discussion on
world events, and I enjoyed it immensely.
Topics that they introduced were the atomic explosion in Alaska that morning (Wil-
liam brought this up); what were the Japanese up to these days; the Vietnam War and,
for local variation, ‘sanguma.’13
Regarding ‘sanguma’ they said they did not have this in their own villages and seemed
a bit puzzled by it. Was it true or just a belief as William suspected? After all, he said,
they aren’t Jesus, they can’t work miracles like cutting up a man, taking out his flesh then
sealing him up as if nothing had happened. The Manus man was sick of the whole thing,
it was all they seemed to talk about. Both asked me about it, and I agreed with William
that magically sealing the wound must just be a belief.

Settling in at Wakau village

The reason I set Friday to make my move from Edwaki to Wakau was because Joyce and
I had a close friend, Marge Behrens from New York City, coming to visit us. Marge and
her friend Janet Sacks from Chester, Connecticut, would spend a few days in Lumi with
Joyce and the children and then on Monday, a charter would fly all of them to Yellow
River, and they would spend two nights with me in Edwaki at Ray’s ‘haus kiap’ (Ray was
still on patrol) and they would return on Wednesday. Although I was eager to begin my

12. What I refer to as a “sago dumpling,” is also called “sago jelly” (Gillam 1996: 30), “sago pud-
ding,” and ‘hatwara’ (Mihalic 1971: 96).
13. While the Vietnam War was an unknown phenomenon to the Lujere, I can’t emphasize
enough how important it was to my thinking during my Lujere fieldwork and I followed it as
best as I could via the weekly Port Moresby newspaper and an occasional late-night, static-
prone, short-wave-radio news report. See Rio and Bertelsen (2018) for a brilliant summary
of the tumultuous political and cultural events of the 1960s and ’70s and their impact on
anthropology.

154
 The Search for a Village

Figure 8. View south from Wakau’s upper village, looking over lower village roofs towards the
‘kunai’ plain, the West Range, and Victor Emanuel Range.

new work, I also wanted Joyce, Ned, and Elizabeth to see where I would be living while
they were in Australia (fig. 8).
I went into “bush-host” mode readying the camp but have no memory or notes as
to how I found beds and mosquito nets for five visitors. On Tuesday, the six of us took
off to visit Wakau, the children astride the shoulders of two young men. The day was
oppressively hot. Marge and Janet, both older than Joyce and me, were motivated good
sports but not in shape for steamy tropical hiking; it took a grueling full day going and
returning with just a couple of turn-around hours in the village to sightsee and rest. We
were all warmly welcomed; I knew the villagers would enjoy seeing my family in the flesh,
especially the children, and it would give me a more fully human presence in their village
in the months ahead living alone as a known husband and father. Nonetheless, I later
was offered, with her permission, the most comely young woman in the village as a wife,
an offer I politely refused, explaining our custom of monogamy. Having recently made
a village census and counted many bachelors, I was aware of the magnitude of the offer.
Had I accepted the offer without a sister to exchange, as is their custom, they obviously
expected a hefty “bride-price” from their new American neighbor.
Next day, Joyce’s plane arrived midafternoon as planned, and my family and friends
flew back to Lumi. I slowly walked uphill to Ray’s big empty house. That evening I had
a rare feeling of loneliness. As much as I liked speaking Tok Pisin, I had thoroughly en-
joyed rapid-fire conversations in English with so many lively Americans and two of them
from New York, my favorite American city. Their responsiveness and vivaciousness had

155
 A Witch’s Hand

excited me, and Ned and Elizabeth had been a delight. Now I was back to hanging out
at night, mostly alone; the only daily English I would hear would be in my head when I
typed up my notes. On Thursday, I readied the patrol boxes, trunks, and boxes containing
my equipment and supplies to be carried to Wakau, making some changes to distribute
the weight more evenly. On Friday morning the men and women of Mauwi and Wakau
began assembling at the ‘kiap’s house and the laborious transfer of my cargo to Wakau
got underway. But the trails were good and the creeks low. Near the end of my fieldwork,
we once had to slosh through one of the creeks waist-deep in water.
The men, like the Wape, were leanly muscular and not tall. Since I was also not tall, I
could savor the uncommon experience of being relatively taller than others while in the
field. The men also appeared to be more energetic than the Wape and perhaps stronger;
instead of lashing a box or case for four men to carry like the Wape did, they needed only
two men, as I mentioned. And rather than my hearing complaints about how heavy the
loads were, there was a lot of smiling and whooping as they set off for Wakau. One man,
however, irritated me and, as I learned later, also irritated most of his fellow villagers. I
had given Aria a bundle of planks to carry but I was disgusted to learn he took the bun-
dle apart and gave the planks to four little girls to carry. Still, if all went more or less as
planned, I would be sleeping in Wakau that night, embedded within a new sociocultural
milieu, the object of my new research.
All day the Iwani men and women carried my cargo to Wakau and dropped it in the
ratty, old, abandoned men’s house as I arranged it and dug out the things I needed for my
temporary camp. It somewhat bothered me that the thatch on the back of the big empty
house was either gone or decayed with little boundary between its rotting posterior and
the encroaching forest. But with logic that defied me, ignoring the house’s gaping rear,
the men made sure that I could secure the front entrance from a murderous ‘sangum-
aman.’ Unlike the Wape, who believed that Europeans were immune to ‘sanguma’ attacks,
the Lujere apparently thought otherwise. As a stranger in the village, it was a disquiet-
ing thought. We erected my umbrella tent and, strictly on intuition, I chose a temporary
personal assistant, Nauwen—clean, quiet, single, and pleasant—from several young men
who presented themselves, but Nauwen was so easy to work with that he continued to
assist me throughout my stay. As we interacted daily, he was invaluable in keeping me
abreast of village events, but he was not a teacher. With no intellectual interest in his
culture, I had to look elsewhere for ethnic enlightenment. Interestingly, it would be his
brother who would fill that role.
After I had eaten and Nauwen and I had put things away, a group of men stayed to
watch and visit as we all swatted at mosquitoes. But our conversation was rather slow-
going; even slower initially than with the Taute village men. By using the bug repellent
“Off,” the mosquitoes weren’t too annoying, and we visited until about 9:00. My visitors
were adamant, however, that I not sleep alone, further intoning the terrors of ‘sanguma.’
I thanked them but brushed aside their idea to protect me. While by definition a field-
worker’s privacy is limited, I drew the line at bedtime; the idea of a nightly ‘sanguma’
minder was untenable.
Gradually the men filed out of the old rotting house declaring that if I heard any odd
noises, I must yell loudly, and they would rush out with bows and arrows to attack or
rout the intruder. What sane ‘sangumaman,’ I thought, would wander around outside this
dilapidated house when he had a wide-open entrance from its forest end? I blew out my

156
 The Search for a Village

kerosene lantern and eventually went to sleep. But at some time before daylight, I was
frightened awake by a crashing rustling sound on the sloping ‘morota’ roof just above my
head. Sitting bolt upright, I also heard a chicken’s desperate cackling. I listened intently
for any other sounds from the house’s dark gaping posterior. Assuming it must be an er-
rant roosting fowl that tumbled off the roof, when all was quiet, I warily lay back down.
Closing my eyes, I wondered what the hell had I gotten myself into.
Several weeks later after moving into my new house I began to grasp why my new
hosts were so concerned about a ‘sangumaman’ attacking me. Ray sent me the following
handwritten note that he knew, while it might alarm me, would also make me laugh:

Bill,
Have just heard an interesting story: A certain gentleman from IWANI (an tap)
[Mauwi hamlet atop the hill] T____ (brother of deceased TULTUL) has threatened
to DO YOU IN!! for reason as yet unascertained. (Yu no ken frait masta, GOVMAN
i stap clostu!) [Don’t be frightened sir, the government is nearby!]
Not necessarily shall you meet your doom per medium of Sanguma, but could be
by the rather common instrument of destruction, a tomahawk.
Cheers,
Ray
Will investigate more thoroughly AFTER the act. (Letter from R. Lanaghan to
W. Mitchell, n.d.)

But I made my own investigation and Nauwen said they had heard the story. T____
was one of Mauwi’s accomplished ‘sangumamen’ who thought Wakau ‘sanguma’ had
killed his brother, the ‘Tultul.’ In retaliation, he had threatened that Wakau’s new ‘masta’
may not be with them very long. Some men thought it was a double-edged threat because
they also had enticed me to live in Wakau instead of Mauwi.

157
part two

Who are the Lujere?

They are more traders than warriors.

ADO J. K. McCarthy, 1936

They are more hunters than agriculturists.

Lumi ADC J. E. Fowke, 1968

159
chapter seven

Lujereland

Facilities for education within this area are at a

deplorable level. There are no agricultural economic
developments whatsoever throughout the area.
PO Ric Hutchings (1970)

The people show a complete lack of interest in

anything that is going on in the outside world.
ADC Peter J. K. Broadhurst (1970)

In the late 1950s, when I began graduate school in anthropology at Columbia University,
it was customary for many ethnologists to present their fieldwork account as more or
less definitive: an “objective” and “true” account of a people’s culture. Today, anthropology
having survived the postmodern turn and, becoming both more mature and enlivened by
it, takes a humbler approach to ethnographies. Thus, this account is but one version of
Lujere culture and society, a version skewed not only by my training and personality but
also by my association primarily with the villagers of Wakau and male informants; I was
not allowed linguistic access to the women. This should not be interpreted as an apology
that my data are not more inclusive (although I wish they were, one never has all the
data) but simply a statement of what this ethnographic account is: one American man’s
descriptive interpretation of Lujere culture in the early 1970s from the perspective of: (1)
an examination of its colonial history; and (2) my living in Wakau village as reflected in
the twilight of Australian colonialism.

161
 A Witch’s Hand

The Lay of the Land: Low, Wet, Hot, and Humid

Luckily, as long as I’m in a tee-shirt or less, I like to sweat; in the Sepik’s atmosphere of
optimal humidity, it can be done without even moving. In northern Vermont one’s skin
is often dry and scaly; in the Sepik it is always moist and plump. A hot, humid July day
that can drive a native Vermonter almost to tears is a welcome pleasure to me. The Lujere
temperature ranges from nighttime lows around seventy degrees Fahrenheit to a daytime
high of around ninety-five degrees in both the wet and dry seasons. That was different
from the Torricelli Mountains I had just left where the low was a “chilly” sixty-five de-
grees with a high of eighty-five degrees.
The Lujere habitat is covered with a mixture of swampy grasslands and tropical
rainforest. While good garden land is at a premium, game (including pigs, cassowaries,
and Victoria crowned pigeons) is plentiful, and the waterways abound with fish. There
are no roads or towns, no plumbing or electricity. Villages are located on relatively
high ground and the level of wetness in surrounding areas rises and falls precipitously.
One might leave a village on a muddy track and return a few days later thigh deep
in water. A semisedentary people, the Lujere spend days, even months, hunting, fish-
ing, and working sago while living in bush camps where related families might live
together in a single flimsy structure. Village houses are traditionally inhabited by a
woman and her children, while men and youths sleep in a large dormitory-style A-
frame structure.
I arrived in the Yellow River area toward the beginning of November 1971, at the start
of the rainy season that averages around ninety inches of rain and lasts into April when
the rains diminish. The wet season brings heavy rains every three or four days with up to
seven inches in a single day and the occasional high wind and spectacular electrical storm
like the one that greeted my arrival at the base camp. Storms of that intensity with gale-
force winds were a special concern to my Wakau neighbors who, frightened that their
roof would collapse, or a tree fall on it, might vacate the house and shelter on the ground
beneath its stronger ‘limbum’ flooring. Indeed, Klowi’s wife’s old house, just below mine,
fell in during a big windstorm. Some men know a secret ritual to make fierce winds; in
Wakau only Meyawali knew how.
The dry season persists from April into late October or early November with rains
on the average once or twice a week and rarely over three weeks apart. The roughly six-
month dry season averages sixty inches of rain. The level of humidity drops a bit in the
dry season just as there are more clear skies than during the rainy.1 Apparently, the reason
neither the Namia language nor Tok Pisin has a word for “humidity” is because it is a
climatic constant. A day of nil humidity was unknown. Referring to a “dry” and “rainy”
season is actually a misnomer—some expats facetiously call them the “wet” and “wetter”
seasons. As Gillam points out about the Lujere climate,

Though people try to define an actual wet and dry season, there are simply high rainfall
and low rainfall seasons. In other words rainfall is a matter of degree and the dry season
is simply a period of less rain. (Gillam 1983: 59)

1. My climate information is augmented by the Feldspauch’s (1988: 4) records for the area.

162
 Lujereland

Lujereland lies in the lowlands between the Torricelli Mountains and the Sepik River.
The landscape is one of rainforests and vast natural grass plains on poorly drained soils
intersected by wooded creeks and two major rivers, the Yellow and the Sand, rising in the
cloud-bound Torricelli Mountains, then flowing southward to unite before entering the
Sepik. The grassland soils are leached, sandy loams with poor nutrient values and kan-
garoo grass (Themeda spp.) is the most common ground cover. The rivers are bordered by
tall open forest; sago palms (Metroxylon spp.) dominate some of the more inland water-
courses while rushes (Juncus spp.) and bracken (Pteridium) predominate in the marginal
and wet areas.2
The area traditionally occupied by the Lujere villagers runs roughly from the Sepik’s
south bank area (home of three villages) at the mouth of the Yellow River for about twen-
ty-five miles northward, while its east–west axis of habitation extends for about eighteen
or so miles from the immense fens west across the Sand River opposite Wakau, east to
Worikori’s land, or about 475 square miles. The geographic elevation of the region ranges
from around one hundred to three hundred feet along the rivers with the Edwaki hill
system seven hundred to a thousand feet high. This embraces Mauwi hill, on top of which
Mauwi hamlet of Iwani village sits, and the other slightly higher Edwaki hill just to the
east, where the CMML Mission and Edwaki Base Camp are situated. Other than these
twin tropical monadnocks, the terrain is relatively flat except for a small hill southeast of
Tipas village near the Sepik. On the Sepik’s south bank before the abrupt mountain rise
are also several small hills within the Lujere territory, including Kojabu (Kociabu), where
Robinson burned his signal fires in 1932 and the Japanese bombed the Mosstroops sup-
ply base in 1943. The southernmost Lujere villages situated on the south flanks of the
Sepik River are Aukwom, visited by Joyce and me, and to the east, Panewai and Purami
located near the Mosstroops’ Catalina water landings. Behind them the mountains rise
steeply towards the domain of the Lujere’s traditional cannibal enemies, the Sawiyano,
and, during my fieldwork, the recently built Ama airstrip of the Seventh-Day Adventist
Mission.
Footpaths of varying width and oft-challenging conditions connect all the Lujere vil-
lages and camps with the ease of travel greatly dependent upon the amount of rain that
had fallen, necessitating administration patrols to be scheduled in the dry season. During
the rainy season log bridges over a creek might wash away and some foot trails could
disappear into the mud of a spreading swamp, while the torrents of tropical rain coursing
down the Yellow and Sand Rivers can make them impassible. There are no bridges over
either the Sand or Yellow Rivers and, although the prime habitat of crocodiles, they must
be forded on foot if no dugout canoe is available, which is often the case. A felled tree
sometimes bridges a large creek that otherwise would be impassable after a heavy rain.
Small barefoot children learn at an early age to navigate the various demanding surfaces
they daily encounter, developing a sure sense of balance with feet that are tough, strong,
and amazingly dexterous with enviable toe-gripping power.
One aspect of a tropical equatorial locale that is very different from a Vermont per-
spective is the relative consistency of daylight hours throughout the year. Because New
Guinea lies directly south of the equator, there is very little variation in the time of sunrise
and sunset regardless of the month. While I lived in Wakau, the sun—when you could

2. These paragraphs have benefitted from the data compiled by Ian Bean (1971).

163
 A Witch’s Hand

see it—plunged quickly over the horizon around 7:00 a.m. and, without any lingering
twilight, the nights were long and dark, unless the moon was out. Because of the fear of
‘sanguma,’ villagers were normally confined inside their houses after dark. Wakau at night
was mostly a silent, solemn, even slightly ominous place. As I usually spent my evenings
typing up notes in my screened work tent by lamp light until late, I missed the sound
of my Taute friends visiting on their house verandas or the happy sound of a clutch of
women’s raucous laughter.

Colonial Consequences

Once a land is seized and colonized by a foreign power, it is transformed in both subtle
and severe ways. But compared with some other parts of New Guinea, Lujereland in
1971 looked much the same as it did when Thurnwald made “first contact” on the Yel-
low and Sand Rivers in 1914. An exception was that the omnipresent penis sheath that
heralded a man’s approach was disappearing, at least in the presence of expats. The houses,
fabricated from the forest and bound with cane, were mostly unchanged, and hamlets
and villages were still connected by a crisscross of native paths; the sago-oriented cuisine
and pace of living remained very similar. Yet colonialism had irrevocably altered both
the psychological context of everyday life and the individual consciousness of each man,
woman, and child. Of marked importance was that personal biographies, once experien-
tially constricted, had differentially expanded as most men left for several years to work
far from home for foreigners while women at home had to take up the slack. Missionaries
brought new stories and explanations about life they were eager to share; ‘kiaps’ brought
new rules and forms of punishment hitherto unknown; medical patrols and aid posts
brought new, often amazing therapies and radical ideas about sickness and its prevention;
anthropologists wandered through villages buying old handmade crafts and ritual items
or even moved in to record their way of life and ancestors’ stories. Regardless of the vil-
lager, their awareness of the world was, depending on the individual, impacted by their
experiences with colonialism.

“Isolated and Undeveloped”

Whenever an administration official referred to the Lujere’s homeland, the terms “iso-
lated and undeveloped” would appear like a sacred mantra. Lujere villagers eyed the world
from a somewhat different cultural perspective. While they might disagree with the term
“isolated,” feeling to be in the center of the world they knew, few would argue against the
term “undeveloped” if translated into Tok Pisin (‘no gat wok bisnis’). Colonialism had
raised their consciousness regarding money and development, contemporary concerns
previously unknown to them. There was a very good reason why the only expatriates who
lived in the South Wapei Census Division were missionaries and the local ‘kiap’: there
was no way to make money. Lujereland was one of the last places an enterprising colonial
entrepreneur would choose to be. What Karl Heider (1970: 297) wrote for the Dani of
Irian Jaya—“The Dani have nothing and produce nothing which the world wants”—
could also be written for the Lujere.

164
 Lujereland

The South Wapei Census Division

From the Kaiser’s reign to Australia’s, Germany’s nineteenth-century style of colonial

bureaucracy persisted as a marvel of imposed administrative nesting divisions striding
over a multitude of culturally alien societies. As already seen, the Australian system, like
the former German one, was highly hierarchical both internally and in its imposition
on the subjugated populace. It could be argued that Anglo-Saxon colonialists stress the
value of numbers and counting, especially when so much else is culturally elusive. Count-
ing and recording a village’s residents by name was a continuing responsibility of patrol
officers—an indispensable colonial ritual. After assembling villagers in a line, preferable a
very straight one, the patrol officer sat at a small table under a hand-held umbrella taking
roll call in the village book with several uniformed and armed policemen in attendance.
Toddlers learned early who were the rulers and the ruled.
Since this book is about the Lujere, it is also about the Australian colonial realm in
which they were embedded, and the South Wapei Census Division (SWCD) was the ad-
ministration’s smallest unit that enfolded their villages. Among the Lujere, probably only
a handful knew what the SWCD was and how it pertained to them. Most Lujere were
simply unaware of the Australian colonial bureaucratic structure that tightly overlaid
their looser primordial society. Their knowledge of the administration and its forms of
governance was in strictly personal terms: a politically powerful ‘kiap’ with armed police-
men who visited the village every year or two. If villagers were away in the bush hunting
or making sago, as they often were, they could easily miss a few ‘kiap’ sightings. Although
the Wakau villagers had come under the Kaiser’s foreign suzerainty in 1884, it would be
seventy-two more years before a colonial official, an Australian ‘kiap,’ entered their village
and took a census of the residents. As described in chapter 4, PO Oakes mapped and took
the first census of Wakau and most of the other Lujere villages in June and July, 1956.
When possible, the Australian authorities attempted to create census divisions by
common language and geography to facilitate patrolling and the collection of statisti-
cal information. Among the Lumi Sub-District’s thirteen census divisions, the SWCD
was by far the largest in geographic area with more than 730 square miles and by far the
smallest in population density at six persons per square mile. Its population was forty-six
hundred with the Lujere a majority at just over three thousand.
None of the Australian patrol officers who visited the villages of Lujereland and knew
the area up close had any positive or encouraging words about either its present or future.
The conclusion of PO R. K. Treutlein’s 1962 report, written nine years before I arrived,
is typical:

A very backward area, in all fields, the South Wapei is going to be a great problem in
the near and distant future. Advancement of these people will be severely hampered by
their great dispersion, the difficulty of the terrain, which becomes well nigh impassible
in the wet season, and the lack of an assured economic future. (Treutlein 1962: 25)

Indentured laborers

In the early 1970s, the only sure way most Lujere men gained access to money was to sign
a contract as an indentured laborer and work on a distant plantation or mining project.

165
 A Witch’s Hand

Their patrol officer (Lanaghan 1972: 4) wrote, “These people have become professional
Plantation Labourers—with some going back for their 2nd and 3rd terms.” While they
still had the ‘selmani’ [shell money] of their ancestors, they coveted the introduced Aus-
tralian coins and bills that could buy foreign things. During my fieldwork, 33 percent of
the SWCD’s males were working as indentured laborers in other parts of the country
(Lanaghan 1972: 2). That was a high proportion of the male population but characteristic
of native areas once they came under the administration’s influence and eventual control
as an essential part of the colonial economy. This partial absence of adult males in village
life is one of the defining attributes of almost all New Guinea anthropological studies of
village life. It is why I tried to find a village that had enough men in different statuses at
least to give a sense of the normal rhythms of everyday life.
Ric Hutchins characterized the economic contribution of SWCD returned laborers
in a 1970 patrol report, noting that

These men can be expected to earn a gross $23,000 between them during a year. At
the completion of their two years contract each man will return to his village between
$20 and $30 cash apart from goods such as axes, clothing, saucepans and other trade
store goods.
From this source approximately $10,000 of “new” money enters the area each year.
Most is buried in tins etc. only to be produced on the occasion of a marriage taking
place or some unforeseen circumstances arising such as a Court fine having to be
paid. . . . By tradition these returning labourers bring with them some article of cloth-
ing for each of their immediate relatives. (Hutchins 1970: 46)

The administration’s indentured laborer strategy had a two-pronged advantage: first,

cheap labor was recruited for maximum economic returns often to the degree of ex-
ploitation, and second, the men recruited were brought into totalizing work situations
subjecting them to a regimented and severely truncated version of “civilized” society. The
experience was thought by authorities to be personally transformative by replacing sav-
agery with a worker’s colonial civility. But there was tremendous diversity in how men
experienced and interpreted their years as an indentured laborer. While many a man’s
consciousness was altered about what a life could be as they became intimately involved
with alien ways and learned a new language, Tok Pisin, there were many others, as we
meet in chapter 9, who returned to their village, itself little changed, with their ancestor’s
active stances on warfare and cannibalism vividly intact. The pioneering Sepik anthro-
pologist, Ian Hogbin (1943), is one of the few experienced fieldworkers who have written
critically regarding the multiple negative aspects of the indentured laborer experience.3
Very little has been written about the indentured experience, but these men frequently
were an anthropologist’s principle informants as they could speak Tok Pisin that was

3. Hogbin writes, for instance,

Maintaining that a few years spent in European employment “is the most hopeful
means of introducing the natives to civilization,” the Administration systematically
encourages them to leave home for the plantations and goldfields. . . . however, the “in-
troduction to civilization” which the labourer receives can scarcely be called beneficial.
(Hogbin 1943: 134)

166
 Lujereland

especially important among the societies with difficult, unrecorded Papuan languages.4
Often, most of a plantation’s or mine’s indentured workers were segregated, ghetto-like,
to work and sleep with men of their own village and/or language for ease of worker–boss
communication and to avert inter-group hostilities. Workers’ free time usually was very
restricted with little opportunity for learning beyond their rudimentary job skills. Some,
like Aiyuk of Wakau, returned home without even learning Tok Pisin. My experience
was that village children, especially boys, appreciated the trendy cachet of Tok Pisin and
picked it up quickly as a second language. Labor contracts, as noted, could be for two or
three years and some men returned several times as the one sure way to get the White
man’s money that was rapidly supplementing, if not replacing, traditional wealth in cul-
tural exchanges and to secure a wife. Like a college student who returns after spending
her junior year in France, a returned laborer had prestige in contrast to the ‘buskananka,’
the “wild uncivilized man” who had never left the jungle. The anthropologists Ian Hogbin
and Camilla Wedgwood (1943), who both had done fieldwork in the territory and knew
firsthand the exploitative problems of the indentured laborer system, wrote a scathing
twenty-nine-page pamphlet indicting it.5

Claiming that a few years spent in European employment is “the most hopeful means
of introducing the natives to civilisation,” the Administration in Mandated New
Guinea systematically encourages them to leave home for the plantations or goldfields,
a policy which has also been adopted in Papua and the Solomons. . . . Labour recruiters
are permitted to enter new districts immediately after tribal fighting has been stopped,
and, as it is rarely possible for the natives to obtain the necessary money for the head
tax, which is imposed on all able-bodied men, the young people with fewest respon-
sibilities are forced to make contracts. . . . The minimum period of indenture is three
years in New Guinea, two in the Solomons, but contracts are generally renewed, the
average period of absence being six years.
Inquiry reveals, however, that, despite the claims of the New Guinea administra-
tion, the laborers are not “introduced to civilisation.” On the contrary, the information
they obtain about Western culture is vague in the extreme and usually inaccurate, the
tasks carried out in no way enrich their outlook, and the elementary hygiene picked

4. On March 29, 1971, I wrote a letter to the manager of the Dylup Plantation near Madang,
where thirteen men of the Wape village of Taute that I was then studying were working. After
introducing myself, I wrote in part,
I have decided that anthropologists are never going to understand village culture unless
they have at least some kind of first hand understanding of the villagers’ experiences on
plantations. Certainly in my work these experiences loom as the most important and
interesting in a man’s life. And I think they have a profound influence on the structure
and quality of village life—not only for the men but for their wives and children too.
(Letter from author to the Dylup Plantation, March 29, 1971.)
I asked that I be able to visit informally with the Taute villagers and their supervisors and as-
sured them that I would not abuse this privilege. My letter was not favored with a reply.
5. See Lutkehaus (1995: chap. 10) for a detailed discussion of Wedgwood’s participation in
various organizations involved with Australia’s civil policies for the Pacific, in particular New
Guinea.

167
 A Witch’s Hand

up is quickly forgotten. It is difficult to see how the native can discover much about us
when all but a small—though notable—minority of island employers look upon him
as a “stupid kanaka” or a “bloody n_____” and, far from cultivating his acquaintance,
do not learn to speak to him even in correct pidgin English. (Hogbin and Wedgwood
1943: 5–6)

Their tract is an important historical document as it develops a detailed critique of the

system from its impact on the sexual behavior of young men isolated for years at a time
from meaningful contact with young women,6 to its opposition

of educationists and others interested in training them for self-government. All sorts
of excuses are made for discouraging the establishment of schools, for example, and
even medical services are in some quarters frowned upon as unnecessary pampering.
“As soon as the natives here are made to work the healthier they will be, and the
less call there will be for the expenditure of the Government on large quantities of
medicine for the curing of native ailments, which are nothing more than pure laziness
on the part of the kanaka,” wrote a commentator in the Rabaul Times. (Hogbin and
Wedgwood 1943: 7)

Although in the 1970s racism was still a major factor in some expat–local relations
even within the administration, it had of political necessity gone more underground and
was no longer an accepted stance, as espoused by the writer to the Rabaul Times, that
could be self-righteously publicly shouted.
Even though the indentured worker’s opportunities were usually constricted, there
were instances where workers from different societies did become friends during their
work period and, if proximity permitted, even maintained their friendship after returning
home. Just as persons who share a language are called ‘wantoks’ in Tok Pisin, those that
share a work experience are called ‘wanwoks.’ These ‘wanwok’ friendships also display
the importance the plantation experience had in establishing intercultural relationships
among men who, ordinarily, never would have met. Such was the case of Tuai and Biai—a
Lujere and Wape man—who met on New Britain Island while working copra on Kapit
Plantation near the town of Bainings.7 What follows is the tragic story of the only re-
lationship I knew about between two men from the two cultures in which I carried out
fieldwork from 1970 to 1972.
Tuai was from Yawari, the northernmost Lujere village I never had visited, and Biai
was from Taute village, my Wape research base in 1970 and 1971, and I knew him and
his family well. The two men had remained friends and occasionally visited each other.

6. Hogbin and Wedgwood (1943: 9), espousing a 1940s view that homosexuality was a “malad-
justment,” report, “Exile in labour barracks gives rise, too, to much sexual maladjustment. The
labourers are at an age when desire is most urgent, and the savage punishments meted out
by the courts have done nothing to check the inevitable increase in homosexuality. A study
of Solomon Islands records reveals that even the sentencing of a youth of seventeen to seven
years for ‘unnatural behavior’ brought no diminution in the number of cases heard.”
7. Lewis (1975: 213) also indicates the importance of the ‘wanwok’ relationship for the Gnau in
the Torricelli Mountains.

168
 Lujereland

Their relation also had an interesting economic aspect that highlights a significant dif-
ference between the two societies. The Lujere bush, while infamous for ‘sanguma,’ was
renowned for its wildlife—its quantity of wild pigs, cassowaries, and other birds—while
the Wape bush was just as well known for its poverty of hunting opportunities. The
Wape area was always much more densely populated than Lujereland, but originally
had sufficient game for occasional successful bow-and-arrow hunting. However, the
introduction of the gun, first by the Franciscan priests in 1947, to find their dinner, then
by the ‘kiaps’ and police in 1949, to find theirs, began to impact the wildlife breeding
population. Then this dwindling game population seriously worsened after it became
legal in 1960 for village men to apply to the ‘kiap’ for a hunting license and own a
shotgun.8
Hence the interest the Taute villagers had, via their contact with Tuai, in 1966 to
invest in a new gun for Yawari village. Altogether, five Taute males and one woman
advanced ten dollars towards its purchase. However, as far as getting the wild meat they
wanted, it wasn’t a great success because Yawari was several days’ walk away. Nevertheless,
villagers had on occasion made the trek and returned with meat and one of Taute’s two
licensed gun owners also had taken his shotgun down to hunt in the Yawari bush. But it
was considered a dangerous excursion and Biai was occasionally warned that he could be
killed with ‘sanguma.’
Inevitably, the Yawari villagers’ notorious reputation for ‘sanguma’ became a problem
in Taute village. The incident began when Biai, angry with his wife, yelled at her to go
fuck her faf, (her mother’s brother), a heinous insult. She then told her faf, Wamala,
and he, in turn furious at the insult, accosted Biai on the village dirt plaza and, in his
railings, accused Biai of bringing Tuai, who was then visiting, to Taute to kill him with
‘sanguma.’ The dispute was eventually more or less resolved but, in November of 1970,
when the incident occurred and I typed up my notes about it, I was unsure of the loca-
tion of Tuai’s village and totally unaware that this would be my very first data on the
Lujere. Biai, however, eventually paid a tragic price for his friendship with his ‘wanwok’
Tuai. When I returned to Taute village in 1982 for a short visit, I learned that Biai was
dead—attacked by ‘sanguma’ in the Yawari village’s bush—and his Lujere friend Tuai
was implicated.
The story was that he had been hunting with Tuai who had shot a cassowary and,
while Tuai continued to hunt, Biai was to plant some sago for him. Biai was approached
by two men who asked to borrow his knife, but Biai saw them hide theirs and told
them so, whereupon they attacked him and cut several places on his left side to take his
blood. When they began to close the cuts, two pregnant women appeared and the last
cut wouldn’t close. Biai fought the men who then ran off and he somehow made it to
Kwieftim, but his Taute companions had to carry him on to the aid post in Wilkili near
Taute. Once home he reported the attack in Lumi and his attackers and Tuai apparently
were apprehended and put in jail. Although his “sore” became dry, it was still wet on the
inside causing his death; at least this story was how some of the Taute villagers under-
stood Biai’s death as the result of the earlier ‘sanguma’ attack.

8. For the moral implications among the Wape regarding the introduction of the shotgun, see
Mitchell (1973).

169
 A Witch’s Hand

Villagers’ knowledge of the colonial government

One of the pervasive complaints that runs through the Lujere Patrol Reports is the of-
ficers’ dismay at the Lujere’s lack of knowledge and understanding of ‘gavman’—that is,
the regional and national government, albeit totally foreign and unseen—and their lack
of awareness about the Territory’s impending rapid conversion towards self-government
and then independence. Thus, the following negative summary comments from two of
their patrol officers: “Generally speaking there is no political awareness among the people
on the Central or Local Government Council level and only a limited understanding
and appreciation of the administration in the village” (Fowke 1968: 20), and “A universal
lack of knowledge, relating to anything political, is common throughout the whole of the
South Wapei” (Lanaghan 1971: 23). I can only agree, at least for the Lujere.
It is difficult for a Westerner raised in a complex, industrialized, and urbanized coun-
try to project himself into the mind or thinking of a Lujere man or woman: a person
whose parents and relatives were born, lived, and died in a society lacking the social, eco-
nomic, religious, and political institutions we take for granted and that shape everything
we do. But if it is a psychological stretch for us to grasp their cognitive world—and it
is—it seems obvious that we are a bigger mystery to the Lujere than they are to us. We at
least have the advantage of seeing them in situ in their home habitat; they see us out of
our Indigenous context as exotic and mysterious isolates in theirs. For them, we are the
invading Martians from another planet they can only wonder and guess about. Without
schools, literacy, newspapers, radios, and political educational patrols to inform them in
a sustained way, they have no entry route into our cognitive worlds of organization. They
cannot even frame the question. So it is no wonder the Lujere were in the dark as to how
their village fit into the administration’s political divisions of “District” (West Sepik),
“Sub-District” (Lumi), and “Census Division” (South Wapei) or the nature and work of
the “House of Assembly” in relation to their right to vote.
Another factor caused outright confusion in local thinking as it did in mine initially:
the names and boundaries of the House of Assembly Electorates. PO Wafingian wrote
the following after completing a patrol of the SWCD:

The people are confused as to the fact that their representative to the House of As-
sembly is from the AMBUNTI Sub-District; whom the people had voted for. But the
South Wapei Census Division is still part of the Lumi Sub-District, therefore are also
still part of LUMI [Sub-District]. They stated that if they are still part of LUMI Sub-
District, why did they have to vote for a man from the AMBUNTI Sub-District. This
I was not able to answer, and stated that, I would seek the truth and tell them later.
(Wafingian 1972a: 1)

The “truth” the patrol officer might have known was that the Territory is divided into
House of Assembly Electorates that may be different from the Sub-Districts. In the 1968
election the SWCD was part of the Wapei-Nuku Electorate, but for the 1972 House of
Assembly election, was part of the Upper Sepik Open Electorate. 9 I didn’t discover the

9. It is impressive that in this election 75% of the registered voters in the SWCD cast a ballot
(Fowke 1968: 20).

170
 Lujereland

change until a local candidate from Ambunti came to Wakau to campaign. Wafingian,
admittedly new to the Edwaki Base Camp, seemed unaware of the administration’s divi-
sion of the Territory into assigned electorates that were independent of district and sub-
district boundaries.
After all, ‘gavman’ to most Lujere was not an abstract concept but the boots on the
ground of the ‘kiap’ and his ‘polis.’ These men had direct influence over their lives and did
not hesitate to exert their power when they felt it was necessary to carry out their duties.
Fortunately, and to these men’s credit, I saw very few blatant abuses of that power while
living in New Guinea, but the ones I did see were egregious ones. Although the ‘lululai’
and ‘tutul’ were, from the administration’s perspective, an indispensable part of their gov-
ernment, the Lujere villagers did not share this view. As their patrol officer (Lanaghan
1971: 16) expressed it, “Most everyone pays lip service to Luluais and Tultuls. They don’t
possess any real authority.”

Councils and the Southwest Census District

After World War II, the Australians began to plan how the indigenes could be involved
not only in a representative national governmental body, but also at the local level. The
results were the Local government councils that in the 1950s were an experimental idea.10
However, after the Local Government Ordinance 1963–71 came into operation on Janu-
ary 1, 1965, they were an increasing reality. In 1965 there were 114 councils covering a
population of 1,250,000 and by 1970 the number had increased to 146 councils serving
2,068,000 people; some 90 percent of the population was under locally elected govern-
ment councils (Grosart, 1972c: 268). These councils functioned as a form of local govern-
ment similar to a village or town government in the United States with some legal power.
Depending on the community, they had various responsibilities that could, for example,
include building and maintaining roads, bridges, parks, aid posts, airstrips, water and
power services, and community markets, and may make rules regarding, for example,
public health, school attendance, livestock control, and the levying of taxes at a flat or
graduated rate. But just as the Territory’s administrator was subject to Australia’s prime
minister, so were the councils subject to their ‘kiap.’ Mair cites an administrative ruling
that states,

Whenever possible [the officer] should refrain from giving direct orders. He should
endeavour to induce the village council to see the advantages of the course he would
like to follow so that they themselves initiate the desired action. Only when it is im-
possible to persuade the Village Council to undertake action itself should the admin-
istrative officer make use of his authority to issue instructions. (Mair 1970: 82)

In the Sepik hinterland, a local government council usually consisted of several cul-
turally related villages whose population exceeded 5,000 and, most important, had some
economic base so that taxes, albeit sometimes nominal ones, could be collected. The

10. Mair and Grosart (1972) provide a lucid history of local government in Papua New Guinea
including the origin, formation, and challenges of local government councils. Also see Mair
(1970: 81–111) for a much more detailed discussion on their origin and history.

171
 A Witch’s Hand

administration encouraged the formation of these local councils since “council experi-
ence is regarded as a significant element in the political education programme and coun-
cils are indispensable agents in all aspects of the rural development programmes” (Mair
and Grosart 1972: 658). The Wape had a local government council that was especially
important to villages near Lumi, although to Taute villagers across the Sibi River where
I lived, the council became a topic of concern, it seemed, only at tax collection time. Still,
undoubtedly the local government councils were a significant initial approach to raise
the thinking of villagers regarding representative government and bringing them into a
politico-economic universe greater than their village.
There was also a distinct economic advantage in having a local council as they were
eligible for governmental grants, especially the job-making infrastructure construction
projects. But the SWCD was in a catch-22: without a crop like coffee or rice that neces-
sitated transport to market, there was no compelling need to construct roads thus provid-
ing employment. Perhaps the strongest argument against a council for the SWCD was
that there was not sufficient local lobbying for one. After a patrol of the SWCD villages,
PO Lanaghan reported,

In a follow-up of the last patrol, people were again asked, how would they receive the
implementation of a low budget council, with perhaps Government subsidy. . .the an-
swer was an emphatic “No.” (Lanaghan 1971: 24)

The administration’s patrol interpreter Makau Papkai and the Yegerapi village aid
post orderly, Litabagi, were both active supporters of a council for the area and used their
voices and influence toward establishing one, but the fact that everyone would have to pay
taxes to maintain it was a powerful negative argument; the wide support necessary even
for the administration to consider one was never forthcoming.11 As ADC Broadhurst
acutely observed,

The only genuine political pressure exerted by the people as a group has been to place
before the Administration their desire to have a Patrol Post established in the area near
to Yellow River. This year the Administration approved the establishment of a Base
Camp at EDWAKI, the station currently being staffed by a Patrol Officer. (Broadhurst
1971: 8)
DC Stevens summarized the overall situation succinctly when he wrote that,
I regard the provision of at least a limited economy and communications system
as an essential pre-requisite to the establishment of a Council. Apart from the fact
that the people do not want a Council, the system would presently create many more
problems than it would solve. (Stevens, in Lanaghan 1971: 8)

The SWCD had achieved a base camp for the Lujere but, to the satisfaction of most
villagers, there would be no local government council hounding them for taxes.

11. PO Wafingian (1972b: 4) reported that the people he had talked with wanted a local govern-
ment council in their area, even if it were a low-level one, then notes that “it was the voice of
only three villages” but doesn’t name them.

172
 Lujereland

Jobs: An unfulfilled wish

A common question that dominated the thinking of both the administration and Lujere
villagers was about “development” or ‘wok bisnis.’ There also was no other concern that
had such a bleak if not impossible prospect for successful achievement. When a society
occupies a compromised ecological zone with no market-desired natural resources or
crops plus lacking an economically feasible infrastructure to move it to market if it did,
the possibility for new wealth approaches the realm of the surreal. Here is a case in
point:
When the Lumi ADC J. E. Fowke made his patrol to the SWCD to initiate the new
Yellow River Base Camp, the section of his report “Economy of the Area” stated that

There was no agricultural economic development whatsoever throughout the area at

the time of the patrol. Such activities as the planting of perennial crops, market gar-
dening or animal husbandry for monitory return are not practiced. Approximately
eight months ago one Makau of Magaleri, an Administration Patrol Interpreter at
Lumi, cultivated a small patch of rice from which he harvested approximately half a
ton of paddy rice. 600 lbs of this paddy rice was airfreighted to Lumi at cost of $15.00
where he sold the rice to DASF for three cents a pound representing a net profit to
him of $3.00. The balance of the crop has been allowed to rot beside the Magaleri
airstrip.
This was the first attempt anywhere in the Census Division at economic agricultur-
al development. Being a leader in the area and a very influential man it can be expected
that no further rice plantings will take place until some more realistic marketing facil-
ity is provided. (Fowke 1968: 21)

Harvesting crocodile skins had been tried and a few men did make some money
selling skins to traders, if and when they came up the river, but it was not a dependable
source of income for more than a few, if them. A man in Worikori planted a cacao tree
that had born fruit, establishing viability as a crop, but at the time there was no economic
incentive to plant more. The base camp, as already described, was an economic hope as
a source for local jobs but while I lived in Wakau, it remained just a hope. There were
schemes for building a road to Lumi but, being thirty-five miles away as the cockatoo
flies and with swamps, rivers, and rugged mountain terrain, it was cost prohibitive. Even
project money to hire men to build a road to the Sepik, a feasible task, wasn’t there. The
administration, always struggling with tight budgets, was not about to squander precious
funds to build a road to nowhere.
As previously mentioned, the only dependable money the Lujere men could earn was
as indentured laborers and this was considered an insufficient economic base for estab-
lishing a council. The SWCD was similarly economically stigmatized, but because of its
proximity to Lumi, it was allowed to join the Wapei Government Council. Lumi’s ADC
J. E. Fowke, who you recall got in trouble in 1968 for fostering a Yellow River station, was
one of the few administrators to even speculate about establishing a local government
council for the SWCD. He was well aware of the “isolated and undeveloped” argument
against a council, as well as the administration’s current policy to “consolidate rather than
expand in this field,” yet he thought that by growing rice it would

173
 A Witch’s Hand

be practical to establish a subsidised Low Level Council in the South Wapei with a tax
rate of fifty cents. With this resultant revenue a project such as the setting up of a rice
polishing factory and purchase of river transportation equipment could be embarked
on. (Fowke 1968: 8)

The district commissioner’s two-paragraph comment on Fowke’s idea began with an

admonishment:

Before there is any native encouragement or fostoring [sic] of business ventures in

the South Wapei census division by Administration officers it will be necessary for
full submissions to be presented to the District’s Co-coordinating Committee for ap-
proval. (Fowke 1968: 29)

And the next paragraph outlined more discouraging requirements. Of the numerous
administration officials whose usually thoughtful comments I read regarding the eco-
nomic and political development for the SWCD, none were optimistic about the area’s
immediate potential for success. Only money—unrealistic amounts of money—might do
the job. According to Lumi ADC Broadhurst, for

Political, Economic and Social Development of the area. . . the Administration would
have to commit to the area a tremendous amount of financial aid. This would take the
form of numerous Political Education Patrols. . . and the posting of an Agricultural
Field Assistant to EDWAKI to assist the people in economic development, which
would be centered around the crocodile industry, rice, lowland coffee and cocoa. Trans-
port of produce to outside markets is a problem and consequently costs to undertake
development would be astronomical. (Broadhurst 1971: 2)

Considering the area’s small and dispersed population, constricted government fi-
nances, and an administration soon to be devolved with independence, any real economic
development for the SWCD was imaginary—in Tok Pisin, just ‘tok win.’ But even in the
economically walloped Upper Sepik Basin, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast”
(Pope [1733–34] 2016). Shortly after I returned home toward the end of April 1972,
Ray Lanaghan was transferred and replaced by PO F. J. Wafingian who, with the eagerly
volunteered labor of Lujere men, began a nine- to ten-mile road to the Sepik. He writes
in his “Road Construction” Patrol Report that

In four weeks, some 60 men have turned up and had completed l mile of road already.
The people are brought to work on a village to village basis. They work for two weeks.
Then go home and a fresh 30 men take over. To show their willingness the workers had
never complained of long hours they work. The supervisory job is done by the author
aided by MAKAU the Government Interpreter. They even carry out orders without
hesitation, and they do not complain even if it is hard work. Work starts at 7 a.m. in
the morning, with a break for lunch and goes on til 4 o’clock in the afternoon. . . . An
application for Rural Development Board has been put in already. However if this ap-
plication fails, could the Administration consider giving us aid in supplying more tools.
(Wafingian 1972: 1)

174
 Lujereland

Wafingian reasoned that with the plentiful timber, bridges could be constructed over
the six to eight small creeks and swampy sago patches, but his main concern was build-
ing a proper bridge over the more formidable (especially in the wet season) Yellow River.
Optimistically he added, “More advice would have to be sought on this matter at a latter
date. I presume this could be one of the Army Civic Aid Projects if necessary” (Wafingian
1972: 1).
ADC Wright noted in his comment on Wafingian’s report that, while the application
for administration support money was not granted, the requested tools to help build the
road would be forthcoming from Lumi. It was an example of bureaucratic compassion
that had been in such short supply in 1936 when McCarthy’s request for a few axes
and knives for the steel-deprived Lujere was ignored. From the District Commissioner’s
comments on the report, the odds on completing the road project looked grim:

Developmental Departments have been loathe to encourage economic development

in this area due to its isolation and lack of adequate communications. It is thought
that this area has potential for rice, cattle, coffee, copra and tobacco. Due to the low
population however (5,500 is the entire South Wapei Census Division) this project has
received a low priority on the District R.D.F. [Rural Development Fund] programme.
(ADC memo, in Wafingian 1972)

Or, in more direct parlance, “forget about bridging the Yellow River.” To this day,
there isn’t one. The last comment on Wafingian’s road building report was, as usual, by
Tom Ellis, the secretary of the Department of the Administrator. His comment was more
avuncular than critical. He knew from experience the local problems in raising unrealiz-
able hope.

Mr. Wafingian is obviously a keen young officer who undertakes his duties with enthu-
siasm; however enthusiasm must be tempered with discretion otherwise there could be
an adverse reaction from the village people. (Ellis memo, in Wafingian 1972)

As I write today, now well into the twenty-first century and well over a hundred years
after Schultz-Jena’s 1910 ascent of the Sepik River first transected Lujereland, the area
remains “isolated and undeveloped.”

Rural Airstrips

The location of airstrips in remote areas was one of the most physically visible and non-
controversial legacies of the colonial years. While airstrips brought some advantages to
the local people, such as the possibility of an airlift to a hospital, the primary beneficiaries
were the territories’ resident expatriates, such as government administrators, businesspeo-
ple, miners, missionaries, and anthropologists, all now enabled to work in isolated places
with the advantages of swift ingress and egress and the rapid transfer of mail and valued
commodities. The SWCD’s four minimum-category Delta airstrips were located at Yilui,
in the far eastern area; Magaleri, into which Joyce and I flew; Abrau, which Father James
helped supervise its readiness in 1949; and Yellow River, Lujereland’s only licensed airstrip
and operated by the CMML Mission. In 1968, PO Fowke reported that in the SWCD

175
 A Witch’s Hand

Three other airstrips are under construction at Yakiltim, [northeast area, Awum lan-
guage] Akwom, and Warukor [Warikorwi], the first two mentioned are supervised by
CMML and the last by the [Lumi] Catholic Mission.
All construction work on these strips has been done on a voluntary unpaid basis
while, regular maintenance is performed similarly. With the exception of Yellow River,
the land on which the ‘strips are located is owned by the village people.’ (Fowke 1968: 16)

When patrolling, PO Fowke heard a complaint from the Magaleri villagers that, while
it was their labor that built the airstrip on their land, the CMML Mission permitted only
their CMML planes to use it. Villagers, he was told, had assembled a load of fresh meat
to be back-loaded and sold at Lumi but the CMML plane was diverted for mission busi-
ness and the meat, about eighty dollars’ worth, could not be sent or sold locally at a good
profit. A Catholic mission aircraft was available but, because of CMML’s restrictions,
could not be used.
While PO Fowke was told that the Akwom airstrip was supervised by the CMML,
when I visited Akwom and Worikori in 1971 with Joyce, I was told that their rudimen-
tary airstrips were built for the Catholic mission’s plane, but it had never landed at either
one. However, I knew from Joyce that their plane flew medical workers routinely to the
Abrau airstrip to conduct health patrols. Trying to better understand the rationale be-
hind the unused airstrips, while writing this book I contacted retired Franciscan priests
who said they were unaware of their mission’s involvement with the airstrips or of any
intent to proselytize among the Lujere. It remains a puzzle what motivated the men to
expend such tremendous effort to build airstrips by hand with no assurance of their being
used unless they misconstrued the mission’s intent or were misled. There is no evidence
that the airstrips were the result of “cargo cult” thinking, that is, preparing a landing
strip to facilitate the arrival of deserved foreign riches from their ancestors.12 Rather, like
their generous contribution of labor to build the Yellow River Base Camp, I assume they
thought that an airstrip seemed like a smart thing to do if they wanted to develop ‘wok
bisnis.’ I generally found the Lujere, excepting some of their supernatural beliefs that
we’ll examine later, to be a very pragmatic and levelheaded people.

Hunting with Shotguns

Every Lujere man had a black palm bow and a few arrows, and he seldom left the village
without them, ever ready to shoot game. In those areas of Papua New Guinea where wild
game is available, shotguns are an important weapon augmenting the traditional bow and
arrows. However, in a relatively densely populated area like around Lumi, the introduc-
tion of the shotgun contributed to a great diminution of game. This was not a problem
in Lujereland because of the small, scattered population and immense acreage with an
abundance of game.
A license to hunt with a shotgun called a “Certificate of Registration” was secured
through the ‘kiap’; he decided who got a gun and how many per village, usually dependent

12. Lanaghan (1972: 6) notes in his patrol report that, “The well publicized TURU Cult did not
noticeably effect the environs of the South Wapi nor is there any sign of cult behavior or un-
rest evident among the S.[outh] WAPEI’S.”

176
 Lujereland

upon its size. In some of the Lujere villages, as among the Wape, villagers pooled their
money to buy a gun. Although only the licensed hunter could use the gun legally, oth-
ers might borrow the gun to hunt covertly. Women and men with the money bought a
shotgun shell or two and gave it to the licensed gunman, gambling he would kill game
with it. One of the tasks of the ‘kiap’ when on patrol was to see that each license was
current and that the gun was in working order; a defective gun could be confiscated and
destroyed. His tally shows that all Lujere villages had shotguns and that most of them
had three. They were all single-shot and most were Winchesters. While villagers could
not be licensed to own a rifle, the CMML missionaries, Cecil Parish and Phillip Ace,
each had licenses for a .22 rifle. The only other guns in Lujereland were those of the police
stationed at the base camp.
A villager owning a shotgun (called ‘sutboi’ in TP) with a ‘laisens’ (license) from the
‘kiap’ was perceived by villagers as in a superior relationship with the administration.
Although the ‘luluai’ and ‘tultul’ also had a unique relationship with the administration,
from a villager’s perspective it was more of a “gofer” role, while the licensed gun owner
enjoyed a more prestigious status among villagers. The special military-style caps given by
the administration to the ‘luluai’ and ‘tultul’ were usually only worn when in attendance
with the ‘kiap.’13
One of the three Iwani shotguns belonged to Klowi of Wakau, the village’s most
interesting man. Villagers gave him shells and he actually hunted, more or less, for the
whole village. He also was a very good shot, as I recorded early in my stay in my typed
notes:

THE ABUNDANCE OF GAME

There is no doubt of it, this bush is filled with wild life. Until five months ago, the
Wakau men had never owned a shotgun; all game had to be killed by bow and arrow.
Now with Klowi’s 12-gauge shotgun, he seldom goes out without bagging something.
Yesterday before lunch he shot one pig, one cassowary and five [Victoria] crown pi-
geons. In the afternoon he shot another cassowary and a ‘kokomo’ [hornbill]. Everyone
had plenty of meat to eat last night! (MN: 34).14

The Wape men were allowed to purchase shotguns in the early 1960s but the Lujere
not until later because of the administration’s assumptions regarding their “primitive-
ness.” PO Treutlein wrote in his patrol report,

A number of villages, both in the SW [Southwest] and South Wapei approached the
patrol about shotguns. While the South Wapei natives [the Lujere] could make good
use of guns in their areas of bush, they are still far too primitive and ready to resort to
blood-shed in settling their differences to allow any guns into that area. (Treutlein 1962:
15; my emphasis)

13. This prestigious status of the ‘sutboi’ was clearly recognized by the administration officials.
ADC Broadhurst (1971: 2) noted, “In some cases his sphere of authority is accepted by the
people as being greater than that of village officials, particularly if the village officials are not
strong characters.”
14. As indication in Part 1, MN is an abbreviation for my typed-up fieldnotes.

177
 A Witch’s Hand

Of course, this was a totally specious assumption, since the Lujere, even when first
contacted by the 1930s Australian patrols, were at peace among themselves; McCarthy,
you will recall, reported, “The people are the most peaceful I have ever met” (McCarthy
1936: 20).
While most of the game presented a hunting challenge, the stunning Victoria crowned
pigeon, docile and as large as a small turkey, was too easy to kill. Like the northern New
England spruce grouse or the Galapagos blue-footed booby, it was more a ground-dwell-
er than a flier and often indifferent to human presence. Occasionally Klowi would bring
me one and, although I might feel an initial tinge of guilt for eating such a hapless and
beautiful bird, it was too delicious to refuse.

Scientific Medicine in the Bush

Colonialism has been a whipping boy for every other kind of -ism, but it is rarely faulted
for its introduction of scientific medicine to a preliterate society. In the West Sepik Prov-
ince, the administration worked closely with the missions in establishing medical servic-
es. The CMML hospital at Anguganak was directed by Dr. John Sturt, a New Zealander,
and the administration’s hospital in Lumi was directed by Dr. Lyn Wark, the CMML
medical missionary from Australia already mentioned; both were assisted by several expat
missionary nurses and local medical orderlies. Anguganak was also the site for one of the
Territory’s hospitals for training aid post orderlies, the men who provided most villagers
with their only immediate access to Western medicine. These men, literate in Tok Pisin,
completed a two-year training course of didactic lectures and supervised work on hospi-
tal wards and in clinical laboratories. They were trained in basic medical techniques and
treatments as well as in hygienic village practices to prevent illness. Their training in first
aid procedures included the treatment of wounds, burns, fractures, asphyxia, shock, her-
nia, fits, fainting, dislocations, sprains, and bruises, as well as in the diagnosis and treat-
ment of tropical diseases of the skin, malaria, respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses. In
reply to my email query, Dr. Sturt wrote,

I started the medical work at Anguganak in 1959 and was there until the end of 1969.
One of the major activities was training medical orderlies to work in the hospital but
later to go out and run aid posts. The nurses trained local girls to work in the Infant
Welfare ward and to go on trek with them to run [village] clinics. We didn’t have a
separate name for the Aid Post training school. We named the hospital ‘Haus Laip’
[life] and referred to it that way rather than ‘Haus Sik.’ . . . I think the mission still
owns the hospital but Government is responsible for staff. (Email from J. Sturt to
W. Mitchell, July 21, 2015)

The Lujere had access to two of the aid posts run by the administration’s Public Health
Department, whose orderlies were trained under Dr. Sturt’s supervision; one in Akwom
that Joyce and I visited on our patrol, and the other in Yegerapi near the mission’s airstrip
that replaced in 1969 the service previously provided by the CMML Mission. Lita-
bagi was the aid post orderly at Yegerapi and during my fieldwork worked closely with
the mission’s health services provided by Rosemary Ace and Betty Gillam, both trained
nurses. Litabagi also did Bible training in 1968–69 but, as the CMML historians Dennis

178
 Lujereland

and Barbara Thorp observe, “His place as a teacher of the Bible has been made difficult
by his marriage to four wives” (Thorp and Thorp 2004).
Aid posts were first aid stations dealing with any and all health complaints presented
to them.15 They also had several beds for inpatients but at the aid posts, as in the two hos-
pitals, patient’s families were primarily responsible for their food. Depending upon the
evaluation of a patient by the Yellow River CMML missionaries, a seriously ill or injured
patient might be evacuated to the hospitals at Lumi, Anguganak, Vanimo, and Wewak
on an AMAF plane. An aid post orderly was paid fortnightly, and villagers were expected
to help with his food and maintain the structures; both requirements could become an
occasional contentious issue.16
Most months one or two CMML nurses from Lumi flew down to Yellow River and
patrolled some of the Lujere villages giving “Maternal and Infant Welfare” clinics with
special attention to lactating mothers and their babies and the physical development of
toddlers.17 While I was in the field, Betty Gillam was the lone patroller; later she made
two valuable nutritional studies among the Lujere (Gillam 1983, 1996).18

Radios and Newspapers

By now there should be no surprise that the Lujere were neither participants nor in-
terested in the national culture of Papua New Guinea. Newspapers were not a part
of their community life except as paper for rolling cigarettes. I earlier mentioned the
lack of radios or ‘wailis’ owned by Lujere villagers; as table 2 indicates, only six villages
had radios and only three, Alai, Naum, and Yegerapi had working ones. PO Lanaghan
(1971: 15) observed after a patrol of all the villages that more radios were being brought
back by laborers returning from coastal plantations but that “Lack of care and protec-
tion from insects render most radios inoperable soon after the original battery supply
has expired.”

15. Given to each orderly was The Aid Post Medical and Hygiene Training Book (Fowler 1960), a
171-page manual in Tok Pisin produced by the Public Health Department that uses text,
drawings, and diagrams to discuss a wide range of topics a medic might have to treat. It also
was my first-aid bible while in the field.
16. Some points of strain in the colonial Aide Post Orderly (APO) system are discussed by
Mitchell (1968). In 1965, the Department of Public Health decided to phase out the APO
health role and closed the government’s training schools. However, missionary medical facili-
ties, like at Anguganak, continued to train some APO’s. The closing of the schools was widely
criticized by some of the country’s health officers, such as Radford (1971:14), saw the APO
program as “a top priority in planning the allocation of resources for a successful future health
service.” After I left the country in 1972, the government reversed its policy and reopened one
of the APO training schools at Mt. Hagen.
17. Denoon’s chapter on “Women and Children Last” in a book on public health in Papua New
Guinea (Denoon, Dugan, and Marshall 1989) documents that it was not until 1948 that the
Public Health Department began to initiate special attention to the medical needs of mothers
and infants.
18. I deal with some of these findings in chapter 12.

179
 A Witch’s Hand

Table 2. Lujere shotguns, radios, and male literacy in Tok Pisin

Village Shotguns Working Nonworking Literate males

radios radios
Aiendami 3 0 0 2
Akwom 3 0 0 0
Alai 3 2 0 1
Gwidami 1 0 3 5
Iwani 3 0 0 10
Mantopai 2 0 0 1
Nami 2 2 0 0
Naum 3 0 1 5
Norambalip 3 0 0 10
Pabei 3 0 1 1
Tipas 2 0 0 2
Worikori 3 0 0 4
Yawari 2 0 0 3
Yegerapi 4 4 1 20
Totals 37 8 6 64
Source: Abstracted from Lanaghan (1971)

I had a strong AM radio with an antenna wire strung high between two trees that I
played mostly at night in my ‘ofis’ screen tent and tuned to a distant classical music sta-
tion I sometimes could pick up. Once it was dark most villagers were inside their houses
with doors shut tight. But after dinner I lit my Aladdin lamp that gave a bright, soft light
and went to work typing up notes, the notes that made this book possible so many years
later. Once in a great while, one of the men or an adventuresome youth would come by
and quietly watch me type, ever ready to help me understand what had happened that
day. If I wanted New Guinea news, I might tune in to Radio Wewak, a Tok Pisin station,
but it was unusual for anyone to comment on what we heard. It seemed to have the same
grabbing interest as a local broadcast from Bismarck, North Dakota would have for me.
The radio was recognized as a purveyor of music and talk, but the sole local function
of a newspaper was, as mentioned, as a coveted form of cigarette paper. My weekly Post
Courier from Port Moresby, while sometimes loaned to the missionaries or ‘kiap,’ was
usually returned to become valued currency for buying local foods or rewarding a helpful
informant.

Trade Stores and Markets

The CMML mission ran a small trade store that carried the basic commodities, such
as salt, tin fish from China, sweets, batteries, fishhooks, line, kerosene, men’s shorts,

180
 Lujereland

and women’s blouses and skirts. A trade store usually consisted of a shed with an out-
side high counter and merchandise on the shelves behind the salesperson. In January
of 1971, Makau, the administration interpreter, opened a competing trade store near
the Edwaki Base Camp and its Wakau visitors said the new store had cheaper and
fairer prices. Kerosene was twenty cents for a full bottle; the mission’s kerosene was also
twenty cents a bottle but not filled to the top. Makau’s store also sold trade tobacco and
newsprint for wrapping cigarettes, which the mission store didn’t. Sometimes a villager
would try to establish a small store, as in Norambalip, but it was unusual for them to
last.
A regular community market was organized that January and, according to the ‘kiap’
Ray, it had come about by chance. Some locals had approached him with produce and
he bought some for the jail, but told them to return the next week and they would have
a market. That’s the gossip we heard in Wakau, so I went in with Nauwen and with Oria
who had spent the previous afternoon in the bush getting betel nuts he would try to sell.
But we did not get to the base camp until almost noon and the market unfortunately was
over. Ray said about one hundred people had come but with just him and the police as
dependable buyers, most returned home with what they had brought, just as Oria had.
His plan now was to have a single village bring produce each week; next week it would
be Norambalip village as they had come the farthest. Eine and Arakwake’s wives also
had brought food they tried to sell to Rosemary at the mission with no luck. Rosemary,
incidentally, didn’t know about Ray’s weekly market plans, which was typical of the re-
grettable lack of communication between the two expat institutions.

Tok Pisin Schools and Literacy

Ces Parish and Bruce Crowther both had devoted considerable time to small ad hoc Tok
Pisin Bible Schools advancing literacy with Bible-oriented materials, as did Phillip Ace
during my PNG fieldwork. While most men who left their village to work for the Euro-
pean returned speaking fluently in Tok Pisin, far fewer were also able to read and write
it. In most villages, as in Wakau, there were no female Tok Pisin speakers, and those who
were literate in the language were still rarer. An exception was Yegerape village near the
mission. Ray Lanaghan’s statistics in table 2 are only for males, and Yegerapi village had
by far the most literate males just as it had the most attendees in Bible Schools as well
as the most shot guns and radios. But two of the Lujere villages Ray visited, Akwom and
Nami, had no men literate in Tok Pisin and three had only one literate man. Reading in
Tok Pisin was mostly restricted to religious material while writing was almost exclusively
in missives to relatives away at work or to an anthropologist friend. As noted earlier, ex-
cept for a few New Testaments, there was little, if any, national literature, such as books,
magazines, or newspapers, in the villages.

Yellow River Preparatory School

Bruce Crowther, with the CMML Mission as sponsor, began the first English language
school at Yellow River during his and his wife Margaret’s stay from August 1963 to to-
wards the end of 1965. After building his family’s house atop the hill, he and local men
built the classrooms and school desks from local materials below the mission’s hill station

181
 A Witch’s Hand

for easier student access. Crowther also taught classes in Tok Pisin and had about one
hundred students in all.19 With Crowther gone, Violet Goff, another adherent of the
Australian Christian Brethren, took over the mission’s commitment to the school. In
1968, as discussed in chapter 5, the Lumi ADC J. E. Fowke made a patrol of the SWCD,
then spent several days based in Yegarapi village to mark out his proposed administration
station atop Edwaki hill, also home of the CMML Mission. Although his patrol report
does not mention conversations with the missionaries, it is obvious from his report he
did have contact with them, as the following quotation about the lack of educational op-
portunities for children indicates:

Efforts have been made over the past seven years by the CMML at its Yellow River
station to establish a preparatory school, with little success. Children from several of
the nearby villages, within walking distance, have attended at irregular periods but it
has not been possible to keep them at school to a stage when they can read or write.
The main reason for this failure is the all consuming fear by the parents of sorcery or
‘sanguma’ which they state will attack their children while on the way to school. . . Ap-
proximately two years ago a child was “lost” while traveling to school and to this day
no trace has ever been found. Since this incident no local children have attended the
Yellow River school. (Fowke 1968: 12)

However, in October 1970, PO Hutchings reports that

Children are again attending the Primary T School at Yellow River even though in-
cidences of “Sanguma” in the area are high. This indicates the importance placed on
education, if parents are prepared to risk their child’s safety for the sake of education.
(Hutchings 1970: 12)

Hutchings then makes the point that the facilities for education “within this area are
at a deplorable level,” citing the “abundance of small children” within the SWCD: 594
from six to ten years old; 684 from one to five years old; and 286 under one year of age.
As table 3 indicates, only 97 Lujere children of school age (16 percent) attended school.

Table 3. CMML Yellow River primary school students

Girls Boys Total

Standard 2 5 15 20
Standard 1 14 24 39
Preparatory 11 27 38
Totals 30 66 97
Source: Hutchings (1970).

19. Lyn Wark Murray, email to author, July 30, 2015, based on her phone conversation with Mar-
garet Crowther.

182
 Lujereland

When PO Wafingian patrolled the Lujere villages in July 1972 after both Ray and I
had left the Lujere, he included a brief report on “Education” but without any enrollment
figures:

There is only one proper school where English is taught. This is looked after by the
C.M.M.L. Mission and is staffed by 3 teachers. The classes range from standard 1 to 4.
The successful students proceed to Angugunak (sic) for their higher primary education.
Besides that we have a few pidgin schools [that] also are supervised by the C.M.M.L.
Mission. . . . Only a few students, (4) have succeeded from the English school at Yellow
River, and are undergoing training for jobs or tertiary education. (Wafingian 1972: 8)

The ADC’s comment on Wafingian’s education report was, “The educational facilities
are reasonable having regard to the remoteness of the area and the scattered settlements
of local population” (Wafingian 1972: 9). But here is what’s odd: in June 1968, there is
no Yellow River school, but in July 1972, four years later, the PO says there is an English
language school with standard (elementary grade levels) 1–4 and that four students have
finished and moved on. Thus in 1968, when there was no school, four children would
have been in attendance to move on by 1972. One or both of the ‘kiaps’ seem to have
things mixed up a bit.20

20. I thought I might be able to sort things out if I got the term schedule so on July 27, 2015,
Sister Jo Scanlan, who at the time in question was a teacher in the Lumi school, emailed me
from Australia to provide the following data regarding the schedule for the three terms: (1)
mid Jan, Feb, March, April, followed by first term holiday; (2) May, June, July, August, second
term holiday; (3) September, October, November, mid December, then six weeks holiday.
Unfortunately, this did not resolve the discrepancy.

183
chapter eight

The Lujere Villages

The villages are all friendly to one another.

ADO Keith McCarthy (1936)

Very few people live in the village all the year round.
PO R. K. Treutlein (1962: 14)

A Muddle of Terms
The administration generally used the word “village” as a collective term for several geo-
graphically separate but culturally related clusters of houses called “hamlets.” A single
‘luluai’ and ‘tultul’ was appointed for the “village” regardless of the number or size of
its “hamlets.” This nomenclature system of “villages” and “hamlets” was a colonial or-
ganizational shadow imposed on the Lujere’s own Indigenous sense of organization and
generally was ignored by them except when the government interrupted their lives. More
confusing when consulting maps or texts, there often is no lexical consensus on a settle-
ment’s spelling, hence the custom of placing alternative spellings in parentheses. Also, a
tropical village constructed of bush material is not securely fastened in place with nails
and mortar so if cultural or environmental events necessitate a move, it is easily done.
Although the villagers remain the same, the ground or area where the village is newly
placed has a different name and so might the village. That is usually the situation when
you notice on a map or in a text two very different names with one—usually the old
name—in parenthesis, such as Mokadami (Gwidami) or Ameni (Tipas). On some maps,
both the old and new names will appear separately. Furthermore, as already noted, a vil-
lage may have many hamlets, each with a different name. In the initial 1956 census, PO
Oakes recorded nine hamlets for Aiendami and three hamlets for Wakau village: Wakau,

185
 A Witch’s Hand

Leubangi and Iwalamu. To show that there is no consistency in naming practice, when
Wakau moved back across the river to its earlier World War II site where they had traded
with the Mosstroops, the administration retained its name of Wakau but, while it had
been mapped as a “village” when west of the Sand, it was now considered a hamlet of
Iwani village in the census.1
For the Lujere, unconcerned with maps and printed texts, settlement naming is a
simple oral task. They do not have comparable terms in Namia to distinguish “hamlet”
and “village”; 2 each separate cluster of dwellings is considered a distinct settlement
called a walamaku (wala = house, maku = group) and each walamaku has a distinct name.
As mentioned earlier, it is usually the name of the ground on which the settlement sits.
To the Lujere, each walamaku is a social entity to itself, beholden to no other walamaku,
and held together based on cognatic and affinal kinship ties that, in turn, links it to other
walamaku.
In practice, the administration, especially in censuses, sometimes muddled the con-
cepts “village” and “hamlet.” I also tend to use them interchangeably unless I am mak-
ing a specific organizational point. Although Wakau was considered an Iwani hamlet
in the 1972 administration census, I usually refer to it as a “village” using that word as
a synonym of “settlement.” There also is no specific number of Lujere villages; it all de-
pends on the patrol officer who is doing the counting and how he categorizes a specific
settlement or malamaku. For example, in 1956, George Oakes’s initial administration
census of the Lujere (see table 1 in chap. 4) counted Wakau as a separate village (which
included Leubanagi and Uwalamu hamlets), but after they all moved back across the
Sand River in the 1960s to an old site (where I lived), Ray Lanaghan’s 1971 census (see
table 4 below) reclassified Wakau as a hamlet of Iwani village. So, to maintain equanim-
ity, it is best to be linguistically adaptive when discussing Lujere settlements. For the
record, however, my Wakau informants taught me that “Iwani” consisted of four related
settlements: Mauwi, ostensibly the oldest atop the hill of the same name; Iwarwita,
tiny and near the southwest base of the hill; Wakau, just off the ‘kunai’ northwest of the
hill; and Aukwom, the newest, on the far (south) bank of the Sepik near the mouth of
Yellow River.
A source of perennial confusion for me concerning all of Namia speech was that I
could not discern a clear-cut tradition on how words should be pronounced, even in a
small community like Wakau. If I were working with more than one informant, pronun-
ciation of the same term could vary. Most vexing was that Nauwen and Oria, raised in
the same family, sometimes contradicted each other on pronunciation of a Namia term

1. The linguist couple that studied Namia in the 1980s render “Wakau” as “Wagou” in their pub-
lications (Feldpausch and Feldpausch 1988: 48). In terms of Namia vocabulary, I follow their
renderings (Feldpausch 2011), but in proper names including villages, I use the pronunciation
I heard in Wakau or the spelling used by one of the village men literate in Tok Pisin. I have
mentioned elsewhere that there was no clear consistency in the pronunciation of many proper
names and my decision was an arbitrary one.
2. This is a common practice in Melanesia; for instance, Scott notes that the Solomon Islands’
“Arosi do not verbally distinguish between villages and the smaller hamlets which they com-
prise, but use the same word, ‘omaa, to refer to both” (Scott 2007:39).

186
 The Lujere Villages

or the name of a person or village. Although I never attained even rudimentary fluency in
Namia, I never ceased my study of the language.

Population and Gender

A little over a week after I moved to Wakau, Ray Lanaghan began a patrol of all the
SWCD villages that included the Lujere villages north of the Sepik River. In early Janu-
ary of 1971, we heard he would take a census of the Iwani hamlets on the ninth and, as
his girlfriend was visiting him from Australia, I invited them for dinner in Mauwi hamlet
after the census concluded. The villagers knew about his impending visit and were well
aware that a ‘kiap’ would be annoyed if a village looks untended with tall grass on the
path. Arakwaki had cleaned up the upper part of the village where his wife’s house was
located, but the rest of the village by contrast looked abandoned. It was an awkward time
for me. I never interfered in village affairs, but I was concerned that Ray might scold
them or even send a few to the ‘kalabus,’ so, late in the afternoon on the eighth, I finally
voiced my concerns about the impending visit of the ‘kiap’ to a few of the men; about
ten minutes later I saw some taking turns cutting down the wild grass with their ‘sarips.’
These men were so different from the Wape who, if they had an inkling that a ‘kiap’ would
be coming to their village, not only did the grass get cut but also any old unoccupied
house was burned to the ground. But the Wakaus could not be more blasé regarding
colonial authority.
Based on Ray’s late 1971 patrol census (Lanaghan 1971: 25), the administration rec-
ognized fourteen Lujere villages in the SWCD (see table 4), with a total population of
2,847. However, if the Lujere across the Sepik River in the May River Census Division
were added, it would come to just over 3,000.3
The most interesting information revealed by the census is the disproportionate ratio
between males and females. There are 250 more men than women and 119 more boys
than girls. These lop-sided demographics infer there will be a significant number of men
who will not marry and have families. As the Lujere are a society where the preferential
form of marriage is sister exchange, the demographic consequences are most severe for
sisterless males.

3. There are three settlements across the Sepik in the East Sepik Province: Panewai, Purami, and
Aukwom (Aigum, Augam). In 1972 the census for Panewai was 108 (Stevens 1972). I found
no census figures for Purami and Aukwom. Aukwom does not appear in censuses of either the
East or West Sepik Districts for the reason below. PO Payne writes regarding Aukwom that
A group from ‘Mowi’ [Mauwi] village in the same census division [SWCD] have also
made a camp at the mouth of the Yellow River known as Aigum [Aukwom, Augam],
they claim they hope to move in permanently. Their location may give rise to some
confusion in the future, but at present they are lodged between the Sepik-May and
Rocky Peaks C/D, and it was thought unwise to attempt to include them in either of
these C/D as Tipas and Aigum are only 4 hours walk from Edwaki Base Camp and
most of their ties are with people from this area. (Payne 1972:1)

187
 A Witch’s Hand

Table 4. PO Lanaghan’s Lujere village census data, November–December 1971

Children Adults
Name of Male Female Male Female Total village
village Resident Absentee* populations
Aiendami 46 36 35 30 45 192
Akwom 57 34 41 14 45 191
Alai 21 19 31 8 28 107
Gwidami 58 39 60 22 69 248
Iwani 64 72 79 23 90 328
Mantopai 26 18 25 23 24 116
Nami 53 36 52 29 54 224
Naum 32 32 42 16 43 165
Norambalip 55 44 75 8 59 241
Pabi 55 49 50 21 46 221
Tipas 27 30 31 9 31 128
Worikori 40 27 45 19 38 267
Yawari 58 49 51 26 56 240
Yegerapi 75 63 69 7 63 277
Demographic 667 548 686 255 691 2,847
totals:
* Absentee men were away working as indentured laborers for colonial enterprises.

For both the world and Papua New Guinea, the ratio of males to females, favors
males. However, if there is a marked gender disparity in a society, cultural attitudes to-
wards children must be examined for the possibility of female infanticide. I did not per-
sonally obtain any direct evidence from the Lujere on this practice; I did, however, hear
rumors from the expatriates about female infanticide—never males—but without hard
data. The closest is when the linguist missionary Becky Feldpausch, who lived in Yaru
village with her husband Tom, reported:

One man told us that 15 years ago [when I lived in Wakau], a father intended to kill
his newborn daughter because he had no son and this was his 5th daughter. Another
man intervened and said not to kill her but to consider her as his. So the father did not
kill her and she is considered the intervener’s adopted daughter. (Feldpausch 1988:18)

In another incident, PO C. A. Trollope reported a case of female infanticide with a

more tragic outcome and submitted the following report to the Lumi ADC:

AKWOM VILLAGE A native [named] AIDO was arrested from this village on the
suspected killing of his new born daughter. The man had ordered his wife to hang the

188
 The Lujere Villages

child in a basket from a tree and leave it there until its death. The wife, WEINI did
so under her husband’s compulsion. Several hours later, moved with emotion for her
child, she took it down and was seen doing so by AIDO. He took the child from her
and buried it apparently alive. Preliminary hearing has been completed and AIDO
committed for sentence. (Trollope 1962: 2)

The two authenticated incidents just cited seem to indicate that female infanticide
occasionally was attempted but of themselves, are insufficient to hypothesize female in-
fanticide as a definitive answer for the gender discrepancy. A comparison of the 1956
and 1971 censuses offers an interesting historical picture of the problem. Of the 2,847
Lujere in the 1971 census, 1,608 were males and 1,239 females or, at a one-to-one ratio,
a surplus of 369 males. For comparison see table 1 for data from the first census of Lujere
villages made by PO George Oakes in 1956.4 In his 1956 census, of the 2,318 Lujere ac-
counted for, 1,235 were males and 1,083 were females or, at a one-to-one ratio, a surplus
of 152 males. In other words, the ratio of males to females in 1971 was 1.3 and in 1956,
1.14. The “Absent Male” column refers to indentured laborers.
Compared to the male-to-female gender ratio for Papua New Guinea of 1.05, or
1.01 for the world,5 the gender imbalance for the Lujere was substantially higher. While
I can’t tease out the factors to account for this robust disparity between the sexes, its
obvious cultural consequence is to make marriage a more challenging act for males than
females. Besides, the mature male’s disadvantaged status position when he is wifeless
with neither sons nor daughters and often motherless exacerbates the problem of who
will feed him.

Lujere Regions
While the Lujere have no word comparable to “region,” they mentally arrange their vil-
lages into four geographic regions with the affective feel of the American idea of a “re-
gion” or “district,” indicating recognized social, even historical, ties. The four regions are
each distinguished by the name of the ground it occupies: Lawo, Edwaki, Weari and
Pabei. No distinctive cultural or dialectical differences exist among them, nor is there a
known reason to group the villages together beyond sharing in common a named ground
whereby their proximal locations facilitate social interaction and, formerly, both defensive

4. Aukwom, a small community, is presumably censused with Iwani village. So, if Panewai had a
population of 108 and Purami was a similar size, my estimate for the 1972 Lujere population
would be just over 3,000. Aukwom was the Sepik River village Joyce and I visited en route to
Iwani village and Mauwi hamlet.
A patrol report for PO Gilbert’s 1949 patrol to the Sepik from Lumi with Fr. James could not
be located in any archives. However, Oakes’ (1956) patrol report notes that a census for the
village of Wokian (Pouye lang.) was done in 1949; it was one of the villages Gilbert visited
with Fr. James. He also notes that Edawaki had a census in 1951 by a Green River Patrol Of-
ficer. All the other Lujere villages Oakes visited are cited as an “Initial Census,” so it is a safe
assumption that Gilbert did not officially census any of the Lujere villages.
5. See www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio (accessed August 16, 2015).

189
 A Witch’s Hand

and offensive warfare. That a “region” might also be the name of a “village,” such as Pabei,
is not a concern. Like other aspects of Lujere culture, this was not a hard and fast typol-
ogy. 6
The Lujere do not have terms for the cardinal positions to indicate direction as in
English, but the named regions are one way to orient oneself or others. The four regions
and their constituent villages are

1. Lawo: The northwest villages of Yawari (Yuwari), Montopai, Aiendami, and

Gwidami;
2. Edwaki: The central villages of, Yergarapi, Yaru, Norambalip, and Alai;
3. Weari: The eastern villages of Akwom, Naum, Nami, and Worikori;
4. Pabei: The southern villages of, Wakau, Iwani, Pabei, Tipas, Aukwom, and
Panawai.

An individual may be identified by her regional name, such as Weari, as well as by

her village, for instance, Worikori. It is probable—although the historical research has
not been done—that a district’s villages are historically closely related as various factors
generated the departure of villagers to create a new community, as they continue to do
today. Both my and the Feldpausches’ informants attested to more extensive social and
marriage relations with those within their district although this is not fully substantiated
by the empirical evidence. For example, Wakau residents had stronger social ties with
nearby Gwidami and Aiendami villagers (Lawo District) than with more distant Pabei or
Panawai villagers in their own Pabei District, at least during my fieldwork. Still, villagers
referred to Panawai, located across the Sepik, with a sense of social closeness that for a
long time puzzled me until I became aware of the regional identities.
One of the most interesting facts about the Lujere, just as the perceptive McCarthy
determined on his 1936 pioneering patrol, is that “The villages are all friendly to one
another.” My Wakau informants were adamant that Namia speaking villages never en-
gaged in warfare with one another. This is an unusual phenomenon as many New Guinea
language groups, certainly in the Sepik area, engaged in internal warfare; the Wape, all
Olo speakers, certainly did. In my pondering why the Lujere had internal peace, I wonder
if they are a young society with insufficient history to routinize and valorize intervillage
strife, a point supported by the lack of regional dialects. There is the further point that
all the Lujere villages see themselves as historically relating back to Iwani village as the
original “Mother” village.7 Whatever eventually can be established to explain Lujerland’s

6. Toward the end of my fieldwork, Oria named six regions adding “Iwani” and its constituent
hamlets, and “Amani” and the Tipas related hamlets. Also see Feldpausch (1988: 3-4) for their
discussion of the Indigenous grouping of villages as viewed by their informants in Yaru vil-
lage. In an even later paper (Feldpausch 1999: 1) they place Iwani, Wakou, Aukwom (Augam,
Aigam), and Panawai into a separate “Southwest area” called “Iwani” with the “Southern area”
identified as “Ameni” or “Pabei” with six villages, namely, Tipas (Ameni), Elmoli, Pabei 1,
Pabei 2, Panewai, and (Panewai 2). Probably part of the reason for the areal differences is that
there is no consistent geographic point for viewing the “areas.”
7. The Marind Anim are a society over three times as large as Lujere that also appears to have
an ethos of peace among its villages. Van Baal’s ethnography of the ten-thousand-strong,

190
 The Lujere Villages

lack of internal warfare, the fact remains that a ‘sangumaman,’ in Namia a nakwolu, is
believed not only to furtively kill in his neighboring villages but within his own village as
well. While the Lujere did not war among themselves, it was believed that a nakwolu, did
not hesitate to secretly attack even his fellow villagers.

Leadership and Authority

PO Lanaghan writing about the Lujere notes that “Generally speaking there is no tra-
ditional ‘leader’ in respect of an all-powerful individual. Occasionally there may appear a
man that could wield more influence than was the normal case, but this gentleman still
needed support from his compatriots” (Lanaghan 1972:16). Just as there is a laissez-faire
attitude among the Lujere settlements vis-à-vis one another, so there is towards “local
authority” that is primarily based on kinship statuses and roles. As already noted, the
administration’s appointed ‘luluais’ and ‘tultuls’ had unquestioned authority only in the
presence of the ‘kiap.’ The concept of a single authority figure over all the Lujere villages
did not exist until the ‘kiap,’ supported by his armed policemen, demanded compliance.
Between a ‘kiap’s visits, there could be months, even years, when local life immediately
returned to its egalitarian ways. And, as we saw in chapter 2, the Lujere did not protest
the pioneering patrols by Thurnwald or the administration’s patrols by Robertson and
McCarthy. Instead, the patrols were shyly welcomed as bearers of exotic and desired
trade objects, which the locals eagerly obtained in exchange for the sago given to feed the
European’s entourage of police and porters.

Ancestral Origins
In Warikori during my patrol with Joyce I first heard that all the Namia speakers traced
their origins to Iwani village. That certainly was the view in Wakau. One of my main in-
formants in Wakau was Kaiera, a quiet thirtyish man whose mother, born in Wakau, had
married a man from Mauwi where she still lived. Kaiera, born in Mauwi, was afraid of
Mauwi ‘sanguma’ and, via his mother’s connection—plus his mother’s brother’s daughter
was Klowi’s wife—had moved to the men’s house of Wakau’s upper village where he felt
safer and did not have to climb up and down Mauwi’s steep hill. A partially blind bach-
elor with a left eye that swung around wildly, he spent most of his time in or near the
upper village’s men’s house. However, he had enough vision to find his way around the
village, gather a little firewood and tend a small garden just below my house. He also had
made friends with Nauwen, my ‘mankimasta,’ and was often sitting quietly in my ‘haus
kuk,’ so I saw him frequently.

warlike Marind Anim located across the international border on New Guinea’s south coast,
notes, “Most remarkable of all is that, in spite of absence of intervillage authority and or-
ganization, they managed to maintain relatively peaceful conditions among themselves” (Van
Baal 1966: 24).

191
 A Witch’s Hand

Then Friday, after our hardly having ever exchanged more than a hello [for three
months], he came to my office and was watching me type in the afternoon. He said
something about his telling me stories sometime so I said now is a good time. I turned
on the Uher [recorder] and away he went, first singing war songs that I had never
heard, one after the other with volunteered translations, source, etc.; an anthropolo-
gist’s dream informant. So we worked for about two hours until I was too tired to go
on. (MN: 539)

That afternoon I learned, among many things, why the Lujere no longer had ‘garam-
uts’ and the origin story of the Lujere people. The ‘ofis’ Kaiera and I were sitting in was a
screen tent protected from insects and rain under a ‘morota’ roof that also covered a cou-
ple of low benches for visitors. Newai, a teenage boy, later joined by Klowi, occasionally
added a detail to Kaiera’s story, or laughed at its lewder events. It was a long story with
occasional backtracks and corrections. The following version of the Lujere origin story
is Kaiera’s but, as retold by this listener, is considerably leaner.8 In chapter 14, we will
examine more stories and their place in the life and imagination of the Lujere.

A Man, His Son, and Dog Go Up the Sepik

According to a Lujere traditional story, the Lujere ancestor was a man named Walwin,
who went up the Sepik River in a canoe with his son and a big male dog named Mau-
wi, which was a great hunter. [Kaiera infers that Iwani’s mountain was named after
this dog, adding that they still “have” the dog as they have not lost his name.] While
they go up the river the father decides to go hunting with his dog and tells his son to
wait for them. The dog kills a pig and a cassowary, and the father brings their carcasses
back to the canoe and they continue to paddle upstream until it gets dark. Then they
cut and eat the game, the boy eating with the dog. Every day they do this, the dog kills
the game, and they rest at night and eat.
Finally, the three of them came to the mouth of the Iwan (Yellow) River and go
up a ways until they come to the mouth of the Taun (Sand) River. The son wants to go
up this river but his father says, “You can but I’m not,” and they continue up the Iwan
River until they come in sight of the little mountain Mauwi. The father climbed the
hill and saw the Inarlit River.9 He notices that its water was different—that it is red
and that it is a very good river that he thinks comes from the mountains. When they
get to the Inarlit River the son wanted to follow it but the father says no. Then they go
up the Milyar tributary as the father wanted. Finally, they beach their canoe and begin
walking. The father goes ahead until he sees Mauwi mountain, returns for the boy and
dog, and they all go up the mountain and continue to a small grassy area where they

8. For the Lujere, like most New Guinea societies, there was “a lack of concern with the origins
of the universe in general or of the earth as such” (Berndt 1972: 824). Indeed, the idea of a
“universe” or “earth” was not a part of their Indigenous consciousness. Many New Guinea so-
cieties do have stories about human origins but, if the Lujere have such a story, as they could,
I did not learn of it.
9. This is the main river or creek that flows between the two highest hills that lie between the
Yellow and Sand Rivers; Iwani village sits atop the west hill and the CMML Mission and
Edwaki Base Camp atop the east hill.

192
 The Lujere Villages

make a little house and, after eating the dog’s game, go to sleep. The next morning,
they find another grassy area named Ireno with a large ironwood tree in the middle
and they start building a house. A single woman named “Wind Woman” or in Namia,
“Oroble,” lives up in the tree where she would rest on one of the branches and call out.
After Walwin and his son finish building their house, they sleep there.
On the very top of the hill is an ironwood tree, the kind with the fruit that falls
down and cassowaries and pigs like to eat. It stands in the center of what is now the
central plaza of Mauwi hamlet. Walwin, on seeing many pigs and cassowaries gath-
ered around this tree, says, “I can’t shoot them all because they might kill me.” Then
he shoots the biggest pig there. It is as big as a cow. Then all the pigs and cassowaries
run away; some go down to Bapei, some towards Iwareyo, some towards Edwaki, some
down towards Wakau, and some towards the big bush to the west. Walwin follows
the injured pig he has shot until he finds its dead body. He says, “Oh, I’m not strong
enough to carry this pig, it’s not a small pig I could carry.” Then he covers the pig with
leaves and returns the next morning with his son to butcher it.
The woman who lives in the ironwood tree returns and sits down on a branch of
this tree. The branch stood up just the same as a man’s erect penis, and when she sat
down on it she made this sound: “Loble, loble, loble.” The branch goes into her vagina,
and she bled as if it were water. Walwin looked at her and says, “What’s going on? I
think this is a spirit woman, not a real woman.”
Walwin then cuts some branches and vines and makes a bed in the tree just beneath
the branch she has fucked. He measures the branch and thinks that his penis was just
as big. Then he chops off the branch and it falls to the ground below; now his penis
stands erect just as the branch had [much laughter]. In the afternoon it rains and when
it has almost stopped, Walwin tells his son he is going up in the tree now; his son ties
a rope around his father’s waist, who then climbs up into the tree and lies down on the
bed he has made. The wind begins to blow and Walwin says, “I think she will come
with the wind.” He then instructs his son to hold fast to the rope around his waist.
Walwin lies down on the bed and his penis is already erect when he hears the
woman’s “loble, loble, loble.” She comes and sits down on his erect penis as if it were
the branch. As they are having sex, they both fall out of the tree down to the ground.
As they lie on the ground they continue to have sex. They continue on, and on, and on,
and on, and on, and on, and on, until the woman is pregnant. But Walwin does not
take his penis out of her but keeps it in and they continue to have sex. Finally, the baby
that is inside of the woman wants out, so she shoves Walwin’s penis out of her way and
the baby girl is born.
The Wind Woman speaks another language and does not understand Walwin’s
language. After she has the baby girl, she uses hand signals to tell Walwin that she
would like to try some of their food, such as sago dumplings, cooked sago, meat, grubs,
fish, and all the different kinds of food she points to. First, they give her sago and she
likes it; then she tries sago dumplings and likes them too. Then she tries meat, grubs,
fish, eggs, Victoria crowned pigeons, hornbills, birds of paradise, lizards, and she likes
it all.
Then they begin having sex again and this time she has a baby boy. She decides she
wants to learn how to make sago dumplings and they teach her. Then she learns how
to cook sago with a hot stone. She tries cooking meat and says, “This kind of work is
very good.” She learns how to get grubs out of tree trunks and cook them, how to catch

193
 A Witch’s Hand

fish and to butcher the stomach of a pig. She also learns how to pick up the pig’s shit.
Then she learns how to cut firewood and to wash sago. Walwin and his son teach her
all these things. And she continues to have babies, alternating between a girl and a
boy. After she had learned all these different tasks, Walwin said that she is now a real
woman, not a spirit woman and tells his son, “You can stay with her, she won’t eat you
now. She is a real woman and understands all of the things we do.”
Walwin, his son, and the dog finish killing all the game on the mountain including
all the young game. Walwin then goes to the top of the mountain where the ironwood
tree stands and all the game has earlier gathered and clears the area and builds his
house there. The ground on the top of the mountain is wet and muddy because so
many animals have walked about there, but once he cuts down all the trees and bushes,
the sun shines on the ground and it is dry. All the children of the Wind Woman also
live up there.
Once, when Walwin is walking in the forest, he finds two men. He discovers them
on the side of the mountain where Iwariyo hamlet [the “funeral” hamlet Joyce and I
passed through] is now. These two men live inside the earth; neither is married nor has
any children. They walk around underground breaking firewood [Kaiera imitates the
sound]. Walwin said, “Who is that making that noise underneath the ground? What is
it? Is it a spirit man or a spirit woman?” He goes home but decides to return the next
day and dig a hole in the ground to see who is there. During the night he whispers to
his son, “I think tomorrow you and I will go and find what it is I heard making the
noise inside the ground.”
The next morning, they go to the place where Walwin heard the noise and each cut
down a tree, sharpen both its ends, then begin digging into the ground. They dig the
hole down, down, down, down, down, until they saw the house of the two men. They
ask, “Who would live here? Are they spirit men? Who would live underground like
this?” The two men look up and see Walwin and his son standing there and say, “Who
are you standing there? We hope you aren’t spirit men.” Walwin and his son reply, “We
are not spirit men, we are real men. You are the spirit men!” They continued back and
forth accusing each other of being spirit men until Walwin and his son ask the men
to come up on top, but the two men keep asking Walwin and his son to come down
where they were. Finally, the underground men get their way and Walwin and his son
go below and sit down with the two men.10
The two underground men eat dirt and their shit is abnormal. They eat meat but
with dirt, not sago. They think sago is not good to eat. The men smoke some grubs
and fish and give it to Walwin and his son to eat. After eating, the four visit, smoke,
and chew betel nut. Walwin and his son eventually say they must go back to their own
house, that they have ruined the men’s house by digging the hole, so the two men go up

10. Stories of hidden underground people are rather common in Melanesian societies and they
always enchant me. In the Solomon Islands’ Makiran culture they have “cargoistic and mil-
lenarian aspects” that Scott summarizes:
wonder discourses about the underground envisage that, when the army emerges, true
Makiran language and kastom will be restored, the hidden riches of Mikira will bring
fabulous prosperity, sexual immorality will run rife, and Makira will become an au-
tonomous superpower. (Scott 2016: 489)

194
 The Lujere Villages

with them, take wives, and have children by them. Walwin’s son also takes a wife from
one of the Wind Woman’s daughters and he also has children.
Now there are many people on the mountain and it is completely covered with
houses. Finally, some of the people leave the mountain because it is too crowded and
make new houses in Bapei. Others make houses at Iwariyo, while others go down
and make houses at Edwaki, some go to Lawara, and others to Epoumu. Some of the
people eat meat, but others go to bed hungry so they continue to move into other areas
to live. Some go off to Gwidami and Aiendame, others Yuwari, others to Tipas. More
time passes and Walwin’s son’s children now must move out. One, however, stays in
Mauwi, but the rest leave: one goes to Gwidami, one to Edwaki, one to Tipas, then
some to Magaleri and others to Wagu. It was only later the people moved to Wakau.

Just when I was beginning to think that this story could go on endlessly tracing mi-
grations, like the First Book of Chronicles in the Old Testament traces who “begat”
whom, Kaiera rather abruptly said the story was finished. It was after 4:00, extremely hot,
and the cicadas were droning monotonously. I wanted to ask Kaiera how Namia speakers
settled Magaleri and Wagu as neither village speaks Namia today, but I lacked the energy.
A different line of questioning revealed that another name for Walwin was Mais, but
what interested me most about the story—besides the riotous marathon sex scene that
ends with his infant daughter pushing his penis out of her way so she could be born—was
the relationship between her mother and father that provides a rationale for the female
division of labor. It is her father who instructs her mother, a spirit woman, at her own re-
quest, not only about all the father’s foods but how to prepare them, besides other female
tasks like collecting firewood and, of course, picking up pig shit, that civilizes her into
a real woman. Initially, according to the story, males had to do everything, until females
came along and opted to help.
It goes without saying that Lujere men invented these stories, and they are told over
and over in their men’s houses. Kaiera learned them as a growing boy in a Mauwi men’s
house, as did Newai and Klowi in a Wakau men’s house. When local news and gossip
was insubstantial, telling stories—a term I prefer to legends or myths—in the darkness
of a men’s house during the long nights was the main form of entertainment. Some
of the stories were so long they could be classified as sagas; Yaope told me one about
“Snake Woman” that lasted over two hours. The mental “worlds” of these Lujere males, if
compared to a contemporary Westerner privately accessing an array of digital devices to
discover all information and images throughout the known universe, are both geographi-
cally and culturally acutely localized. But that is part of the intellectual and emotional
excitement of fieldwork: liaising with minds whose workings are in some ways so vastly
different from one’s own.
As Kaiera was telling the story, I thought I might also learn about the origin of men’s
houses but there was nothing special about males except the bonding of the father and
son, and the peaceful encounter between them and the two underground men. Unlike
some Lujere stories, this one was totally absent of violence, something I became acutely
accustomed to in Wape tales. Instead, there was the scene of the underground men feed-
ing the strangers Walwin and his son, then their visiting, smoking, and chewing betel—
just like Lujere men did when I lived with them—before the underground men were
taken home and given Walwin’s daughters for wives. At no point was there any indication

195
 A Witch’s Hand

of a man having more than one wife—Walwin’s only spouse was the Wind Woman—or
any suggestion of sister exchange as a preferred form of marriage. It is also interesting
that Walwin’s son married a half-sister, but this anomalous tie is ignored.
A related point to the story’s absence of violence is that the fissioning of the villages
and resultant migrations were due to depletion of the local food supply, not because of
internal fights or arguments. Whether this was completely true or not, it is the way the
Wakau men view their past in terms of their origins story.11 What is significant is the
historical fact that the Lujere villages did not wage war or raids on one another. Finally,
it is noteworthy that Walwin and his humanized wife appear to be of equal genealogical
standing; there is no heavy emphasis in the story of one line—female or male—over the
other that, up to a point, is echoed in my findings. While it is true that both parental
sides of a Lujere person’s kin network are of great social and emotional importance and,
significantly, postmarital residence is highly flexible, the overall system, as discussed in
chapter 12, is patrilineally skewed with strategic resources transmitted through males.
Finally, there is the inevitable emphasis in a story invented by males that Walwin’s Wind
Woman, like Adam’s Eve, owes her humanity to her male consort.

Male Initiation: Myth or Authentic History?

In my second and third patrols among the Lujere when I was searching for a village on
which to base my research, men in both Worikori and Tipas villages spoke about male
initiation, but in inconclusive ways, indicating it had existed in the distant past. From my
work in Wakau, I had decided that it did not exist now or probably ever. Then Kaiera told
me an interesting story about the initiation of young boys into manhood. The story, as
in all the Lujere folktales I heard, was related as if the events had actually happened and
perhaps was the source for the earlier inconclusive stories I had heard. Here is the story,
which was told in Tok Pisin and which I have edited only slightly.

A long time ago, even before our grandparents were alive, all the young men from all
of the villages used to go into one great big house when they were about to mature
into men. The house was completely enclosed, and the doors were fastened so the boys

11. Betty Gillam had another less sexually overt version of an origin story from villagers she knew
near the Edwaki CMML Mission. I suspect, but don’t know, that perhaps it was cleaned up
for telling a woman missionary.
The legend has it that Wilaki and Krenmau as fully grown men suddenly came to life
by coming out of the ground on the top of Edwaki hill near the Sepik River. These
two brothers built a shelter there. Wilaki was the adventurous brother who took to
wandering around the other hills and swamp land. On the hill called Mauwi [location
of Iwani village] which is in close proximity to Edwaki, Wilaki observed some beauti-
ful pigeons. There was one special female pigeon he became attracted to. To befriend
it he built a pigeon house on the top of an ironwood tree and tried to lure her inside,
which he did after waiting a long wait. Kremau, being a good brother, built a house for
them at Edwaki. There Wilaki and his pigeon wife lived and brought up two children.
Wilaki continued to wander through the area and claimed it as territory for his de-
scendants. (Gillam 1983: 10)

196
 The Lujere Villages

could not go outside. They were kept there from five to twenty years old. Their bodies
were rubbed with thorns from the sago palms and ‘kanda’ and other thorns as well as
the jaws of pigs and crocodiles, and the bones of snakes and other animals. When their
bodies were scraped, the boys would yell and scream, and the men would beat on the
‘garamut’ and their ‘kundus.’ All the rubbish from the great house would be put be-
neath it and burned, creating a tremendous amount of smoke. No weapons were kept
in the house to prevent the boys from trying to run away.
While the boys were in seclusion, their mothers and fathers made decorations for
them to wear when they exited the house for the festival. The women made huge
amounts of sago and the men went hunting for game, and other food was gathered
for the male initiation festival. All of the boys from many different villages would be
in one big house, for example boys from Gwidami, Aiimdani, Bapi, Wiere, Mauwi,
and Tepas would be together. The reason for scrubbing their bodies was to make them
bleed so the old blood would leave them, and the new blood would come into them
so they would grow big and strong. When the boys first went into the house, a banana
species called aralt was planted, and the boys were not allowed to leave until it bore
fruit. Then they would leave the house for the great festival; the men and women from
the surrounding villages would all bring their food to the big men’s house.
However, this time the boy’s parents had all gone into the bush to get food but
stayed a long time. The boys became very hungry then very angry. They collected all the
‘apike’ [a green] and bananas, made a fire, then burned the bananas and put the black
skins on themselves. Then they used the ‘apica’ leaves to make wings, finally they cut
their skin and bled. Now they became giant fruit bats.
When the parents returned with food for the boys, they knocked on the door to
give it to them, but the boys had made a hole in the roof and had flown away. They were
hanging up in all the village trees, the breadfruits, the mangos, the betelnuts, and the
coconuts. When the parents saw what had happened to their sons, they began to wail
and cry, saying it was all their fault; “We were gone away too long and our sons were
hungry.” So the villagers lost all of their young men. (MN 1971)

Kaiera told me that this was a Mauwi story but that they never had male initiation
in his time, his father’s time or in his grandparent’s time but, he added, before then they
might have. The term he associated with this story was mariaita but said there was no
translation for it.

Talk, the Essence of Life

Talking and listening, listening and talking, make humans unique in the animal world;
language is an essential part of being a sentient human being. As Lamont Lindstrom
observes for Melanesian societies, “Here are people who define humanity by the capac-
ity to talk” (Lindstrom 1990: xiv). This is related, of course, to the fact that none have
devised a form of writing, thus prioritizing oral communication. Nowhere in the world
have there been people as actively engaged in inventing new languages as on the island
of New Guinea. In the Indonesian western half, formerly Irian Jaya, there are over 300
languages and in the eastern half, Papua New Guinea, there are over 850 languages, and
these are different languages, not dialects (Lewis et al. 2015: 201). New Guinea is the

197
 A Witch’s Hand

world’s second largest island but with over a thousand languages spoken on the island, no
other area of the world for its size comes close in terms of linguistic multiplicity.

A Plethora of Papuan Languages: Namia’s Neighbors

New Guinea’s Upper Sepik Basin has the highest concentration of different languages
and variety of major language families on the island and perhaps in the world.12 For ex-
ample, while the Lujere have their own language, Namia, they are surrounded by thirteen
other vigorous languages: Abau, Ak, Ama, Amal, Awun, Bouye, Guriaso, Iwam, Iteri,
Kwomtari, Odiai, Yale (Nagatman), and Yis. These languages, in turn, are variously mem-
bers of four different major language families: Arai (Left May), Kwomteri, Sepik, and
Torricelli, except for the Odiai and Iteri languages that are “isolates” with no known ge-
netic relationship to other languages. According to Steer, “The Sepik catchment exhibits
a degree of genetic diversity unequaled anywhere in the world. . . . [and] the upper Sepik
has diversity commensurate with this” (Steer 2005:5).

The classification gambit

All the above languages are classified “Papuan,” as are most of the other languages of Pap-
ua New Guinea except a few coastal languages newer to the island classified as “Austro-
nesian.” The term “Papuan” does not presuppose a genetic tie among languages so labeled
but distinguishes them from Austronesian and Australian languages. Sidney Herbert
Ray (1892), a member of A. C. Haddon’s famous 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Ex-
pedition to the Torres Strait, originated the important distinction between Papuan and
Austronesian languages.13 Joseph Greenberg and Stephen Wurm made early attempts at
large-scale classifications of the numerous Papuan languages but more recently Malcolm
Ross, building in part on their work and using newer findings has classified all the known
Papuan languages as a work in progress, updating Laycock’s (1973) preliminary classifica-
tion of the Sepik languages. The comprehensive and authoritative Ethnologue: Languages
of the World, published by SIL International, uses Ross’s classification of the Papuan lan-
guages, as do I in these comments.14

12. The online Ethnologue has the best mapping of the Upper Sepik Basin languages. See http://
ethnologue.com/map/PG_3 and http://ethnologue.com/map/PG_5.
13. Ray was born and raised in tough East London of working-class parents and attended a
teacher’s college. He was a self-taught linguist, at a time when linguistics, as Stocking (1996:
116) notes, was of “marginal status” in the emerging science of British social anthropology.
Despite his accomplishments as a published linguist, he taught in an elementary school in
East London until retirement. Haddon tried, as did other distinguished British anthropolo-
gists including Oxford’s Edward B. Tyler, to find an academic or museum post worthy of him,
even in Australia, without success. See Wells’ (1999) brief biography of Ray as a poignant case
study of the rigidity of the Twentieth Century British class system.
14. SIL International, a faith-based organization, was formerly named the Summer Institute of
Linguistics. Ethnologue, edited by M. Paul Lewis (2009), may be viewed online: http://www.
ethnologue.com/. For hardcover see Lewis (2015). Also see Pawley, et al. (2005), a sprawling
book examining the Papuan-speaking peoples’ cultural, linguistic, and biological histories; for

198
 The Lujere Villages

The first attempt to classify the languages of the upper Sepik Basin was by Loving and
Bass (1964), while the first attempt to classify all the known languages of the Sepik Basin
was by the Australian linguist, Donald Laycock (1973). Much of Laycock’s pioneering
work has stood the test of time but Ross (2005), on the basis of his analysis of pronoun
paradigms, separates Laycock’s “Sepik-Ramu” phylum into two groups, “Ramu-Lower
Sepik” and “Sepik,” the latter to include the languages of the middle and upper Sepik
River Basin area.15 He also suspects that the most promising candidate for an external
relationship with Sepik languages, including Namia, is with the Torricelli language fam-
ily, not the Ramu. Interestingly, Don Laycock, in a long letter to me of June 1, 1976,
mostly about ‘sanguma,’ had some thoughts about the Lujere having formerly spoken
a “‘Torricelli’ [phylum language] that was absorbed to the extent of adopting a Middle
Sepik language.” If Ross and Laycock’s suppositions were true, that would presuppose
that the Lujere’s ancestors came from the north and over the Torricelli Mountains, in-
stead of up the Sepik and Yellow Rivers as their mythic origins attest. Following Allen
(2005) writing more generally on the migration of Sepik inhabitants, I find the evidence
more convincing that some ascended the Sepik then down the Torricelli’s south flowing
rivers into the lowland fens.
There are fifty-six languages in the Sepik family that are spoken from the middle
Sepik west to the Indonesian border, south into the Southern Highlands and, spilling
north over the Prince Alexander Mountains, to the coast around Wewak and even into
the Bismarck Sea and a part of Mushu Island. There are even several Sepik family lan-
guages in the coastal vicinity of Vanimo. The Sepik languages are characterized by simple
phonologies and few consonants, are rarely tonal, and usually have a three-vowel system
that recognizes only vowel height.
Ross, as well as Laycock, places Namia, Ak (83 speakers), and Awun (384 speakers) in
a “Yellow River” subdivision of the Sepik family, indicating they are more similar to each
other than to other languages.16 Ak, as mentioned earlier, is spoken only in Kwieftim vil-
lage, a traditional Lujere enemy, and Awun only in Abrau and Yakeltim villages, also tra-
ditional Lujere enemies.17 One can only presume that the remote ancestors of the present
Ak and Awun speakers either left or fled from the remote ancestors of the contemporary
Lujere because of some enmity. an enmity only relaxed from retributive homicide after
the colonial law of the ‘kiaps’ was established. Evidence shows (Steer 2005, 27) that Na-
mia has a distant genetic link to Iwan that “corresponds to a separation of at least 3,000
years.”

an excellent detailed review of the book’s important contributions, see Terrill (2007). For an
earlier seminal linguistic analysis of the Papuan languages see Foley (1986).
15. While Laycock’s (1973) and Steers’ ([2005] 2011) hierarchical rationale uses the traditional
nomenclature of phyla and stocks, the Ethnologue eschews this usage.
16. Steer, however, is skeptical because of the dearth of data on Ak and Awun languages, noting
“at least as far as the public record is concerned, the place of Ak and Awun in the Yellow River
family is a matter of faith” (Steer 2005: 27).
17. According to Antje Kelm (1972: 447) who did fieldwork in Abrau, they referred to the Lujere
as the Kari.

199
 A Witch’s Hand

Namia

When I began my Lujere fieldwork in 1971, Laycock had only roughly classified their
language.18 It was not until Tom and Becky Feldpausch, American linguists with the
Summer Institute of Linguistics, intensively studied the language that it became well-
documented. Their research base was in Yaru village from 1985 to 2008 and my com-
ments about Namia are based on their extensive research.
The first study of Namia was a sociolinguistic survey by missionaries Ronald and Doris
Pappenhagen (1981). Their linguistic informants indicated that four regional dialects of
Namia existed. However, neither they nor the Feldpausches discovered any substantial
empirical evidence to substantiate the presence of dialects and their “dialect” areas appear
to refer to the Lujere “regions” already discussed. The Feldpausches’ dialect survey (1999)
established that the words from every area were 98 percent cognate. They also indicate that

The richness of the Namia language is found in its verbal affixes and phrases. The
Namia people make fine distinctions in the categories in which they view situations.
They mark almost every statement with their view of reality. They can make different
types of commands, and make negation in multiple ways. The study of tense, aspect,
and adverbials and mood in Namia has been rewarding to understand more fully how
the Namia people view their world. Their use of duration and transitivity give much
more information about the event than a tense system could give. When an event
starts, ends, or is accomplished, are also more important than time, and are all shown
by aspect suffixes. (Feldpausch and Feldpausch 2003: 26)

Like many languages, Namia has several words with multiple meanings: naki means
“new,” “neck,” and “vine,” and wei means, “ripe,” “red,” and “slit-drum.” Namia is the most
frequently spoken language in Lujereland; unlike Papua New Guinea’s towns, theirs is
not a polyglot society with many linguistic migrants. Very few Lujere speak or under-
stand another Indigenous language. However, many of the men and youths, as noted,
speak Tok Pisin. Except near the mission, it is rare for a woman to have learned it; none of
the Wakau women spoke it. Sometimes, when I hung out in a Wakau men’s house (iron)
at night, I often overheard men’s conversations with a mixture of Namia and Tok Pisin
and, sometimes for a short interval, just Tok Pisin, especially if it concerned a contempo-
rary political issue with the administration.
As Namia has no concept of a Western week with its seven named days, it borrows Tok
Pisin’s weekday names as it does many other terms for alien concepts, items and actions.
It is interesting that two of my best informants in Wakau, Oria and Kaiera, were men re-
jected from labor recruitment for physical reasons, but both had learned Tok Pisin in the
village, and Oria also was literate from attending Phillip Ace’s mission literacy classes for
a while. Tok Pisin had the cachet of modernism and, as the lingua franca of Papua New
Guinea, Lujere males could easily communicate with other Tok Pisin speakers regardless
of their mother language whether it was Papuan, Austronesian, or English. However, if
one is a Tok Pisin speaker and doesn’t speak Namia, there can be lexical glitches listening

18. Foley (1986: 242) critically discusses Laycock’s earlier proposed Sepik sub-phylum that con-
tained a large grouping of Sepik languages including Namia.

200
 The Lujere Villages

to a Lujere man’s Tok Pisin. Namia has no voiced or aspirated stops, such as [b], [d], [g];
and there are no alveolar fricatives, [s] and [z]. This can make Tok Pisin at times sound
oddly accented to an English speaker. While in the field, it seemed that the village of
“Tipas” was never pronounced the same way twice, not to mention numerous other words,
alerting me to phonological particularities of Namia that were beyond my linguistic skills
to codify long before the Feldpausch’s research. In hearing Namia spoken while I lived
there, it also seemed that there were an inordinate number of “l” words or “l” sounds lap-
ping through the air. Indeed, in checking Becky Feldpausch’s (2003) Namia Dictionary,
there are more words beginning with “l” than any other letter. In speaking Namia, it also
appeared to me that, compared to the Wape I lived with or the English-speaking expats,
there was very little lip-work—a visual lack that frustrated my attempts to learn it.
One of the instructive papers the Feldpausches have prepared on the language consid-
ers the rules for translating the Namia language.19 Here is a brief sample of their findings.
The most common word order is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), such as Loko-tanalwa
taplu-pnowe (He gave food to his son). Sentences with time and place are usually ordered
as Subject-Place/Time-Object-Verb, such as On-apo-kali lomon-ija, (I will now tell a
story.) In sentences that describe something, the word order is Pronoun-Noun, such as
Loko-lu (He is a man) or Noun-Adjective, such as Loko-walei (He is tall).

In her Introduction to the Namia Dictionary, Becky Feldpausch writes,

Typologically, Namia has the following characteristics. Basic word order is SOV [sub-
ject, object, verb], it uses postpositions and has no switch reference, medial verbs nor
absolute tense. The morphology is agglutinative (with aspect, mood, and direction
markings required on verbs). . . . But it does not have person markers on indicative
verbs. For this reason it uses free pronouns instead. Number is not marked in the
nouns, there are few adjectives and no comparative words like ‘bigger’ or ‘smaller.’ Rea-
son clauses normally occur before result clauses. There is no grammatical marking for
direct quotations. (Feldpausch 2011: 2)

Namia, like Tok Pisin, has no plural ending for nouns and I have followed that con-
vention in my use of Namia nouns, for example, lu signifies both “men” and “man.” Namia
has no tone and accent is predictable on the penultimate syllable. It also has six phonemic
vowels and shares lexical similarities with the languages of the Lujere’s traditional Sepik
enemies: 13 percent with Abau and 12 percent with the May River Iwam (Lewis et al.
2015: 235).

Namia, as is typical of many Papuan languages, has high inflection on the verb with up
to seven orders of prefix and up to five orders of suffix. There is verb serialization but no
clause chaining nor switch reference. The tense system is unusual with nonfuture (past
and present), definite future and indefinite future as marked categories. Also perfective
vs. imperfective aspect can be marked on the verb. . . . Namia also has a limited gender
system, marking male and female gender on certain third person singular forms. (Feld-
pausch and Feldpausch 1992: iii)

19. See “Rules for Translation in the Namia Language” by Becky Feldpausch, November 2008.
http://www.sil.org/resources/archives/31078.

201
 A Witch’s Hand

The gender of all animals and birds is determined by suffixes: amowabu for females
and aibagi for males. Namia is the child’s first, and often, only language. Everyone living
in Lujereland, except for expats and police, spoke Namia. Today, thanks to the Feld-
pausch’s dedicated work, Namia is one of the most comprehensively studied languages of
the Upper Sepik Basin and their numerous papers are all accessible online.20

Tok Pisin

Tok Pisin, the second most spoken language in Lujereland, is a creole language and, like
English and Hiri Motu, an official language of Papua New Guinea.21 As the country’s
most popular language, Tok Pisin’s word sources are mostly from English, just over 80
percent; from German, nearly 5 percent; from Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Geek and ono-
matopoetic words, nearly 5 percent; from the Pacific area, nearly 7 percent; and unknown,
about 3 percent (Steinbauer 1969: 6). As de Groot notes,

The people of Papua New Guinea use the language of Tok Pisin every day to commu-
nicate, to teach, to command, to pray and to express whatever they want. Tok Pisin is
a living language, continually expanding and changing, and characterized by regional
differences. (de Groot 2008: i)

The regional Tok Pisin of the Lujere was that of the country’s northwest coast and the
Sepik River Basin. This is the version of Tok Pisin used in the cited dictionaries—that
is, Mihalic (1971) and Volker (2008). The Tolai language of New Britain is an important
source of Tok Pisin’s grammatical structure (Foley 1986: 36). Tok Pisin’s simple syntax
facilitates mastery and easy communication among those using it as a second language; it
is not a “broken” English but a language that can accurately reflect a speaker’s “thoughts,
feelings and emotions” (Volker 2008: i). I have no gift for languages but was fluent after
my summer stay on the Sepik in 1967. Today it is usually classified as a creole rather than
a pidgin as it increasingly becomes a first language replacing an Indigenous one, as Kulick
(2019) has documented for Gapun village in the Lower Sepik. Most Lujere men were
fluent in Tok Pisin having learned it as indentured workers. Even some men who hadn’t
worked away picked it up as had some women near the base camp and mission, as well as
some children, especially boys.22 For Lujere youths, speaking Tok Pisin had connotations
of both modernity and mature masculinity, while in the nation, especially in the multi-
lingual towns, it was a language of personal and commercial expediency for both sexes.

20. Also see Thomas and Becky Feldpausch (1993) regarding phonology essentials and (2000) for
Namia orthography. The Feldpausch’s numerous Namia papers can be accessed at http://www.
glottolog.org/resource/languold/id/nami1256.
21. Tok Pisin, the accepted term today for the language, has been called variously “Pidgin Eng-
lish,” “New Guinea Pidgin,” “Melanesian Pidgin,” “Neo-Melanesian,” and “Tok Boi.” For an
enlightening discussion of the origins, history, and usage of Tok Pisin see Foley (1986: 30–
41). For Tok Pisin dictionaries see Volker (2008), Steinbauer (1969), and especially Mihalic
(1971: 1–54) for his detailed linguistic analysis of the language.
22. For information on Tok Pisin literacy among Lujere men, see the discussion related to table 1.

202
chapter nine

Old Enemies

The reason for cannibalism itself has been given by

natives as the simple desire for good food.
F. E. Williams (1930: 171)

“ You managed not to get eaten, then?”

Prince Philip, questioning a Papua
New Guinean hiker, 1998.

At first contact, the Lujere villages were at peace with each other but not with their
linguistically different neighbors. A bordering village that did not speak Namia was an
enemy, and the enmity was mutual. Inhabitants of enemy villages could at any time and
in almost any circumstance feel free to kill any member, male or female, young or old, of
an enemy village. “Warfare” in egalitarian societies like the Lujere consisted of retaliative
surprise raids. As Fried has observed, “military organization in such societies indicates a
complete absence of command or coordination: every man stands and fights or runs away
by himself ” (Fried 1967: 104). In lowland New Guinea, the payback killing or running
feud characterized intervillage hostility. Knauft describes it as follows:

The goal of most such raiding parties was to capture and/or kill one or more enemies
in retribution for previous killing. It was usually of little consequence if the person(s)
were men, women, or children. Frequently, the raiders would try to surprise their target
village or obtain victims unaware on its periphery. Ideally a victim could be obtained
without raising the general alarm, thus allowing the raiders to return successfully to
their own territory without resistance. In many cases, the killing of a single victim by
the attacking force (without themselves sustaining a loss) was tantamount to a “vic-
tory.” (Knauft 1999: 102)

203
 A Witch’s Hand

The nature of this kind of “warfare” is clearly demonstrated in the section below on
“the Tsila Village Massacre.” In culture areas like Lujereland without chiefdoms or other
Indigenous over-arching political institutions, small independent hamlets like Wakau
often made alliances with neighboring groups to mount retaliative killing raids.1
One of the most interesting facts about the Lujere was that on first contact they did
not raid within their language group, that is, other Namia speakers. I have no compel-
ling explanation for this unusual phenomenon in the Sepik region. Because they did
not evolve more culturally complex institutions such as initiation and regional exchange
systems, as well as their overall ethos of keeping life simple, I hypothesize that they are a
younger culture than some of their neighbors and that time has not eroded the original
amity among villagers as population pressures caused a sequence of people hiving off
from the mother village of Iwani to establish new villages in the easily available land. It
is, however, just a guess.

Traditional Enemies
The Lujere’s enemies were the foreign villages that surrounded them, but a Lujere village
usually clashed only with the alien villages in their immediate area. The most important
enemy villages are shown in table 5 along with the language spoken and their cardinal
direction from the center of Lujereland. The ten enemy villages surrounding the Lujere
spoke eight distinct languages, all members of the Sepik language family. While accord-
ing to Laycock (1973: 23) Bouye (Pouye), Awun, and Namia are more closely related as
members of the Yellow River family, this relationship is challenged by Steer (2005: 27)
and others and is discussed later.

Table 5. Lujere enemy villages by cardinal direction and language

Village Direction Language

Maurom North Pouye
Wokien North Pouye
Kwieftim North Ak
Abrau East Awun
Yakeltim East Awun
Magaleri East Amal
Wanimoi South Iwam
Wapoulu South Ama
Wagu West Abau
Tsila West Yale

1. Shaw (1974: 14–15) in the context of Papua New Guinea discusses the factors contributing to
the functioning of a society including the role of alliances. For a critical summary of warfare
in both precolonial and colonial New Guinea, see the chapter “Warfare and History in Mela-
nesia’ in Knauft (1999: 89–156).

204
 Old Enemies

There is an interesting story about Wagu told to me by Kaiera. He said that Iwani,
tired of Wagu’s homicidal raids, made peace with them before the Europeans came and
were like ‘wanblut’ [one blood], visiting back and forth. When they made peace, the
Wagu’s came in canoes and the Mauwi villagers walked to the river (MI: 151). If true, it
makes the marriage of an Iwani man to a Wagu woman, as espoused in chapter 3, plausi-
ble; I did not get Kaiera’s story confirmed but such voluntary truces did occur. The Wape
village of Taute where I lived made peace with the enemy villagers of Kamnum before
the ‘kiaps’ came. When men became contract laborers before ‘kiaps’ exerted direct control
over them, it was the returned laborers who sometimes were the catalyst for peace.

Trading with the Enemy

As the Lujere were also dependent on their enemies for much of their trade goods, ex-
change partners were an ironic necessity. Parts of New Guinea, especially the north coast
and offshore island societies with sailing craft, developed complex systems of symboli-
cally linked trade like the famed kula of Malinowski (1922), but not the Upper Sepik so-
cieties. There, trading with the enemy was a simple, stark transaction. Not every man had
a trading partner in an enemy village, but those that did provided the conduit through
which desired objects and products flowed across borders. When Tok Pisin became the
common lingua franca for trade between enemies, exchange was facilitated but it could
still be, as we soon see, a risky encounter.
Shell valuables were in sufficient number that they reached the Lujere from the north
coast’s Bismark Sea, passing over the Torricelli Mountains into Wapeland and down to
the villagers of Kwieftim and Maurom where the Wakau men gave them smoked meat
and sago grubs in exchange. But metal tools were so scarce and prized that, as McCa-
rthy clearly realized, they rarely, if ever, were obtained in trade. The shells received by
the Wakau men and other Lujere were, in part, then traded with the Sawiyano cannibal
villages2 across the Sepik in the mountains just above the Lujere villages of Panewai
and Purami. In return for their shell valuables, the Lujere received very thin spears with
beautifully carved tips for killing humans, “fright” attack wigs of women’s hair worn over
a warrior’s forehead and eyes, bird of paradise feathers, tight net bags (unlike the Lujere’s
looser style), and an aromatic bark. Scrapings from the bark were mixed with ginger,
skinned betel nut, betel pepper vine, then folded into betel vine leaves and rubbed back
and forth until it turned red. A prized charm, it was fed to a man’s son or dog for hunt-
ing luck. The trading was often done at the Sepik River where both groups presumably
would meet in peace.
Phillip Guddemi (1992: 152–53) relates a fatal incident he was told by the Sawiyano
during his 1986–1988 fieldwork, an incident initiated by customary trade that ended in
cannibalism. Waliyaupei was a Lujere man from Panewai village who, under the protec-
tion of his Sawiyano trading partners, was visiting their ritual houses associated with

2. My Mauwi-born informant Kaiera said the Namia name for them was woniablu (WN:113)
while Oria of Wakau said we had no name for them. The men were of similar age, both excel-
lent informants, but because of Kaiera’s sight impairment, he had spent much more time than
Oria sitting in the men’s house soaking up tradition and was an endless font of the old stories.

205
 A Witch’s Hand

male initiation, a custom not practiced by the Lujere. The incident had occurred after the
Sawiyano men had begun work as contract laborers and Guddemi spoke with several old-
er men still alive who had participated. Waliyaupei’s opportune visit struck one Sawiyano
man as an excellent time to “avenge general and particular slights coming from the region
of Panewai,” and convinced others they should kill him. Waliyaupei’s protectors protested
by asking the avengers where they expected to get their shell valuables if they killed off
their trading partners, but the men in favor of the killing were adamant; the others, afraid
they would miss out, acquiesced. Waliyaupei was ambushed, killed, butchered, divided,
and eaten. When Guddemi asked some of the senior men of Panewai about the incident,

They mentioned that it was not by accident that Waliyaupei had been killed. He had
been caught in adultery by another man, who prepared a potion of magic plants and
uttered spells into it . . . so that Waliyaupei would find death. The death might have
taken place in many ways; as it happened, he found death at the hands of the Sawiyano.
Thus, in 1988, it is maintained in Panewai that there was never any anger over Wali-
yaupei’s killing, he was already meant to find death. (Guddemi 1992: 153)

Consequently, the Panewai people never reciprocated Waliyaupei’s death, so it became

the Sawiyano’s last recorded cannibal feast.3 This did not mean that the implicated villag-
es became fast friends. In 1987, Guddemi heard rumors of a letter sent by some Panewai
men to the Sawiyano threatening death by ‘sanguma’ if they did not stop encroaching on
their territory. Thus, even though traditional enemy villages may no longer murder one
another, the feeling of enmity lingers even as it does between some Vermonters and New
Yorkers across Lake Champlain, aware of their colonial history.
Tsila [Tila] village4, another traditional enemy of the Iwani hamlets, is a day’s walk
into the sprawling wet lowlands west of the Sand River and today the Wakau men still
trade with them, but trade is limited usually to their hunting charms in exchange for
shell rings or money. Their hunting charm called keri is composed from a bush hen’s egg,
sago beetles, and wild ginger wrapped together in aromatic leaves. Wakau also received
from them some of the curing rituals and artifacts discussed in chapter 15. One January
morning shortly after hearing a radio broadcast of President Nixon’s new budget, I met
the Tsila ‘luluai’ Wapia who happened to be in Wakau and we sat down for a short visit.
The name of his hamlet was Era and the other hamlets or villages he named were Marak-
wani and Nagatiman, all speakers of the Kali [Yale, Nogatman] language that is a major
linguistic conundrum. Classified as an “isolate” it has been compared with languages in a

3. A Sawiyano origin myth (Guddemi 1992: 67) also concerns the Panewai people. The ances-
tors of the Sawiyano lived in a large magic ginger plant that was aggressively encircled by an-
cestors of the Panewai villagers who came in twelve canoes. Not surprisingly, the Panewai of
the story were vanquished. “The magic-ginger-plant turned into men and these twelve canoes
were finished, killed altogether” (Guddemi 1992: 67).
4. This is not the Tila village that is on the Horden River as it is too far to the west but probably
Dila or Hila village—or a hamlet—whose lands could logically border those of Wakau. As I
have observed elsewhere, there was a lot of variation in the pronunciation of village names not
to mention how they were recorded.

206
 Old Enemies

radius of about a hundred miles and shows no traits to justify inclusion in any of them.5
Knowing this fact I spent most of a short time with him getting a long word list and
numbers in Yale. It would have been more helpful to my research, for example, to elicit
historical information on trade, vendettas, and curing customs. I did learn that only single
males sleep in their men’s house, that they have a ten-month male initiation, and they
never had the ‘garamut.’ They have several different curing ceremonials and he sketched
in my notebook four headdresses or masks—difficult to tell which—but none were simi-
lar to the na wowi mask said to come from there. When I tried to find out if they have
lineages or descent groups, I struck out completely. No ethnologist had before, or since,
attempted to collect cultural data on this small group, isolated both geographically and
linguistically and with hindsight I regret I did not dig deeper. Oria and I and others had
planned a visit to Tsila, but it never happened.

Dressed to Kill
Oria startled me one day with a dreadful face decoration of matted human hair that his
stepmother had given to him after his father’s recent death. He didn’t want it and hoped
to trade it for some newspaper to roll cigarettes. As I received a weekly newspaper from
Port Moresby and had the only supply of newsprint in the village, we made a trade. The
hair was from women living across the Sepik in the Western Range, the Sawiyano, the
Lujere’s traditional enemy. It had been purchased with shell rings by a now dead Mauwi
man who knew their language, although it was not clear to Oria how he had learned it
as neither parent came from there. The hair ornament comprised four bundles of matted
hair from five to eight inches long, tied together with ‘tulip’ twine decorated with Job’s
tears grass seeds.6 It was worn tied around the forehead, the matted hair falling over the
face. Only men on the warpath or sorcerers out to kill could wear it. Oria then tied it on
his forehead to demonstrate its fierceness. Without a doubt, it was a weirdly scary kind of
facemask. He said that when women saw a man bedizened with one, they simply fainted
from fright.
A warrior’s costume also consisted of a waist string and upper armbands draped with
shredded sago and wild coconut leaves. His face was painted black with ashes mixed with
water and a half-shell ring was thrust into the hole in his nose septum. If he had killed
any enemy except a baby, he could place the feather of a young cassowary into his nostril
holes extending upward. Another homicide badge consisted of crocodile teeth; old Me-
netjua had four holes in the top of his nose, with the two outer ones for the insertion of
the teeth. The decorations were worn in an attack and in a victory celebration. The long
claw of a wild bird, the ewara, was also sometimes worn at the celebration. A warrior’s
wife’s decoration consisted of the skin and feathers of a small bird attached to her ear and
a small shell nose ring.

5. For references to the relevant linguistic research on Yale, see Steer (2005: 41–43).
6. The item was part of the collection of Lujere artifacts I presented to the American Museum of
Natural History and can be viewed in their online catalogue as catalogue # 80.1/6464 of the
Lujere items, Papua New Guinea, South Pacific Collections of the Anthropology Division
under “Our Research.”

207
 A Witch’s Hand

During the 1940s and into the ’50s, all the Wakau men and women had the two
nostril and single septum holes, just as McCarthy and the Mosstroops inspector Colonel
Wills earlier reported. The holes were made in early adolescence before secondary hair
growth appeared. Depending upon the bravery of the person, the holes were made all at
once or singly. Like piercings in America, there was no attached ritual and anyone could
do it. After the piercing, the holes were filled with bits of wood; for the septum, the plug
was gradually increased to the size of hole wanted. These piercings were made only during
the rainy season when the flesh was believed to be softer, thereby lessening the pain and
chance of infection. All the older men and women of Wakau had some of these piercings
but they already had ceased decorating them before I arrived. Once Eine inserted part of
a pig’s tusk into his septum to show me how he used to look.

The Lujere Fight Shield

A Lujere warrior’s largest and most decorative fight implement was his shield or wali. 7
Until the Mosstroops introduced metal tools, they had been laboriously hacked from the
imposing buttress root of the ficus tree with a stone adze. Barry Craig, whose 1969 col-
lecting trip is described in chapter 5, published the first article on the Lujere. His article
(1975) on the art style of Yellow River is based on the analysis of twenty-nine Lujere
shields. During his visit he photographed seventeen shields, ten of which he collected.
Most were recently made for sale to outsiders except the older one he collected in Wakau;
it was made in 1922 by Weima (see fig. 9) but the design was reworked about 1966.8 He
also was able to photograph six more Lujere shields owned by a collector in Ambunti.
Most important were the five precolonial shields now in Berlin’s Museum für
Völkerkunde, collected in 1912–13 by the German expedition that Thurnwald joined.
These shields, all carved with traditional tools before they had metal, came from “Un-
terhalb Mäander-Berg” or below Meander Mountain, roughly the same area where the
Mosstroops established their initial base camp in 1943. One of the expedition’s ethnolo-
gists, Dr. Roesicke, photographed a sixth shield from the same area. The shields were
shaped into wide, flat, rectangular boards about four and a half feet high and a half inch
or so thick, an appropriate size for a Lujere man whose average height was about five feet
four inches.9 “The carrying strap is strung horizontally through two holes, one at each
edge of the shield, so that it can be slung over the shoulder, leaving the hands free for
using the bow and arrow” (Craig 1975: 430).

7. The C-14 dating on a Lujere shield in the Jolika collection at the de Young Museum in San
Francisco is 1490–1670 (93.7% probability) (Peltason, 2005: 141, plate 357). If the dating
were correct, the design for the Lujere shield would have been achieved between three hun-
dred and five hundred years ago.
8. Abrau village, a traditional Lujere enemy bordering to the north, had shields very similar to
the Lujere. See Plates 28 and 29 in Kelm and Kelm (1980) for photos of the traditional fight
stance of a warrior with shield and a pulled bow and arrow. Also see Beran and Craig (2005:
76–77) for a summarizing discussion of the Yellow River shield. See Craig (1988: 62–67) for
relationships of neighboring styles of design.
9. See chapter 10 for more detailed information about the size of the Wakau villagers.

208
 Old Enemies

Figure 9. A Wakau village fight shield. Australian Museum, Sydney, E64932. Photo courtesy of
Barry Craig.

Based on the design and appearance of the twenty-nine shields pictured in his article,
Craig abstracted the characteristics of the Yellow River style in terms of form, tech-
nique, composition, and motifs. The relief bands that shape the design are black and the
interstitial areas variously white, red, brown, or yellow. “The commonest arrangement
of motifs is around a lozenge shape with spirals at top and bottom . . . or around an X-
shape with spirals at top and bottom, turning either outwards or inwards” (1975: 430).
Craig also notes “that there is a distinct boundary between the Iwam style of the Sepik
and May Rivers, and the styles of the peoples of the West and Central Ranges and of the
Sepik upstream from Meander Mountain” (1975: 439). The ethnographic irony Craig has
identified is that, while the Lujere’s Namia language is more closely related to the Iwam
language than, for instance, the Mountain Ok’s, in terms of art designs, the reverse is true.

209
 A Witch’s Hand

When I began collecting Lujere artifacts for the American Museum of Natural His-
tory at the end of my fieldwork, there were no fight shields available, not even new ones.
However, the men of Wagu village just up the Sepik from the mouth of the Yellow had
carved several new ones on speculation and brought them to the Yellow River Base Camp
in several canoes in hopes of finding buyers. They were well crafted and similar in design
to the Lujere shield and I bought several. But with Yellow River far off the tourist route
and with no expat community, most had to be carried back to their canoes.

Slaying the Enemy

One hot, laconic afternoon when most of the villagers were working in the bush or liv-
ing at a bush camp, Kaiera wandered down through the empty village to my ‘ofis’ screen
room tent and began telling me stories and singing songs, actually more like chants, about
former enemy attacks. His visits became frequent and as I recorded our interviews on my
Uher tape recorder, he occasionally asked to hear a song and I would replay it to his smil-
ing satisfaction. As usual, he voluntarily translated into Tok Pisin. Kaiera was an excel-
lent teacher, a tutor really, and I his only student. He was especially proud of his paternal
ancestor Komtri, a successful warrior. In Mauwi’s continual war with Epai village (which
the government called Wagu), a number of Lujere had been killed by the Epai warrior
Aubou, who was greatly feared by the Mauwi villagers until Kaiera’s ancestor Komtri
killed him. Kaiera then sang the chant celebrating Komtri’s killing of their fierce enemy.
Among the Wakau men who had participated in raids, he said the only ones still alive
were Aiyuk, Ukai, Leno, and Menetjua.
When the Lujere ambushed and killed an enemy, they cut off the left forearm and
returned with it to their village for a celebration. It was always the left forearm; to take
a man’s right arm, his indispensable bow arm, would be an unnecessarily cruel, even dis-
honorable act, what we might call “overkill.” As Kaiera told it, the rest of the body was
left at the spot where it had fallen. Before leaving, the warrior chewed ginger and spit it
on his dead foe. Then when his relatives came to carry the body away, they would not be
angry and want revenge.
Once home, the trophy arm was heated over a fire with parts of a ginger plant and
then held or hung aloft while the warriors paraded victoriously around it. Eventually
the arm and the fingers were mutilated with many small cuts. The ritual of the heated
ginger was to make the enemy forget about the murder and not pursue them, as were the
songs the men sang as they celebrated the killing. Kaiera sang some of the songs—actu-
ally more like chants—for me: one ordered the enemy to “stay on your mountain just as
the tree trunks do!” Another song was, “You people must stay on your mountain like the
stones do. I killed a man, but you must stay there as the stones do!” I learned from others
it was the one time they beat their big wooden slit-gongs in celebration of an enemy’s
death.
In Tipas I was told that when they killed one of their Sawiyano enemies across the
Sepik, they too cut off the forearm as a trophy, cooked it, and hung it up. If a child did not
grow well or a man or woman was sickly, they would be fed a bit of the cooked flesh of the
victim’s arm. But, my informant emphasized, ‘lik lik,’ a very tiny amount. It was the only
Lujere example of ritual cannibalism I learned of other than associated with ‘sanguma.’

210
 Old Enemies

According to Kaiera they called the cannibals across the Sepik the “Woniablu” who
referred to them as the “Iwani,” but their ethnographer Phillip Guddemi (1992: 35)
wrote that they called the Lujere the “Sonamo.” Regardless, Kaiera had another fight
song for me about two cannibal men, Akaru and Imari, and he sung it so slowly it seemed
more like a lullaby. Before I could query him, he launched into an intense description of
how the cannibal men, women, and children all eat the victim including the blood. He
claimed they brought their sago, ‘tulip,’ and ‘apica’ leaves with them to eat with their vic-
tims’ raw flesh. What they didn’t eat in situ, he added, they carried home.10
Kaiera had never seen his village attacked but his account was a detailed child’s night-
mare image of the cannibal enemies across the Sepik, undoubtedly echoing the grisly
stories he heard from his parents and others growing up. I recall another informant tell-
ing me, as if it were yesterday, how the attacking cannibals would truss up a victim to a
pole and carry them home like a pig to butcher and eat. In all the local cannibal accounts
I heard, I could never distinguish between what was a nightmare fantasy or real. The
last cannibal feast of Lujere villagers—a bloody massacre reported even in the New York
Times—was just fifteen years before my fieldwork, so memories and fears of their an-
thropophagic neighbors were still acute and vivid. But the story Kaiera wanted to tell me
just then was not about their cannibal enemies across the Sepik, but their fierce enemies
in the sparsely occupied swamps sprawling westward across the Sand River whose lands
bordered theirs. My genealogies are testimony to Tsila’s raids with an occasional relative
killed by a Tsila warrior: for example, Klowi’s maternal grandfather’s sister and her two
children were attacked and killed in the bush, as was Oria and Nauwen’s father’s youngest
brother.

The Tsila Village Massacre

While the Lujere’s cannibal neighbors were literally bloodthirsty, the Lujere were blood-
thirsty in a more symbolic sense but, in terms of delight in killing the enemy, just as
spirited. The Iwani hamlets made a brutal attack on a hamlet of Tsila village west of the
Sand River sometime between the devastating earthquake of September 20, 1935, and
the end of World War II. Again Kaiera, one of my best informants for detailed historic
events, gave the following account.
One time both the men of Iwani and Tsila were in the bush en route to raid each oth-
er. The Iwani men saw some of the Tsila men’s tracks headed towards Iwani but said, “We
won’t worry. None of the women are in the village so they won’t get killed,” and proceeded
to Tsila. When they neared the village, they stopped to put on their fight decorations

10. At contact, cannibalism was widely distributed throughout Melanesia. According to Knauft
(1999, 103-04), on New Guinea it was found variously along the south and north coasts, the
southeast highlands, the Sepik region, Strickland-Bosavi area, and the Star Mountains area.
On the adjoining islands of the Bismarck Archipelago cannibalism occurred in the Admiralty
Islands, the southern Massim area, northern New Britain, the Solomon Islands, northern
New Hebrides, New Caledonia and, further to the east, Fiji. Obeyesekere’s (2005) book Can-
nibal Talk is primarily on Polynesia and takes exception to colonial and popular accounts of
cannibalism in that cultural area while not denying that it existed in places.

211
 A Witch’s Hand

and then began yelling and loudly hitting the trunks of trees. Once decorated, the men’s
faces were somewhat concealed. The Tsila women thought that it was their men return-
ing triumphantly home. Two old men who had remained in the village came out of the
men’s house and began to hit their ‘garamuts’11 to celebrate. One of the main Iwani men
on the raid was called Biauwi; one of the main Tsila raiding men was Wauri. Tsila was
filled with women waiting for the return of their men, but a third old man had remained
inside the men’s house.
As the Iwani men approached the village some of the women began to doubt if these
men were their own warriors, then, as they came into view the men began singing their
victory song. Then they ran to encircle the women to keep them from escaping. Kaiera
told me that they murdered every single woman and child that was there. Some of the
children were killed inside their houses. They killed the two old men beating the ‘gara-
muts’ and their bodies fell over their drums. Kaiera smiled at the thought of so many
enemies being killed. The only person that the Iwani men did not find was the old man
who had hidden himself in the men’s house. Victorious, the Iwani men returned towards
home.
The thwarted Tsila men were returning home when they heard some sounds in the
forest. First, they thought it was cassowaries. Then they decided it was Iwani men strik-
ing the trunks of trees and realized their own village had been attacked. Afraid of what
had happened to their families, the men began to run towards their village. When they
saw the tracks of the Iwani men they knew their families had been murdered. Entering
the village, they saw only dead bodies. One man on entering his house saw his murdered
family and called out, “All of my children and wife are killed, every one of them; not a
single one escaped.”
They found the old man who was still alive, and he told them about the raid, how all of
the women were outside waiting for their men so that none of them escaped. Finally, they
buried all of their children and wives. Then Kaiera remembers this was before the ‘kiaps’
came and says that they built scaffolds for the dead, and then correcting himself a second
time, said that would have been too much work so the men carried the dead into the
houses and abandoned the village. The name of the hamlet where the massacre occurred
was Woarani. The account ends with Kaiera adding that the men cut off the forearms of
their victims and brought them back to Iwani as trophies for a celebration.
Although there are some logical glitches and questionable firsthand details in Kaiera’s
version of the tragic event, it was, at least to the Iwanis, a real event. Unfortunately, my in-
terview with Wapia, the Tsila ‘luluai,’ was in January 1972 and it was the following March
when Kaiera told me about the Iwani’s massacre of the Tsila hamlet. Had the dates been
reversed I could have questioned Wapia about the massacre’s authenticity and his version
of it, hopefully yielding significant new data.
Another bit of enemy fighting data I regret not having is Hodgekiss’ patrol report
when McCarthy met him at the Yellow River [Kogiabu] Base Camp in 1936. Regarding
Hodgekiss, he wrote,

His own arrival there hadn’t been quite as peaceful as ours had been. He had turned
up during a full-scale battle between the Mariyami [old Lujere village on lower Yellow

11. In my Wakau interview the Tsila ‘luluai,’ if you remember, told me they never had ‘garamuts.’

212
 Old Enemies

River] and the [Abau] villages of the Sepik. Hodgkiss [sic] had simply announced that
he intended to camp on their battle-ground and that he advised everybody to cease
fire and go home. The warring sides watched Hodgkiss’ [sic] party pitch its tents, then
shrugged their shoulders and took his advice. (McCarthy 1963: 163)

Because McCarthy did not witness the “battle” (both he and Hodgekiss were new to
the cultures), and Hodgekiss’ patrol report cannot be located, I assume that McCarthy’s
account, written so many years later, misconstrued Hodgekiss’ report. None of the rel-
evant Sepik cultures engaged in face-to-face skirmishes as famously reported by Heider
(1970), Gardner and Heider (1968), and Mathieson (1969) for the Dugan Dani in what
was then West Irian. Lujere “warfare” was limited to clandestine raids—never traditional
combat—so it is hard to visualize a “full-scale battle” on the “battle-ground” referred to.
McCarthy’s patrol report (1936) mentions nothing about the Lujere’s fight style but em-
phasizes their peacefulness; nevertheless, enemy villages with whom they fatally feuded
surrounded them.

The Yellow River Massacre

Unlike Kaiera’s account of the Tsila massacre or McCarthy’s alleged “battle,” the fol-
lowing massacre account does not rely on one man’s narrative but on a bulging file of
documents labeled “Tribal Fighting—Lumi—Sepik District, 1956–1957” in the Austral-
ian National Archives and for years closed to public access.12 On August 22, 1956, the
front page of Sydney’s Morning Herald carried the sensational three-column headline,
“HEAD-HUNTERS KILL 28 IN NEW GUINEA MASSACRE” and, continuing
the story on an inner page, couldn’t resist the two column headline, “CHILDREN’S
HEADS CHOPPED OFF.”13 The New York Times recognized the uniqueness of the
story but relegated it to page four with a one-column heading, “28 SLAIN IN NEW

12. I initiated access to this voluminous file in May 1978 and received an apologetic reply in July
1979 that it was “completely within the closed period” and that “Special access is usually only
given for projects of national importance or cases such as a minister of the Crown wishing to
refresh his memory.” Still, I was invited to apply for special access and did. In the meantime,
when in Lumi I was able to make a chance perusal of Brightwell’s report in 1982 from the
recruiter Ron “Kit” Kitson’s old copy, but with time only for a few cursory notes. (He was
recruiting laborers in the Yellow River area when he learned of the massacre). After much
correspondence the old-fashioned way, I was notified by a letter from the Director General
of the Australian Archives dated 24 January 1984 that my request for special access to Com-
monwealth records relating to the Yellow River Massacre of 1956 had been granted and a
copy of the file was sent to me. It was over a five-year wait, but the data were worth it, and
I wish to again express my appreciation to the officers and staff of the Australian Archives.
Without direct access to Brightwell’s superb reports and the Archive’s accumulated records
regarding the Yellow River Massacre, I could not have told its story. Today the Archives’ file
on the Yellow River Massacre is in “open access.”
13. Most of the data for this section are from the large file on the Yellow River massacres in the
Australian National Archives (CRS A518 [Department of Territories] EU840/1/4, Tribal
Fighting—Lumi District, 1956-1957). See especially Merton Brightwell’s masterful (1957a)

213
 A Witch’s Hand

GUINEA,” while the Los Angeles Times, totally ignoring the event, observed on page
sixteen that “French Slay 50 Algerian Rebels.” Killing one’s enemies is a universal phe-
nomenon, but the New Guinea story had a difference, the victims—Lujere men, women,
and children—were eaten.14
The following day the New York Times had another one-column story titled, “HEAD-
HUNTER TOLL RISES” and reported that ten more bodies of “cannibal headhunters’
victims” were found by a district officer in the Telefomin area in the mountains southwest
of the earlier report. More germane was that the Lujere massacre also was having interna-
tional political repercussions. The Times article concluded with the following paragraph:

The Melbourne Herald assailed the United Nations Trusteeship Council today for
advocating self-government for New Guinea in view of last week’s massacre of twenty-
eight natives by cannibal head-hunters. The newspaper branded as “nonsense” a recent
8-to-6 vote of the council calling on Australia to set a “target date for self-government
of its trusteeship territory.”15

Such politically motivated comments by the Australian press were a principal reason
the Territory’s government responded so quickly. The administrator, politically sensitive
to criticism from the homeland and always strapped for money—thus especially parsi-
monious with “wild” uneconomic areas like the Upper Sepik—hurriedly responded with
visits from high officials, augmenting the local field staff, sending additional patrol equip-
ment, and establishing a new patrol post. A murder, especially lots of them, even without
the added infamy of cannibal headhunters and international press coverage, was often a
sure path to augmented government services.
The massacre, usually referred to as “the Yellow River massacre,” occurred on a Sepik
River sand bar on August 9, 1956. Two male survivors traveling via canoes and footpaths
took a week to reach the nearest patrol post at Lumi to report the calamity. On August
seventeenth, the Lumi ADO Frank Jones notified his superior, Sepik District Commis-
sioner Tom Aitchison, that

A report has reached this office [Lumi] of a massacre of South Wapi people by mem-
bers of an uncontrolled people. . . . The massacre occurred approximately ten days ago,
and the people murdered were from the villages of AMENI (TIPAS), IRIMUI, and
PANYEWAI. These [Lujere] villages were recently censused by PO Oakes in an initial

“Report of Investigation of Massacre of Yellow River Natives,” and his follow-up reports on
seven short patrols (1957b) during the investigation of the massacre.
14. There is a huge bibliography on cannibalism; see especially Goldman (1999) for a critical view
of the anthropological literature, Sanday’s (1986) examination of cannibalism as a cultural
system and Lindenbaum’s (2004) review of the changing anthropological approaches to can-
nibalism. For a contrasting psychohistorical stance towards cannibalism see Sagan (1983), and
Prinz (2007:173–214) for a philosopher’s wide-ranging discussion of the concept of moral
relativism and practices such as cannibalism, infanticide, human sacrifice, and honor killings.
Not surprising, cannibalism is also a lucrative hook for some tourist tours; for instance, Mar
(2016) describes a tour to the “Cannibal Caves” of Fiji.
15. “Head-Hunter Toll Rises,” 1956, New York Times, August 23, 1956.

214
 Old Enemies

census.16 . . . Of the men who came to report the matter, two had spear wounds which
were healing. They reported that the killing was done by tomahawk and limbom spear
only. . . AMENI canoes were used to help the raiders remove the dead, and the report
states that the dead were eaten. Two bodies [actually five] were left at the point of the
massacre, as the canoes were overloaded, but the heads were removed from these two
bodies by the raiders. . . . It is expected that more information will be obtained in the
next few days, but this basic information is forwarded by today’s courier urgently, as it
is felt this is probably the worst native massacre reported for some years.17

Later it was reported that the massacre messengers to Lumi carried bundles of ‘pitpit’
stems denoting the number of male and female deaths and, to authenticate their account,
one finger each cut from two of the bodies left behind. ADO Jones’s initial report to
his district officer started a procession of memorandums, radiograms, and international
phone calls up and down the chain of command from the ADOs of Lumi and Ambunti
in the bush to Australia’s capitol, Canberra, and the Minister of External Territories, Paul
Hasluck.
PO George Oakes, who had made the first census patrol among the Lujere just weeks
earlier, was again on patrol when his superior Frank Jones sent a message that he was to
proceed to the village of Tipar (Tipas) in the South Wapei Division to join him (Oakes
1956b: 5). Hiking via Abrau and the Lujere villages of Nami and Naum, he liaised with
Jones on the twenty-seventh. An ironic footnote to the Yellow River massacre is that
an Australian woman went to jail because of it. Patricia Robertson, an expat Teletype
operator in Port Moresby employed by the Department of Post and Telegraphs, illegally
disclosed the massacre contents of the government’s official radiogram to an Australian
newspaper and was sentenced on a Friday, August 31 to three months in jail. As the Ter-
ritory had no accommodation for a jailed White woman, she spent the weekend at the
jailer’s residence with him and his wife, until housing was readied at the Bomana Gaol
(Brown 2012).
The government’s reaction to the horrific event was, considering the challenging en-
vironmental circumstances, both administratively effective and compassionate to victims
and slayers alike and makes a good case study of a colonial regime in critical action. Yes,
compassion to the slayers up to a point, as the officers knew that the administration had
not yet exerted political control over the killers who, simply put, were faithfully following
the respected precepts of their ancestors: you kill us, we kill you and eat you.

16. See Oakes (1956). On the morning of June 26, 1956, Oakes carried out the census of the
Pabei hamlets: Ina, Yegiratok and Ibigami. He adds, “The inhabitants of IRIMUI and PA-
NYEWEI Hamlets and the AMENI Hamlets—TIPAR [Tipas] and ABIRAMI further to
the south near the SEPIK River had also gathered at PABEI on their own volition” (Oakes
1956). They had heard he did not plan to visit them and were partially right. Oakes correctly
believed that as Panyewei was situated on the south side of the Sepik it was not in the Lumi
Sub District, but in the Ambunti Sub District.
17. Frank D. Jones, memorandum, August 17, 1956 (CRS A518 [Department of Territories],
EU840/1/4, Tribal Fighting—Lumi—Sepik District, 1956–1957), Australian National Ar-
chives, Canberra.

215
 A Witch’s Hand

By August twenty-first, DO Aitchison, keenly aware of the massacre, sent a two-page

memorandum to his immediate superior in Port Moresby, A. A. Roberts, director of the
Department of Native Affairs. It contained one new bit of information and the admin-
istration’s plan of action:

It now seems practically certain that the raiders were members of the IWAM people
on the MAY RIVER. . . . A patrol lead by ADO Jones is leaving LUMI within the
next two days to proceed to the scene of the alleged murders. He will be accompanied
by 12 Police. Mr. PO Oakes who is at present on Patrol will join ADO Jones imme-
diately on completion of this Patrol.18 ADO Brightwell will proceed from Ambunti
to arrive at the Sepik, Yellow River junction not later than the 29th August. He and
ADO Jones will liaise. ADO Brightwell will take over the investigations. Should it be
deemed necessary a further Patrol Officer will be made available to ADO Brightwell.
[The trawler] M. V. THETIS is proceeding to Ambunti where it will be joined by my-
self [obviously flying to Ambunti], and proceed to the Yellow River Area. It is expected
no further information will be available for ten days.19

Mert Brightwell was appointed Cadet Patrol Officer (CPO) in 1947 after having
served in World War II as a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) wireless operator and
air gunner. In 1954 he was posted to the Ambunti Patrol Post when it was still a part of
the Angoram Sub-District and was knowledgeable of the Sepik area as far as the Dutch
border. When the Ambunti Sub-District was created in June 1956, he was placed in
charge. Bill Brown, a fellow officer, notes that

He had wide shoulders, a barrel chest and no neck—attributes he credited to his long
line of furniture-removalist forebears. But, despite his stature, Mert was light on his
feet and the life of the party when he would sashay from behind a screen, straw boater
in one hand, cane in the other, tap dancing through his own sung-rendition of Father
In His Life Was Ne’er A Quitter. (Brown 2012)

On August twenty-seventh, Aitchison boarded the Thetis in Ambunti and proceeded

upriver toward the massacre site. The following day the Ambunti workboat, M. L. Mala,

18. As noted earlier, George Oakes contacted me via email March 11, 2012, after reading my
book, The Bamboo Fire: Fieldwork with the New Guinea Wape. To my happy surprise he wrote,
In 1956 I visited and censused every village in the Lumi area. . . . Six weeks after I
had visited and censused the Yellow River people word got out that about 30 of them
had been killed and eaten by May River people. I joined the ADO from Lumi and
went down to the Sepik River where we met the ADO from Ambunti and did an
initial investigation into the deaths and also travelled on the 40 ft. workboat [Mala] to
Ambunti and back. Later a fellow Patrol Officer Tony Redwood, was given the job of
rounding up the cannibals and caught over 40 of them. Tony Redwood is now living
in retirement in Florida. [I was unsuccessful in contacting him.]
19. T. G. Aitchison, memorandum August 21, 1956 (CRS A518 [Department of Territories]
EU840/1/4, Tribal Fighting—Lumi—Sepik District, 1956–1957), Australian National Ar-
chives, Canberra.

216
 Old Enemies

with a four-man boat crew likewise departed with Brightwell accompanied by seven po-
lice and a medical orderly. They passed the Ambunti-based labor recruiter R. C. Mackie
moving downstream with forty-three new recruits and early in the afternoon overtook
the Thetis. After a run of eleven hours, the Mala moored and after dark the Thetis arrived
and moored astern the workboat. River fog delayed an early morning start but later they
passed fifty men in their canoes taking crocodile skins to sell in Brugnowi, just above
Ambunti. Stopping at Iniok village, Brightwell made inquiries about the massacre, and
learned they had seen bodies floating down the river and that a neighboring group had
told them about the attack. Now there was no doubt that the perpetrators were the May
River Iwam.20
On August thirtieth, the river was again in heavy fog necessitating the Mala to reduce
its speed until, near the mouth of the Frieda River, visibility was almost zero and they had
to stop for a half hour before moving on. Eventually the Mala passed the mouth of the
May River, and at 1:20 p.m. Brightwell saw the following chaotic scene:

Abandoned canoes sited at left bank; went ashore and found four temporary houses
of rude construction—there were string bags hanging with their contents and empty
ones lying about. Several fishing nets were scattered about and washed sago. Fires had
been used to burn pigs teeth ornaments and a human jaw bone was found in one fire-
place. Several meat tins were scattered about. Broken bows and arrows were found and
two spears and four fishing spears. One bush knife. There were razor blades, mirrors,
and lap laps, trade paint, a rucksak and odd native ornaments broken and scattered
about the place—some partially burned. Many lime gourds were lying about, all of
them smashed. THETIS arrived at 1330 [1:30 p.m.] and D.O. Aitchison came ashore
and inspected scene. Gear collected and put aboard THETIS. Obviously this is the
camp of the Yellow River people and the scene of the massacre. (Brightwell 1957b: 2)

He was almost right. While it was the victims’ camp and where the survivors ex-
pressed their grief afterwards, the massacre occurred across the river on a bloodied sand-
bar now swept clean of both blood and the few bodies left behind. Brightwell’s ensuing
investigation into the massacre was extensive, taking months to complete. By diligently
interviewing the Lujere survivors and Iwan attackers he gradually grasped the nature of
the murder plan, its execution, and its aftermath. It is one of the most complete and au-
thoritative accounts of a large New Guinea cannibal massacre to be recorded.

Prelude to a Cannibal Feast

The Wanimoi villagers (Iwan language speakers), living in an uncontrolled area far up-
river from the nearest patrol post in Ambunti, had little contact with administrative offic-
ers. According to them, Westerners had visited them only three times: by “Sepik Robbie”
in the 1930s; in May 1942 by a party from the administration boat Thetis; and in April
1952 by the Ambunti-based labor recruiter R. C. Mackie. At some time beyond living

20. See Yoshida (1987) for data on the migration routes of the Iwam to the May River based on
their myths, Schuster (1969) for a discussion and photos of their palm-leaf sheath paintings,
and Rehburg (1974) for a description of their social structure.

217
 A Witch’s Hand

memory, the Wanimoi people lived on the Sepik at the mouth of the May River then
moved eighteen miles up the May apparently to distance themselves from their Lujere
enemies. The animosity between the May River Iwan and the Sepik River Lujere was an
ancient one. Brightwell reported that

Each side recognises the other as a traditional enemy and each can give hazy and mu-
tilated reports of past killings and retributions as related by the old men. Some stories
relate as many as 12 people being killed at a time whilst other old men say they could
not count how many had been killed in their lifetime as . . . the killings formed a con-
tinuous [back and forth] process. (Brightwell 1957: 2)

Brightwell’s findings regarding the massacre begin with the 1950 killing by the
Iwam of Nanau, a Lujere man of Tipas village. Revenge came late in 1953 when eleven
Lujere men in two canoes from Tipas and Abirami villages, apparently looking for
trouble, paddled down the Sepik and intercepted two Iwam canoes carrying three men
and a married couple. They pursued both canoes but the one nearest the right bank
escaped into the May River. The other canoe, cut off by the two Lujere canoes, was
forced toward the left bank where the two Iwam men, Kwaso and Nabreik, scrambled
ashore. Nabreik escaped into the bush but Kwaso, hindered by elephantiasis in his large
swollen leg, was quickly run down by eight of the Lujere men and easily killed, his body
pin-cushioned with arrows. Before they left, Kwaso’s left forearm was severed and taken
home to display in a victory celebration. But the price of victory meant it was now the
Lujere’s turn to fearfully wonder when and where the Iwam would attain their retribu-
tive homicide for Kwaso’s death. Who the killer might be was easier to ascertain; Kwaso
was from Wanimoi village and it would be his Wanimo mates who would avenge his
murder.
In March 1954, labor recruiter Mackie in need of indentured workers, signed on
twenty Iwam men to work copra at the Tomlabat Plantation on New Ireland, and eight
Iwam men to work at the Numanuma Plantation on Bougainville, all for two-year con-
tracts. Of these twenty-eight men, eleven were from Wanimoi village. During their con-
tracts, the men did not leave the plantation and were housed and worked only with other
Iwam men. Their lone opportunity to see the Territory’s towns and have any outside con-
tact with other islanders was during transport to and from the plantations. When their
contracts were finished in April 1956, they were returned to Ambunti and then borrowed
canoes from the ADO for the long paddle home up the Sepik and May Rivers. The sta-
tion’s ADO Brightwell later commented,

It was remarked upon at the time these repatriates were landed at AMBUNTI how
little they had learned whilst they were away at work—there was not one of them that
spoke reasonable pidgin—the best was a broken rather crazy and rather unreliable
grasp of the language whilst the majority of them could not talk even mutilated pidgin.
It was remarkable that they had learned so little and regrettable that better use had not
been made of the two years. . . . Apparently the IWAMS had little more contact with
Administration and more advanced natives than they would have in their home village
and the effect of these conditions was most apparent on their repatriation; they had
learned little, some nothing. (Brightwell 1957a:10)

218
 Old Enemies

The returned Iwan laborers were some of the first to experience extended contact with
the allegedly “civilizing” Australian colonial regime and Brightwell was eager to follow
up on this meager beginning. As the Mala was then attached to the Ambunti Patrol Post,
he decided to visit all of the upstream villages including Wanimoi. Brightwell was in
Wanimoi village the fourth and fifth of May and asked the repatriated laborers to return
the canoes he had loaned them. They arrived in Ambunti on the ninth of May with the
borrowed canoes and all started home the following day except one young man, Nari.
Brightwell was selecting a man from each of the returnees’ villages to live on the sta-
tion for a time to improve their Tok Pisin, thus giving the administration someone to
communicate with in every Iwan village. He planned to return each man with a ‘tultul’s
hat as the administration’s first step in exerting control over the Iwam. For Wanimoi
village he had selected Nari who seemed to have some initiative and whose Tok Pisin,
while not really intelligible, was the best of the village’s eleven returnees. On May 29, an
Iwam canoe voluntarily visited the station, the first time this had happened, and on June
2 Brightwell allowed Nari, although his Tok Pisin was not much improved, to return to
home. He intended to give him a ‘tultul’ hat but the only ones he had were ridiculously
large.

Shortly after NARI arrived back at WANIMOI an old man named NANI, a clansman
of the murdered KWASO, brought to the attention of the young men that KWASO’S
death had not been avenged during their absence and it was about time something was
done about it. NARI advised the villagers against this and suggested that they forget
the whole thing. He told them that the YELLOW River people were more advanced
than the IWAMs and that such action would make the Government cross and lead to
trouble. . . . At this indication of non support NAHI turned on NARI and told him
that he would never give up the obligation to avenge KWASO and that NARI knew
nothing about Europeans, Government or Government officials; and if NARI knew so
much about these things then he should go to AMBUNTI and have the Government
Official adopt him and look after him. This remark caused NARI great shame and he
made no further opposition and appears to have thought it necessary to do something
to re-establish himself. (Brightwell 1957a: 4–5)

But an epidemic of whooping cough started moving up the Sepik and May Rivers
resulting in five Wanimoi deaths, so it was not until the end of July that Nari broached
his scheme that could regain his respect. His idea was to go to the Lujere and, under the
deceitful guise of friendship, arrange a meeting to end the enmity between their villages,
at which time they would avenge Kwaso’s murder. His plot gathered enthusiasm and on
August 4, two canoe loads of men, five in one canoe, and nine in the second, were on
the Sepik headed upstream towards the Lujere when they eyed two Lujere canoes with
twelve people aboard moving downstream.

The YELLOW River canoes on sighting the IWAM canoes made off upstream but
NARI called out to them in his pidgin that they need not be afraid or run away, that
he wanted to shake hands with them and be friends. The use of pidgin overcame all
the traditional distrust and the YELLOW River canoes came down to the sandbank
where the IWAMS were waiting. NARI spoke pidgin to one of the YELLOW River

219
 A Witch’s Hand

men named IROLAI saying that all the fighting of the past was finished and that they
should be friends as they all had native officials and had progressed from the old con-
ditions. Spears were broken as tokens of friendship, betel nut and food was exchanged
and consumed. (Brightwell 1957a: 4)

They agreed that villagers from the two groups would meet together in five days after
they all returned home at a particular sandbar chosen by the Lujere a bit downstream
named Ausin. There they would feast each other to celebrate forsaking their old warring
enmity for a new relationship of peaceful amity. Irolai in Tok Pisin told his new Iwam
friend, Nari, that on the third day his Tipas group would go down to Ausin to make shel-
ters and prepare food for the Iwam’s arrival on the fifth day. On August 7, the Tipas vil-
lagers started down the Sepik arriving near the meeting sandbar on the eighth where they
built shelters and began fishing and making sago. As newcomers arrived, their eventual
group numbered forty-two people from four villages; the majority, twenty-eight, were
from Tipas, eight were from Irimui village and three each from Abirami and Panawai
villages. Of the forty-two, nine were children, the youngest a three-year-old boy from
Abirami; the rest comprised eighteen females and fifteen males.
While the Lujere were busy preparing for the unprecedented peace parley, Nari was
arranging revenge. At a meeting in one of Wanimoi’s men’s houses, Nari asked how many
should they kill to avenge Kwaso’s death, one or two? Some of the younger men thought
one death was enough when the aged Nahi, strongly disagreeing, said, “I am against that,
I want them all killed. They are always killing us off—if we only kill one or two they will
continue to kill us—I want them all killed and that will finish the matter and we will be
free from further attack” (Brightwell 1957a: 6). In the discussion following Nahi’s sug-
gestion of a mass slaughter, it was agreed that they would arrive a day early knowing that
their true Tipas enemies would be there, in case on the fifth day, Lujere villagers they
don’t fight were present and they would be outnumbered. The plot was settled: they would
arrive a day early and kill everyone. Nowhere in the record is it mentioned that a massacre
would provide a generous feast for all the villagers.

The Massacre

On August 7, the Wanimoi villagers started down the May River in twelve canoes with
their prepared food. They numbered forty-four men, and two aged women, one of whom
was Kwasho’s mother, apparently eager to witness the gory revenge for her son’s murder.
Before they got underway on the morning of the ninth for the nearby Ausin sandbar
and the Lujere’s rendezvous with death, old Nami gathered the group. He told them he
would give the signal to commence killing by saying to Nakuno, “Nakuno, I want to eat
sago now.”
It was still early morning and the Lujere were busy with food preparations when the
twelve Iwam canoes slid into view downriver, canoes that were not expected until the fol-
lowing day. They were definitely surprised and probably embarrassed as their food for the
celebration was not ready. The Lujere camp was on the north bank, but the Iwam ground-
ed their twelve canoes on a sandbar just across from them. Going ashore with some of
their provisions, they called across the sprawling Sepik to their new friends to come over
and shake hands. Completely trusting, without weapons, they—with the exception of a

220
 Old Enemies

young wife and two young girls—complied; men, women, and children climbed into the
long, narrow, and tippy canoes that standing men adroitly paddled to the Iwam’s sandbar
killing field. Nari greeted them in Tok Pisin extolling their newfound friendship and, to
memorialize their goodwill to one another, spears were broken and lime gourds smashed.

NAMI then told NARI and the others to pair off with the YELLOW River men—
but did not mention the women and children. The YELLOW Rivers did not have food
with them so they were taken by their IWAM partners and provided with food. Many
of the YELLOW River people were sitting in the IWAM canoes with their IWAM
partners attending to them. Food was distributed to the YELLOW River men who
shared it out to their women. (Brightwell 1957a: 7)

Naini, a married Wanimoi man with two wives, also gave some of the Lujere women
sago and fish, six of whom with two of the children then returned to the Lujere camp.
Their rationale is unknown but whatever it was, it saved their lives. The two aged Iwam
women fraternized with the remaining Lujere women and, if ten of the fifteen Lujere
men were in a canoe being served by their Iwam host, that left thirty-four Iwam men
standing around free to attack the remaining thirty-four Lujere of which only five were
men. While the food was being distributed, Woripa, the only man from Panawai and a
boy from Tipas got into a canoe and pulled away upstream to bring back some Lujere
men who were working in an area called O’gwibira and missing out on the big occasion.
Seeing this, Nari told his guest Oralai to call them back as their leaving might make
the Iwam suspicious or afraid, as indeed it had. Oralai innocently complied and the two
returned to the sandbar and certain death. The Iwam, now convinced that other Lujere
men were nearby, felt compelled to hasten their attack.
While the former enemies were enjoying the improvised brotherhood feast in com-
parative quiet as so few Iwam knew Tok Pisin, the Iwam alone knew that they were actu-
ally dining with their next meal. Then old Nami, speaking in Iwam, spoke the arranged
signal, “Nakuno I want to eat sago now.” Nakuno did not reply but immediately speared
his partner Paidei, a young single man from Irimui; Nari without a pause ran a spear
into his alleged friend Irolai killing him, and N’habe, after spearing Abai of Abirami, cut
off his head. The terrified screams of unarmed men, women and children being chased,
caught, speared, and axed to death carried easily across the Sepik and the women and
children in the Lujere camp fled in terror into the bush, sure they would be next. On
the bloodied sandbar, victims tried vainly to escape the slaughter by running into the
tall grass only to be speared or axed from behind. As the victims one by one fell dead or
dying, three fell into the river and their bodies were swept away. Tipas, with the most
people present, suffered the most casualties with eighteen dead. Wolali, his wife, and his
seven-year-old son were all killed, as was Nawepogo and his young wife. Taigwe of Tipas,
who carried the news of the massacre to Lumi, dashed safely into the bush with only
a spear wound to his arm, but both his wife and two young daughters were killed and
carried away. There were only two other survivors of the massacre, both agile youths of
Tipas: Wunibei, who like Taigwe escaped death with just an arm wound but whose father
was killed; and Youneri, the only survivor who miraculously vanished into the tall grass
unscathed. The Iwam’s twenty-nine victims numbered thirteen women, twelve men, and
four young boys, including the three-year-old.

221
 A Witch’s Hand

The attackers, having killed every enemy in sight and still spooked by Woripa’s earlier
starting upstream, were anxious to be gone before any Lujere canoes would appear and,
seeing evidence of the attack, try to overtake them. The Iwam readied their twelve canoes
and seized two of the canoes the unsuspecting Lujere had used to cross the river, like
proverbial lambs led to slaughter. They quickly loaded eighteen of the bloody bodies lying
about as well as two heads from the corpses left behind.21 As a witness to the treacherous
carnage, Masio, Kwaso’s old mother, must have felt triumphantly revenged for her son’s
death as she settled into a departing canoe. Leaving at top speed they vigorously pulled
their canoes downstream to the May for the eighteen-mile row upstream, arriving at
Wanimoi village about 5:00, well before dark. After the Lujere bodies were lined on the
ground outside one of the men’s houses, the village drum was sounded, and the women
and children who missed the murderous adventure came to admire the trophies. The bod-
ies were first decapitated then butchered into portions and distributed to all the villagers
to consume at their leisure. Unlike the Aztec, here the eating of human flesh was a feast,
not a sacrifice to seek communion with the gods (Sahlins 1978).
The heads were collected and carried up into the men’s house where they were cooked,
and the sacred flutes blown for a village-wide celebration. Eventually the men ate the
flesh from the heads and the initial celebration finally ended at dawn. Later the skulls
were hung in the open to dry and then individually decorated by the killer.22
Once the Iwam were clearly out of the vicinity of the massacre, two of the Tipas
females from the Lujere camp—Aiyenali, about twelve years old, and Yegei, the young
wife of the murdered Wariso—canoed across and joined Wunibei to survey the tragedy.
This would have been an especially horrific experience for Yegei. Of the five bodies the
Iwam left on the bloody sandbar, one was her husband, Wariso, still wearing his blood-
soaked checked shirt and black shorts. Brightwell’s report notes that “WARISO had an
axe wound through the back of his neck but had died of a spear wound which was not
noticed because he was wearing a shirt. The axe wound was inflicted later by MOM”
(Brightwell 1957a: 8). Also lying among the murdered was Yegei’s mother-in-law—War-
iso’s mother Owinawaki—who “had a spear wound just below the ribs through stomach”
(Brightwell 1957a: 8). The three other sandbar casualties were the speared and beheaded
bodies of Abai and Palei and the body of an old woman, Yemiei, who had been speared
through the chest and had an axe wound on her back.

21. Rune Paulsen who lived with the May River Iwam for two years in the late 1980s, says the
Iwam did not take prisoners but after a massacre, “If the river and canoes were located nearby
they would carry all the corpses back to their village” and their extensive food taboos were
lifted for a cannibal feast. “Everybody was allowed to eat food from everybody else and that
people even took food from each others mouths—a thing which is unthinkable at all other
times” (Paulsen 2003: 44). Cannibalism, he writes, was “a very complex and large-scale ritual
extending over several weeks” (Paulsen 2003: 45).
22. See Van Baal (1966: 745–51) for a more detailed grisly comparative account of a head-hunt-
ing massacre, home coming “merry-making,” and cannibalism among the Marind-Anim of
the southeast coastal section of Irian Jaya’s Merauke district. It is ironic that Arens’ (1979)
book calling cannibalism a “myth” was published so near the time it was still a fact in New
Guinea.

222
 Old Enemies

Yegei and Aiyenali canoed back to the Lujere camp where they joined the other wom-
en and girls in breaking, smashing, scattering, and burning their possessions in a frenzy
of hysterical grief, creating the chaotic scene Brightwell witnessed. As it was still early in
the day, the thirteen survivors eventually started upriver to O’gwaibira where the Lujere
men who missed the deadly celebration were working. Two of the men there retrieved the
bodies of Yegei’s husband and his mother and placed them in a house in O’gwaibira. The
other three bodies left on the killing sands were carried away by the rising river. Five days
later Abai’s headless torso was lifted from the Sepik 175 miles downstream.

The Aftermath

Once Brightwell had located the site of the massacre on August 13, inspected it with the
District Officer, and removed evidence to the Thetis, his investigation of the incident con-
tinued. The following morning there again was heavy fog. By nine-fifty when the Thetis
with DO Aitchison had not arrived, Brightwell returned downstream to find the Thetis
stuck on a sandbank. After lashing the Mala to the side of the Thetis, with all engines in
reverse, the Thetis was liberated and the DO decided to return to the scene of the mas-
sacre. Brightwell continued upstream to Tipas, home of some of the massacre survivors
whom he wanted to interview as possible witnesses, and where, as prearranged, he met
Lumi’s ADO Jones and PO Oakes.

Remained overnight and had general discussions on ADO Lumi’s investigations and
enquiries. Decided to move Yellow River witness[es] down to massacre site and carry
out investigation on the spot. . .0630 [6:30 a.m.] left Tipar [Tipas] with ADO Jones
and PO Oakes and Yellow River survivors of massacre. . . [At] O’GWAIBIRA [the of-
ficers] went ashore and inspected the bodies of WARISO and OWINAWAKI [killed
in the massacre] and had them identified.23 . . . 1110 [11:10 a.m.] came upon THETIS
moored in stream just below massacre site. Carried out investigating of happening
preceeding [sic] and at time of massacre in the YELLOW River camp—a very poor
account given by the survivors—their story changes and they do not seem to be very
clear on rather obvious points—there is also some difference in their accounts of move-
ments. Will make very poor witnesses. Remained with THETIS overnight. General
discussion with District Officer [Aitchison], ADO Lumi [ Jones] and self. THETIS
damaged and will return to AMBUNTI with District Officer. . . ADO Jones broke up
his party—some to return overland to LUMI and others to come to AMBUNTI on
MALA. (Brightwell 1957a: 2–3)

23. George Oaks, who is retired and living in Australia, sent me via email two photos from Au-
gust 1956 from “the trip to check on the cannibals with Frank [ Jones] and Mert [Brightwell].
(These two unfortunately passed away years ago). As a matter of interest, the Wewak District
Officer . . . was Tom Aitchison who had been a Patrol Officer in the Sepik for several years
before the war and I think then visited the Yellow River area. He had been patrolling over
quite a bit of NG by 1956—he retired shortly after.” The photos were one of the two bodies
brought to O’gwaibira after the massacre, now gutless and partially mummified, and a photo
of the small workboat Mala approaching to pick up Oakes and Jones. (Email June 19, 2012,
from George Oakes to author.)

223
 A Witch’s Hand

By September fourth, Brightwell was back in Ambunti—but not for long, as his next
task was to apprehend some of the eight repatriated laborers involved in the massacre to
get their account of the attack and, through them, exercise influence on bringing in the
other offenders to stand trial for murder. He sent a message that the ex-laborers should
meet him at a designated site but, while about a dozen of the Wanimoi men came, only
a few of the ex-laborers appeared. Still, his discussion with them about the massacre was
gratifying as they openly admitted to it. He first learned that “The massacre was deliber-
ately planned and cleverly executed with nobody in opposition to it” (Brightwell 1957a:
4). The following morning, he proceeded up the May in the Mala to Wanimo village with
several of the Wanimoi men aboard.

As arranged yesterday the skulls of the victims were produced and handed over. Also
as arranged yesterday five of the repatriated labourers who are involved in the mas-
sacre prepared to proceed to AMBUNTI. At the last moment one of them was a little
reluctant and it was necessary to raise the voice and firm the features in ordering him
aboard whereupon he complied. . . . Two drums of fuel were left at WANIMOI village
as a reminder of the Government and also to serve as an indicator of their attitude to-
wards it—should the drums be destroyed, looked after as instructed, or ignored. . .The
people did not run away when the patrol entered the village but gathered around. Their
attitude was quite good but every precaution was taken. There was some crying and
pleading by the women and old men about taking the five repats and if the matter had
been unduly prolonged difficulties would have arisen. (Brightwell 1957a: 4–5)

The Territory’s administrator, Brigadier General D. M. Cleland in Port Moresby, was

kept updated on the investigation by DO Aitchison and sent several radiograms regard-
ing the massacre to his superior in Canberra, the Minister of the Department of Territo-
ries, Paul Hasluck. Administrator Cleland’s August 21 radiogram to Minister Hasluck,
which contained part of DO Aitchison’s action plan, had an interesting added typed
note: “Rec’d by phone from Mr. McCarthy 8:30 pm 21.8.56.”24 McCarthy had made a
substantive evening phone call regarding the massacre to the Minister’s Canberra office.
Once again, Keith McCarthy, now executive officer in the Department of the Admin-
istrator, had a tangential role in the Lujeres’ affairs. By September 3, some of the action
plan was being realized as described in Director of Native Affairs Roberts’s dispatch to
the administrator:

Following upon my earlier discussion with Your Honour, I left for the Sepik District
on Thursday, 23rd August, 1956, and in conjunction with the District Officer [Aitch-
ison] visited AMBUNTI and the May River area. . . Patrols from LUMI by road
[ADO Jones] and AMBUNTI by river [ADO Brightwell] have met at the YELLOW
River approximately 60 miles upstream from the May River Junction. The District
Officer [Aitchison] has also taken M.V. ‘THETIS’ to the area and is in radio com-
munication. He will advise what will be the final course of action after investigation,

24. Copy of Administrator Cleland’s radiogram to Minister Hasluck, August 21,1956. (CRS
A518 EU840/1/4, Tribal Fighting—Lumi—Sepik District, 1956-1957), Australian National
Archives, Canberra.

224
 Old Enemies

on the spot, where the murders occurred. . . . I do not anticipate any real result for at
least one month.25

Apparently, Director Roberts flew to Wewak, was joined by Aitcheson, and flew on to
Ambunti where they met with ADC Brightwell. The three men made an extensive aerial
reconnaissance over the May River area to estimate the population and to hunt for an
aerodrome site for a possible new patrol post to deal with the crisis. They observed seven
village groups all in swampy country on the lower May, some miles in from the Sepik
River. Women and children were seen in the villages and men in their canoes, but no
possible site for even a small airfield was seen. The officers’ aerial patrol was simple and
easy; the hard work for coming to grips with the massacre was now on the land and rivers.
Only there did the details of the massacre come into focus.
By October 16, Administrator Cleland had enough information from the field in-
vestigators that he sent a two-page foolscap report to the Department of Territories in
Canberra for Minister Hasluck’s attention. In it he noted that an experienced patrol of-
ficer, A. L. Redwood, had been posted to assist Brightwell in the establishment of a base
camp on the May River twenty-one miles from its mouth and in the capture of the men
still at large. Twelve additional police, including a sergeant and a lance corporal, were
also assigned to assist in an unrelenting program of patrol work to continue until all who
had killed during the massacre were apprehended. To facilitate the patrols, two outboard
motors suitable for canoe patrolling in the Sepik and May River backwaters and swamp
canals were delivered to Ambunti. Already, the administrator noted, the men’s vigorous
investigations were paying off.

At Wanimoi Village eighteen (18) freshly decorated human skulls were recovered by
Assistant District Officer Brightwell, and these were claimed by the people of Wani-
moi . . . to be the skulls of some of the victims of the attack on the Yellow River people.
Five of the Iwam Group who took part in the August attack have been apprehended,
and are at present at Ambunti.26

Most of the attackers had disappeared into the May River swamps and it was a tedi-
ous and lengthy project rounding them up to stand trial. But by November 24, Bright-
well, who was at the May River Base Camp, reported in a radio conversation with the
DO that only sixteen of the murderers were still at large, as were seven uncontacted
witnesses. Throughout the rounding up of the attackers, as well as the Lujere and Iwam
witnesses, the administration showed concern for the villages losing many residents and
ensured that children with absent parents were cared for. Because the Iwam had actively
predacious enemies, the Mianmin, on the upper May River, one of the reasons for the
new May River Base Camp was to protect the women and children of Wanimoi village,

25. A. A. Roberts dispatch to the Administrator, September3, 1956. (CRS A518 EU840/1/4,
Tribal Fighting—Lumi—Sepik District, 1956–1957), Australian National Archives, Can-
berra.
26. Administrator Cleland’s report for Minister Hasluck’s attention, “May River Patrols—Sepik
District,” October 16, 1956. (CRS A518 EU840/1/4, Tribal Fighting—Lumi—Sepik Dis-
trict, 1956–1957), Australian National Archives, Canberra.

225
 A Witch’s Hand

now devoid of warriors, from Mianmin attacks. Another reason was to send a strong
message to the Iwam that their raids against the Lujere had to stop.
While there could be no trial without the accused, the Lujere witnesses were essential
for the State to make its case. On the fifteenth of November, Brightwell was in Tipas and
sent out a message that all the survivors of the massacre should meet with him the next
day. Of course, little happens that quickly in New Guinea and only a handful appeared.
He did choose three interpreters who could translate Namia to Tok Pisin for the court.

17th November. Remained at TIPAR [Tipas] and interviewed all survivors of the mas-
sacre selecting six as the best possible witnesses. They are very difficult as witness[es]
are bound to give much trouble in the box. They will return to AMBUNTI in MALA.
18th November. . . brought the following Yellow River witnesses; females AIYENALI,
YEGIEI and ARUKOMIE, and males TAIGWE, WUNIBEI and YOUNERI. In-
terpreters SAMBEN, MINIA, and AMI – not a very bright lot but about the best
available. (Brightwell 1957b: 7)

That night they stayed at the base camp and the following day PO Redwood returned
with four more prisoners and the last of the attackers was caught on December 1. With all
the parties to the case eventually in Wewak, the lower court hearing against the Wanimoi
village men was heard in January and the Supreme Court Hearing was heard in Febru-
ary. The result was predictable. An International Telegram was sent to Canberra from the
administrator on February 11 with the fateful outcome: “FORTY NATIVES FOUND
GUILTY [in] WEWAK OF WILFUL MURDER BY MR JUSTICE GORE AND
DEATH SENTENCE RECORDED.”27
The forty death sentences for the Lujere’s mass murderers were later commuted to
seven years in prison. The post-war application of law in the Territory was changing.
In earlier times seven Kimindimbit men from the central Sepik who took the heads of
twenty enemy villagers were hung at Ambunti on separate gallows until dead.28
But what about the six Lujere witnesses and three interpreters who had been com-
mandeered by the administration in November? After being away from their families for
over three months, they finally returned to Tipas accompanied by Brightwell on March 8.

The witnesses and interpreters returned home. The 18 skulls of the victims of the mas-
sacre which had been recovered from WANIMOI were handed over to the villagers

27. Australian Archives ACT CRS A518 Item EU840/1/4. Canberra.

28. Nari, who had originally been groomed for a local leadership role but became one of the
massacre’s ringleaders, reappears in a 1969 patrol report of the Sepik-May Census Division
by ADO M. E. Tomlinson (1969). Having served his sentence and returned home, Nari is
mentioned in Tomlinson’s report under the section on “Leadership” as “pro Administration,”
apparently more for his name recognition than leadership skills. Hence,
He has made unsuccessful attempts at growing rice in the IEMOMBUI area and
is now believed to be growing coffee in conjunction with people in the Lumi Sub-
district. NARI is noted in his area for his pugnacious attitude towards outsiders, but
otherwise has no real influence over his people. (Australian Archives ACT A518 Item
EU840/14. Canberra: 7)

226
 Old Enemies

for burial. Those men who were responsible for the killing of KWASO of WANIMOI
were told that no action would be taken against them under the circumstances – but
no future killings would be tolerated. (Brightwell 1957b: 9)

Brightwell had learned of two other skulls of Tipas villagers killed by the Wanimoi
men some years before and these too he collected, along with several human teeth brace-
lets from the victims of the recent massacre and returned them to the village. Finally,
he returned Kwaso’s skull to his Wanimoi kin.29 Wanimoi village, a primal nemesis of
the Lujere, was no longer a threat. With its warriors in prison the two big men’s houses
looked abandoned and, with so many of the prisoners’ families gone to live with relatives,
the village now was more dead than alive. The colonial rule of the ‘kiap’ was altering eve-
ryday life in multiple ways. For one, the Iwam’s ancient tradition of a cannibal massacre
and feast seemed to be over. But not for the bordering Mianmin.
In December 1956, they attacked the Atbalmin, killed and ate eighteen men, women,
and children, and carried off two young women. The killers, like the Iwam, were arduously
tracked down, captured and tried. Then in 1957, Mianmin men attacked a village near the
May River Patrol Post. The new station that was supposed to deter the Mianmin as well
as the Iwam was not doing the job.

The Mianmin—garbed only in narrow cane waist bands, 15 centimetre working-dress

phallocrypts, testicles in the breeze—considered the May River people to be under-
clad “bush kanakas”—their attire being a small marine shell perched snail-like on
the end of the penis. Some six months after [Patrol Officer] Aisbett’s patrol had
passed through [from Telefomin to May River] a group of Mianmins made the next
foray, selecting the small settlement of Suwana in the Abaru group near May River
Patrol Post. . . . The Miamin surrounded the village at dawn, killed three men and
one woman, cut up the bodies and set off for home with seven female captives and
butchered bodies—leaving only the heads and entrails behind. One of those women
had difficulty keeping up so she was killed and parts of her body taken to be eaten.
(Brown 2012)

One of the abducted women escaped and reported the raid to the OIC at May River
Patrol Post, Jack Mater, who, along with PO Jim Fenton from Telefomin, an interpreter,
and police, sped up the May in outboard-motor-powered canoes.30 Entering the rugged
hills, on the patrol’s fourteenth day they reached the Mianmin village and surrounded
it. At dawn they captured the killers without incident.31 Among the police, Constable

29. Brightwell’s next assignment was to the Okapa Subdistrict in the Eastern Highlands. Here
again he was involved with cannibalism—not the exocannibalism of the Iwam, but the endo-
cannibalism of the Fore related to the famous neurological disease of kuru (Glasse 1969:18;
Lindenbaum 2013). For a zoologist’s recent, if often cheeky, review of the research on kuru
and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, as well as a probing discussion of can-
nibalism across natural species, see Schutt (2017).
30. For a fuller account of this raid and its aftermath see Gardner (1999: 31–34) who quotes
extensively from Mater’s patrol report.
31. See Dornstreich and Morren (1974), who both did field work in the Sepik Basin, for a careful
examination of the nutritional value of cannibalism. Morren (1986) did fieldwork with the

227
 A Witch’s Hand

Augwi alone arrested nine of the fifteen murderers. In an adventuresome life of ex-
tremes, in 1953 Augwi had been in London as part of the Territory’s contingent for
the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. While these clashes indicated that cannibal strife
remained rife among some of the Upper Sepik societies, at least for the Lujere it had
come to an end.

Mianmin, raiders of the Iwam. For an authoritative discussion of the history and regional
systems of the Mountain Ok or “Min” who reside in the central mountains above the Iwam,
see Jorgensen (1996).

228
chapter ten

Wakau Village

One comes across actual villages with houses built in

groups in a narrow area. There are special houses for the
men and they are not built in the unskilled manner.
Richard Thurnwald (1914: 347)

For our house is our corner of the world.

Gaston Bachelard (1964: 4)

Wakau Local History

According to local belief, Wakau village had its origins atop Mauwi hill when a group de-
cided to move down to the rise of land called wakau just north of the ‘kunai’ plain, hence
the village’s name. At some point, the villagers moved southwest across the Sand River to
the area where the ‘kiap’ first visited Wakau in 1956 and, since a census was taken it was
recognized as a component, albeit minuscule, of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea.
Then, sometime between when the Sola Fida missionaries arrived the middle of 1958,
built their mission station and airstrip, and departed in December 1959, the Wakau vil-
lagers returned to their old village site just east of the Sand River where I lived with them.
Arakwake told me it was he who initiated the move. He first learned of the mission’s ar-
rival when walking back home from Lumi after returning from Dylup Plantation1 as an

1. Dylup Plantation, located near Madang, contains 2,300 hectares and was established in 1904
by the German Niugini Company. Later it became a copra plantation where many Sepik men
like Arakwaki were indentured workers. More recently the old coconut trees are used to make
furniture and the Madang provincial government has purchased the property for a vocational
school. See http://asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/2010/10/big-future-for-coconut-tim-
ber-in-png.html (accessed May 18, 2016).

229
 A Witch’s Hand

indentured worker. After overnight stops in Kamnum and Wokien villages, he first heard
about the new missionary ‘masta’ in Edwaki.2 Back in his village across the Sand River,
many were dying of ‘sotwin,’ probably pneumonia or flu, but it was blamed on ‘sanguma’
and Arakwaki decided to move back to Wakau’s original site. Some of the young men
who came with him were Eine, Yaope’s and Tsaime’s fathers, and Kwoien. The site had
returned to forest, but the towering old coconuts were still there. They cleared the brush,
built houses and gradually the rest of the villagers joined them. And that is where I found
them in 1971 (see fig. 10).

Figure 10. Aerial view of Wakau village, looking north.

When an ethnologist takes the audacious step to move into a strange village to learn
a new way of life, the ardent hope is that the choice of village was a wise one. With
no control over how one’s education will evolve, the personal charge is to keep wholly
open to people, ideas, and events while relentlessly trying to document a record of it

2. There is the problem, however, that PO Treutlein (1962) shows Wakau on his 1962 patrol
map as still west of the Sand. Although his patrol path shows him closely circling Wakau,
which is odd, rather than passing through it as with the other villages, he explicitly notes,
“WAKAU: This village used to be censused separately also, is now a part of IWANI.” (1962:
25). Therefore, he took a census of the Wakau villagers at Iwani just as Oakes did in 1956. So,
it is doubtful that Treutlein visited Wakau or even knew that it had moved its location. Tell-
ingly, there is no indication in his day-by-day patrol diary regarding his walk from Aiendami
village to Iwani that he and his patrol crossed the Sand River twice, a messy wet necessity, to
visit the Wakau on his map.

230
 Wakau Village

all. Ethnographic fieldwork is an enveloping experience of humble surrender, giddy ex-

hilaration, and restless trepidation like no other I know. It continues 24/7 from the day
one moves into a village, until the day you move out.3 Fortunately, Wakau village was an
excellent choice with the exception that I could not communicate with the women. Most
villagers grasped the nature of my work and generally tolerated—even at times encour-
aged—my eccentric questioning and occasional imprudent intrusion into local affairs.
But there were boundaries. Some were those they imposed on themselves, like most of
the women all in cloth—but still topless--after I moved in. I had lived in Wakau almost
four months before I started seeing many women in their traditional string skirts or,
sporadically, just with a pubic covering (fig. 11). I wrote in my notebook, “I’m just part of
the scenery at last!”

Figure 11. Mothers visiting at Oria’s wife’s house, across from my office. Kwoien’s wife Wariyeh
with her newborn son is on the right.

3. But living alone in a radically different alien culture can definitely challenge your senses. How
else can one account for the following amazing—weird, really—comment I found in one of
my field notebooks?
Marvelous dinner of lamb chops, thyme rice, succotash, and beer, then finished
Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. The most civilized fun evening I’ve had since coming to N.
G.! Enchanting book. (NB #24)
It also indicates how deep the “field” experience can become as a life zone in and of itself when
working solo.

231
 A Witch’s Hand

Only once during my stay did they impose a boundary on me of which I was aware.
While attending a nighttime funeral wake at the very end of my fieldwork, I was abruptly
asked to leave the house of mourning. The ancient custom of many mourning nude as an
expression of their sorrow was inhibiting some of the visiting women—embarrassed by
the White man’s presence—from fully expressing their grief. I, chagrined and internally
grumbling, quietly departed.4

Cultural Impact of the Mission

Although the Wakau villagers appreciated the mission’s small trade store for essentials
like salt, and a mother with a critically sick baby knew that Rosemary’s help was available,
overall, my neighbors paid little heed to the mission’s presence. It also appeared that the
disregard was mutual, not in any hostile sense, but I had the distinct impression that the
mission viewed the Iwani hamlets as especially Satanic-riven and even frightening places
compared to the villages where some had accepted their Christian teachings. Wakau had
no committed Christians during my stay and until I moved into the village, a maternal
and infant welfare nurse had never visited. They did not visit, I was told, because of fear
after hearing “such horrible stories about the place”—stories of ‘sanguma’ atrocities—re-
peated by their villager friends near the mission. In reference to the CMML Mission’s
influence among the Lujere, ADC A. S Wright commented, “They do not appear to have
made a great impact on the spiritual beliefs of the people” (Wafingian 1972).

A Pragmatic People
One of my first research tasks was to make a map and census of the village. It took me
two days, and I had no sooner completed it than there were important changes. It was my
first indication—although I did not know it then—of the suppleness of Lujere society
and culture. I gradually learned it was a society very unlike the Wape, where one’s be-
havior and choices were strongly constricted by cultural customs. Instead of being driven
by cultural fiat, Lujere customs were guidelines indicating preferred ways to do things
while acknowledging that extenuating circumstances were important considerations that
determined what actually happened. This was a society where the exigencies of life, not
customary principles, usually took precedence. During my fieldwork, over and over again,
I recognized the Lujere inclination to prioritize practice over principle. Related to this
generally practical approach to life, they were disinclined towards altered states of con-
sciousness; trance was not practiced, and hallucinogens and alcohol were unknown. Many
villagers, however, were avid chewers of betel nut, a mild stimulant comparable to caffeine.
Overall, Lujere culture also appeared to have very little formal learning like among the
Iatmul, where men’s lengthy ritual chants were explicitly taught. But just as Lujere chil-
dren picked up their native language from hearing it, they mostly picked up the gendered

4. At the time it never occurred to me that if I had removed my shorts and tee-shirt, I may have
had the moral right to have stayed.

232
 Wakau Village

skills they needed by accompanying their parents and observing them. The only special-
ists in Wakau were Klowi, the licensed shotgun owner, who had learned to use the gun
for hunting by trial and error, and the imoulu healers who, after their initial initiation as
nakwolu, already knew their overt healing moves by watching other imoulu curing their
neighbors as well as themselves since childhood.5
It was not that the Lujere did not have traditions, but theirs were more open and prag-
matically situated with seemingly more choices than I was accustomed to, having lived in
two much more tightly organized New Guinea societies—that is, the Wape and Iatmul.
In the Iatmul village of Tambunam, the women’s only path through the village, for exam-
ple, was behind the houses along the forest and latrines; the men’s path was in front of the
houses and along the always-interesting Sepik River where the canoes were beached and
visitors arrived and departed. It was the difference between an urban alleyway and a grand
boulevard. Women could walk down to the river but had to return to their path to trav-
erse the village. By comparison, in Wakau a person, female or male, could walk anywhere
irrespective of gender; to an outsider like myself the Lujere appeared to have a relatively
relaxed approach to life. For certain, they were easier to live among than the Taute Wape.
In one early letter to a friend, I described them as “loose, wicked, and warm.” My view of
Lujere culture was initially influenced by the continual movement of villagers in and out
of the village, seemingly at will. The Taute villagers I knew so well were like most peasants
everywhere; regardless of where they were during the day, in the evening they came home
to supper and bed. The Lujere, however, were much more peripatetic, they could walk
away from the village to a forest camp and stay for days, weeks or even months at a time.6
This fluidity in their residential patterns seemed to reverberate into other aspects of
their behavior. Attention could wane when I began going for detailed data on, for ex-
ample, kin terms, descent lines, land tenure, inheritance, and marriage. This part of the
research was often challenging and frustrating, as few men cared much about this kind
of knowledge. Unless a man knew his father’s and mother’s parents personally, he might
not know their names, and this in a culture that casually called relatives by their given
name, not a kinship term. A Wape man would suddenly leave the group in abject shame
if he inadvertently uttered a relatives’ tabooed name; a Lujere man would not. There
were no similar naming taboos. Nor was Lujere society like that of the Iatmul, with deep
genealogies and ritual experts who took pleasure in teaching a culturally naive outsider.
While the Lujere were ideologically patrilineal, maternal ties might take precedence if the
situation warranted. What mattered to my Wakau friends was not a life that slavishly
followed cultural precepts, but an emphasis on the present and tomorrow in terms of a
practical, workable existence.7 To me, at least, that seemed to be the kind of society their
ancestors—and the environment—had created for them.

5. Their therapeutic techniques are described in chapter 18.

6. This is a characteristic of some of the societies of the Upper Sepik Basin. For example, Jor-
gensen writes of the Mountain Ok speakers in the mountains of the Upper Sepik, “Even
where there are permanent villages, people commonly have alternate residences to which they
move for longer or shorter periods of time” ( Jorgensen 1996: 192).
7. In reading an essay by Margaret McArthur about the Kunimaipa of the Goilala Subdistrict
north of Port Moresby after finishing this section, I empathized with her comment: “I do
not know why these people are prepared to take for granted many features of the human

233
 A Witch’s Hand

British anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry, who did pioneer fieldwork on the middle
Sepik with the Abelam in 1939–40, has commented on what she calls “The Plasticity of
New Guinea Kinship.” She specifically calls attention to publications since World War II
noting, “many writers have emphasized the flexibility [my emphasis] with which rules of
recruitment to kin and local groups are applied in many New Guinea Societies” (Kaberry
1967: 106). She makes the further point that this kind of plasticity or flexibility was also
a characteristic of prewar studies, particularly referencing patrilineal descent, and cites as
examples two Sepik societies, the Arapesh (Mead 1947: 182) and the Abelam (Kaberry
1941–42: 88–9). Lujere society, as shown in “Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage” in chapter
12, is but another more recent example.8

Cultural Changes Since Robinson’s and McCarthy’s Patrols

Lujere villages in the 1970s, especially those like Wakau with no colonial structures such
as an aid post or church, looked outwardly much the same as they had when Robinson
and McCarthy made their pioneering patrol reports in the 1930s. An important differ-
ence, however, was that in precolonial times a Lujere village was more lost in the forest,
encased in trees, shrubs and grasses. The idea of a ‘ples klia,’ a clearing or open plaza amid
the village houses, was a standard ‘kiap’ expectation, but also an expectation by some
returned workers who had spent a couple of years on colonial stations where large open
areas importantly symbolized modernity and the opposite of an overgrown ‘ples bilong
buskanaka,’ a village of wild uncivilized persons. Most returning workers spoke Tok Pisin,
thereby giving them verbal access to Westerners and other New Guineans that helped
establish and burnish a new identity of a ‘man bilong nau’—a modern man—not a ‘bus
kanaka.’
The traditional A-frame style house assembled from natural materials without nails
remained popular throughout the region but now there were some houses with very low
sides. As noted earlier, there was considerable variability in the appearance of a village’s
houses, especially as they aged. Wakau’s tattered and abandoned men’s house, the largest
structure in the village, was obviously an impressive presence in its prime. While house
styles had changed some, gone completely were a village’s funeral scaffolds holding de-
composing bodies whose stench swiftly drove McCarthy and his men from a village.
Now as a health precaution the government had long ordered the dead to be buried as
soon as possible. However, if death came at a distant bush house where ‘kiaps’ never trod,
a traditional funerary scaffold might be raised.
Most notably, dress also had changed. Unless a man was in the bush—or a European
entered a village unannounced—a phallocrypt gourd was seldom seen. Cloth shorts,
however threadbare, were generally preferred. As men usually wore the same shorts day

condition that in other societies fire men’s imaginations. . .The emphasis of their society is on
the here and now” (McArthur 1971: 189).
8. Kaberry’s excellent article (1967) also provides a searching review of a number of Highland
societies, such as the Chimbu, Mae-Enga, Bena Bena, and Kuma, summarizing their charac-
teristics and documenting their organizational plasticity as well as critiquing Barnes’ (1962)
article.

234
 Wakau Village

after day, it was a big aide in helping me learn their names. The women were generally
topless, wearing either a shapeless faded skirt or sarong; both seemed to be winning
out over the traditional and elegantly simple brown string skirt that Lujere men found
graceful and alluring. 9 McCarthy described their skirts as short in front and long in back
but, according to what I saw and was told about the past, their skirts were long in both
front and back. It was in the Wape area that the women’s skirts were short in front and
long in back.10 Little children were still naked and girls began wearing clothing before
boys. At any government activity that involved the ‘kiap,’ like voting or census taking, it
was seemingly mandatory for everyone except the youngest to jump into cloth of some
kind.11 The ‘kiap,’ of course, could have cared less how they dressed as long as they were
present.
Body decoration had also changed. Traditionally, piercings of the nose, ear lobe and
helix were fancied, but these fell out of fashion sometime after men began to leave as
contract laborers. Now some men and women had small “homemade” tattoos, often on
the face. Men such as Nauwen, having seen the elaborate keloids of the Middle Sepik
men while working as indentured laborers, occasionally attempted less extensive ones on
their bodies.
A man’s armory of bows and arrows was essentially unchanged from precolonial times,
except that arrows for killing humans were no longer made. The shotgun was a new
weapon, but only a select few men were licensed by the government to own one. Wakau
village, as noted earlier, did not have a shotgun until five months before I arrived. Food
getting, such as gardening, hunting, and fishing, had also changed little from Robertson
and McCarthy’s reports, except for the introduction of basic metal tools and plastic fish-
ing line to facilitate these activities. Although the ‘garamut’ or slit gong that celebrated
an enemy’s death were gone, the small wooden hand drum or ‘kundu’ was still made, as
was the traditional two-piece smoking pipe (mero) also popular in other parts of the Up-
per Sepik (see fig. 12).12 Composed of a narrow length of incised bamboo inserted into a

9. There could be slight stylistic differences among villages: for example, the women of Gwidami
had some yellowish strings over the darker ones.
10. In 1972, I collected and donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York
City 198 Lujere artifacts, such as skirts, penis sheaths, body decorations, pipes, tops, jaw harps,
whistles, lime pots, bone tools, bows, arrows, and net bags. To see images of the articles,
go to https://anthro.amnh.org; narrow your search by choosing “Collections Database,” then
“Pacific” for Collections Area; “Ethnographic” for Collection Type; “Papua New Guinea” for
Countries; and finally, “Lujere” for Cultures. This is a rather quirky database, so play around
with it.
11. George Oakes, the Lujere’s first census ‘kiap,’ in an April 13, 2015, email to me wrote, “In
1956 many of the Yellow River people still wore traditional dress. It was interesting that when
I came to do a census everyone had a laplap [waistcloth] on!” It was customary for a returning
indentured laborer to bring gifts to important family members and essential were cloth skirts,
waistcloths, and shorts. The same was expected of me, plus watches, when I returned to the
Wape or Lujere.
12. According to McCarthy the Lujere hand drum at contact had no handle but my village pho-
tos show only hand drums with handles, a style they probably picked up as plantation workers.

235
 A Witch’s Hand

long gourd, both men and women used these striking smoking devices.13 Native tobacco,
as initially observed by McCarthy, was still smoked relatively green by many after a brief
drying in the sun or over a fire. Hand-decorating a mero’s bamboo stem that held the
tobacco was still an appreciated skill.

Figure 12. Enmauwi smokes a traditional mero pipe as his daughter Wea plays with the stem of
Nimo’s mero.

Dating Local History

Establishing an accurate timeframe for events among a preliterate people, like the Wakau
villagers, is a research challenge. While several men in Wakau were literate in Tok Pisin,
they did not have the Western obsession with dates. Many, however, had memories or
knowledge of significant events, if not of the year. The two oldest events I could date
precisely and use as markers with informants to establish the relative date of other events
were the great Torricelli earthquake on September 20, 1935,14 and 1943, which marked

13. See Craig (1990) for a comparative discussion of Namia smoking tube designs and pictorial
representations.
14. Wakau villagers had no stories about what causes an earthquake. Oria’s father, however, told
him about this one. His father was in the bush near the Sand River ‘sovalim pis’ (scooping up

236
 Wakau Village

the Mosstroops’ visit. Other established dates were more recent: for example, 1956, the
Yellow River Massacre and Wakau’s first census by PO George Oakes; 1960, Iwani’s
double ‘sanguma’ murder; 1965, six-week jail terms for twenty-five Iwani men (mostly
Wakau) for “disobeying a lawful order” related to the village being in disarray; and 1968,
the building of the Yellow River Base Camp.

The People and Households of Wakau

Betty Gillam and Jalman’s Medical Clinic

There were no overweight people in the whole of Lujereland. It was by luck that I was
able to collect the height and weight of the Wakau villagers, the only Lujere group so
studied. The CMML nurse, Betty Gillam, who had visited the Lujere from Lumi since
1966 to conduct infant and maternal welfare patrols, had never visited any of the Iwani
hamlets; she had been intimidated by the frighteningly negative stories she had heard
about them. Joyce and I knew Betty as a friend from our Wape fieldwork, so I invited her
to bring her health patrol to Wakau and she accepted. She had assisted Dr. Wark in her
growth and maturation studies of the Wape people (Wark and Malcolm 1969), so she
had both the implements and knowledge to assess the overall health of the Wakau villag-
ers, especially the children, and to record each individual’s height and weight.
Betty came to Wakau with Jalman, a medical orderly, and we had the clinic ready the
morning of January 17, which took almost two hours (see fig. 13). The clinic was held
at my ‘haus kuk’ with the adults and children standing on Betty’s kilogram scale and her
measuring stick marking the height in centimeters. The babies were weighed in a cloth
attached to a hanging scale and, as usual, they did not like it. This was a new experience
for the villagers, so the mood was more festive than just dutiful; the only outright re-
fusal to participate was Samaun’s. Jalman helped to place the people on the scale, Betty
adjusted the marker stick, and I recorded the figures she called out. I was surprised that
Betty, who had done this routine many times among the Wape and other groups, seemed
rather nervous and her movements quixotic. Once she pushed the metal marker com-
pletely up and off the top of the height measuring stick almost stabbing old Leno. And
when they did not stand up just so, she pushed and pulled them in place. Most surpris-
ingly she did not speak to them in her fluent Tok Pisin but in English! Which means,
I guess, that an ethnologist’s ‘wantoks’ may at times be just as puzzling as the locals he
is studying.

stunned fish) when the quake hit. Trees fell down as he ran back to Wakau. The frightened
villagers were also afraid of a flood and then hiked up to Mauwi hamlet to be safe. Coastal
villages have good reason to be frightened of a tidal wave, but it is puzzling how they, so far
inland, got this belief. The only explanation is that when Robinson returned up the Sepik in
1932, twenty-seven Lujere indentured laborers had returned from the coast and brought the
knowledge of the association of earthquakes and tsunami home with them. The date of the
quake also establishes that in 1935 they had yet to move across the Sand River to where PO
Oakes visited their village in 1956.

237
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 13. Nurse Betty Gillam and the medical orderly Jalman set up for a medical clinic.

Overall, Betty found most of the villagers in good health and, happily, no childhood
malnutrition, a more frequent finding among the Wape and occasionally among the Lu-
jere as well. After the weighing and measuring, a few people came up to her for a shot for
‘sotwin’ (shortness of breath), having learned the power of the aid post orderly’s penicillin
injection. She was a bit reluctant to get involved but I pressed her into it, knowing most
would not go to the aid post and could get dangerously worse. She did not, however, give
any inoculations to the children, as she doubted that she would patrol here again for the
booster shots. But she did treat Leno, Menetjua, Luritsao, Ai’ire, and Kairapowe, Ukai’s
wife, all in various stages of pneumonia, as well as Sakome, whose fever Betty thought was
from malaria, and Wolwar’s wife Nauware, who had a very fast pulse and bronchitis. As
one shot of penicillin was not always enough to achieve a cure, I volunteered to continue
treatment of the sickest ones with my own tetracycline capsules, and Betty instructed me
on their follow-up medication for the next few days. As the villagers knew I was just fol-
lowing her instructions and she was leaving, it wouldn’t get me into the medical business.
After all, I was there to study their therapeutic systems, not to become one myself. As you
will later see, their propensity for pneumonia challenged my original intentions.
We collected data on 113 villagers present, but here I will give data only on the adults,
of whom there were 33 men and 22 women.15 The height range for the men was from 4’
11” to 5’ 7,” with an average height of 5’ 4.” For the women, their height ranged from 4’ 10”

15. All of the data were collected in terms of centimeters and kilograms then converted into feet
and pounds.

238
 Wakau Village

to 5’ 4,” with an average height of 5’. The men and women’s short height and lean frames
also accounted for their low weights. The men’s weight range was 82–126 pounds, with
an average weight of 107 pounds. The weight range for the women was 71–109 pounds,
with an average weight of 95 pounds. At 5’ 6” and 135 pounds, I was—for probably the
only time in my life—always one of the biggest guys in the room.16 Size, of course, is rela-
tive. When Ray entered the village on one of his rare visits with his tall, lanky Australian
frame striding in long steps across the plaza past my neighbors, my perception of our
“normal” village instantly shifted to one populated by a diminutive people with miniature
houses.

Who Lives Where?

The day after I moved to Wakau, I began to take a census of the households and roughly
map the village. I had lived in the village for over three months when I did another census
and, as I feel more secure with this one, it is the one I will report on. Table 6 shows the
marital breakdown of Wakau’s population on February 25, 1972.

Table 6. Wakau population by marital status, 1972

Status Males Females Totals

Single 11 4 15
Married 26 26 52
Children 24 24 48
Widowed 3 2 5
Totals 64 56 120

In table 6, the discrepancy in the ratio between males and females is major only among
the single adults. Table 7 compares the male–female population of Wakau’s first census in
1956 (table 1) with my 1972 census and shows that the numerical relationship of females
to males had slightly increased.

Table 7. Wakau population by age and gender, 1956 and 1972

1956 1972
Male Female Male Female
Child 20 13 24 24
Adult 44 33 40 32
Gender totals 64 46 64 56
Village totals 110 120

16. Arakwaki, Enmauwi, and I were the same height; only Oria, at 5’7,” was an inch taller.

239
 A Witch’s Hand

In 1956, there were sixty-four males to only forty-six females, while in 1972, the
female count had gained by ten, but the male count stayed the same. However, with
eleven men and four women unmarried it meant there were almost three times the
number of unmarried men to unmarried women. The ratio of girls to boys, however, was
equal, possibly indicating a more favorable forecast for Wakau’s future bachelors. Of the
single adults in the village, all their parents were dead except for one woman and one
man. Two of Wakau’s forty-eight children lived with a parent who had remarried, nine
lived with a single parent and two, who were not born in Wakau, lived with adopted
parents. Ten of the twenty-six married couples had no children, but they were young
and mostly newly married. Two of the couples were married by proxy after the husband
left the village as an indentured laborer and one couple, Ukai and Kairapowe, were older
and childless.
While I lived in Wakau, six men were away working, but in the years since the men
began leaving the village for contract work, only three men took jobs and never returned
home. However, one who was a driver in Kokopo, East New Britain, returned before I
arrived and left with a widow as his wife. When I made the February 1972 household
census, there were ten bachelors; from their perspective as men, it was possible they might
never marry if they had no sister or other woman to exchange. Of those, only Poke, Ku-
nai, and Aria not only had no woman to exchange, but were considered by all, including
themselves, as too old to marry and were confirmed bachelors. Mangko was an interest-
ing exception. He was a lively and attractive young man, an excellent hunter and nakwolu,
and had a woman to exchange. I was told that Mangko did not want to marry, ‘Em i no
laik long marit!’ But he ultimately succumbed. When I returned to Wakau briefly in 1982,
Mangko was a married man.
Most of the men spoke fluent Tok Pisin. Only the two old-timers, Menetjua and
Leno, had no facility with the language, while Aiyuk and Ukai, two other older men,
had a limited hearing knowledge but not speaking.17 Four men, Klowi, Kwoien, Waniyo,
and Meyawali had some facility with the language but were not fluent. There were also
several men who, besides being fluent, were more or less literate in Tok Pisin: Oria, Unei,
Kairapowe, Nakwane, Yaope, and Tsaime. Villagers kept in touch with men working
away with letters and sometimes sent brief missives to the ‘kiap’ with a request.
In any Lujere village, there are two kinds of houses: a number of small houses and
one or two larger ones. The former are the women’s or family houses, while the latter the
men’s houses. The size difference is because the men cluster together into dormitories
while their wives live either alone or with one or two other wives and their children.
Marital couples also have one or more rudimentary bush camps where family members
go singly or together to get food. Women making sago would never stay in a bush camp
overnight without their husband, but a hunting husband might spend several days in
a camp, especially if he were hunting with other men. For extended stays, the family
packed up and went as a group. The men did all house building, agnates usually helping
one another.

17. I never heard Aiyuk speak any Tok Pisin; Ukai did speak to me a few times in Tok Pisin, but
haltingly as if he had first worked out what he was going to say.

240
 Wakau Village

Map 6. Wakau village women’s and men’s houses in November, 1971. Drawing by Dan Holbrow.

Women’s Houses
Most of the houses in a Lujere village are those where one or more women—the wives of
related men—live together with their children. These houses are devoid of partitions and
there are no raised beds to sit or sleep on; all life is lived on the strong ‘limbum’ floor that
spreads out in wide bark sheathings like planks in an old farmhouse. Although the husband
builds the house for his wife with the help of clan mates and other village men, it is her
home where she cooks and cares for her family. If she is pregnant, it is also where she might
bear her child attended by other close women unless in a bush camp. Depending upon the
number of women residents, there are usually one to four clay hearths level with the floor
where cooking is done, each woman with a hearth of her own. Wawenowaki’s house (fig.
14) was in the traditional A-frame style, but a newer style had low side walls made of sturdy
sago palm stems as did the upper village’s iron (see fig. 19, below) which, while was not as
elegant a design, was roomier. At night, the women and children sleep around the hearth,
infants in their mother’s arms, hence babies don’t fall off a bench into the fire as can happen
among the Wape. Whereas Wape babies are carried within a house because of the dirt floor,
the Lujere baby is allowed to crawl on the ‘limbum’ floor exploring her or his environment.
Husbands usually sleep in the men’s house where their wives bring them their food.
That is the tradition, but the Lujere play with tradition and adapt it to their needs and
whims. For example, sometimes I saw men having their evening meal of sago, cooked

241
 A Witch’s Hand

Table 8. Key to map 6, women’s houses and men’s collective houses in Wakau village

House Occupancy
1 Elewa (Waniyo), Aiidwapi (Nimo), Debrai (widow)
2 Miwali (Ai’ire); Wowire (Aiyuk)
3 Wawenowaki (Klowi)
4 Lower men’s house
5 Pourame (Oria)
6 Abandoned, Oria’s widowed mother’s (remarried) house
7 Irowe (Ino), Waluware (Luritsao)
8 Abandoned men’s house
9 Maiteniya (Enwauwi), Noloware (Wolowar)
10 Sakome (Waripe) [Wauripe]
11 Yaopowe (Mari)
12 Idet (Akami), Talai (Eine)
13 Wariyeh (Kwoien), Apewaki (Mowal)
14 Upper men’s house
15 Alitowi (Arakwaki), Auwe (Nakwane)
16 Being built by Arawaki
17 Being built by Nakwani
18 Kairapowe (Ukai)
19 Being built by Nauwen
Note: Wife’s name appears in regular case; husband’s name appears in italics.

greens, and usually some form of meat at their wife’s house while playing with their
children. A man also might choose for a time to sleep in his wife’s house, a finding I had
for other Lujere villages. In Worikori village I was told that all the married men slept in
their wives’ houses. This type of a woman’s house is different from the first only in that
the husband often builds himself a raised bed in one corner, similar to the kind he would
sleep on in the men’s house with a smoldering clay hearth underneath primarily to drive
off mosquitos. I have also been in a Wakau house where two husbands (who were broth-
ers) partitioned off a small room for themselves with raised beds while still having a bed
in the men’s house. While these were purportedly women’s houses, village males, at least
to me, always referred to them by the husband’s name or, if two brothers’ wives occupied
the house, by the oldest brother’s name. I don’t believe their privileging the husband’s
name was a sexist put-down; rather, by referencing the husband, it facilitated commu-
nication with me, as it was the men I knew well and could communicate with, not their
wives who only knew the Namia language. When referring to a village house I generally
have followed their lead.
The Lujere did not have a separate house for menstruating women. Menstrual blood,
as in much of Papua New Guinea, has alleged powers to diminish a man’s prowess. So, if

242
 Wakau Village

Figure 14. Wawenowaki (Klowi’s wife, second from right) relaxes with family and friends on the
front veranda of her traditional house.

a man’s wife were menstruating, he would probably sleep at the men’s house and someone
else would prepare his food. Not to respect this taboo supposedly could result in early
aging and jeopardize his hunting competency. However, how slavishly this custom was
followed varied.

Family Bush Camps

The bush camp was a more rudimentary dwelling built in the forest for hunting and
making sago where families, as indicated, might stay for days, weeks, or even months.
Formerly, villagers might leave their village home for six or more months at a time if
their bush camp were a several hours’ walk from the village. A few camps in the great fens
west of the Sand River might be nearer the “enemy” Tsila hamlets than to Wakau. Some
families might have more than one camp if their resources were scattered.
One February day at random I made a count of the whereabouts of all twenty-three
husbands or “household heads” that included Soukene, whose husband was away as a
contract laborer and who lived alone with her children (WN: 516). Nine of the men
were in forest camps with their families; another was visiting in Mokadami with his new
wife; another was at the aid post with his sick daughter. Soukene, who had gone with
her children up to Mauwi, her natal village, because the bachelor, Samaun, harassed her
for sex. In sum, twelve household heads and most of their families were not in the village
that day, leaving eleven married men and their families in and around Wakau. Most of the

243
 A Witch’s Hand

bachelors, as usual, were home except Mangko, who was hunting with two youths from
the lower men’s house, and the bachelor Aria, who was helping Luritsao in his garden to
assure some dinners from his wife, Waluware. It’s interesting that the day I took the count
the number of families was almost evenly divided between those home and those away,
but that ratio could vary wildly.
Most forest camps were relatively isolated and very casually built; some even jetti-
soned the A-frame style and were little more than a roof over a raised ‘limbum’ floor open
on several sides. Considering their genuine fear of lurking ‘sanguma’ murderers, it was a
persistent enigma to me how they logically justified such a vulnerable house style (see fig.
16) in the middle of a jungle with no immediate next-door neighbors to call on if help
was needed. Small paths crisscrossing the forest and swamps provided access to friends’
and relatives’ camps thus maintaining social ties and keeping up on each other’s news,
hence the encamped families were not as socially isolated as some ‘kiaps,’ and I originally,
believed them to be.
The family bush camps, while of significance to the social and economic life of the
village, were ad hoc affairs with fluctuating residents. Their egalitarian composition also
was different from either type of women’s village houses. In the bush all the members of
a family plus visitors slept in the same house regardless of whether they were married,
unmarried, old, young, male, or female. Occasionally a small hut for youths might be built
semi-attached or nearby. At no time did I hear any complaints about going to a bush
camp or living there; in fact, it seemed families enjoyed the change in location and daily
tempo, not unlike an American family on a camping trip.
The rainy season that was more or less November through April was also the hunting
season when families moved to their bush camps for weeks at a time. The first bush camp
I visited was K____, on a cloudy morning in early February. The hike from Wakau with
Oria, Mangko, Alomiaiya, and Newai was about two and a half hours into the forest but
included a short stop at old Leno’s “hamlet” about forty-five minutes out of Wakau. He had
built a village-type house—not a bush camp—in an open area that provided a retreat for his
often-truculent temperament. On reaching Klowi’s bush camp, I was surprised to see that it
was much higher off the ground than a village house (fig. 15). The front was closed but the
back was open, and the sides had strips of ‘pongal’ laid up halfway providing an atmosphere
of air and light. The wives and children of K____, Kwoien, and Luritsao, a grown daughter
of K____ by an earlier wife, and a couple of youths were scattered around the several active
cooking hearths. Ai’ire, with his wife and little daughter, was the only man present. Visiting
ensued, with some horseplay between Newai and Mango, and a tasty lunchtime snack of
pork and sago cooked in a long green leaf. We returned to Wakau by 2:30, hot and tired.
Klowi had asked me to visit him at his hunting camp across the Sand River so on the
last day of March, Oria, Nauwen, and I, together with Samaun, Kworu, Nakwane and his
wife Auwe, and Marawame visited his camp about an hour’s walk west of the Sand River.
The river was high from heavy mountain rains, so we had to ferry across in a dugout ca-
noe. The trail, like most bush trails in the wet season, was abysmal; I was sloshing through
shallow muddy swamps with leeches climbing up my boots and heading into my socks.
We passed through Ai’ire’s new garden with bananas, some taro plants and sweet potato
vines then through an old garden of Klowi’s, now new bush. We passed a big murky pond
where a large python was killed a few months earlier. Klowi’s camp (figs. 16 and 17) was
minimalist at best, with only a roof and a ‘limbum’ floor, no sides, but there were several

244
 Wakau Village

Figure 15. K____ bush camp, a two-and-a-half-hour hike from Wakau.

hearths, the welcoming smell of smoke and food cooking, and people and possessions
(including at least one dog) lying comfortably around. Attached to the camp was a small
lean-to where the youths slept.
As we visited, Oria, Nauwen, and I ate the snack offered to us of sago and edible
greens. Mangko, who was ill, was quietly sitting up by a hearth and, although he looked
better, said that his chest still hurt. Leleware, Porken’s widow, came in saying that Wara-
jak wasn’t around and Tsaime and his wife went to find him. She was afraid that a ‘sangu-
maman’ might attack him, but there was no general alarm; a fact was presented, and ac-
tion was taken: typical Lujere behavior. I visited with Ai’ire who was still chronically ill,
chatted with the youth Kairapowe, always smilingly upbeat, who had come from Yaope’s
nearby bush camp to see me. Later, when a few of us were on the ground and leaving,
Klowi returned from hunting, still full of vigor, and with a beautiful Guria pigeon slung
over his shoulder that he insisted was for me. I refused outright, but it was useless. Klowi
passed the bird to one of my party and, moving on, we sloshed back through the leech-
infested swamp towards home.

Men’s Houses

The Namia term for “men’s house” is iron, and Barry Craig (1972: 34) had visited, pho-
tographed, and sketched one in Norambalip that was as proud and handsome as our old
abandoned one once had been but that now sat defeated and battered (fig. 18) It was a
classic Lujere A-frame about twenty-nine feet wide and fifty-three feet long, with an

245
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 16. Klowi’s bush camp in the fens, across the Sand River.

Figure 17. The interior of Klowi’s bush camp.

246
 Wakau Village

inside apex of twelve feet. The beds lining each side were about eight feet long by three
feet wide, and stood two feet above an in-floor clay hearth that was two and a half feet
square, which, when smoking, provided warmth and, hopefully, kept the mosquitos away
while sleeping.

Figure 18. The abandoned men’s house (iron) in Wakau, once the men’s sleeping quarters.

With their old iron falling apart plus some partially disclosed tensions among mem-
bers, the Wakau men built two new smaller ones; one in the lower village section, and the
other one toward the middle of the village’s upper section, as seen in map 6 of the village.
The upper village iron (fig. 19) was the larger one, measuring twenty-three feet wide by
thirty-one feet long with a five-foot front veranda, while the lower iron was fifteen feet
wide and seventeen feet long. Some men, like Oria, now spent more time at their wives’
houses, even sleeping there instead of in their iron. From their comments I surmised this
sometimes was related to fears of a ‘sanguma’ attack from a fellow iron resident. When I
moved to Wakau, construction of a large new iron to house all the village men was un-
derway. Already a large platform frame was completed on the ‘kunai’ near Waniyo’s wife’s
house, but as long as I lived in the village, that was as far as it got. No one would give me
a direct answer why work had stopped but I gradually became mindful of interpersonal
animosities and aware that the ‘sanguma’ fears among some of the men from different
clans had not diminished but intensified. These seemed answer enough. For whatever
reasons, the traditional separation of Lujere husband and wife to sleep in separate houses
when in the village was apparently changing. When Joyce and I visited Worikori village,
married men, as indicated earlier, said they slept in their wives’ houses. Nevertheless, two
sturdy irons in the village indicated that, like in Wakau, married men could and probably

247
 A Witch’s Hand

did maintain a space in the iron. Again, in Tipas I was told the same thing but, in neither
village did I have the time to verify assertions as I could in Wakau.

Figure 19. The new men’s house in the upper village of Wakau.

A Lujere iron is more than just a dormitory for village men; it is also a center for
male learning, storytelling, gossiping, healing, and community sociality, including dy-
ing. It should not, however, be confused with a ‘haus tambaran,’ a men’s ceremonial
house where sacred objects are housed and celebrated. In the Middle Sepik among
the Iatmul these are large ostentatious buildings, while among the mountain-dwelling
Wape they are small, plain, and functional. But there are no comparable ritual struc-
tures among the Lujere, correctly indicating that Lujere ritual life was not as rich and
complex.
In Wakau’s upper village iron, each man had a bench or bed of his own although
Poke and Kunai, two older inveterate bachelors with no sister to exchange in marriage,
slept on one together. Sons, as soon as they can leave their mothers, go to sleep with
their father in his iron. As boys mature, they eventually leave their father’s beds and
sleep in clusters on the floor with light blankets if they are lucky or on empty beds. This
iron also had rudimentary plumbing; a long bamboo tube extended from the house to
the outside, averting the inhabitants from leaving to urinate at night or during a rain-
storm. When I first took a census of the upper iron there were twenty-two men and
youth inhabiting it. However, it was rarely, if ever, fully occupied as families came and
went, alternating their time, as just implied, away in bush camps. Which males lived
together in a specific iron was related to the Lujere patrilineal clan system discussed in

248
 Wakau Village

chapter 12 and the nature of the ties between specific clans. When Wakau was located
across the Sand River they had three irons then, when they moved back across the
river, a single large one, abandoned for the two smaller irons during my stay. Women
and older girls rarely entered an iron but little girls had total access especially if their
fathers were there. An exception during my stay was when a male villager lay dying in
the upper iron and his wife and one or two other female mourners sat with him. After
his death his body was removed to his wife’s house for the customary mourning period
before burial.

The House as Cultural Metaphor

The house is not necessarily a metaphor for a particular culture, but for the Wape and
Lujere they appear to be. The mountain-dwelling Wape traditionally was a more closed
and secretive society with food eaten privately within a house built directly on the
ground; a single door and smoke hole in the center top were the only openings. Fam-
ily members slept on slightly raised beds made of ‘pangal’ stems with the father’s bed
partially separated by a ‘pangal’ wall and another separated section for a menstruating
female. Youths slept in a separate communal house or ‘haus boi.’ Neighbors and visitors
were free to join a family member on the house’s roomy front dirt veranda, but only
close family and perhaps an ethnographer who also was a personal friend, were invited
into the house.18
In contrast, and reflecting the Lujere’s more open culture, the Lujere houses had at
least two doors and sometimes even a separate door for dogs. Villagers, male and female,
were usually (but not always) welcome into each other houses; for instance, although lit-
tle girls came to the iron if their father was there, other females usually entered only if
involved with a curing treatment. For me, who had lived in both societies, the difference
was almost like night and day.

The Fieldwork Camp

My base in Wakau as built of native materials, open on most sides and measuring forty by
sixteen feet, that sheltered one large tent with an attached screen room of the same size,
my living quarters, and another large screen room tent, my ‘ofis.’ It was strategically situ-
ated toward the middle of the village, and easily provided both visual and walking access
to community events and daily activities. The front of the house (see fig. 20) bordered the
main path and contained my office, which had a view of many of the village’s houses and
offered a mosquito-proof work and interview area. The inside space fronting the screen
room had low benches that welcomed anyone to come in and hang out while I was there
working with an informant or typing up my notes (fig. 21). Like all Lujere dwellings, it
was several feet off the ground.

18. This closure of the Wape domestic unit ironically reminded me of Metraux’s (2001) descrip-
tion of le foyer for the French family.

249
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 20. Villagers outside my office listening to a tape recording of a curing ritual.

As I was the only exotic entertainment the village provided, there were occasionally—
albeit not as frequently as in Taute village—a few men or youths present with whom I
could clarify data, seek new information or just casually converse.19 The back of the house
had a large area for my sleeping tent and personal supplies with an equal size attached
screen room for dining and relaxing that looked over the adjacent cemetery and glimpsed
the ‘kunai’ beyond. This was the same versatile tent I slept and worked in when I joined
Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux in 1967 on the banks of the middle Sepik in the
Iatmul village of Tambunam. Outside this tent and under the same roof was a pantry area
and a small, attached bathing area for a bucket shower; a separate ‘haus kuk’ or kitchen
was behind and to the side of the house to minimize the hazard of fire, and Kunai’s splen-
did outhouse was further back near the forest.
Building a house from bush materials in a strange village is an excellent way to be-
gin fieldwork; by becoming gradually acquainted with the village men’s work skills and
distinct personalities, I also began to learn the cadence and cares of the community. I

19. As Craig has written, “It is hard to escape the feeling, when in a fieldwork situation, that it is
the anthropologist who is on display to the villagers, rather than the other way around” (Craig
1975:10). You might also recall from chapter 1 how Thurnwald said he felt “like the elephant
in the zoo.”

250
 Wakau Village

Figure 21. My office, with its two indispensable and faithful assistants: an Olympia typewriter
and an Aladdin lamp.

chose Arakwaki as a supervisor to oversee the house building. He had returned to the vil-
lage several months earlier after a period of indentured labor and seemed steady, mature,
strong, and with a ready smile. But building a house among the Lujere was a far different
task than among the Wape. When I outlined the kind of house I wanted to the Taute
men, they set to work following my plan with very few questions. Not the Lujere. First,
unlike the Wape, they were not as familiar with carpentry tools. The village had no saws

251
 A Witch’s Hand

and only two hammers. Their universal tool was still the ‘busnaip’ or machete introduced
by the Mosstroops and, for their building needs, it served them well. However, my pantry
called for a counter and shelves and, with no planed lumber, its construction was definite-
ly a challenge. The low sides of the office area for my screen tent were to be just vertical
pieces of sago palm stems or ‘pangal’ thirty inches high. Simple? I thought so.
I cut them two ‘pangal’ pieces the required length to use as models. But when they
lined the ‘pangal’ they had cut, it was sometimes long and sometimes short, a motley
hodgepodge of lengths. They had mostly ignored my stick models, but then they weren’t
using their eyes either as the low wall was a wildly jagged affair. When I explained anew
the sticks had to be the same length so that long finishing pieces of ‘pangal’ would cover
the rough ends on top, they nodded good-naturedly and, I imagine, inwardly rolled their
eyes. Years later when I read Ric Hutching’s travails with the Lujere men in building his
much more ambitious Yellow River Base Camp, I felt a retrospective pang of compassion
for him.
Compared to some of the Lujere villages I had visited, most of the Wakau houses
were old and rather sloppily constructed with spindly supports, tattered ‘morota’ roofs
and drooping eves. But my new house was handsome. The men, twenty-eight in total,
were undaunted by my occasional critiques and suggestions in house building, persevered
jauntily, and speedily finished it in twelve days. I could see why the labor contractors liked
to recruit in the Yellow River area; the Wakau men were definitely strong and willing
workers. But the biggest building surprise was Kunai’s outhouse for me, a job he took on
single-handedly. I had to reevaluate my view of his goofiness when I went to look at it.
Constructed without any guidance, for what it was and what he had to work with it was
a splendid latrine.
I was very pleased with my new camp, which was both functional and comfortable if
far from anything familiar. But that is the point of fieldwork. Much later, Iwi cut a tree
that was blocking my view of the base camp’s hill. If it were a clear night without driv-
ing rain or fog, I might see a distant speck of lantern light from the ‘kiap’s camp; a tiny
welcome sign of urbanity.

The Lower Village: Dramatis Personae

Because the lower village was just down a slight rise from my house, I tended to interact
more with its residents, especially the men, several of whom are key players in this nar-
rative. I will introduce some of them here in more detail to increase your familiarity with
what may seem, as it did to me, a flurry of strange names. Fortunately, you don’t have to
hear the varied pronunciations I heard but only see the pronunciation I opted for. I had
one advantage in learning their names that I did not have as a professor. While my stu-
dents in the US wore an array of clothing, most men in the Lujere villages had a single
pair of shorts each and, if the cloth for each pair had a distinctive pattern, it further sim-
plified my task of learning their names. It was also convenient that the lower village (see
map 6) had only three homes and one iron and that all the men, except Aiyuk, belonged
to the Elamoli clan through their fathers.
House One was the village’s southernmost house and located a good walk away on the
‘kunai’ near the floor frame for the proposed new iron. It had more household members
than any of the others, nineteen in all. Village men, as explained earlier, referred to it as

252
 Wakau Village

“Waniyo’s house,” thus prioritizing the household’s senior male. Three brothers made
up the nucleus of this household: Waniyo, Nimo, and Engwe. Waniyo, about forty, lived
withhis wife Elewe and their three children. Nimo, about thirty-two, lived there with
his childless wife. Engwe, about twenty-seven, was a bachelor (he finds a wife in chap.
12), They lived there together with their widowed and childless sister, as well as with
old Leno’s daughter, Nemiai, who ran away to live here because her father forbade her
to marry (she also finds a mate in chap. 12). Others who lived there were the family of
Debrai, a widowed affine with two sons both away at plantation work, one son’s wife, a
married daughter whose husband was also away at work, and four younger sons. Without
any young sisters to exchange in marriage, prospects that these sons would find a wife
were dim.
House Two was Ai’ire’s wife’s house and they had one little daughter. Ai’ire was a
thoughtful, smart man in his early thirty’s, a good friend, but ill during my entire stay.
He is mentioned frequently in the text as I followed his illness and report in detail on his
case in Appendix. Ai’ire’s parents died when he was small and he was raised by Klowi and
his wife, as Ai’ire’s father was Klowi’s mother’s brother. In a similar way, when Klowi’s
parents died while he was still a boy, his mother’s other brother took care of him.
Ai’ire’s two orphaned half-sisters were also household members, as was Mangko, a
thirtyish bachelor recently returned from indentured labor, and his two younger brothers,
one who was away working, and his young sister, Wabe. Another household member was
the youth Newai who came to Wakau as a little boy from Mauwi to live with Mangko, his
mother’s clansman. Klowi said that Mauwi village killed their children with ‘sanguma’ so
he would help Mangko look out for him. Aiyuk, who moved his wife and five children to
Wakau because he was afraid of the ‘sanguma’ in Mauwi, were also attached to this house
for a time before moving to Arakwaki’s wife’s house in the upper village.
House Three belonged to Wawenowaki, the wife of Klowi, the feared ‘sanguma’ killer,
popular healer, and licensed shotgun owner, as well as the most charismatic and unusual
man in Wakau. They had four children; the youngest was an adopted boy, Pipia, whose
name in Tok Pisin means trash or something you throw away. Apparently sickly and
rumored that he was a ‘masalai’s child, his parents didn’t want him and they gladly gave
him to Klowi to raise.
Also, part of this household were four siblings whose father was dead and whose
mother, Mamau, had remarried Anwani, a Gwidami man who was Eine’s wife’s brother.
In exchange for the widowed Mamau, Anwani gave his twice-widowed sister Aidwapi
to Nimo (House One), well into his thirties and still wifeless. In the next chapter, we
learn about Nimo’s negative feelings about this match. Anwani was very sick and the
plantation where he worked broke his contract and sent him home; his mysterious ill-
ness and attempts to cure him are discussed in chapter 15. The four siblings who did not
follow their mother Mamau to Gwidami were the bachelor Tsaime, in his late twenties
with a warm and expressive personality and whose nuptial misadventures are followed in
chapter 12; his sister Wabe; their bright fourteen-year-old brother Warajak; and younger
sister Womie. Klowi and his wife also took in and fed the orphaned youth Unei, an alert
youth with extensive tinea.
House Four was the clan’s iron where all the single males slept, and often the married
men like Klowi and Ai’ire were there too. With so many youths and young bachelors, it
was a lively house when they were around, and their enthusiastic voices were easily heard

253
 A Witch’s Hand

from my house when they played their game of spinning tops in the open plaza. It was
my favorite place to hang out. After one evening visit to the iron I wrote, “These men are
great—so much easier to live with than the Wape—and generous. I really like them; all
lolling about, talking, smoking, chewing betel and little girls in the house too!”

Village Rhythms

Morning and afternoon

In the morning, if a family was in the village, a married man was usually up and off to
find food or perhaps going to the forest with his family. The husband carried his bow and
arrows, a large knife and maybe his axe over a shoulder. While his wife processed sago,
he might hunt, fish, or work in his small garden. Babies, toddlers, and girls were with
their mother while sons accompanied their father. During the day the village was mostly
empty, but from around four thirty to six, the villagers began returning. The husband
usually returned first, his wife and children afterwards. He would carry his weapons and
any game he may have shot (fig. 22). Sometimes he might also carry some firewood on
his shoulder, but he would never bring water. Or he might bring a few bananas or some
garden plants for transplanting to a new little garden. His wife and daughters would be
much more heavily laden, carrying sago, garden foods, and abundant firewood (fig. 23).
Then the wife or a daughter would make a separate trip to bring water for cooking sago
dumplings, the preferred dining staple.

Figure 22. Wakau men returning home late afternoon with their hunting weapons. Note the old,
abandoned iron in the background.

254
 Wakau Village

Figure 23. Wakau women returning home with firewood.

But the iron’s single men, especially the older ones whose fathers are dead, slept late, as
did the widowers. They had no family to feed so they slept in, arising leisurely about eight
or nine, maybe later. Perhaps they would go, usually in twos, to find fish, or work a bit in
a small garden. Early in the afternoon they returned to the iron. Or perhaps they would
spend the entire day in the men’s house lazing about with a faraway look in their eyes,
smoking or chewing betel. They did not talk much. Their lives were quite restricted, and
they had little responsibility except for themselves. They also had little status.
A single man does not always know who is going to bring him his dinner sago, es-
pecially if he has no mother or married brother or sister in the village. Some evenings
several women will give him sago; sometimes no one. Whether they are given sago for
an evening meal depends upon their relationships mainly with their male married rela-
tives whose wives provide them with food, especially if they have helped in gardening or
house building. If a bachelor was a good hunter like Mangko and occasionally provided
his relatives with pig and cassowary meat, they will more kindly provide him with sago
and greens. Otherwise, any food is given perfunctorily and, when in short supply, not at
all. Or if the bachelor is suspected of sorcery or other anti-social behavior, his married
male relatives have the supreme sanction of cutting off his sago supply from their wives
as they did with Aria. Then he goes to bed hungry, and the day is spent scrounging in the
bush for food. And no one brings him water or firewood. Other men in the iron might
take pity on him and give him a bit to eat. There is a myth about men who don’t share; the
man not fed disappears, thus weakening the group as a punishment to the selfish. Even
at best, the position of a bachelor is not an enviable one.

255
 A Witch’s Hand

So, the usual atmosphere of a men’s house during the day is a desultory one. Only the
village drones or sick are within, dreaming away. But when a visiting curer, an imoulu, ar-
rives and the house is crowded with men and boys, things liven up. It is the same in the
evening after eating when the men and youths, visiting with one another, catch up on the
local events and gossip as they smoke and laugh. It was my favorite time to visit an iron
and, as I always arrived carrying a kerosene lantern, was warmly welcomed into the dark-
ness. Smoking tobacco was enjoyed by both men and women but compared to the Wape,
there was much less betel chewing with its red spittle decorating the landscape.
The mood at the lower iron, which was smaller and had several younger men and
youths, was, as already indicated, usually more upbeat. In the afternoon around 4:30,
the youths and younger men might gather outside the iron to play a lively game of spin-
ning tops. The tops were composed of a small coconut shell disk with a wooden spindle
through its center. Some disks were beautifully carved and painted.20 Stout low sticks
were set up about a foot or so apart—gradually replaced by empty tin cans from my kitch-
en—then standing back several yards, the player, sometimes leaping into the air, would
send a top spinning towards the cans, hoping to hit one (as in fig. 24). One afternoon I
filmed them playing when Akami, Newai, Iwi, Kworu and K____ visiting son, Yaunuo,
were on one side, and Unei, Warajak, Alomiai, and Aka’u were on the other. There was no
sense of them being two teams. It was simply a fun-game. Although skill and a certain
amount of athleticism were required, no score was kept and the opportunity for competi-
tive comparison among the players was ignored.21 Similarly I watched boys stage a mock
fight just for play after being up all night at a curing festival. The only other toys I saw
were small bows with arrows like Ai’ire’s little daughter Yawori holds in figure 25.
One thing that was unusual after I’d lived so long with the Wape was the general ex-
pressiveness of the villagers, best described in an extract from a letter to my mentor and
friend, Rhoda Metraux.

This is a much more assertive society than the Wape. The parent-child relationship is
incredible after the placid tempo of the Wape. Children swear at parents, throw their
belongings about, throw away food they have been yelling for, bop their parents and
throw big sticks at the houses. It is very startling. Of course parents aren’t just taking
all of this and they bop children on the head (always the head!), yell at them and drag
them off to the bush when the child wants to stay in the village and play. In Wape, if
the child didn’t want to go to the bush, the entire family stayed home with him! Yet
there is great affection too. . . . I do miss the Wape wit that so beautifully veiled their
hostility. But it is easier to live here where things are open and there aren’t schemes
afoot that are hushed up. There is scheming here but it seems to be mostly out loud.
(Letter from W. Mitchell to R. Metraux, February 13, 1972)

From my house, as mentioned earlier, I had a good view of much of the upper vil-
lage, so I was a witness to little children playing together quietly in the dirt as well as to

20. The carved and painted surface of some tops and the incised terminus of a mero’s bamboo
tobacco holder were the only everyday objects I observed that were expressively decorated.
21. According to Beatrice Blackwood (1935: 279ff.), on Bougainville Island boys and men play a
game with similar coconut tops but compete to see whose top spins the longest.

256
 Wakau Village

Figure 24. Boys spinning tops in the lower village.

Figure 25. Ai’ira’s daughter Yawori holds a toy bow as boys spin their tops in the lower village. The
path connects the lower and upper villages.

257
 A Witch’s Hand

some of their tantrums. I rarely knew what they were upset about as the houses were not
that close to mine. My account in the letter above of the boy throwing sticks was about
Wolwar’s son and he was hungry, so he let everyone know. I recall another little boy cry-
ing loudly and throwing away his sago to the chickens. It is not that children weren’t fed
as they were well cared for. I attributed the childhood storminess to the general openness
of the culture; adults also were expressive of their feelings, resulting in frequent discord,
as detailed in the next chapter.
In an early notebook entry regarding motor activity, I wrote, “Movements of men and
women are slow and deliberate; graceful but rather pokey. But the heat has me slowed
down in activity and motions too! Not as invigorating as in the Torricellis (not that that
is Vermont).” Wape men strolling around the village more often than not walked with
their right hand behind their back holding their left arm, but I only occasionally saw this
posture among the Lujere. Another difference was that a Wape man holding his bow in
his left hand signaled shooting an arrow by slapping his right thigh while a Lujere man
would snap his right-hand fingers. Men carried small children around on their shoulders
and babies in their arms but rarely, if ever, in a cloth sling as Wape men and women and
Lujere women did.
Although it appeared that women had a much heavier workload than men, they did
have leisure time when they enjoyed each other and the children, especially the house-
holds with several wives who might gather with their children on the front veranda to
visit, smoke, and chat with a passerby (as in fig. 18). From my office vantage point, I fre-
quently saw several women, especially younger ones with babies, standing together visit-
ing (as in fig. 14) and, like children everywhere, the Wakau youngsters, although toyless in
Western terms, found ways to entertain themselves like playing in the village’s sandy dirt.
Most bathing, which was frequent, occurred for the men in the creeks and the Sand
River. A male waded naked into the water casually shielding his genitals, rubbed his body
to remove the mud, and then submerged his head to rinse his hair. Soap was a luxury they
did not have. If his shorts were muddy, he would wash them at the same time, as some
men owned only the shorts they wore. The females bathed in two water holes for their
exclusive use. The holes were about four feet in width with a small log placed across the
top. To bathe, I was told, a woman would lower herself nude into the water from the pole.
Because I lived in Wakau, the villagers seemed to wear more cloth than in some of
the other villages I visited nearby where on entering, I often saw traditional string skirts
and the occasional penis sheath, but if I stuck around they might be quietly replaced with
cloth. This was not a ‘kiap’s expectation or mine but a projected local view of appropri-
ate attire when around Europeans. I assumed it was a form of embarrassment avoidance
related to the same psychology when Europeans feel constrained to dress up or dress
down in a social situation to feel at ease and has little to do with the others’ sartorial
expectations. My dropping in at a bush camp was different; no one was concerned with
what they were wearing, and a penis sheath or string skirt never came off. It was always
“casual Friday” in the bush.
Appraising another’s perception of time is difficult as it can only be inferred. I know
my sense of time changed radically after moving to Wakau and living alone without my
family’s different schedules, for instance, Ned was schooled by Joyce on weekdays and our
weekend was marked off behaviorally if not always as forcefully as at home. The Wape
also were adherents of a weekly routine and on Saturday night the men often gamboled

258
 Wakau Village

at ‘satu,’ a dice game. But in Wakau, there was a sense of timelessness with days and weeks
drifting into each other. It was fascinating, and delightful, to gradually be aware of my
loosening sense of time. I wrote to my colleague and close friend May Ebihara,

Unlike the Wape, they treat every day like the other. They know about weeks from
their plantation experiences but they haven’t brought the weekend concept home with
them. The European week has so much finality to it and you are always feeling guilty
because you got so little accomplished. But here the days just tumble along with few, if
any planned climaxes. Like the biggest thing that has happened around here for quite
a while was that a dog was found dead under the abandoned men’s house today. (Letter
from W. Mitchell to M. Ebihara, January 14, 1972)

The evening dinner

Dinner took place from 6:00 to 7:00, just before sunset, being the main mealtime and an
occasion of great activity, with villagers walking around with food, women and girls car-
rying it to the iron, and young men walking together as they ate their dinner of meat or
fish and sago, maybe with some greens, while somewhere a child was yelling out for more
food. Eating was not a private activity, as with the Wape who ate their sago and greens
closeted inside their houses, rarely with any meat to share. Eating in Wakau was a lively
public activity, probably because they had access to an enviable amount of meat.
Early one evening, sick of typing up notes and limp from the humid heat as well as
feeling isolated from the village activities, I impulsively took off into the village without
notebook or pen; the idea of having to do another single bit of work right then was
intolerable. Feeling genially liberated, I walked through the hamlet headed towards the
upper iron where I visited a bit and learned that Kunai was cutting up the pig that Klowi
had shot yesterday. He had wounded it but it had not fallen so Mangko and a few others
from the lower iron had tracked it down and Mangko had killed it with an arrow. I found
Kunai sitting on Arakwaki’s veranda with part of the butchered pig in front of him in
a ‘limbum’ basket and cutting it into smaller pieces with his rather dull knife; the youth
Kairapowe was helping him. Standing by the open door I glanced inside and was smil-
ingly invited to come in.
The house was occupied by the wives of two sets of brothers: Arakwaki and Nakwane’s
wives, Alitowi and Auwe, had the hearths in the front of the house, and Luritsao and
Enewan’s wives Waluware and Abuwe, who were also sisters, had the two hearths in the
back of the house. When I went in, all four wives were sitting on the floor at their hearths
preparing the evening meal. Two dogs were also wandering around and Kairapowe point-
ed out their own little entrance opening to the porch. Auwe, Nakwane’s wife, was making
sago dumplings and she offered me one on a leaf that I ate with a bit of freshly cooked
pork that Kunai gave me. Auwe was putting six to ten dumplings onto separate leaves
then wrapping them; later they would be taken over to the iron for the men to eat. To
make the dumplings, she mixed sago flour with hot water in a ‘limbum’ basket. The water
was warmed by dropping into it hot stones heated on the hearth. After removing the
stones, she added the sago flour and a grayish viscous mixture soon formed. To make the
dumplings she took a small stick in each hand, reached into the mix and, twirling the
sticks, lifted out a portion that she twirled a few more times to make it about eight inches

259
 A Witch’s Hand

long, then placed it on a leaf. The dumplings were then eaten with the fingers. Auwe also
placed several dumplings on a leaf for the two dogs, but they totally ignored the dump-
lings. being only interested in the bounty of pig meat that Kunai had brought into the
house and placed by Alitowi’s hearth.
Alitowi then began to prepare her evening dish of pork with sago cake and cooked
greens; ‘tulip’ and ‘apika’ are favorites. First, she placed several long vines on the floor that
she covered with palm fronds then added a layer of bright green banana leaves. After cov-
ering the banana leaves with a thick layer of sago flour about two and a half feet square,
she added pieces of the butchered pig with the skin intact. By this time the stones heating
in a wood fire on her hearth were hot, some red hot, and they were placed atop the pig
meat producing an immediate scorched aroma that excited the dogs more than me. Then
more pig pieces were set atop the hot stones and a few more stones were placed around
the food mound and on top. Greens were placed over the entire sizzling and steaming
mound then a final layer of palm and banana leaves. With assistance from one of the
women she pulled the vines up around the bundle, tightly closing the leaf enwrapped
food, and then securely tied the vines. Picking up the bundle she placed it on the hearth’s
wood burning fire where she had heated the stones. I didn’t stay for the cooking—I went
home to type up what I had seen—but Kunai said she eventually would turn the bundle
on another side to cook and, when she had decided the food was done, she would remove
the bundle from the fire, open it, and her one dish dinner of sago, pork, and greens would
be distributed and appreciatively devoured.
Traditionally, the Lujere had no access to true salt for seasoning but today they can
buy it from the mission trade store. However, if they don’t have the money, the old way of
seasoning food is still practiced. Leaves of the rattan plant or the stem of a sago palm leaf
are dried in the sun then burned to the ashes that are used for flavoring.
Tropical evenings near the equator are short so when the sun drops over the horizon
and nightfall descends, most villagers have eaten and already are in their dark houses lit
only by a hearth’s glowing embers, the doors fastened tight against any ‘sangumaman’s
incursion. But the nights were not always quiet ones. Children would awaken and cry
out. Oria’s five-year-old daughter Womkau who lived across from me was notorious for
awaking then launching into an attenuated wail until someone quieted her with a bit of
sago. However, the most disturbing nighttime sound was the indescribable crying of an
infant suffering with cerebral malaria.

Greetings, Old and New

A villager’s daily comings and goings were usually unceremonious with no ritualized
“hello” or “goodbye” Namia greeting of any kind, a convention I never was comfortable
with. However, the relation between strangers or between expats and locals who spoke
Tok Pisin was usually recognized with ‘moning’ (good morning), ‘apinum’ (good after-
noon) or ‘gutnait.’ The traditional colonial greeting to an expat was ‘moning masta’ (mas-
ter) or ‘misis’ (Mrs.), but I insisted to be addressed by my first name, “Bill,” which yielded
a greeting that sounded like ‘moning Beal.’
Although there was no Indigenous everyday greeting in Namia, there was a behavioral
one when a villager met or left someone who lived far away or wasn’t often seen. Once in
a neighboring village with Eine, I saw an old man recognize another man and grabbing

260
 Wakau Village

each other with hands on each other’s shoulders, they put their faces very close together
and nodded back and forth, rubbing noses. It was a joyous embrace full of happiness
reflected in both of their faces. Later that day in another hamlet, Eine saw a relative and
they repeated the same joyous greeting. It was a unisex greeting and a very old tradition,
but was going out of fashion, especially with some of the younger villagers.

The Ancestors’ Stones

Lujere villages are ephemeral creations that can quickly burn down, rot away, suffer severe
wind and rain damage, or be abandoned for a new site. Constructed of bush materials
in a harsh, humid, and storm-prone environment, homes were not long-lasting; no bride
went to her new husband from the house whence she was born. Material permanence
was limited to small, hard things like shells, girdles strung of bone, a boar’s tusk, and the
stone blades of axes. Large objects or monuments constructed in perpetuity, so familiar
to Western communities, didn’t exist. Or so I thought.
Near the end of my fieldwork Kunai, in need of newspaper for his cigarettes, brought
me two old stone axe blades, and we made a trade. Earlier I had wondered where their
axe blades came from and who made them but, like so many questions, had never pursued
it. Had I thought to ask Kunai right then as we made our swap, I’m sure he could have
told me. But later that day, knowing that only twenty-eight years ago a stone axe or amei
was all they had for chopping, I asked Oria. He surprised me by saying that one of the
big stones where village men used to sharpen the stone blades for their axes was up near
Arakwake’s wife’s house, so we went to have a look. Indeed, there was not just one big
stone but three. Then he showed me a taller stone covered by jungle vines at the end of
the village near Nauwen’s unfinished house.
One of the stones was about a foot and a half off the ground and three or so feet long.
This was a big rock and, except for the other grinding stones, there were no others around
and the village’s slight rise from the ‘kunai’ tapered to perpetual forested wetlands. The
mystery to me was how did these big “ancestral” stones, these monuments to an ancient
past, get there in a primeval society without the wheel or beasts of burden. No one knew.
‘Mipella no savi.’ Then came the predictable retort, “They are to do with our ancestors
of a long time ago.” Perhaps, I thought, they had lain there for centuries but no one had
invented a story to explain their presence, as surely an Australian Aborigine would have
done. The Lujere imagination, it seemed, was not prone to performing the anomalies of
nature. Their creative métier, something we have only sampled but explore more deeply
in part 3, was in generating unseen terrors and inspired visionary tales.
The job of grinding the blades was done by the old men who sat astride a stone as they
shaped and sharpened the blades by hand while the younger men were, as today, out hunt-
ing, fishing, finding food or goofing off in the iron. The craftsman sat astride the rock, as the
boy imitates in figure 26, and ground the blade against the rock to shape and sharpen it, ob-
viously a slow tedious task. The grinding scars were still very evident on the vine-free rocks.
The Lujere had two basic types of stone blades. The large aruwa blade was used in an adze
to cut down trees; the pointed cylinder shaped yauna blade was used to fell sago palms.
Women also sometimes used the yauna blade when processing sago. Both types of blades
were secured into a conventional wooden axe handle found throughout New Guinea.

261
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 26. A boy astride an archaic grinding stone near the end of the upper village.

Oria showed me a traditional adze that belonged to his father, but the stone had been
replaced during World War II by a piece of metal. It was a swap his father had made with
‘Whiski’ for his mother’s sago to feed, we now know, the Mosstroop’s policemen. Back
then, boys had small adzes with stones in the aruwa shape as well as the small bows and
arrows still made in 1972. The small adzes were also used for jobs like cutting pig bones.
I also wanted to know the source of the stone blades, so we found old Menetjua and with
both Oria and Wauripe translating, learned that the stones came from far up the Yellow
River. This was possibly up in the Wape area where the Wape got their stones from the
local riverbeds. There was also a mountain just across the Sepik River where the Lujere
also acquired stones from its streams; as an alternative source, Wakau villagers might also
obtain them from Edawaki in exchange for shell rings.

Taboos in Daily Life

The innumerable taboos the society has acquired through time and applies relentlessly is
one of the inescapable factors in being a Lujere. The taboos reside, however, primarily in
the individual’s consciousness and a central part of Lujere socialization is learning what
actions are tabooed and the negative consequence if broken. First, “Taboo is not a thing.
Being taboo is a condition” (Bracken 2007: 1). As taboos vary according to one’s age,
gender, and societal situation, acquiring this information is an extended learning duty
from childhood to old age. Throughout the book I occasionally mention specific taboos,

262
 Wakau Village

but it would be impossible for me to list all of these, as they are legion—and enormously
tedious—and I was still acquiring new ones when I departed. There is, however, a short
discussion of food taboos in chapter 13 because they are believed to importantly impact a
villager’s health. I mention the topic of taboos, not to provide closure on it, but to empha-
size that it was a complex and pervasive factor in how villagers interacted and of which I
had only partial knowledge. Below, is an example regarding a tabooed behavior and the
serendipitous way much of fieldwork proceeds.
In February, Mowal’s wife Apewaki had a baby daughter and, several days after the
birth, I asked some of the men if I could see the new baby. But I was told “no” because
it would harm me if I did. If I, a man, would see the mother and baby before they both
had bathed, I would lose weight, become skin and bones, and always be hungry. Girls and
women could visit them without incident, but even little boys were tabooed. Only the
father could interact with the baby and her mother without fateful results. I thought it
was curious that the father was immune, while the rest of the village males were not. No
explanation was offered. I could only surmise that the mother’s husband was somehow
ritually inoculated against proximity to her vaginal bleeding that, whether from men-
struation or childbirth, was deleterious to a man’s well-being. A few days later I learned
that they had bathed and, when I dropped by, Apewaki proudly showed me her tiny pink
infant who she had named Kairapowe, which I came to recognize as a “unisex” name.

263
chapter eleven

Discord and Dissent

Domestic disputes and marital problems were many.

PO Ray Lanaghan (1971: 7)

Annette Weiner (1984) writes about the cultural constraints in a Trobriander’s mind that
inhibited the expression of anger towards a fellow villager. The Lujere behavioral tem-
perament was very different. In a society where individuals were as publicly expressive
as the Lujere, dissension was a common occurrence and sometimes was brought to Ray
for mediation. While verbal assertiveness was common, physical aggression was unusual.
Although there are instances of interpersonal conflict throughout the book, here I will
(1) offer some incidents demonstrating the range of village conflicts; (2) examine the
administration’s colonial record of civil and criminal offenses for Iwani villagers; and (3)
review the liaison between ‘kiaps’ and villagers.

Domestic Quarrels

These first examples are domestic clashes. The most common were between children and
parents; as several appear in the text here is one more with implications for wider emo-
tional assumptions. One morning early in my stay, I heard a commotion coming from
Ai’ire’s house in the lower village. It sounded like a child or young person yelling out in
anger. Then I saw Aiyuk come out of the iron carrying a big stick in his right hand and
a shorter one in his left hand. He hurried across the plaza and went into Ai’ire’s house
where his family lived. The noise continued, the boys in the plaza playing with tops
stopped to watch the excitement, and I called to Nauwen in my ‘haus kuk’ to join me to
see what was happening. Then Klowi emerged from the iron and he too entered Ai’ire’s
house. Soon the loud commotion ended.

265
 A Witch’s Hand

What had happened was that Aiyuk’s oldest boy was angry because he wanted some
money to buy a pair of trousers and either his father wouldn’t give him any or didn’t have
any, hence his yelling and tumultuous behavior that had included throwing some of his
mother’s belongings around. Aiyuk had intervened with his threatening sticks and then
Klowi intervened to keep the father and son from fighting. Gradually, the commotion
in the house subsided. Klowi emerged calmly carrying an axe. A short while later, Aiyuk
also left the house, but the boy remained inside. It was interesting that the boy wanted
trousers, called ‘trausis,’ not shorts, as no expats in the Yellow River area ever wore long
pants because they were too hot. However, ‘trausis,’ like sandals, were definite status sym-
bols among more acculturated New Guinea males, and apparently he was aware of that.
It made me more attentive to how the seemingly isolated Lujere culture was changing in
odd little ways. Aiyuk’s sole attire as a youth was a small gourd penis sheath that he chose
from the forest and styled for himself, but his son’s sartorial imagination and desires were
influenced by global capitalism and commodity fetishism.
Wakau parents were, I thought, very tolerant of their small children’s ofttimes de-
manding behavior. Womkau, Oria’s little daughter and immediate neighbor, I observed
the most. When she did not get what she wanted, she never hesitated to express her
dislike orally and often physically as well. One morning she wanted some ‘apica’ (green
leaves) to eat. Her busy mother’s response was to holler at her to fetch some water. Wom-
kau then began to wail loudly and repeatedly struck the side of the house with a stick, ac-
tions both of her parents ignored. It reminded me of Wape parents who rarely responded
to a child’s temper tantrum but let the child exhaust themself.
Around noon I went down to the lower iron and there was Aiyuk sitting by a clay
hearth in his never-never land, calmly smoking his Lujere style pipe. When his son came
in he sat down near his father. I looked him over well and saw no bruises, and he smiled
when our eyes met. This father-son quarrel prompted recall of a similar argument when I
lived in the Wape village of Taute, between Moala and his son. In Wakau the angry boy
was physically combative toward his parents, in Taute the angry boy threatened suicide;
their contrasting actions seemed to highlight the difference between the Lujere and Wape
cultures in the handling of anger. With the Lujere there appeared to be less sublimating
of anger and turning it back on oneself than among the Wape; for instance, I heard of no
cases of suicide or attempted suicide while with the Lujere, but among the Wape it was
not unusual. At the risk of severe over-simplification, one could venture that the Lujere
tended to “vent” their frustrations and that the Wape tended to “sublimate” theirs.
I also noticed when small children misbehaved or did not follow instructions they
were bopped on the head, not painfully, but jarringly. While in my ‘ofis’ working I had a
good view of several houses up-village and, consequently, casual village behavior. One late
afternoon I saw Kwoien, whose house was just across from the upper iron, bop his little
son Aleowaki on the head, not too hard, but I didn’t know why. (Perhaps it was related to
his son’s earlier behavior when he and another little boy were throwing things at a child
in a house.) Kwoien then grabbed his son by the arm and pulled him up to the house
veranda, bopped him again, then walked over to the iron. Aleowaki did not fight back, nor
did I hear him cry. It was a typical miniature parent-child altercation. Late one morning
Irowe, whose husband Ino was away as an indentured laborer, went past my ‘ofis’ pulling
her complaining little daughter along. Finally, as they started down the short incline to
the lower village, Irowe stopped to slap her daughter’s head and smack her body with the

266
 Discord and Dissent

blunt side of her bush knife; then continued to pull the child along. The child’s argument
was that she wanted to stay in the village instead of going to the bush to work sago with
her mother.
Most spousal arguments are commonplace and dreary to the outsider; here is an excep-
tion to that presumption. Luritsao’s family lived in the house just north of mine, House
Seven but, two days after I had completed mapping the village and taken a census of each
household, he tore the house down. He and his oldest boy continued to sleep in the up-
per iron while his wife and other three children, one a baby, moved in with Arawaki’s and
Nakwani’s wives in House Fifteen.1 I was in my office screen room one morning getting
organized while a few youths were sitting just outside visiting and having a good laugh.
I asked them what was making them laugh but no one would give me a serious explana-
tion and I was too busy to push them for it. Later I asked Oria what the joke was, and he
explained that it was an earlier argument, audible to all, between Luritsao and his wife
that occurred at the abandoned iron. The argument concerned Luritsao’s baby boy who
was sick again. He was running a fever and Luritsao’s wife wanted to take him back to the
‘haus sik’ where she already had spent several days. Luritsao was emphatically against it
and told her absolutely no—probably because he again would have the responsibility for
the other two young children including feeding them during her absence. She persisted
and he, in his anger, broke her sago container. Furious, she replied that the reason the
child was sick in the first place was because he couldn’t abstain from having sex with her.
Furthermore, she said, if he didn’t let her go to the ‘haus sik,’ she would take a knife and
cut up her vagina so he never could have sex with her again! That, of course, was what the
youths had been laughing about. Oria explained that the child was sick because Lurit-
sao continued to break the taboo of having intercourse with his wife until the child was
several years old, two at the very youngest. Oria added that his son was one year old last
month, so he had a big taboo on intercourse, hadn’t broken it, and didn’t intend to. But
Luritsao’s last children, he said, were too close together, as the toddler was carried about
most of the time and, if walking, had to have a hand.
When Eine’s wife Talai went to the new Edwaki market and then to the mission to
sell food without success, Eine was furious when she returned with no money to give
him and yelled at her insultingly in both Namia and Tok Pisin. Her response was not to
respond in kind as Luritsao’s wife did, but to simply walk up to Arakwaki’s wife’s house
and spend the night there. But that didn’t quiet Eine. The following night he began an-
other rant about her stupidity while sitting on Oria’s porch holding a burning torch. The
next morning the entire family returned to Oria’s house where they had been living or, if
Oria spoke English, he might have said “squatting.” I’ll return to that quarrel in the next
section.
In many New Guinea societies, the status of women was low and wife beating, while
a civil offense, was locally approved and endemic (Counts, Brown, and Campbell 1999).
In such societies, wives are viewed as controlled by others. A wife is an obedient chattel
and, when not, is to be physically punished. However, the Wape villagers I lived with
disdained violence towards women; if a husband and wife were in a loud escalating

1. Luritsao’s mother’s father and Arakwaki’s and Nakwani’s father’s father were brothers that, in
terms of Lujere ideas of kinship and descent, made for a close tie that should become clearer
in the next chapter.

267
 A Witch’s Hand

argument, the women neighbors would surround the house until tempers cooled or the
woman came outside (Mitchell 1999). But that was not the Lujere way. Compared to the
Wape I knew, the Lujere were more open to violence but, by New Guinea standards, still
on the light side.
I only knew of four incidents of physical wife abuse while in Wakau and one of those
was by the Mauwi man K____, first mentioned in chapter 5. I learned of it one evening
while at the lower iron visiting with Unei, Klowi, and Iwi, his grown adopted son. Iwi
initiated the conversation saying that a couple of days earlier K____ had attacked his wife
with a bush knife striking her across the forehead. The blood flowed and she was knocked
unconscious. She was born in Wakau, was Kwaien’s sister, and known to everyone includ-
ing me. The story was that she had taken her child to the ‘haus sik’ for treatment but
K____ was angered, like Luritsao, when she stayed too long. Because he was a feared
‘sangumaman,’ no one, especially not her brother, soft-spoken and mild Kwoien, would
report the attack.
Tsaime said if it were his sister he would go to the ‘kiap’ and have K____ jailed. There
were different versions as to how long she had remained unconscious, which was not sur-
prising, as it was a neighboring village. It happened near the end of my stay in Wakau and
I already had a negative view of K____, based partly on the adverse talk that accompanied
his name but more specifically on my watching his treatment of a Wakau girl, discussed
in chapter 18. About a week later I saw K____ entering the village with his wife and two
children; obviously, she had survived the attack and life moved on. In this next incident
of wife bashing, I had an active first aide role.
Early one Monday morning when I was mixing up some pancakes and cheerfully
anticipating the Vermont maple syrup we had brought from home, Waniyo’s wife Elwe
came up to my house with blood dripping from her upper left forearm and from the area
just in front of her right ear. There was also blood on her thigh and in one hand she car-
ried a bloody piece of firewood. With Oria and Nauwen translating, I learned that she
and Waniyo just had a fight and he had struck her repeatedly with the firewood. She
had come to me with the hope that I would report the incident to the ‘kiap’ but Oria ex-
plained that the rules for filing grievances were that she, being the aggrieved party, must
personally take her grievance to the ‘kiap.’ Here is what she told Oria had happened: she
was getting ready to go to the bush to make sago when Waniyo accused her of making the
sago for an aewal wowi curing festival for Ai’ire, our neighbor, who was sick. But appar-
ently, he was really angry at Ai’ire and Klowi for not helping him with food for the two
aewal wowi curing festivals (discussed in chap. 15) that he gave for a sick member of his
own household. Elwe protested that the sago would be for their own household, but as
he did not believe her, they began to fight. Oria said that before I came to the village, he
occasionally hit her but not since I had arrived. I dressed her arm wound, an ugly jagged
affair, and put antibiotic powder on her cheek cut, a bloody mess but not as deep.
The third instance of wife abuse surprised me as they were my neighbors and seemed
very compatible. I had lived in the village almost two months when one evening just after
dark I heard a loud commotion near the men’s lower iron. I went down to investigate and
Klowi was striding around the plaza railing against Tsaime’s marriage, as discussed ear-
lier. But a concomitant commotion had been that Ai’ire had struck his wife Miwali. He
was angry because she regularly went to Waniyo’s wife’s house after dark. But, according
to Oria, the real reason was that Ai’ire and Klowi (Ai’ire’s dead father’s brother) were

268
 Discord and Dissent

shamed, or humiliated, when Leno accused them of always eating his sago, thus implicat-
ing the men in cutting his sago palms and their wives in processing the flour. The insult
was that the men could not provide for their families. For some reason Miwali appar-
ently was punished, you might say scapegoated, for this. But, if true, the exact dynamics
escaped me; it was one of numerous examples where my understanding was left dangling.
The last case of spousal abuse was, like the first, by a Mauwi man of his Wakau born
wife. Turai, the licensed shotgun owner in Mauwi, was married to Oria and Nauwen’s
sister, Note, and when he shot a cassowary, his wife gave some of the meat to her brothers.
This so angered Turai that he burned his wife’s backsides with a piece of glowing wood.
In retaliation, she had come down to Wakau with her son and wanted her brothers to
report her husband to the ‘kiap.’ The source of her husband’s anger was that on a recent
visit to Wakau, Oria had not given him any meat although Oria had received some pig
meat when his father’s brother’s dog had killed a little pig.

Disputes Among Villagers

As the Lujere had a surfeit of land and a small, dispersed population, land was not a major
source of dissension, as it was in more densely populated areas of the country. But the
distribution of resources could excite passions if someone felt unfairly treated. Such was
the response when Oria felt cheated on a pig distribution.
Oria and other men had gone to shoot a pig that was loitering near the Kaigu Creek.
Oria killed it with a spear and, as the slayer, would get a good cut. Although the hunter
was tabooed from eating his own kill, at least his family could. The next day, Oria and I
went to the base camp to see the new market Ray had organized; when we returned, the
pig had been dressed and distributed at Waniyo’s house. Oria had been given only the tail!
The following morning, while Oria and I were working together in my screened room, his
wife occasionally called over to him with comments that seemed to make him increas-
ingly edgy. Finally, at 11:50, he went out to deal with his allocation of the insulting pig’s
tail and gave an explosive lecture to all and then had his little daughter carry the tail to
the upper iron, making it clear that he wanted none of that pig’s tail. (Later I heard from
Nauwen that he wanted the jaw). But there was a further dispute about who had killed
the pig. Waniyo claimed that Mangko had shot it first, but Nauwen said that Mangko
claimed that he had missed the pig. I wasn’t a witness to the further details but eventually
the dispute was resolved and there seemed to be no residue of bad feelings from Oria
toward the other men.
A more serious quarrel erupted between Eine and Oria after he moved his family into
Oria’s house. Eine was a mature knowledgeable man, a good hunter, with a wife from
Gwidami and four children. He was also a shameless scrounger. While I lived in Wakau,
he did not have a village house for his family but, taking advantage of both his and his
wife’s kinship ties, moved his family into other men’s wives’ houses. He was also the only
villager who made innumerable material requests from me, the rich newcomer. When
Nauwen returned from working on the coast, he was infuriated to discover that Eine had
cut a line of his sago palms. After I moved to Wakau, Eine also cut some of Wolwar’s sago
palms so angering him that in a burst of fury he threatened to burn down Eine’s house,
momentarily forgetting that he didn’t own one.

269
 A Witch’s Hand

In Eine’s partial defense, it was only when I began to collect the villagers’ genealogies
that I came to better appreciate one factor contributing to his scrounging behavior. His
was a worst-case scenario for a son whose father dies relatively young without planting
adequate food resources for his progeny. Eine’s mother and father had three children: a
daughter, a young son who was killed in a Tsila raid and Eine, still a baby when his fa-
ther died. His mother then married Purkan who was one of Oria and Nauwen’s father’s
(Limeritjo) three younger brothers: Ukai, who I came to know, Purkan, who became
Eine’s stepfather and now long dead, and Sitwaui, slain in the same Tsila raid that killed
Eine’s brother. Purkan took his young stepson Eine with him into his large bush, shared
in part with his two brothers, to cut sago, hunt, and fish. Then, while Eine was still a lit-
tle boy, Purkan died, as did his mother; now an orphan, Limeritjo and Ukai took care
of him. Thus, while still a child, Eine became a putative agnate to the younger Oria and
Nauwen, whose mother helped feed him, giving him the putative rights and obligations
as a patrikin with a common grandfather.
Nauwen was the first to challenge this interpretation when, after Eine had cut sago
Nauwen considered his, he pointedly told Eine that they did not have the same grand-
father and he had no rights to the sago palms, thus discounting Eine’s status as Purkan’s
stepson. It was also true that Eine had inherited sago palms from his own father, but they
were in another area of the forest and, presumably, not convenient to the village. But it
was his rift over housing with Oria that finally disrupted the relationship between the
putative paternal cousins.
After Oria’s father died, he moved his family into his mother’s house after she remar-
ried and moved to her husband’s village, and Eine’s family moved into Oria’s old, dilapi-
dated house. It wasn’t long, however, before Eine’s family moved in with Oria’s family and
Oria’s old house was torn down. Both houses were near mine, so I observed some of these
changes. Earlier I cited a domestic quarrel Eine had with his wife, but there was additional
tension in the joint household when their daughter, about ten or so, repeatedly would sit
on Oria’s porch and wail for sago. I knew indirectly that Oria resented Eine bringing his
family to live in his small house and as putative close agnates it wasn’t necessary for Eine
to ask permission. While I was not aware of any open quarreling between the households,
I was aware of the increasing tension and of the tension developing between Eine and me
because I would not comply with his many querulous requests. To everyone’s relief, one
morning the family departed, Eine resentfully, to a bush camp. Oria later told me that
Eine could not come live with his family again; his house was taboo to him.
Just as Elwe wanted me to report her husband to the ‘kiap’ for striking her, others
sought my intervention in quarrels although I had been very vocal that the ‘kiap’ wanted
to hear complaints from the actual aggrieved person, not from me. One evening just be-
fore dark, K____ arrived in the village with his family. He almost immediately went to
my ‘haus kuk’ and talked with Oria and Nauwen. Oria was initially evasive when I asked
what he wanted, then said K____ had asked if I had written a letter to the ‘kiap’ at Ari-
awani’s suggestion. A couple of days earlier, Ariawani had asked me to contact the ‘kiap’
and report that K____ had threatened him with ‘sanguma’ after Ariawani had accused
him of cutting his sago palms. I told him I couldn’t, and hadn’t; of course, Oria already
knew that.
Stick fights were sometimes fought between villagers or between men in neighbor-
ing villages; always the intent was to chastise but not to kill. I witnessed one of these

270
 Discord and Dissent

on the ‘kunai’ just west of Wakau. It concerned a Wakau father who did not want his
daughter to marry and is described in the following chapter. On a more mundane level,
there was much more contention and disgust with pig feces within Wakau than in
Taute where there might be some grumbling, but never a yelling match as in Wakau.
Waniyo allegedly built his house down on the ‘kunai’ to avoid pig feces, and Klowi
said he would build a new iron on the ‘kunai’ and Enewan already had started a house
down there for the same reason. One “pig shit” yelling match occurred near my ‘ofis.’
Late one morning I saw Aiyuk poke his head out of the lower iron and begin yelling.
Next, I noticed Sakome carrying her baby walking down towards my house where she
stopped, faced down towards the iron, strongly called out a few sentences, then turned
calmly back up the village path. Eine, translating, said Aiyuk was angry about the feces
from Waripe’s pig and wanted his wife Sakome to have it shot, but she wasn’t about to
comply.
Gossip and quarrels are closely related. Here is a case of gossiping that skidded around
on the edge of a quarrel. Eine was visiting with me one hot afternoon at the ‘ofis’ when
we observed Menetjua crossing the ‘kunai’ after bathing. Next, we heard him talking just
below us; he obviously had stopped at the iron to voice his complaint. Eine said he had
named Samaun as responsible for casting the spell that was causing so many villagers to
have a very bad cold including him, and that he did it in retaliation against the women
who were not sending him enough ‘sacsac’ and ‘hotwara’ (two sago preparations)—but,
Menetjua added, they were. When I questioned Eine about the spell, he said that Sa-
maun wasn’t a nakwolu, but that his brother Meyawali was, and he probably had in-
structed him in the ritual. I heard other complaints about Samaun as the cause of all the
coughs, runny nose, and chest pains but as far as I could learn, he never retaliated with a
strong denial. I supposed that the negative gossiping at his expense might have got him
the food he wanted.
When I returned from Lumi after being in Lumi for Christmas with my family, sev-
eral of the men came by and we were lounging in the evening on my little back veranda,
and I asked what had happened while I was gone. Silence. I was back on Wakau time,
always a physical and mental shock after several days of being on active family and expat
time. I gradually shifted into local mode and, as we sat swatting the occasional mosquito
with only the light of a little hanging kerosene lantern, an event was presented, discussed
listlessly, then silence until another event was presented. It was a slow and gradual revela-
tion over a couple of hours of the life of a little New Guinea hamlet; an attenuated pace
that would drive some people nuts. Had I gone inside to my ‘ofis,’ as was my strong initial
inclination, instead of restfully surrendering to the silences and slowing down, I would
have learned nothing.
Relevant to our topic of discord, Yaope had hit Aria when Luritsao, Aria and Yaope
were all sleeping in the old, dilapidated iron. Men sometimes sleep naked and, on this
occasion, Yaope had put his light cover aside. Aria, seeing this, attempted anal intercourse
with him. This was, incidentally, the first time I had heard a mention of sex between vil-
lage men among either the Wape or the Lujere. From the matter-of-fact way the incident
was related I wondered if sex did occasionally occur among Wakau’s single men; there
certainly was a large number of mostly enforced bachelors. Anyway, Yaope struck Aria
hard as he threw him off. A few days later Aria went to the base camp and told the police
that the Wakau men wanted to kill him with ‘sanguma.’ When he returned to Wakau

271
 A Witch’s Hand

the next day, he was roughed up by Nauwen and Mangko and told to get out and move
up to Mauwi, which he did. As everyone seemed to dislike Aria, I was surprised to hear
Nakwane speak up for him and say he was an innocent victim of Samaun’s suggestions
and held Samaun as the real culprit regarding his going to the police. The minutia of life,
any life, is staggering. There obviously was another thread to this story but I didn’t pursue
it as Arakwaki mentioned that Yaope also took a wife while I was away and this was an
event, reported in chapter 12, I was eager to learn about.

Colonial Offenses, Official and Unofficial

While in Lumi at Christmas, I examined the “Gaol Register” published by the subdis-
trict, which recorded all the inmates in the Lumi Correctional Institution (LCI). The
register began in 1951, and I checked from then through December 1971 for the indi-
viduals jailed from Iwani village’s four hamlets including Wakau. The offender’s name was
given first followed by a slash then his father’s name. Spelling, as usual, was challenging
and the administration’s “official” name for the offender also could be different from his
popular village name. Back in the village I sat down with several of the men, and we
figured out from my detailed notes who most of the Iwani offenders were and the men
specifically from Wakau. With the offender’s name was his legal offense but not always
its substance, the sentence imposed, the date the sentence began, and the release date. Of-
fenders charged with capital crimes like murder were committed for trial by the Supreme
Court in Wewak and their trial records were kept elsewhere.
Although the Gaol Register was begun in 1951, the administration, as we know,
did not begin patrolling all the Lujere villages until George Oakes’s 1956 pioneer-
ing patrol that included Wakau when it was located in the sprawling fens west of the
Sand River. The total number of offenses committed by Iwani villagers in the twenty
years up to and through 1971 was sixty-two, all by men, although if a woman didn’t
show up for census, it was her husband who was punished, not her. The type, number
and percent of the different violations are shown in table 9. Of the nine violent of-
fenses, one was an October 1960, three-month sentence to Saime, a Wakau nakwolu
and Mangko’s father, for “unlawful assault,” unspecified, and five for “willful murder”
including three related to a 1960 ‘sanguma’ double murder in Iwarita hamlet involving
the Iwani ‘sangumamen’ K____, S____, and A____ whose case and trial is discussed in
chapter 17. In table 9, K____, also accounts for “escaped from custody” two times and
the “theft” conviction.
The other two convictions for “willful murder” were in 1955 before any government
official had visited the Iwani hamlets. The convicted murderers were two Wakau men:
Waribe, and Tiai, the father of Arawake’s wife Alitowi. According to Oria and Kunai,
they speared and killed the Bapei man Nemano while he was in the bush collecting sago
grubs with his small son. This was apparently in retaliation for Tiai’s child being killed by
‘sanguma.’ Tiai and Waripe were tried and sentenced to prison in Wewak for four years
and, according to the Gaol Register, were respectively, forty and thirty years old. They
were the first Wakau men to be jailed by a colonial regime. At the time Kunai was a la-
borer on Buka for two years but he recalled Tiai returned from his imprisonment looking
like an old man and died soon afterwards.

272
 Discord and Dissent

Table 9. Iwani village males convicted of offenses 1955–1971

Offense Number convicted Percentage of convicted

Violent 9 15
Disobeyed lawful order 29 47
Escaped from custody 10 16
Aided prisoner escape 2 3
Failed to appear for census 7 11
False report 2 3
Child neglect 2 3
Theft (in prison) 1 2
Totals 62 100

The other violent convictions were rape (one), “unlawful assault” (two), and “did lay
hold of a woman” (one). The last offense concerned Klowi’s adopted son Iwi, twentyish,
who was the only Iwani villager convicted of violence close to my time in Wakau. In
April of 1971 Iwi served three months in the LCI for the citation: “On 23 of April at
Edwaki laid hold of and forced to the ground and removed her dress of IPAI / NERIAU
of Iwani.” She [Ipiyai] was an older woman making sago when he attacked her, but she
broke loose before he could rape her. She told her husband and when Oria who was at
the mission Bible school learning Tok Pisin heard about it, told the new local ‘kiap’ (that
Ray replaced) who sentenced Iwi to three months. According to Oria, Iwi did not take
offense to his reporting him to the ‘kiap.’
Most of the Iwani villagers’ offenses—47 percent—were for “disobeying a lawful or-
der” or “failure to comply with instructions,” common charges by a patrolling ‘kiap’ who
found a hamlet in disarray. This is what happened in Wakau on August 31, 1965, when a
patrolling ‘kiap’ sentenced sixteen Wakau men—Aiyuk, Akami, Eine, Aria, Engwe, Enuk,
Limeritjo, Luritsao, Meri, Mowal, Nauwen, Oria, Poke, Waniyo, Wauripe, and Wolwar—
to six weeks in the LCI because the trail to the village was not maintained, the grass was
uncut where villagers line for census, and the brush was not cut back from the village.
Eine, as Iwani’s ‘tultul,’ was held partly responsible and had his ‘tultul’ hat removed that
same day.
Table 9 also shows seven men were charged with failing to appear for census; for
instance, in October 1960, Meyawali was sentenced to one month of jail time for not
appearing. The Lumi records indicated that Klowi was one of the two men convicted of
“child neglect.” On December 5, 1962, he was sentenced to three months in jail for diso-
beying PO C. A. Trollope’s order to take his five-year-old daughter for medical treat-
ment, as it was “readily accessible” at the “CMML Mission Hospital.” But he and three
other Iwani men, while being escorted by the police to Lumi to serve their sentences
of census evasion, escaped at Abrau the following day. Klowi was captured January 24,
1962, and his fifty days at large were added to his original sentence. He again escaped for
six weeks but was soon back in the slammer and finally released June 5, 1963. Keeping
Iwani villagers in custody once they were committed was sometimes a problem for the

273
 A Witch’s Hand

administration, as there were ten charges (17 percent) of escaping from custody and two
charges (3 percent) of aiding a prisoner to escape.
There were also two charges for “false report” related to a ‘sanguma’ case I observed
in Lumi before I lived with the Lujere and describe in chapter 17. Overall, the Iwani
people, as a village of over three hundred people with only nine violent offenses (albeit
five murder convictions) known to the administration since they began patrolling, were
by comparison to some Highlands societies a nonviolent people. That is an outsider’s
view. But a villager who believed that most of her co-villagers’ deaths were caused by the
violence of ‘sanguma’ might make a different judgment.
While discussing law and order from an administration perspective, it is significant
that not all violations were of an official nature, but some were by the unofficial fiat of the
‘kiap.’ At the more rural stations, the ‘kiap’ was a king-like figure with police to back up
his orders, and ‘kiaps’ varied on how they exercised this power. The ‘kiap’ at Yellow River
was in an unfortunate catch-22. While he was expected to maintain the station, he was
not provided the funds to keep the grass and jungle from re-engulfing the laboriously
cleared land, work that the Lujere men had provided gratis to build the station. After-
wards they expected jobs but there weren’t any.
In Lumi it was easier to keep the station looking good. The Wape men were devotees
of an illegal gambling game called ‘satu’ so, when the large airstrip’s grass needed cutting,
as it almost constantly did because of the high rainfall, the police would go to a village
where they knew ‘satu’ was being played and legally bring in the men for several weeks
of cutting grass by hand with their ‘sarips.’ The Lujere, however, were not gamblers. In
Yellow River, the ‘kiap’ had to be more creative to secure his free labor, for example, when
the people were coming to the base camp to vote in the 1972 national election, he im-
mediately put the early comers to work cutting and digging grass, but when three took
off, which was their right, he sent the police after them and they had to spend the rest of
the day—except when they voted—cutting grass until 6:00. Or, when he was taking the
census for Iwani, a man’s wife did not appear as soon as he thought she should, so he put
the husband to cutting grass at the station for a couple of weeks. The ‘kiap’ was aware that
these capricious practices were all outside the law—although locals didn’t know it—and
a regretful way to keep his station in shape.

Klowi’s Crimes

Klowi was to me something of an enigma. On the one hand he was righteously authori-
tative, a feared ‘sanguma’ killer and alleged murderer of two fellow female villagers. On
the other hand, he seemed sensitive and caring, was a popular curer or imoulu, and one of
the most amiable, personable, and interesting men in the village. I liked him immensely.
But I remember his stopping alone by my ‘ofis’ late one dark night and, as he watched me
type, soberly saying in his limited Tok Pisin, “Mi man nogut,” that he was a bad person.
He spoke it calmly, almost ruefully. I don’t recall my response, but that quiet nighttime
admission is seared in my memory.
From different people I had learned that he was the only man who had openly killed
fellow villagers. Eventually, I learned more pointedly about his crimes in an interview with
Oria and a chance one with Mangko, Klowi’s paternal nephew. They said the murders

274
 Discord and Dissent

occurred when Wakau was located across the Sand River. The first murder was of Unei’s
mother, but I do not have any reliable information regarding it except it was some in-
formants’ belief and that Klowi took responsibility in raising her son Unei.2 Had I asked
an old-timer like Eine, I might have gotten the full story. The other alleged murder was of
his stepdaughter Manwe whom he desired. After Klowi’s first wife died, he married Wea
who was widowed and came to him with her daughter Manwe. Her apparent murder was
during an aewal wowi curing festival held for Arakwaki and Nakwane’s mother (later
Oria and Nauwen’s stepmother).
Oria began his account of the murders by recalling that he had just shot a very large
pig, his second one, then named the number of pigs several other men had killed (e.g.,
Arakwake, three pigs; his father’s brothers Ukai, five pigs and Purkan, two pigs; Kwoien,
two pigs) but that his father had been unsuccessful—in fact it had been a very long time
since his father had shot a pig. It was an odd preamble to a murder story but did authenti-
cate, again, the importance of hunting to Lujere men: Klowi was enamored with Manwe;
she was a plumpish young woman with high pointed breasts and Klowi wanted to marry
her, but she wanted to marry another man, and this angered him. They apparently argued,
even fought, in his hamlet. Then she ran away to Oria’s hamlet where the curing festival
was being held and hid in Ukai’s house. Oria said he and his friends were just youths
and did not know what was happening. The villagers celebrated all night. At daybreak,
Tsaime and Warajak’s father asked Engwe and Nimo why Klowi had battered Manwe.
Klowi, who was hiding in Arakwaki’s older brother Luman’s house, came out brandishing
his bush knife and went up on Ukai’s veranda and called out, if you want to argue with
me, come on! He then went into Ukai’s house and Manwe ran out quickly followed by
Klowi, but she ran back into the house, chased by Klowi. Once inside, she went out the
back door that was on a slope and fell. In the darkness Klowi couldn’t see her at first, but
when he did, he struck her three times around the head with his bush knife. She didn’t
scream but was covered with blood that ran like water and some of the villagers saw this.
In Oria’s account, it is unclear where and when she died but the horrific part is that he
allegedly cut off her lips and ate them raw. At some point her body was placed on a scaf-
fold in the forest and not in the village as done traditionally, apparently so a patrol officer
would not see it, as burial was now the law. That is the story I got from villagers. But when
I made a study of the Lumi Gaol Register, I came upon the following contradictory data:

KARAUWI [Klowi] / NANAMIAR [father’s name]

July 28, 1960
That on or about the 14th day of September 1959 at Wakau, Karauwi [Klowi] a male
native of Wakau in the Lumi Sub-District did unlawfully strike Manowai [Manwe] /
Tiora [father’s name] a female native of Wakau.
Given 6 months at Lumi Correctional Institution by [PO] J. Martyn

While my local data were all over the place regarding exactly where and when she
died, my informants agreed Klowi murdered—not just assaulted—her during the aewal
wowi festival. How do you reconcile that surety of local village data with the documented

2. It is possible that Klowi was thought to have murdered her via ‘sanguma.’ Unei, as shown in
the next chapter, also had a special kinship tie to Klowi.

275
 A Witch’s Hand

fact of PO Martyn’s Lumi record that Klowi “did unlawfully strike” her in September
of 1959 and was sentenced in July 1960, to six months jail time in Lumi? That was only
twelve years before I arrived, not a generation or two that could account for faulty memo-
ries. And why the ten-month hiatus between the alleged attack and Martyn’s sentencing?
The confusion only increases. I once thought that the reason I got such conflicting ac-
counts regarding when and where she died, was that she initially survived the attack then
succumbed to her injuries, but when I read PO Martyn’s citation written ten months after
the attack that seemed less plausible.
I had first heard about her death from Mangko when I was hanging out in the lower
iron one afternoon as he cooked the toes and leg bone of a cassowary, Aiyuk slept, and Iwi
strummed his toy guitar. I asked Mangko to tell me about the times that Klowi had been
in jail. He said it was when Klowi killed the single girl Manwe; when he killed Unei’s
mother, Auwowe; for ‘sanguma’; and for ‘bikhet,’ being disobedient. He then told me a
shorter story about the murder of Manwe; it was not a ‘sanguma’ murder as people saw
him openly attack her at the curing festival.
However, no record exists in the Lumi court records of him killing either woman, only
the citation in the Gaol Register of him “unlawfully striking” Manwe that contradicts the
local memory of her murder. There was no record of any type of an illegal action toward
Auwowe by Klowi. Perhaps her demise was a ‘sanguma’ death that was attributed to
Klowi, or perhaps her death wasn’t reported to the ‘kiap’ as a murder. Questions abound.
Based on the conflicting information, I have given up on solving these dilemmas. In
Wakau, Klowi was unique as a man with a mystique of violence—not just ‘sanguma’—
surrounding him.

Patrol Officers and Villagers

In my hundreds of pages of typed field notes, there are numerous headings or paragraphs
involving the Lujere men’s disapproval of administration policies or officers. Some ex-
amples of this discord, an inherent quality in any large bureaucratic structure, already
have been presented. Here are several more where I also have included my take on the
problematic situation.

Playing Politics

I had slept only five nights in my new Wakau house when Peter Broadhurst, the Lumi
Assistant District Commissioner, totally surprised me by walking into the village just af-
ter lunch. He told me that he and the District Commissioner, Bob Bunting with his wife
Nan, had flown down to inspect the Edwaki Base Camp and were flying back to Lumi
tomorrow. They would return on the plane that Joyce and the children would arrive on to
see my new Wakau digs, and I could spend a few days being a father and husband again.
Peter insisted that I return with him to the base camp to meet the Buntings; as Ray was
there, we could all party, then I’d meet Joyce’s plane tomorrow. Peter and I arrived at the
base camp late afternoon and, after meeting Bob and Nan Bunting, Ray quickly confided
that he had to break into my food order from Wewak that arrived on the Bunting’s and
Peter’s government-chartered Cessna. There wasn’t a single beer in the camp but, he

276
 Discord and Dissent

enthused, the beer in my food order could save the day. And it did. The five of us—four
White Australians and one White American—talked, ate, laughed, and drank beer until
11:00 p.m. It was an affable group of colonialists partying in the bush, but it was a class
of humanity rapidly coming to an end in New Guinea. The administration’s Australian
officers already were starting to disappear; only the anthropologists would survive inde-
pendence. At most, we anthropologists viewed ourselves as inadvertent and peripheral
agents of colonialism, sometime-visitors who adjusted to our social milieu, whether in an
Indigenous village or a colonial base camp, to get on with our important research work.
Part of my work that convivial evening was to give both the district commissioner and
Peter a better understanding of how the base camp was viewed by the locals. I wanted them
to have some idea of how the locals felt ripped off by the administration. What better time
than when we were all having fun and enjoying each other over a few beers. But I had to
tread carefully as I didn’t want to offend Ray, as he was both my friend and a helpful ally for
my research. I emphasized how the Yellow River locals had enthusiastically agreed to give
their labor free to establish the base camp, but their expectation was that this would then
be a station that could give them some jobs. But there were no jobs. Nothing had changed.
They still were expected to give their labor for free. They were no better off than before; if
they wanted money, they still had to leave their families to work on the plantations. I even
mentioned that I had seen women with babies helping by carrying rocks to the airstrip.
The DC was surprised that no pay at all was given, adding that they would do something.
During our lively evening, the subject of missions came up and it was clear that the DC’s
wife thought that missionaries’ trade stores for the locals were funding their trips around
the world. I pointed out that, at least in Yellow River, no missionaries were traveling for
pleasure from their little trade store’s profits. In fact, it was a generous service for the people
as the volume was so small that no expat trader would open a store down here. The mission’s
store, a counter, actually, was the only place at that time where locals could buy basics like
salt and matches, as well as kerosene, batteries, clothing, and other articles. Ray, who had no
particular fondness for missionaries, backed me up on the frugality of their lives.

The Ten-Cent “Tax”

Makau, the base camp’s interpreter, had an idea to get money for shovels by requesting
each man to donate one shilling, about ten cents. He sold the idea to Ray and on their
patrol a couple of weeks later, in each village Macau made the pitch for each man to
give a shilling. Of course, most men did. When Peter at Ray’s dinner party, told me with
pride and amazement that Ray had collected over fifty dollars on his patrol, I stated my
reservations because there is an implied coercion when the law tells you it wants some
money. The man who can jail you should not be asking for money. Peter, of course, could
immediately see it from the villager’s perspective. Ironically, the next day before Joyce’s
plane arrived, Ray told me that the Wakaus had brought in their donation of four dollars
and thirty cents. The DC was so impressed, Ray said, that he gave the station money to
buy shovels. But there is one more angle to this little story.
Back in Wakau with my family, I learned that all the adult men of Wakau had donated
a shilling to go to Makau, or to the government, or exactly where they weren’t sure. Some
spoke of it as a tax. They had heard about it from a Gwidami man visiting a relative in
Wakau. They got the preposterous idea that the money was to buy the shame they had given

277
 A Witch’s Hand

to a Mantopai man who wanted to be council member, but everyone was against it. But
there were no councils in the South Wapei! Nevertheless, somehow the government got
entangled in it, so they gave the money but no one, absolutely no one—not even the most
intelligent men—knew what it was about. They knew they must pay it or ‘go long kalabus,’
be jailed. I was annoyed that they had been taken in without understanding anything re-
garding their donations. Some of the men wondered if Macau got the money and the more
they thought about it, the nuttier their observations got. I finally intervened and said that
the government couldn’t jail them for such a thing. Not paying taxes, yes, but not for giving
to a voluntary fund for shovels. But I’m not sure how much sense that made to them either.
At least money to help buy shovels had a concrete observable outcome, unlike taxes.
Joyce’s visit with the children to my Wakau camp gave us five days to reconnect as a
family; in fact, this would be their only visit. Two of those days would be involved in the
hot humid trek from and to the station. Both children, accustomed to the more temper-
ate climate of the Torricelli Mountains, found the lowlands climate physically oppressive.
They didn’t complain but their afternoon lethargy and damp flushed cheeks were suffi-
cient evidence. I suspended formal anthropological work while they were there and joy-
fully concentrated on them. It was great to have all three with me and gave the villagers a
chance to see and interact with them, thus getting a fuller awareness of who I was (fig. 27).
In the evenings Joyce and I discussed her plans for their living in Australia while I
continued to work with the Lujere and, with great eagerness, our plans for our leisurely
trip home through Asia and Europe after two years away. On Saturday night we celebrat-
ed our being together with a bottle of champagne Joyce had brought. At midmorning on
Monday, we were en route back to the station. First, we had refreshments with Mary and
Ces Parish while Ned and Elizabeth played with their children, Martin and Wesley. Their
baby Christine was asleep. Then Ces heard on the mission’s radio that the plane was late
so Mary made lunch for all of us plus Rosemary Ace and her children Adrian and baby
Laurel. Finally, midafternoon in intense heat and humidity, my family with Ces started
down the little mountain to the mission’s airstrip to meet the mission plane. Joyce and the
children were already dying of the heat and terribly flushed and the long walk down the
unshaded road to the plane almost finished them off. As they crawled into their seats, I
know all three couldn’t fly back to “gloomy Lumi” fast enough. The Yellow River area-—
for a lot of reasons—wasn’t for everyone.

The 1972 National Election

March 1972 was the third national election since the House of Assembly, the national
legislative body, was established. Wakau villagers had voted for the first time in the 1968
election but then it was just a voice vote. This would be the villagers’ first paper-ballot
election and there were photographs of the candidates they could choose from. Around
6:30 on the morning of March 8, most of the villagers who were going to vote had headed
for the base camp. Norambalip villagers would vote ahead of us, so I left with a second
group of voters at 9:00 a.m., and we were atop the base camp’s hill at 10:45. As I looked
around, everyone was in cloth; there was not a penis sheath or string skirt in sight and
very few bare bosoms.
It was an unusually hot and humid day, the base camp was devoid of shade trees and
there was no breeze; the sun was blazing, and it promised to be an especially grueling day

278
 Discord and Dissent

Figure 27. Breakfast with Joyce, Elizabeth, and Ned in my screened-tent dining area.

for everyone, especially those waiting, seemingly forever, to vote. The clerk (who checked
the name of each voter once he located it with a local’s help) and Ray (who then handed
out the ballots) each sat under an improvised cover of palm branches that provided a bit
of protection. Not all of the Wakau men came to vote: Kwoien was sick with a painful ab-
scess that Klowi had lanced the night before, Kworu had a fever, and Kaiera stayed home
because of his visual challenges. No reasons were offered why Mangko, Unei, Menetjua,
Samaun, Meyawali, and others didn’t come. I was sitting in a narrow strip of house shade
with Enmauwi and Oria’s daughter Womkau when Ces Parish greeted me and said he
was here instead of in Warikori as planned; he had gone and come back the day before,
a nine-hour trek. It was almost 12:30 when they finally called for the Iwani villagers to
come and vote.3
Makau, the administration’s interpreter, gave very brief voting instructions in Namia
to the assembled villagers and the voting began. Once the clerk had approved the voter’s
name, they moved over to Ray’s desk where they indicated their choice by pointing to
the candidate’s photo. Ray marked the ballot and handed it to the villager (fig. 28), who
then walked over to the ballot boxes, where the Iwani ‘luluai’ stood in his official hat, and
dropped it in (fig. 29). The padlocked metal ballot boxes were marked “Upper Sepik Elec-
torate, Yellow River Base Camp.” By 2:30, the voting was finished and those who hadn’t
already left started back to Wakau. Seventeen Wakau men and sixteen Wakau women
voted, representing 53 percent of those eligible to vote.

3. Iwani’s Aukwom hamlet had voted earlier. When Ray found them lined up at Tipas to vote,
he agreed to let them vote there.

279
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 28. An Iwani villager receives a ballot from PO Lanaghan.

Figure 29. Ai’ire casts his ballot assisted by the Iwani ‘luluai’; in the middle distance, women line
up for a ballot. The house belonging to the ‘kiap’ is in the rear.

280
 Discord and Dissent

Ray had invited me to stay overnight, and we would have dinner and some beers. I
asked him what he thought of the Iwani voters, did they know what they were doing? He
replied that about half were “donkey votes,” his term for uninformed, but the rest, he said,
seemed to know who they wanted. After dinner our roving conversation was mostly local,
about the area, people, mission, guns, and government. He told me that he had received
$750 from the DC. It was a result of my telling the DC at Ray’s bush dinner party for
his bosses that the natives had made the base camp with no compensation whatsoever.
In the budget the DC’s money gift was apparently listed for the camp’s building ma-
terials. Ray wanted to use it all for a road from the station down to the Sepik but figured
the money would only be enough to clear the brush and dig the ditches, all by hand labor.
He felt he should give some of the money to the workers who built the station but had
no idea how to distribute it fairly because of the number of people involved and the dif-
ferent levels of commitment they gave to the project. I told him that if he wasn’t going to
give it outright to the base camp workers, which I reluctantly agreed would be a daunting
if not impossible task to get it right, an immediate need was some kind of footbridge
over the Yellow River to connect the eastern Lujere villages; when the river was in flood,
which was often, it was impassible. Ray also reminded me that we didn’t know if the sta-
tion would remain or would be closed when the new patrol post [Ama] in the hills just
across the Sepik eventually opened. Right then they were still having problems locating
a proper airstrip. In early June, Ray planned to go on a three-month leave and was sure
he wouldn’t return to the base camp but to another West Sepik post, rather than to his
personal choice of Manus Island—far from the Sepik—with its tropical beaches and
cooling sea breezes.

The Power of the Patrol Officer

One of the reasons I stayed overnight after the voting—besides Ray’s lively company and
the respite from village life—was to see if I could convince Ray to give Wakau a second
shotgun as their bush was huge and there was no problem of overkill. In January, when
all of Wakau went up to Mauwi for the annual census, Oria and the men asked Ray for
permission for a second shotgun, but his reply was a brisk, “No!,” adding that Wakau had
not been eager to come to work at the station—for free of course—so he would return
their behavior. I heard him say it. Besides, he added, his policy was one gun to fifty men.
This was not a policy of the administration, but his policy to protect the villagers’ game
so they wouldn’t shoot it all like in the Lumi area. As he and I discussed the gun issue
that evening, it was obvious that it disgusted him that the men didn’t get out with their
bows and arrows more but wanted to depend on the gun for their protein. I disagreed,
saying that the Lujere men loved to hunt almost more than anything else and that it was
unusual to see a man leave the village for the bush without his weapons. (Of course, there
was always the iron drones, but I didn’t mention them.)
One of my arguments that night was that in a village like Wakau with only one
shotgun—some villages I knew had two or three—the licensed gun owner gets no meat
as there is a taboo against a hunter eating what he kills. Ray did not know this, was as-
tounded, and began to think that perhaps two guns should be allowed per village. He, in-
cidentally, had not issued the multiple gun permits, as the Lumi ‘kiap’ issued those before
Ray arrived. I told him there were villages smaller than Wakau with multiple guns, so his

281
 A Witch’s Hand

system looked blatantly unfair to villagers. But Ray was not interested in bringing about
a uniform distribution of gun licenses. What had been given, he said, had been given,
right or wrong. His concern was the future and what he had to do. So, I totally lost our
gun debate, although he did say that he would put in his next report about the custom of
hunters tabooed from eating what they kill. When I later told Oria about my losing con-
versation with the ‘kiap’—as it was he who wanted and was saving for the gun—he said
he would wait until the ‘kiap’ went on leave then go up to Lumi and ask the ‘kiap’ there.

The Ethnologist’s Rant

Once back in Wakau, I had to get off my chest what was annoying, even exasperating me
with the administration’s approach to the Lujere, and the only place I could do that safely
was at my typewriter. Even there, I tried to control my ire:

The overall problem with the YR base camp in its relations with natives is that the
gov’t has not made a permanent commitment to the place. They established it under
unusual circumstances accepting the natives’ offer to build the buildings if they would
put a kiap there. But the people never expected that they would continue to work for
nothing; the point in having a station was to bring them a way to get money! Instead
they find they are working for nothing; some station!
This has caused them to move away from the gov’t who they see as just exploiting
them for free work and, as they have pulled away, the kiap has become more authori-
tarian to get his work done. Schismogenesis4 has set in as the gov’t and natives move
further away from each other with increasing antagonism. . .Far better to bring in the
council [system], let them get up their own taxes and let the men work off their taxes
to build, [road work] etc. And it would get the kiap off the hook and get some of the
responsibility onto the people. Then they can bitch at their own [council rules] and
change them if they wish. Now they just have to take whatever the gov’t and the kiap
dish out. (WN: 543)

I know I felt better with all that banged out on my sturdy typewriter and partially
banged out of my system as well. I knew, of course, that the council system had been
rejected because the area’s economic base was considered so miserable that there wasn’t
enough money generated to work with. But I still think that a weak, struggling council
would have been better for everyone than the rancor I witnessed.5

4. Schismogenesis is a term coined by Gregory Bateson (1972: 68) that refers to the behavior
of two oppositional forceswhen responses intensify a progressive negative differentiation and
eventual breakdown:
If boasting is the reply to boasting, that each group will drive the other into excessive
emphasis of the pattern, a process if not restrained can only lead to more and more
extreme rivalry and ultimately to hostility and the breakdown of the whole system.
5. Other than me (to myself privately), no one else espoused a local government council for the
Lujere except PO Wafingian, voicing the locals’ wish in his patrol report (1972b), made after
I had returned home. His ADC, A. S. Wright, predictably shot down his suggestion.

282
chapter twelve

Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

New Guinea societies, on the other hand, seem to be

characterized by a considerable degree of optation.
J. A. Barnes (1962: 7)

The most important social unit for replicating Wakau society was the nuclear family with
its members located variously in the women’s and men’s houses and the bush camps. But
the social unit that owned the village’s land and dominated the economic, political, and
formerly warring spheres of village life was the patrilineal clan, or “patriclan” (Murdock
1949: 69). What is unusual about these patriclans is that, while wealth is transferred ex-
clusively through males, a boy or girl belongs to both their father’s and mother’s paternal
clan, a finding explored below. That sounds very straightforward here, but it took me a
very long time to “get it.” The Wape I had lived with for eighteen months before moving
to the Lujere had classical patrilineal descent groups that everyone seemed to understand
so, when I began patrolling the Lujere villages seeking a research site, I was mystified
when answers to my queries regarding descent groups was met with pauses, confusion,
group discussions, and muddled responses. I was slowly learning that descent as a dogma
was alien to their thoughts and lives.
The classic article on unilineal descent groups, based primarily on African materi-
als, was Meyer Fortes’ (1953), “The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups.” A corol-
lary classic is J. A. Barnes (1962), “African Models in the New Guinea Highlands,”
which offers critiques of the African models of descent groups in “what we might call
the African mirage in New Guinea” (Barnes 1962: 5). He cites eight characteristics of
Highland societies to substantiate their distinctness from the African models. I will cite
three of these that are especially representative of the Wakau version of Lujere social
organization:

283
 A Witch’s Hand

(c) An adolescent boy, and even an adult man, has some choice in deciding whether he
will adhere to the local group in which his father is an agnate or to some other group
to which he can trace non-agnatic connection. He may be able to maintain multiple
allegiance or to shift his affiliation.
(d) A married woman neither remains fully affiliated to her natal group nor is com-
pletely transferred to her husband’s group but rather sustains an interest in both.
(e) Many individuals who assert a mutual agnatic relationship are unable to trace out
their connections step by step and are uninterested trying to do so. (Barnes 1962: 6).

Evidence for my highlighting these three features appears in the following pages.
Anthropologists who entered into the debate regarding the differences and/or similarities
between African and New Guinea Highland descent groups included Salisbury (1964),
Sahlins (1965), Kayberry (1967), Strathern (1972), and La Fontaine (1973), among oth-
ers. My intent here is not to belatedly enter into this debate but to acknowledge some of
the apparently unique aspects of descent groups in New Guinea, not only in the High-
lands, but in the Sepik lowlands as well.1

The Work of the Patriclans

There were numerous patrilineal clans or patriclans within Lujereland,2 named mostly
for animals or plants, such as Abi (cassowary), Ewo (lesser bird of paradise), Kinarwi
(large bush rat), Polami (a bee), Amtolami (pandanus), Walili (ironwood tree), Eindami
(a tree species), Wek (rat), Itwaru (crocodile), Luwepan (opossum), and Pargret (wal-
laby), whose members were scattered among the different Lujere villages. Wakau had
five clans, Elemoli (breadfruit tree), Apelami (wild coconut), Iwaridami (a tree species),
Wolo (rattan) and Naroli (a banana species). From the clans I knew, there were no pro-
hibitions, behaviors, or totemic implications of any kind related to a clan’s cultural icon,
such as crocodile or cassowary. When questioned, informants would reply, ‘em i nem
nating,’ “It’s just a name.” This struck me as quintessentially “Lujereistic”; here was
something they could have culturally elaborated upon in numerous symbolic ways like
many societies do, but they, typically, kept it simple. They did, however, have an idea
that clans should be exogamous, but bowing to Lujere practicality, it was not always
honored.
The social implications of clan membership were more extensive for males than for
females; for instance, village males who were members of the same clan, as already noted,

1. During the years my late wife Annette Weiner (1992) was thinking about and writing In-
alienable Possessions, I benefited greatly from our exchange and kinship discussions, probably
because the Lujere data were so different from what she was examining.
2. Like West (2005) and his confused understanding of Muedan sorcery (uwavi) in Mozam-
bique, I was never satisfied with my clan data from my first field trip. It is frustrating when
“Knowledge gained one day was lost the next as I gathered contradictory evidence or became
aware of disparate perspectives” (West 2005: 10). So, on my brief return trip in 1982, I worked
with Oria and others including Warajak, now grown, to clarify and augment my initial data.
The interpretation in this chapter is based on my 1971–72 and 1982 fieldwork.

284
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

slept together in the same iron creating a corporate residential kin group. In Wakau, for
instance, male members of the Elemoli clan slept in the lower iron while the male mem-
bers of the other four clans—that is, Aplami, Iwaridami, Naroli and Waro—slept in the
upper iron.3 This does not mean that males exclusively slept in the iron, as husbands slept
with their family when at a bush camp and a few like Oria slept in their wife’s village
house almost exclusively while maintaining a bed in the iron.4

Dual Clan Affiliation

My Wakau informants declared unequivocally that a person, male or female, was a mem-
ber of both his or her parent’s patriclans. When I would describe the Wape patrilineal clan
system stating that a person, male or female, belonged only to his or her father’s descent
group, they were emphatic that this was not their way. Yet, when I asked Oria to give me
the clan names of all the Wakau men, he gave me only the name of the man’s patrilineal
clan, not his mother’s father’s clan that she was born into, so the Lujere’s descent group
ideology was a point of confusion to me for a very long time.
First, this definitely was not a case of double descent where Ego (in kinship parlance,
“Ego” is used as a word for the person who serves as the focal point from which all other
kinship relations are determined) belonged to both a matrilineal and patrilineal descent
group. There were no matrilineal descent groups among the Lujere. Nor was it an am-
bilineal system with multiple descent groups that Ego could affiliate with. Barry Craig,
during his 1969 artifact collection trip among the Lujere, became aware that this was not
just an ordinary patrilineal descent group society. He wrote, based on his visit to Naum
village on the first of July,

I was told by informants that it is not uncommon for a man to work both his wife’s,
and his own, land, living in her village alternately with his own. His children thus be-
come familiar with both father’s and mother’s land and may elect to inherit rights to
their mother’s as well as, or instead of, their father’s land. Thus the system would appear
to be cognatic, at least with respect to land rights, and the “clans or sub-clans” may not
be unilineal groups at all. (Craig 1975: 420)

Craig’s informant certainly provided an interesting, even startling, example of opta-

tive residence and inheritance. My data are that the circumstances of a man inheriting
land rights from his mother’s patriclan are very unusual and highly variable as explained
below. Thus, my Wakau-based research did not confirm his hypothesis that the Lujere
might have a form of cognatic descent, although he was accurate in supposing that they

3. When the villagers lived across the Sand River in the 1950s, they had three hamlets and three
irons but when they moved back to their present site with a single hamlet, they eventually built
a single large iron for all the men, which was abandoned before I arrived in 1971.
4. I never collected convincing data to indicate that this was either a traditional custom or a
post-contact innovation. My hunch, based on the flexibility in Lujere culture, is that it was
always a possibility but has become more prevalent in recent times. However, youths and
bachelors today, as before, always sleep in the iron.

285
 A Witch’s Hand

don’t conform to the traditional ideal of patrilineality, a point which further strengthens
my own analysis.5
The Lujere’s descent groups were all patrilineal; however, the tie to Ego’s mother’s
group was usually a strong one. In Wakau, many marriages were within the village or the
neighboring villages and this facilitated affective and instrumental interaction between
related families and patriclans. Fortes (1969: 98) used the term “complimentary filiation”
to characterize matrilateral relations that were pervasive and strong; however, the Lujere
had gone a step farther by creating an individual’s bilateral alliance to both parent’s patri-
clans albeit the character of the alliance was not symmetrical. So, if the ethnologist takes
informants at their word—and s/he should—they were declaring that Ego belonged to
two different patrilineal descent groups: his mother’s and his father’s. While a son, for in-
stance, was affiliated with both his father’s father and his mother’s father’s descent groups,
his membership rights and obligations were not coequal. Nothing in Wakau society, ma-
terial or virtual, was transmitted by tradition from a mother to her sons or daughters in
the way that economic assets were transmitted from a father to his sons. The son inher-
ited “basic resources,” to use Fried’s (1967: 186) term, from his father’s line just as his
mother’s brother’s son did from his father’s line. Of course, a boy’s maternal grandfather
or maternal uncle might opt to privilege him with some of their resources, thus honoring
his close tie to them via his mother. The same kind of sharing could be extended to the
boy’s sister as well, but it was always an optative act and not a prescriptive one.
I think my Wakau informants just took it for granted that a person belonged to both
his or her mother’s and father’s patriclan, just as we unconsciously acknowledge our bilat-
eral tie to both our parent’s families. Certainly, no one ever talked about it until I started
asking questions. I had never heard a word about this idea of dual clan membership until
I gave the example of the Wape patriclans, that a person at birth is a member of only his
or her father’s descent group, and they disagreed. I later realized Oria’s emphasis on only
naming the Wakau men’s father’s clan was because the mother’s clan is relatively insig-
nificant to her sons. While a man or woman may belong to the mother’s clan, there are
no strong jural or economic rights and obligations stemming from this maternal tie as
there are to the father’s clan. The tie to the mother’s clan for either a girl or boy is more
accurately characterized as a titular one with the potential for a usufruct relationship.
However, even then he or she must ask permission if one wants a favor related to the
mother’s patriclan’s resources.
Thus, while a person’s clan affiliation at birth is bilateral, that is, filiation is both mat-
rilateral and patrilateral, it is significant that (1) the determination of a man’s iron is by
his patriclan, and (2) the transmission of wealth in basic resources was always patrilineal,
father to son. For a male, it was the patrilateral affiliation to his father’s patriclan that was
highly significant in everyday life, as it was also for a female until she married, and her
sago was now processed from her husband’s palms.

5. In a June 14, 2000 email replying to my queries, Barry Craig wrote,

Always bear in mind that I was doing survey material culture ethnography, not in-
depth research, and I wrote down what I elicited from informants but am quite con-
scious that the information could be individualistic or even that I misunderstood what
I was being told. It is certainly random! So more than a grain of salt is in order.

286
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

When I began making genealogical charts of the villagers’ kinship relations, I was
concerned that they seemed to be a collection of disparate little groups with no ge-
nealogical depth and often lacking demonstrable connections between alleged patriclan
members. They reminded me of Ian Hogbin’s shallow genealogies for Wogeo Island off
Wewak and his comment that “the Wogeo are not good genealogists” (Hogbin 1970: 22).
But I also was learning that the deep past was insignificant to the Lujere, especially when
compared to many other New Guinea societies whose lengthy genealogies are of para-
mount importance for establishing status, claiming ownership, or reckoning marriages.6
When I would press for an explanation on how the scattered collateral kin segments of a
local clan were related, my informants—sometimes a bit impatient and distressed by my
concern for irrelevant minutia—told me that they must have had a common clan ances-
tor in the past but it was too far back for them to know. And, seeing the lineal shortness
of their genealogies, who could argue with that?
Whether or not the kin tie of some local clan members was fictive, having grown up
together they demonstrated in myriad ways their close affective tie to one another. When
I saw several men leaving or entering the village, they were usually patriclan brothers or,
when Mowal and his wife lost their infant daughter to cerebral malaria, it was his patri-
clan brother Nauwen who initiated her burial. Undoubtedly, men usually were closer to
their patriclan-mates than to other village men. In former times they were warriors to-
gether, and today they still usually chose men among their patriclan to hunt with or go as
families together to their bush camps. For example, when the Wakau men first gathered
to build my house, Mowal, Mari, and Oria—all Apilami clansmen—were together with
their families at distant bush camps across the Sand River hunting, fishing, and making
sago.
The reason my informants could not trace their lineal genealogical connections was,
as indicated, that the necessary knowledge didn’t exist. I collected the villagers’ kinship
charts onto wide, long sheets of brown wrapping paper, and I was fortunate if they had
knowledge of their grandparents, as some didn’t. Klowi, however, had more kin data than
most. Lertau, Klowi’s maternal grandfather, had six married siblings. One of Lertau’s four
sisters and her two children were ambushed in the forest and killed by Tsila men, and
one of his two brothers was also killed in a Tsila raid. Although Klowi had information
about Lertau’s other four siblings, he had no information about their parents, his great
grandparents, not even their names. This was typical; lineal data stopped abruptly, but
Klowi got further than most.
All informants had extensive lateral and lineal descending knowledge of kin who
were mostly the people they knew or had known face to face. But the dead kin one never
knew personally were, literally, non-existent. And this made sense in personal terms. All
a man really had to know to prosper in Lujere society were the locations of the economic
resources held by his father that he and his brothers would inherit to help feed themselves

6. The genealogies of the Enga people of the Papua New Guinea Highlands provide a startling
contrast to the Lujere. Wiessner and Tumu (1998: 28) found that the “Enga genealogies
extend back approximately ten generations, the shortest that we collected being eight and
the longest fourteen.” While not as extensive as the Enga genealogies, the genealogies of the
Gnau in the Torricelli Mountains had a range of five to fifteen generations with an average
depth of nine generations (Lewis 1975: 17).

287
 A Witch’s Hand

and their families. The mother’s clan also had an important role as a kind of safety net to
be utilized when needed if, as I explain below, one had maintained an active relationship
with some of its members.
As postmarital residence among the Lujere was usually virilocal, when a woman mar-
ried a man from another village, she left the male members of her paternal clan like her
father and brothers to whom she was more closely related than the males of her paternal
clan residing in other villages. Importantly, members of a person’s mother’s or father’s
patriclan living in another village could be approached for help or a favor if—and it is an
important tactical “if ”—one had sustained the relationship through time. Maintaining
an active positive relationship was emphasized to me when, for example, a man wanted
to hunt on his father-in-law’s land, plant a stand of sago on his mother’s brother’s land,
or move to his brother-in-law’s village. The extent of the favor requested, and chance of a
positive response was very much dependent upon the nature of the relationship.
When Kaiera wanted to move out of his iron in his natal Mauwi because of ‘sanguma’
fears and the lack of bathing water on the hilltop, he chose to move to the iron in his
mother’s natal village, Wakau, as he had maintained good relationships with his mother’s
paternal kin since childhood. When Samaun was harassing Sakone for sex after her hus-
band left as an indentured laborer, she and her five children moved to her nearby natal
village of Mauwi to live with her brother’s family. There sometimes was a special push for
a Wakau male to reside in the village where both his mother and wife were from, that is,
to reside both matrilocally and uxorilocally. Such was Lean’s case; he was a young man
born in Wakau but moved to Iwani’s Sepik River hamlet of Aukwom where his wife and
mother were born. He was a friend of Nauwen’s and, as Nauwen and Oria’s mother also
was from Aukwom, he had encouraged Nauwen and Oria to come to Aukwom to live.
But the brothers declined the invitation, preferring to continue hunting and fishing in
their father’s bush than that of their mother’s father’s and her brothers.
Another example of the flexibility dual clanship provided regarding residence was
Sakrias, a youth born in Papei whose mother came from Wakau. When I moved to
Wakau, Sakrias was living in the upper iron with men of his mother’s patriclan. How-
ever, before I returned home, he had moved back to his father’s village. His was a typi-
cal example of a young male temporarily living with his mother’s patriclan. From my
data, the converse temporary residence pattern for a young female apparently doesn’t
occur.
A girl at birth, like her brother, was filiated byboth her parent’s patriclans but when
her mother’s father died, his strategic resources would be transmitted to her mother’s
brothers as they would be to her own brothers when her father died, bypassing her.
However, her father could opt to give a line of sago palms to her and her husband to
cut and process into sago starch. Or, if she had no brothers and her father had access
to large hunting grounds and owned extensive holdings of food trees, he might invite
her and her husband to come live in her natal village and use his holdings. Then their
sons, having lived in an iron amid her mother’s local clansmen, would be the legitimate
inheritors after their grandfather’s and parent’s deaths. These anomalous situations re-
garding postmarital residence, the prevalence of adoption, and the gifting allocation
of resources, all made Wakau’s clan-held lands a kind of patchwork quilt of practice.
My attempt to understand local ownership and usage, like clanship, defied quick and
easyunderstanding.

288
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

Adoption

The Lujere’s many clans were scattered among the villages; five, as described earlier, had
corporate sections in Wakau. Members were affiliated with a clan through their father
or mother at birth, or by adoption. Adoption had no associated rituals but was acknowl-
edged when others raised an orphaned child. Death of young parents was not uncom-
mon, resulting in the adoption of the children by cognatic or affinal kin. When a boy’s
father died, for example, he might be (1), adopted affinally by his older sister’s husband or
his mother’s new husband, or (2), adopted cognately, by his mother’s brother or a much
older brother. Only in the last instance would he not necessarily become attached to a
new clan. Unless he were very young, he would sleep in his new patron’s iron and hunt
with him in his bush. Only if he moved to another village and ignored his agnatic ties
would he lose privileges in his father’s clan, though not in the harvesting of his father’s
resources, regardless of where they were planted. He could also give some or all of his
strategic resources to another person, especially those that were difficult to access from
his new locale.
For example, I was told that Pewal, whose father had died and his mother remarried,
was not fed well, so his mother’s brother from Tsila came to Wakau to take him home
as a youth to raise him. Now grown, he had remained with his mother’s brother in Tsila,
never visiting Wakau. Some assumed he had probably forfeited membership in his fa-
ther’s clan as he had leveraged his membership in his maternal brother’s patriclan. Here
are a few more examples of adoption, all by Wakau villagers. Unei was a young orphan
living in the lower iron. (His father had died while he was still small, and his mother
remarried Mithaki who in turn died, and then his mother also died.) Unei’s mother’s
brother in Pabei did not offer to care for him, so Klowi assumed responsibility for Unei
because Mithaki, Unei’s stepfather, was Klowi’s mother’s brother. Klowi and his wife
Wawenowaki also had taken in Yamai, a girl, whose father Newai, a Wakau man, was
Klowi’s mother’s younger brother, after both of her parents died. Another case is Kunai’s.
He was the youngest of seven siblings; the eldest was his sister Areawane married to
Kaboi, a Wakau man. When Kunai’s parents died, his sister and brother-in-law raised
and fed him along with their own four children that included their two young sons,
Arakwake and Nakwane.
When Oria and Nauwen’s mother died, their father Limeritjo married Ariawani, the
widow of Walpi of Gwidami. She had one son, Yaope, who came with his mother to
Wakau as Limeritjo’s adopted son. Yaope could at any time return to Gwidami where he
was born and his inherited resources were located, but he remained in Wakau. Because
early death and adoption were so pervasive among the Lujere, other instances of both
appear at random throughout the text.
This common custom of adoption partly explains the cognatic disconnect among local
sections of a Wakau clan. With such a convincing lack of knowledge of, or interest in,
their genealogical past, it only takes a few generations for an adopted boy to disappear
from the collective kinship memory and for his progeny to appear as clan members but
with no visible tie to another clan segment. Men who helped me with the kinship charts
were to a person blissfully unconcerned with these “discrepancies.” I eventually learned—
too slowly for them I am sure—not to press my search for an apical ancestor as no one
cared a whit; it only bothered me.

289
 A Witch’s Hand

Economic Resources

Wakau’s five clans controlled the village’s extensive land holdings, which extended in all
directions from the village. The largest property (belonging to Oria; see map 7) was in the
vast fens extending westward from the Sand River. The land across the river was divided
among the village’s clans into three huge tracts extending east to west from the river. The
lower tract bordering Wagu’s land to the south belonged to local members of the Elamoli
clan (lower village men), the middle tract to the Naroli clan (Luritsao and Enewan, who
were upper village men), and the upper tract bordering Tsila’s land belonged to members
of the related Apilami, Iwaridami, and Waro clans (other upper village men). These tracts
were the villagers’ primary hunting, gathering, and gardening grounds with creeks of di-
verse size for obtaining fish, plus numerous stands of both wild and domestic sago palms.
The Lujere identify two types of economic resources, those that are enduring, and
those that are transitory; all are inherited in the male line, that is, patrilineal. The endur-
ing resources are like the land areas described above, which, in Tok Pisin, are composed
of ‘bus,’ ‘baret,’ and ‘tais,’ that is, forest land, creeks and ponds, and swamp land. A man’s
transitory resources are those that are more permanent than a banana tree but eventually
expended like palm trees such as sago, coconut, betel, and ‘limbum.’ Breadfruit trees, ‘galip’
nut trees, ‘tulip’ trees, and domestic pigs, for example, are also transitory resources but are
usually fewer in number and not of the same significance in providing food for descend-
ants. The sago palm grows in freshwater swamps up to fifty feet tall and takes from ten
to fifteen years to mature; it is usually cut down just before it matures to maximize the
amount of sago starch processed (Lea 1972:14). A coconut palm must be planted on
higher ground, begins to bear in its sixth year and may continue for as long as eighty
years (Shand 1972:187). A good father plants sago and coconut palms for his progeny to
assure they will have food to eat when they grow up. He plants on his father’s clan’s land
or, with permission, that of relatives and friends. A man may own palms on another man’s
land, perhaps his father’s ‘wanwok’ who gave him permission to plant, or on his mother’s
brother’s land if he had secured permission. Unlike among the Wape, Lujereland has a
surplus of land, so obtaining permission is seldom a problem. Importantly, the fact that
land is not a scarce resource in Lujereland as it is for many New Guinea groups, such as
in the Highlands, helps facilitate the society’s flexible nature.
A clan’s forestland is extensive and is the primary hunting ground for its members and
where their small, unfenced gardens are planted. If a man’s mother is also from his vil-
lage, he may seek hunting privileges on his mother’s father and brother’s hunting ground
as well. Within these lowland areas are numerous creeks whose waters eventually empty
into the Sepik River. The larger ones are named and divided into sections that are owned
by members of the clan for their exclusive fishing use, not unlike how a prime Quebec
salmon river might allot fishing rights when the fish are spawning. Most of the large
swampy areas are also named where wild or planted sago grows. I despaired, however, of
ever getting a proper map of a clan’s ‘bus,’ ‘baret,’ and ‘tais.’ The idea of a map, essentially
a “bird’s eye” view of a man’s natural resources where he hunted, fished, collected, and
planted was a puzzling concept to some. I did, however, prevail upon Oria to make me a
map of his natural resources from the perspective of being in an airplane, something he
had experienced. Choosing a green pencil, he made two drawings: one of his ‘bus’ near
Wakau and the other larger ‘bus’ across the Sand River (map 7).

290
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

Map 7. Oria’s map of his land across the Sand River with sago stands and creeks.

The three creeks on his land, Araiu, Tipiera, and Apiap, appear more like ponds but
may just represent to him the part of the creek that is his. The swampy land where his
sago stands are pictured are Plalip and Inyai. The other areas are hunting grounds. When

291
 A Witch’s Hand

I asked him why the lower right corner was blank, he replied, “‘em i bus nating,’” that is,
it’s just wild forest. But ‘bus nating’ is a relative notion; this area, he said, belonged to the
Tsila people and was not one where he roamed. He did make the point, however, that
hunting boundaries were more amorphous as feral pigs and cassowaries move through
the ‘bus’ irrespective of local boundaries, and he added that they aren’t planted like sago
palms.

Resource Transmission

If a man has several sons, his resources are inherited jointly but the eldest son has the
responsibility of their management, a fact reflected in the kinship terms. Primogeniture
among brothers was one of the stronger Lujere organizational principles they usually
adhered to. A father might divide his arboreal resources and water fishing rights before
he died if he anticipated quarreling among his sons. If he died when his sons were small,
his wife supervised his resources. A woman, who since childhood had set fish traps and
processed sago with her mother, usually loses access to her father’s resources when she
marries but gains access to her husband’s resources. However, it is common for fathers to
extend specific resource privileges, for instance, to hunt on his land or plant sago palms in
a swampy area, to his new son-in-law and daughter after their marriage. But if a father-
in-law is hostile, as old Leno was to Tsaime, he may, as discussed later, specifically forbid
his son-in-law access.
A man’s arboreal resources may not all be on his clan’s land but, as already indicated, by
invitation or with permission, he can plant on any man’s land. For example, Poke’s father,
Lumuria, had planted sago palms on Oria and Nauwen’s father’s land. Poke, as noted,
was an older bachelor in the upper iron with no siblings or living agnates. He told Oria
that when he died his sago palms were to go to him and his infant son Nakwane. Oria
also said that Poke had other sago palms near Waniyo’s holdings and believed Waniyo
and his brothers would claim these palms when Poke died, probably because Waniyo
and his younger brother Nimo were two of the five married men whose wives fed Poke.
In the meantime, he was very protective of his resources, as were most men. Poke had a
stand of sago palms in a Mauwi swamp and, when he discovered that one of his palms
had been cut down and was being processed into sago starch without his permission, he
destroyed the processed sago and demolished the processing apparatus. Likewise, when
he discovered an errant fish trap in his section of a creek, he took it out and wrecked it.
Kunai, another bachelor with no brothers or descendants, also had given a couple of lines
of sago to his older sister’s sons, Arakwake and Nakwane, whose mother raised him and
whose wives helped to feed him.

Kinship Terminology
The idea of “kinship terminology systems” —a society’s systematic arrangement of kin-
ship terms, as conceived by Lewis Henry Morgan (1871)—is one of the oldest and most
original inventions of anthropology (Trautmann 1987). Morgan, a nineteenth-century
lawyer in upstate New York, ethnographer of the Iroquois (Morgan 1851), and natural

292
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

historian of the American beaver (Morgan 1868), realized that the terms the Iroquois
called their relatives formed a patterned system very different from his own society’s. For
one thing, one’s father and one’s father’s brother were referred to using the same term.
Moreover, Morgan found it peculiar that all of the Iroquois clans traced descent through
females, not males. His insight was that these and other unusual findings stimulated him
to make a comparative study of kinship around the globe. This being the mid-nineteenth
century, Morgan sent queries to far-flung missionaries, government officials, and travelers
by sea. Logistic difficulties notwithstanding, he amassed an astonishing array of findings
from his cooperative informants about the world’s kin terminology systems. In 1865 he
had completed a first draft of his findings, but publication was initially refused by the
Smithsonian Institutions on the grounds that “in proportion to the conclusions arrived
at, the quantity of your material is very large” (Resek 1960: 97). It was only after he re-
vised the manuscript in terms of a then-fashionable evolutionary hypothesis—it was a
time of Darwin’s (1859) greatest influence—that it was published (Morgan 1871).7 Thus
began the scientific study of “Kinship as an analytical category” (Godelier, Trautmann,
and Tjon Sie Fat 1998, 2). While Morgan’s evolutionary views were later discredited, his
discovery of kin term systems has continued to be a relevant topic among anthropologists
despite Schneider’s (1972) attempts to make kinship a non-subject.
Morgan was especially interested in the kin terms for a person’s (or “Ego’s” in kinship
parlance) parents and their siblings and he discovered that his data fell into either “Clas-
sificatory” or “Descriptive” kin term systems.8 Robert Lowie (1928) built on Morgan’s
initial insights and, surveying even more native kin term systems, found that they fell into
four categorical types determined by whether kin terms on the parental generation were
merged or not, namely, generational, bifurcate merging, bifurcate collateral, and lineal. Then,
George Peter Murdock (1949), based on data in his cross-cultural files at Yale, postulated
six typologies centered on Ego’s children’s and sibling’s children’s terms. His “cousin” term
categories were Hawaiian, Iroquois, Sudanese, Eskimo, Crow, and Omaha.
The field of kinship study, especially that of kin terminologies, however, has had its
critics who have found it arcane and tedious and have questioned its relevance. Even
Robin Fox in his admired book on kinship and marriage acknowledged that kinship
terminologies remained an “esoteric” subject (Fox 1983: 1). One of its most caustic critics
was Bronislaw Malinowski “who complained of ‘the bastard algebra of kinship’ that Mor-
gan had created” (Trautmann 1987: 258). While Malinowski railed against the subject,
David Schneider (1972: 50) more majestically simply defined it out of existence. As Mar-
shall Sahlins (2013: 12) has slyly commented regarding Schneider’s, “Long study of ‘kin-
ship’ had convinced him that there was no such thing,” adding that, “Indeed, by the logic
of Schneider’s argument, there would be no such thing as anything” (Sahlins 2013: 15).

7. It is ironic that the later rejection of Morgan’s evolutionary hypothesis regarding the human
family by men like Kroeber (1909) in turn, for a time, negatively impacted recognition of
Morgan’s major contribution to the scientific study of the world’s kin nomenclature systems.
8. An example of a “Classificatory” system of kin terms is where on Ego’s parental generation
there is a single term for father, father’s brother, and mother’s brother, and a single term for
mother, mother’s sister, and father’s sister. An example of a “Descriptive” system is one like ours
where Ego’s mother and father each have a term, but father’s and mother’s sister share a term
(aunt), as do father’s and mother’s brother, (uncle).

293
 A Witch’s Hand

Regardless of one’s measure of enthusiasm for kinship studies or kin term systems, the
status of the latter as a field of inquiry within anthropology began to pall toward the last
phase of the twentieth century as colonialism gradually ended and access to study kin-
based societies became more difficult. Graduate students increasingly viewed the exotic
fieldwork site as politically incorrect, even exploitative, while the study of the here and
now, even as close as one’s own disability, was favored. Certainly, the required kinship
course for many US anthropology majors has disappeared from the curriculum, as it did
from ours at the University of Vermont.9 Nevertheless, a culture’s kin terms are real and
of ethnographic interest as they document how the actual people, in our case the Wakau
villagers, see their relatives. Homo sapiens is physiologically wired to make sense of things;
so, through time, every society has created a system of kin terms.
One might think that collecting kinship terms would be a simple, straightforward
charge. Anyone who has tried knows it isn’t. There are “terms of address”—what you
call someone, for example, Dad, Gramma—and “terms of reference”—how you refer to
someone, for instance, my father, my grandmother. There are even further distinctions:
“elementary,” “derivative,” and “denotative” terms. Interviewing in Tok Pisin about your
informant’s Namia kin terms, leaves a lot of room for slip-ups and wiggle-waggle. Also
problematic was that, although the Wakau villagers have kin terms, they don’t usually
use them; more often they call a relative, even a parent, by their personal name. So, kin
terms, as evidenced by their general dislike in using them, were not of importance or
interest to the Wakau, which is so different from the Wape. I worked with several Wakau
men on kin terms but, to a man, they found it confusing and gave me blatantly contra-
dictory data they couldn’t explain that were not only exasperating, but were driving me
nutty, and the fact that I was so obsessive in trying to make sense of their answers, was
obviously driving them nutty too. I never did succeed in getting across the difference
between terms of address and terms of reference to the point that I had full confidence
in what I was getting. This was, by leagues, the most exasperating and inconclusive of my
data gathering experiences, so what I am providing here is, at best, provisional. Oria was
the only man who could stick it out with me and at least bring the illusion of occasional
clarity, so what I submit as “Wakau kin terms” are primarily my understanding of his
understanding. All terms are from a male Ego’s perspective, and I think these are terms
of reference.

Wakau Kin Terms

A male Ego’s grandparents and their siblings are all referred to as ajuwa, while kin terms
for Ego’s first ascending generation—the parental generation—are “generational,” that is,
all of Ego’s mother’s and father’s brothers and sisters have the same term as Ego’s mother
and father: mother = mo and father = aja. Although the same kin term refers to Ego’s
mother as well as to her and her husband’s sisters, there is no doubt in the son’s mind,
or anyone else’s, regarding who is his biological mother and who nursed, fed, and cared
for him as he grew. But the classificatory term mo does connote the kind of maternal

9. But only after Carrol Pastner and I, who both cherished teaching the course, had retired.

294
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

relationship he can expect from his parent’s sisters, regardless of where they live. The same
is true in a paternal way for the classificatory term aja for his parent’s brothers.
Logically consistent with this “generational” pattern on the parental generation, in
Ego’s generation the kin terms for matrilateral and patrilateral cousins are the same as
for Ego’s brother and sisters, that is, the “Hawaiian” type. Thus sister = elae while brothers
are distinguished by age; that is, older brother = awa and younger brother = nanwa. This
finding of Generational and Hawaiian type kin terms will strike some readers as strange,
as it initially did me, because the theoretical models for Hawaiian and Generational kin
terms are assumed to be incompatible with the unilineal descent groups that the Lujere-
have. But, once again, I eventually surrendered to their ethnographic facts. And, if you
think about it, by not distinguishing kin on the mother’s and father’s sides, their kin term
system is complementary to their view of descent.
Interestingly, none of the societies proximal to the Lujere for whom data exists have
Hawaiian cousin terms. To the north, Abrau village (Awun lang.) has Dakota type
cousin terms and Kwieftim village (Ak lang.) has Omaha type cousin terms (Kelm
and Kelm 1980: 269–272); to the east, Magaleri village (Amal lang.) has Omaha type
terms;10 to the west, Wagu village (Abau lang.) also has Omaha type cousin terms. To
the south cross the Sepik River, both the Iwam (Iwam lang.) (Rehburg 1974: 211) and
the Sawiyano (Ama lang.) (Guddemi 1992, 112) have forms of Iroquois type cousin
terms.
It gets even more interesting when we examine the kin terms on the generation of
Ego’s grandchildren. A terminological distinction exists between a female and a male
cousin’s children. The children of male patrilateral and matrilateral cousins are termed
tsana, the same term for Ego’s and his sibling’s children. But Ego has a special relation-
ship with his female patrilateral and matrilateral cousins’ children (his parent’s siblings’
daughters) who are termed mamaru—it is a reciprocal term—and whose patriclan is
different from his. There are more mamarus, but first, as already indicated, on the second
ascending or grandparent level, Ego’s parent’s parents and their siblings are all termed
aitdwa, while on the second descending or grandchild level, all children of a tsana are
termed inani, and children of a mamaru, in turn are also termed mamaru.
As the reciprocal mamaru relationship is unique, it demands further attention. The
senior male mamaru, that is, Ego, has a responsibility to occasionally bring food to
his little male or female mamaru that could include sago, grubs, game meat, and fish,
as well as firewood. In response the child’s parents (Ego’s patrilateral and matrilateral
female cousins and their spouses) are required to give him money or traditionally shell
“money.”
If the junior mamaru dies, its parents must give shell “money” to the senior mamaru
as well as pig or game meat; this is not reciprocated. Or if the junior mamaru is sick or
has a baby, again food must be brought. Overall, the senior mamaru has a nurturing and
protective role towards the junior mamaru who, in turn, has a supportive role to his senior
mamaru.This mamaru reciprocal relationship continues throughout life, as in the rela-
tionship between Yaope and Klowi shown in the next chapter. Also, if the senior mamaru
goes away to work and returns with presents for his mamaru, these must be reciprocated

10. Based on my interview at the Yellow River Base Camp on April 9, 1972, with Makau of
Magaleri on his village’s Amal language kin terms.

295
 A Witch’s Hand

with shell “money.” Finally, for the kin terms for the second descending generation from
Ego, all his and his sibling’s grandchildren are termed inani as are the grandchildren of
his bilateral male cousins, but the children of his mamaru are also termed mamaru.11
This exchange between a senior mamaru and his junior mamaru and its parents was
the main kin regulated exchange system I found among the Lujere. Because the Lujere
prescribe patriclan exogamy, a senior mamaru’s junior mamaru would belong to a differ-
ent patriclan from his. In this way the reciprocal relationship between a senior mamaru
and his various male and female junior mamarus, encourages a positive tie between the
nuclear families of different patriclans in different villages.
Some New Guinea societies have rules against calling certain relatives by name; to
unwittingly say the name is a cause for shame. This was true for some groups, such as the
Wape and the Baruya (Lloyd 1974: 98) of the Eastern Highlands District. But for the
Lujere, again indicating the comparative openness of their society, there were no con-
straints against using an individual’s personal or kinship name either face to face or indi-
rectly. In the same way, there were no culturally required avoidance relationships among
kin as sometimes occurs with in-laws. However, there is a joking relationship custom,
often ribald, between brothers-in-law.

Joking Relationships
A male Ego has a reciprocal joking relationship, frequently of an obscene nature, with his
classificatory sisters’ husbands. Nimo was married to Aria’s classificatory sister. and I had
been in the village only a few weeks and still naive regarding kinship terms and behavior
when they began teasing each other in Tok Pisin. Nimo was laughing and saying to Aria
in Tok Pisin, “You are my woman. I’m an evil man. I’m going to fuck you!” and the other
men around, including Aria, were all laughing. This bawdy, even lewd, joking, I quickly
learned, is only between brothers-in-law and seems to occur primarily in the presence of
males. A man has a milder type of joking or teasing relationship with his female mamaru,
and his wife jokes with his male mamaru. These would be in Namia, and if they occurred
in my presence I was unaware of it. I do not recall any casual playfulness between the
sexes as I noted occasionally between males or between several laughing females. With
Ego’s own sister, her husband, and their children, joking or ‘tok pilai’ is banned as with
other cognatic or affinal kin except the ones described.
In summation, despite wealth transferred exclusively in the male line, the overall bi-
lateral symmetry in the Wakau kin term system is, not so oddly, complementary to the
Wakau practice of bilateral patriclan affiliation.

11. The Namia linguists Thomas and Becky Feldpausch (1988: 2011) include some Lujere kin-
ship terms in their publications; I have checked their spelling against what I got in Wakau
and I have tweaked a few kin terms to be in compliance with their spelling. An important
difference, however, is that the bilateral cousin terms they collected in Yaru village are not
the same terms as for Ego’s siblings; thus, female cousin = aripae and male cousin = aripa lu.
Consequently, the cousin terms they collected would be classified as an “Eskimo” system, not
a “Hawaiian” one, although both kinds of cousin terms are theoretically incompatible with
unilineal descent groups

296
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

Love and Marriage

The expression of love and affection was easily observed within most Wakau families.
The tie between parents and small children was especially affectionate and both fathers
and mothers appeared dedicated to succoring not only their own children, but others as
well. However, outward displays of affection between husbands and wives were less easy
to discern.
“Romance” is not a word in either the Tok Pisin or Namia lexicon but young Lujere
men and women, like the young everywhere, were actively, flirtatiously, aware of the other
sex. But the signs were usually subtle and mostly beyond my awareness, especially as the
young women of the village spoke only Namia. However, Nauwen, as an eligible single
young man, was helpful in orienting me to some of the ways a young man could charm
a young woman with magic to want him. He also volunteered that women had no magi-
cal way to entice a man, but in my original notes I typed, “A woman might have another
version regarding this.” (WN440)
A man can charm the attentions of a woman in three main ways. The first two are
traditional; the third is a more recent invention. A man going to a ‘singsing’ (festival) who
wants a girl to be attracted to him, usually sexually or at least for marriage, secretly spits
ginger on the side of his hand drum. He does not incant a charm; he just spits the ginger
on it. Again, in its simplicity, a very Lujerian ritual act. A second way to entice a girl is
to take some of the earth where she has left a footprint, mix it with ginger, then rub a
bit of the mixture around the base of a partially trimmed cockatoo feather. The feather is
attached to a house so it points to the girl’s village and as it waves in the breeze, her heart
will turn to the boy. Interestingly, when I later repeated the feather charm custom to Aria
and Iwi, neither had heard of it. The third way is to take a girl’s bamboo tube for smoking
tobacco and put into its mouth a bit of ginger and ‘senta’ (something that smells good)
but only a tiny bit as she may smell it. This will bring the girl to the boy. Throughout the
book I have cited the magical powers of ginger, but there is yet another deliberate usage
shared with the Wape: some ginger placed under a boss’s or ‘kiap’s house ladder will cool
any potential angry outburst as he crosses over it.
As there was no language the Wakau women and I shared, I mutely wondered how
they felt about their marriages that, to me, appeared to be mostly arrangements made by
men, albeit not covertly. Because of the relatively high status of Lujere women and the
public nature of marital arrangements, a woman could intervene if she wished. Among
all of the Wakau marriages past and present that I knew about, divorce was unknown.
At times of marital stress, however, a wife could stay with her brother and sister-in-law
as Oria’s sister did; a wife’s absence could remind a churlish and hungry husband of his
dependency on her processed sago and evening meal.
I earlier stated that marriage was usually virilocal, but there was no strong feeling
that it had to be. If the wife’s situation looked better than the husband’s and her family
wanted them to join them, then they might make the move to her village. Klowi’s father’s
younger brother Tone married a woman from the Weari region and they settled there
with her family. However, his son Lumai made the occasional visit to Wakau maintain-
ing his tie to his father’s Wakau kin and resources. His son Emiyano was away at work
but, Wakau men said, when he returned and wanted to get married, his home village must
find him his wife, not them. The negative sentiment voluntarily voiced to me was that

297
 A Witch’s Hand

Emiyano’s future wife was of no concern to them as neither he nor his father had ever
lived in Wakau. The implication was that although Emiyano’s father had planted sago
and other food trees for him here that he had the right to harvest and, that while he also
had clansmen here, he was not a son of Wakau, thus there were no marital obligations to
him. This also illustrates a related point: the politics of marriage was the responsibility of
a man’s village, as well as that of his clan. Another example of this principle was Engwe’s
marriage, discussed later.
For a Lujere male, “sister exchange” was the choice for finding a mate, not that it was
a hard and fast rule, but that it was the easiest way to get a wife—if you had an eligible
sister. Two men exchanged sisters, what could be simpler? If a man did not have a sister,
there might be other female relatives, perhaps a young widow, who could be exchanged
for a wife. As always, a lot depended on the attributes of the young man—was he a skillful
hunter and industrious?—as marriages were usually negotiations between families as well
as individuals. Finally, if no woman was available for exchange, traditionally shell valu-
ables and pigs or, today, money might be given for a bride. Although a man should not
marry a woman he terms sister, and that includes his female cross and parallel cousins, I
saw instances where the restriction was ignored without any consequences that I could
discern.

Yaope Takes a Bride

I was in Lumi with my family for Christmas when Yaope and Yaowitjha were married,
and I got most of the story from Arakwaki. He told me that he had expected it, as the
two had been very friendly and playful with one another. One evening, neither was in
the village so everyone knew that they were at a bush camp together. In the absence of a
formal Lujere nuptial ritual, when they returned, they would be considered husband and
wife. His bride was Yaowitjha, the spurned wife of Karol. Here is the backstory.
Karol (Waro clan) and Ariawani (Iwaridami clan), both Wakau men, exchanged sis-
ters. When Ariawani’s wife, Karol’s sister, died he remarried and moved to the Iwani
hamlet of Iwarwita, his mother’s hamlet, the same hamlet that Joyce and I visited briefly
where they were mourning a dead man. Karol and Yaowitjha had a baby that died and
then later he abandoned her when he didn’t return home after completing his indentured
laborer contract. Instead, he got a job in a Wewak store, remarried, had two children
and, having been gone for eight years, was not expected to ever return, thus liberating
Yaowitjha in villagers’ eyes to remarry. When I moved to Wakau, Yaowitjha lived with
Akami and Eine’s wives and their children.12 One of her eyes was impaired, but she was
described as having the oft-voiced male Lujere criteria for female youthfulness: a lively
and energetic woman with upright breasts.
When Iwani’s ‘tultul,’ Ariawani learned of his sister’s marriage to Yaope, he twice
stormed into Wakau demanding a woman in exchange for his sister. This in spite of the
fact that the exchange was consummated years ago and his exchange wife, Yaope’s sister,
had died. Both times he came with a blackened face carrying a bow and arrows, striding

12. While Yaowitjha’s husband Karol belonged to the Waro patriclan and Akami and Eine to the
Iwaridami patriclan, the two clans were associates in the upper village iron and in the large
upper land tract across the Sand River, thus providing a tactical link among their wives.

298
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

through the village loudly claiming they owed him a woman. He also threatened to cut
down his coconuts in Wakau if they did not comply with his wish to which their response
was simply “he can cut his trees if he wishes.” The Wakau men expected him to reappear
and laughed as they recalled his storming through the village, adding that in former times
he might have shot at them. As he was a nakwolu—although supposedly reformed when
he became ‘tultul’—their levity barely masked their anxiety regarding any future covert
actions. However, his demanding public incidents were not repeated, the gossip faded
away, and Yaope and Yaowitjha quietly settled into domesticity during my stay.

Threatening Female Abduction

Abducting a woman to be a wife is a last act of desperation when (1) a man has no sister
to exchange, and (2) when a woman has been given but the return has not been honored.
In the first instance, I learned of no actual cases in the past or present. I did hear it be-
ing threatened by frustrated bachelors who, like Samaun, were sisterless. Late one night
when I returned to my office screen room to type up notes, Samaun was standing just
outside and began talking to me. At that time, it was most unusual for him to speak to
me at all, let alone at 10:00 p.m. Eine and Wolwar were outside nearby and what he had
to say was undoubtedly for their benefit too. He said the villagers were starving him; none
of the women would bring him food. He was very angry with all of them and threatened
to kidnap one of the local girls for his wife. He had had enough, and he did sound very
upset and, obviously, was very hungry. The withholding of food, I knew, was the villag-
ers’ punishment for his alleged bringing the ‘kus sik’ [severe colds] upon the village. Poor
Samaun; now he needed a wife not only for the pleasures of sex but to keep from starv-
ing to death. He did not, however, abduct a wife as he knew that was a sure path to the
‘kiap’s jail.
Again, I was struck with the powerful sanction of food the married men had over
the single men in a hamlet where so few of their mothers were living. Once Oria’s five-
year-old daughter Womkau was horsing around in my ‘haus kuk’ with her uncle Nauwen.
Finally, he told her to take off, he had work to do. Then, totally aware of his gastronomic
dependence upon her mother for food, she laughed and said they wouldn’t give him any
sago! That was the place to get a single man—his belly, and little Womkau already knew
the point well.13
Were women ever abducted for a wife or was it just macho posturing? One old case I
learned about involved K____’s daughter, K____, who lived in Mauwi, by mutual agree-
ment married a Wakau widow, but he did not offer a woman in exchange to her male
Wakau kin. Then early one morning before people were awake, a group of Wakau men
went up to Mauwi and, demanding K____’s little daughter, carried her crying down to
Wakau. Eventually she ran back to her father but, after she had grown, she returned to
Wakau as Nakwani’s wife, the exchange finally completed.

13. The controlling of a village’s bachelors’ access to food by the married men is a common way
to keep younger men in their place. Gell, who worked with the Waris speakers in the Border
Mountains west of the Lujere, cites a situation similar to the Lujere noting, “The fact that the
bachelors were economically dependent on the married men was the fundamental sanction in
social control within the hamlet” (Gell 1975: 108).

299
 A Witch’s Hand

Tsaime and Nemia: A Turbulent Nuptial Scenario

The events leading up to Tsaime and Nemia’s marriage and the associated community
fallout including the ‘kiap’s intercession that set up two more marriages was the fodder
for much village gossip and the impetus for new events that I struggled to keep up with.
Ethnologists don’t usually think of themselves as “gossip mongers” but, as crass and ugly
as that expression sounds, that is what we are. Gossip, that is, talk about people’s personal
matters and life events, is the quintessential stuff of good fieldwork. “Gossiping is a thing
that humans do” (Stewart and Strathern, 2020: 21).14 The only way to learn about a so-
ciety and its culture is to move in, make friends, ask questions, keep your eyes open, and
hang out. It is an immersive experience like few others, and certainly not for everyone.
In the field, your quotidian quest is involvement in the minutiae of other people’s eve-
ryday lives—minutiae that would both bore and embarrass you back home. Your role is
one of a shameless snoop prying into other people’s business, constantly eavesdropping
on conversations, asking personal questions, and generally being a busybody, hopefully a
tactful one.
As social scientists, we professionalize this as “participant observation.” The art of
fieldwork is to carry this off without alienating your hosts while gaining insights into
their lifeways to write about when you return home. Fortunately, in nonliterate societies
like the Lujere’s, ethnologists are such weird, ignorant aliens that they exist as one to be
helped and tolerated at times, rather like a slightly annoying child. Anyway, that is the
way I think my Wakau neighbors sometimes perceived me.
The extended scenario of Tsaime and Nemiai’s marriage began on a Friday morning.
At least it was Friday to me and some of the men who, more or less, still kept track of days
and, by the moon, months (but rarely years) from the Western calendar they had learned
about while away at plantation work. Before then the Lujere, other than tracking days,
had neither the interest nor way to divide time into the named seconds, minutes, hours,
weeks, and years, that for a civilized society are a ceaseless obsession.

An aborted elopement

At 10:10 a.m., while I was working in my office screen room, Waniyo’s wife Elewe came
into the upper village exclaiming to all that Tsaime had tried to elope with Leno’s daugh-
ter Nemiai earlier that morning. Nemiai had lived with Elewe and Waniyo since her fa-
ther forbid her to get married. Elewe was en route to work sago with Tsaime’s little sister
Womie, who also lived with her. Earlier, Tsaime had taken a route across the ‘kunai’ then
doubled back through the forest to meet the two. He grabbed ahold of Nemiai’s arm but
she broke loose. He told her to go back home, that he was going to the Yellow River Base
Camp to see the ‘kiap.’ He continued alone and swam the swollen creeks both going and
again, coming home.

14. Stewart and Strathern’s article is important as it unapologetically takes on gossip and rumor
as important categories of action, distinguishes between them and, while noting they may
lend themselves to harmful actions, they “are not necessarily malicious” (Stewart and Strathern
2020: 20; my emphasis).

300
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

Old Leno was in the upper village’s iron, and as soon as he heard Elewe’s alarm, he
emerged from the iron swinging a bush knife and hollering like a pig being blinded. I
immediately turned on my Uher tape recorder and watched Leno storm past my house
where Oria and I were standing, and on down into the lower village plaza to in front of
Tsaime’s iron. Then round and round he went in a counterclockwise circle, stopping to
shout, to chop the air with his knife, then stop again completely to get his breath, as he
was an old man who had just recovered from pneumonia the week before. Grabbing my
Leica, I went down to the iron, and was surprised to see Meyawali inside. I took some
photos of Leno still yelling and circling (as in fig. 30). Then, seeing Ai’ire sitting by some
betel nut trees west of his wife’s house, I joined him to learn what was going on. Just then
the sun came out blazing and we crossed the plaza to find some shade in front of Klowi’s
wife’s house. Leno, with a new spurt of energy, renewed his tirade, and I asked Ai’ire to
translate.

Figure 30. Leno striding angrily by the lower iron, bush knife in hand.

Leno declared that when his wife was sick and dying and they lived in a bush house
under Mauwi hill, no one from Wakau came to help him, that he had to do all of the
work and caretaking just like a woman. When he first raged into the plaza he was yelling
about sago, saying that Klowi and his clansmen didn’t have any sago of their own—that
they cut the sago palms of others for food. Thus, he fumed, if his daughter went to live

301
 A Witch’s Hand

with Tsaime, where would they get their sago to eat? This was a big status insult indicat-
ing that their fathers didn’t provide for them, so they allegedly had to steal others’ food
trees. Leno, exhausted, despondent, and breathing heavily, switching to Tok Pisin said to
no one in particular, “‘Mi lapun nogut!’” that is, “I’m a worthless old man!” Ai’ire turned to
me saying, “’Bipor em i bikhet tru,’” meaning he used to be a truly stubborn and arrogant
troublemaker; and I was reminded of the stories I already had heard about his temper, his
fighting, and his exploits as a feared ‘sangumaman.’
I took a few more photos, including one of Yaope’s new wife, Yaowitjha, crossing
the plaza in a native skirt, then returned home. Leno eventually came by, exchanged a
few quiet words with Oria, and went on up to the iron. Early in the afternoon I decided
to wander up towards the iron to see what was up if anything. It was almost too quiet.
Leno was sitting on the iron’s veranda, and he acknowledged my presence, but we didn’t
talk. My friend Kaiera came to the doorway, his pitiful eyes shifting around looking in
the wrong direction. We visited a bit then I went down to the lower iron, but none of
the men were there. Aria had followed me down and we watched a mother hen with her
clutch of six-day-old baby chicks. They belonged to Klowi’s wife, Wawenowaki. Someone
had broken a big ant’s nest into five sections, skewered them onto a stick, which the hen
vigorously attacked to make food for herself and her brood.
Around 3:30, I was working intently in my office screen room tent on my blasted,
fouled-up Hitachi tape recorder when I sensed a body standing by the tent screen. Glanc-
ing up I saw Tsaime, his face painted completely black and holding out an envelope to-
ward me. I was surprised, startled really. I quickly went outside; he was breathing heavily
and seemed very upset. A short while before Eine, who was on my porch, said he had
heard someone cry out and thought it must be Tsaime. The envelope contained a note
to me from Ray, the ‘kiap,’ that said he had instructed Tsaime to bring all of the parties
to the marital dispute to the base camp tomorrow and wondered if Tsaime had had sex
with the girl. Tsaime was actually shaking, I didn’t know if it was anger, emotional trauma,
or what. I finally got a brief smile from him—he usually was an extremely pleasant and
positive young man whom I liked a lot—and knew things were under control. Then he
showed me a wooden baton embedded above the handle with a bright silver coin bearing
the Queen’s portrait (fig. 31). None of the men or youths who had gathered had ever seen
anything like it, nor had I. Tsaime was instructed to give it to Leno who was to person-
ally return it to the ‘kiap’ tomorrow; it was apparently a kind of bush subpoena to assure
Leno’s presence. There was no discussion of the events by the men around me, just that
the ‘kiap’ would have court tomorrow and hear the sides.
Earlier Oria told me that Nemiai had wanted to marry Tsaime when he returned from
his contract work, but Klowi would not allow it. The reason was that Klowi’s brother’s
son, Ai’ire, earlier had eloped with Leno’s stepdaughter, Miwali, without an exchange. It
would be wrong for them to take his very own daughter too. Tsaime, much against his
will, had obeyed Klowi—his father’s younger and only living brother—who had helped
raise him after his parents died. Around 5:00, Klowi arrived carrying his shotgun, appar-
ently back from hunting, saying that Leno had just threatened him with burning down
his house. Oria reminded him about the importance of the gun and hunting game for us
all; it was obvious that Klowi was trying to behave himself and not put his gun license
in jeopardy. Klowi, looking at me laughingly, said, ‘Mi man nogut’ (I’m a bad man). Nau-
wen came up on the porch, saw his friend Tsaime’s blackened face and, beaming widely,

302
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

Figure 31. Tsaimi, face blackened to express his powerful emotions, holds the ‘kiap’ baton inlaid
with the Queen’s coin portrait to give to Leno.

reached out to shake his hand. It was a poignant gesture because all the others who had
come to see Tsaime had a questioning gaze when they saw his fiercely blackened face
connoting frighteningly strong feelings. After everyone was gone, I hurriedly began typ-
ing up my notes before something else occurred.
Glancing up just after 6:30, I saw Klowi marching strongly past my house carrying an
axe over his shoulder, then on up past the iron where Leno was sitting on the veranda, on
towards the top of the village, turn around, and head back down towards the old, dilapi-
dated iron. All the time he was talking out loudly to Leno, declaring that these problems
are because Leno would not exchange his daughters in marriage. Next, I noticed Tsaime
walking towards the front of the old iron and quietly standing there. Leno then swung
into action, lecturing Tsaime that it was his sago that his mother fed him when he was
growing up, that it was he, Leno, who was responsible for his food, growth, and eventual
maturity.
Noticing Klowi’s axe, Leno announced that Klowi wanted to cut him with it, but
Klowi answered, no, he used it to cut ‘hap pos.’ This was meaningless to me; later I asked
Mangko what Klowi was talking about. As he explained, I gradually began to understand
that this was all an extension of an old family feud and, at the same time was also gain-
ing insights into why the Wakau men abandoned their big common iron. According to

303
 A Witch’s Hand

Mangko, who was the eldest son of Klowi’s dead big brother, the ‘hap pos’ was a piece of
a post of Klowi’s father’s house in the old settlement across the Sand River, that Oria’s
father Limeritjo with Luritsao had burned down. Exactly why, he didn’t explain. But
at least I was learning that this was a society that expressed ultimate anger by torching
property. A burning house is a terrific inferno; thus, most of the villagers, seeking safety
from the flames of the blazing house and escalating tempers, had taken off for their bush
camps. But there was another even larger firestorm. Leno had set fire to the big iron of
Klowi’s father’s Elemoli clan, because Tsaime’s father, Iwak, had married Leno’s sister
Mamau, without a woman to offer in exchange. In other words, just as Tsaime’s father
eloped with Leno’s sister, Tsaime now wanted to elope with Leno’s daughter. The differ-
ence, and it was a major one, was that Tsaime’s father had no sister to offer in exchange,
but Tsaime did.
Leno and Klowi were still engaged in an extended back and forth shouting match, but
it was getting too dark to see them easily, so I stayed with a few men who had gathered
on my veranda, taking notes while Nauwen translated. At almost 7:00, old Aiyuk, totally
ignoring the shouting men, walked within a foot or two of Leno and past several unflap-
pable children still playing on the dirt plaza. Nimo, Waniyo’s younger brother, walked
up to where Tsaime was still standing and, talking with him, seemed to disapprove of
Tsaime’s actions and was supporting Leno. Tsaime explained that the reason he tried to
elope with Nemiai was that everyone was saying that she was bringing him sago to eat—
a public sign that she favored him—and that they were married, so he decided that he
would marry her!
Nimo walked up to my house smiling; his older brother Waniyo and younger brother
Engwe were still hunting in the big bush. Leno, now extremely agitated, began dancing
around snapping his fingers as if shooting arrows from a bow and shouting. Klowi’s irate
wife was standing in front of my house emphatically exclaiming to Leno that she gets
her sago from her own mother, not from him! Tsaime, his face still blackened, had retired
to my ‘haus kuk’ where we could hear him softly singing a love lament like a gracious ob-
bligato to all the squabbling.
It was now quite dark, but still light enough to write as a shaft of dying sunlight hit
where I was sitting. Leno had gone back towards the upper iron, children were still play-
ing around, and Wolwar’s wife was breaking some firewood, when Klowi came up on my
veranda. He commented that he shot no game today; there was too much village dissen-
sion. It was the same, Nauwen added, when the Mauwi ‘tultul’ stormed into the village
angry over Yaope’s marriage; Klowi’s gun misfired then too.
Klowi returned to the plaza and, walking towards the upper iron, called out to Leno to
strike Tsaime; he was granting Leno permission to give his paternal nephew a beating. It
was not a taunting suggestion, but genuine, telling him to strike Tsaime with a stick, but
Leno declined, saying he didn’t want to be jailed if he bloodied his head. Throughout, and
in the background, Tsaime continued softly singing, over and over again, his love lament.
Nauwen told me that just before the argument this evening, Tsaime said that he was
keeping Nemiai regardless! He added that Nimo also told Leno that he couldn’t support
him anymore; that it was he, Nimo, who should have married Nemiai, not Tsaime. His
complaint was that he had given Leno’s daughters gifts of game many times, yet Leno
would not let him marry Nemiai. Instead, although a young man, he had to marry a
middle-aged woman (Anwani’s twice-widowed sister Aidwapi) and that was not right!

304
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

I was getting dizzy trying to follow all the unexpected permutations that kept arising.
It was now seven-twenty and completely dark; Leno was at Mowal’s house quietly visit-
ing and a few men were still at my place chatting and discussing the confrontations. It
seemed like a good time to go inside, have a strong shot of dark rum, and a warm shower.
Later that evening I visited a bit with Tsaime and Nauwen at the ‘haus kuk.’ Tsaime
had made our place his headquarters during this time of strain. He told Nauwen that he
told Klowi that he would burn down their iron if Klowi forbid him to marry Nemiai; he
was the one who built it and the others just moved in. Speaking to both of us, he said that
Leno had gone to his bush house for the night but it was just so he could work ‘sanguma’
on him. He declared that every time that Leno was angry, he left the village to do his
‘sanguma,’ then added, “I’m not afraid.”
I wondered aloud if Leno ever got the “Queen’s baton,” but they said that he would
not accept it; that he would not go to the Yellow River court tomorrow. Tsaime stayed
the night with Nauwen in my ‘haus kuk’; that was unusual, but it had been a very unusual
day for Tsaime. It was late and I was in my office typing when at 10:30, Eine came by.
I thought he probably had new developments. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear, but it was
just village gossip. He blamed Samaun’s ‘poisin’ for the return of his bad cold. After he
worked in his garden the day of the big rain, it was severe again. He added that Samaun
is disgusted because Tsaime is getting a wife and he still has not been given one. But, Eine
added, who would want him as a husband? He can’t hunt or find food; all he can do night
and day is to sleep!
By 8:35 a.m. on Saturday, Tsaime, Oria, Mangko, and I had left the village and were
crossing the ‘kunai’ on our way to the base camp for the ‘kiap’s hearing. I had stressed that
I was going along for the hike, and that this was their concern and I would stay out of it.
Just before we left the village, Leno came to my house to say he had ‘sotwin’ and couldn’t
go. Then just as we were leaving the lower plaza, Klowi came up to me saying he had sores
and couldn’t go, showing me an old one on his rear and a supposedly new one on his inner
thigh. I was noncommittal to both men, but it was obvious that Tsaime was the only man
who wanted his day in the ‘kiap’s court.

A stick fight

From out on the ‘kunai’ we saw Tsaime’s sister, Wabe, starting down the hill from Wakau
towards us, then a figure left the distant ‘kunai’ house, Waniyo’s and Nimo’s wives’ home,
and it was Nemiai. Looking back and up toward the village, I saw Leno waving a long
stick rushing down the incline to the ‘kunai,’ yelling loudly for his daughter Nemiai to
stay where she was. Tsaime called out once telling her to keep coming, but it would be
easy for Leno to cut off her path to us. Nemiai turned around and started back to Wani-
yo’s house. Oria did some yelling, but it looked like Leno had won the day. Then I saw a
man carrying his bow and a big clutch of arrows approaching us on the Mauwi path. It
was Kowali, the man who had distributed the food at a Mauwi na wowi healing festival
I had filmed. As he approached, he called out that he knew all about our troubles and
that he would straighten out Leno, adding that the problem was that he prevented his
daughters from marrying. Leno was now out of sight and, Kowali and the little boy with
him, continued on toward Wakau. Kowali was on his way to see his sick niece Sakome
who lived alone with her five children and whose husband Waripe was away working.

305
 A Witch’s Hand

It was the first I had heard that she was delirious with fever. Nauwen later told me that
when Kowali met up with Leno in the village, Leno tried to grab Kowali’s weapons, but
Nauwen held him firm, telling him that if he fought him, he would take him to court and
send him to jail. Someone held Kowali’s weapons for him, then he started down the other
path to the ‘kunai’ house where Nemiai was, shouting all the way.
My little group was still standing out on the ‘kunai’ when we saw Kowali leave the
‘kunai’ house followed by Nemiai and Wabe; Nemiai walked with her left arm raised and
her hand to her forehead, looking down as she walked along towards us. Leno now re-
ally incensed and hollering again came charging down the incline with his stick heading
directly for Kowali. Nakwane had appeared and went down the other path to the ‘kunai’
house. Leno, running across the ‘kunai’ to Kowali, began to strike him with his long stick
but Kowali grabbed it and the two men began to grapple with it. The girls, obviously
alarmed, started back towards the ‘kunai’ house. Too far away to intervene or photograph,
we continued to watch, as did a group of villagers from Wakau. I wished for my zoom
Leica lens to record this unusual encounter, the first and only traditional stick fighting I
saw during my stay.
Nakwane was now on the path with the girls; Kowali and Leno had ceased their
struggle with the stick and Kowali began walking towards us while Leno went towards
the ‘kunai’ house. As we continued observing, Newai, a bright-eyed youth that Mangko
looked after, joined us. His parents lived in Mauwi, but he came as a child to live in
Wakau with his mothers’ kin. Then with the girls and Nakwane in the lead, we continued
across the ‘kunai’ plain until we met its edge and Nakwane turned back toward Wakau.
Moving into the forest we proceeded in a line: Nemiai, Wabe, Mangko, me, Oria, Newai
and Tsaime last. It was now 9:00 a.m.; the “stick fight confrontation” had taken twenty-
five minutes. We proceeded to the base camp without further incident, except that with
much of the path under water, it was sloppy going.

The patrol officer’s court

We arrived around 11:00 and Ray was conducting an adultery trial of a young man from
Aukwom who had sex with a young married woman in the back of her house. Phillip
appeared a bit later and it was one of his Bible students; he was very discouraged. “It is
always the same,” he said. I told him that White Christians are adulterous too, but that
was scant consolation to him. After I had lunch with Ray, Tsaime and the others gath-
ered with the ‘kiap’ in an informal session on the steps of his office but without Leno’s
presence, Ray could not proceed. Since the authority of the “Queen’s baton” had failed to
bring in Leno, Ray decided to send his corporal with Mangko to Wakau to fetch him and
set the following day to hear the dispute.
The next morning, Sunday, we were all back on or near Ray’s office steps, including
Leno, for an informal arbitration session, but to the Wakau group this was ‘kot’ (“court”)
and the decision of the ‘kiap’ would be binding (fig. 32). The session lasted about fifteen
minutes; but first, Ray asked Mangko to interpret for Leno. Ray began with a reprimand
to Leno for not returning the baton as he was told to do. When Leno said that he didn’t
see it, the ‘kiap’ knew that was a lie and angrily yelled at him. Ray had little to ask Tsaime,
Nemiai, and Wabe as he had questioned them earlier; he knew they wanted to marry and
that Tsaime’s sister, Wabe, was available as an exchange. Ray tried to draw out Leno but

306
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

had little luck beyond Leno’s comment that when his first daughter eloped, a woman was
not returned in exchange.

Figure 32. Leno and Tsaime at PO Lanaghan’s informal court.

Having heard the parties’ views, Ray concluded there was no reason why Tsaime and
Nemiai should not be married, then gave Leno a gentle lecture. “‘Mi givim lik lik tok
long yu papa,’” saying that Leno can’t fight Tsaime or others regarding this marriage, that
it is a time to be happy, not to fight. It was cold, rainy, and windy on Ray’s small porch
and Leno, standing in front of the ‘kiap,’ was shaking. Ray noticed and recommended
that he visit the aid post before he returned home, which he did. Then he gave Leno a
stick of coveted twist tobacco as a kind of consolation prize. (Later Ray told me he does
this so it “doesn’t leave a man stripped”; this was his idea, not ‘kiap’ policy.) Looking at
Tsaime, Ray told him he can’t ‘bik het long Leno,’ that he must respect him, as Leno was
his father now.
Ray then discovered that the man to marry Wabe didn’t yet know about the arrange-
ment and, Tsaime added, that they could not complete the marriage exchanges until
next week. Ray approved as that gave Leno time to get used to the idea of his daughter’s
marriage and to cool down his anger. Tsaime, Nemiai, and Wabe then left for Wakau,
but Mangko, Oria, and I decided to wait until the drizzle stopped and the sun came out.
But this was New Guinea, and finally, with no sign of sun and the drizzle turning into

307
 A Witch’s Hand

a slight rain, we started for home. At a bush camp on the Inarlit River we met Tsaime’s
group, then together, contented if wet, we tramped over the felled tree bridge, and on to
Wakau.15
Colonialism was a paternalistic, exploitative, authoritarian and, vis-a-vis the Lujere,
often totalitarian system that, regardless of my dislike of it, I could inveigh against only in
silence as the administration controlled both my presence in the country and access to do
research. In spite of how I sometimes felt regarding Ray’s actions to the locals, today I was
impressed with how he, a young foreigner to the Lujere, had carefully used his imposing
authority to resolve a community problem that he didn’t seek out, but was brought to him
by a frustrated young man. And his gift of a twist of coveted trade tobacco to old Leno
was a genuine stroke of compassion.
Once home and removing my water-soaked boots, I heard a loud voice from the lower
village and inspecting, saw Waniyo parading back and forth grasping his bow and some
arrows and declaring loudly in Namia. Yesterday his wife had gone into the bush to tell
him about Tsaime’s attempt to elope with Nemiai, hence his return. Now he was angry
with Nemiai as she had been living with his family for several years since running away
from Leno’s home; it was he, he said, who had given her a home and taken care of her.
He threatened to beat her—or at least Nemiai thought so—and had furtively run away
from the village.
I was reviewing these events with Oria and Nauwen later on my back veranda when
Waniyo and Nimo’s younger brother, Engwe, unexpectedly joined us. I had heard gossip
that Engwe was to be Wabe’s husband but now I learned it wasn’t just gossip. In his quiet,
withdrawn, odd way, Engwe surprisingly said, “No,” he didn’t want to marry Wabe. He
explained that they had more or less grown up together; that their relationship was too
close. He wanted, he said, to use her to exchange for a wife, that is, to exchange her as if
she were his sister. The idea apparently originated with Klowi. I could only think, where
will this saga go next? And who will be his bride?
Earlier when Tsaime learned that Nemiai had disappeared he asked to borrow a flash-
light as I had the only ones in the village or, at least, the only ones with batteries that
worked. He wanted to try and find where she had gone. Of course, I agreed. He found
her alone at Leno’s house out of the village and they spent the night, their wedding night,
there together.

Klowi’s stern lectures

Life in the village, however, continued to be unpredictably eventful. The next evening af-
ter dark, Monday, I heard a commotion down in the lower plaza and went to investigate.
As discussed in chapter 11, Ai’ire, to my surprise, had struck his wife Miwali. But the
big commotion in the lower plaza was Klowi’s peripatetic lecture with several things on
his mind. The primary subject was his disapproval of Tsaime’s attempt to marry Nemiai;
he repeated that his younger brother’s son Ai’ire already had eloped with one of Leno’s

15. When I first moved to Wakau there was no passage over the Inarlit; after heavy rain, the small
river rose perceptively preventing my exit in case of an emergency or carriers accessing mail
and supplies from the base camp area. Mangko, ever resourceful and helpful, cut a large ‘erima’
tree (Octomeles sumatrana) on its banks to bridge the flowing water.

308
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

daughters, and now his nephew, Tsaime, went after the last one. Besides, he was insulted
that Leno said they stole his sago and were squatting on his land; only the last allegation
was new to me. Oria said Klowi also had a few things to say about young people today
who thought only about sex, especially boys who get an erection and the girls who then
let them have intercourse. He railed on in the plaza, striding as he spoke, while the men
sat in the iron, and the women in Ai’ire’s wife’s house. His tone was not of ranting anger,
something he was certainly capable of, but that of a stern self-righteous lecturer.
Having completed his rebukes for the lower village, Klowi came up the rise to the up-
per village and, standing near my house, gave a second lecture that could be easily heard
by both sections of the village. This one was to remind everyone the negative effect that
the current village bickering and arguing had on hunting with his shotgun. That was why
he had no luck hunting again today. Unei already had told me that yesterday Klowi shot
at two wild pigs and did not kill either one.
Later, I asked several men regarding the impact, if any, that village arguments had on
bow-and-arrow hunting and was not surprised to receive different diffident answers. This
obviously wasn’t a topic that had a codified belief attached to it and fit my developing
view of the culture as “loose” in terms of the number of normative constraints explaining
and shaping everyday life. This was very different from the Wape who firmly believed that
in village arguments the wronged protagonist’s ancestor’s intervened to ruin the other
man’s hunt, be it with a bow or shotgun (Mitchell 1973). In just the few weeks since the
gun had arrived, Klowi had espoused this “guns and village goodness” perspective; per-
haps this was the way societies evolved their theories of behavior. I seemed to be observ-
ing the creation of a new belief about “guns and goodness” and the negative consequences
of village dissension on the food supply.

The bow-and-arrow confrontation

Tuesday morning started quietly with the exception that, Nauwen and Oria’s sister, who
was married to the allegedly lazy licensed gun owner in Mauwi, had an argument with
her husband and leaving him in anger, had come down the hill to Wakau. Shortly before
11:00 a.m., Klowi came out of the upper iron talking crossly and proceeded through the
village to the lower iron, returning with an axe (again? I thought); he was undeniable
furious and yelling fiercely. My small 16 mm camera lay nearby loaded with film and I
wanted to follow and film him, but I was hesitant as I was unclear about what was hap-
pening. He also seemed unpredictably angry, and I recalled an early murderous story, later
unsubstantiated, I had heard about him: that he had killed his first child when she was
about five, ate her lower lip, and drank her blood in connection with assuming some of
his ‘sanguma’ powers.
Marching up to Yaope’s new house, Klowi began chopping at the house posts, contin-
uing his enraged shouting, then went to the front of the iron and swung his axe at the log
steps. Tsaime appeared and quietly took his uncle’s axe from him. By this time, the men
in the iron were coming outside and soon everyone in the village was out of their houses
to see what was happening; some had gathered in front of my house. The next thing I
noticed was Klowi marching with his bow and arrows. It was 11:05 a.m. and, finally
emboldened, I grabbed the cine camera, a notebook and, throwing the strap of my Leica
camera around my neck, joined the confused throng and began filming. The atmosphere

309
 A Witch’s Hand

was ominously charged, unlike anything I had experienced in fieldwork before. Then I
saw the brothers Waniyo, Nimo, and Engwe aggressively entering the plaza carrying their
bows and clutches of arrows amid a din of men’s voices shouting and arguing. The shout-
ing was mostly in Namia so I could only guess that it was more emotional fallout from
Tsaime’s marriage.
Klowi was now on the iron’s porch and the three irate brothers surrounded Tsaime.
Nimo threateningly pulled his bowstring back slightly marking Tsaime’s feet with an ar-
row. Nakwani gesticulating, approached Tsaime; Klowi had gone inside and then more
men, including the armed and angry brothers, also went inside the iron. By eleven-eight-
een, the shouting had died down; the angry confrontation was ended. Nakwane came over
to me declaring that I must notify the patrol officer in Yellow River and have the men put
in jail. I told him it was not my fight, I just lived here and besides, I didn’t even know what
was going on! He said that the brothers Waniyo, Nimo, and Engwe wanted a different
sister exchange than the one decided on, and that when Klowi heard this, it angered him.
When the angry men, both inside and outside, calmed down, the mood around the
plaza was unexpectedly mellow, like a crowd after a boxing match. More people than
usual were still outside, so on my way home I took photos of the smiling girls sitting
on Kwaien’s house porch, then of Mari and his family at his house, and old Leno going
up the men’s house ladder that Klowi had chopped at. Some of the men had come back
outside the iron and I saw Klowi, Kaiera, Tsaime, Yaope, Aiyuk, Aria, and Alomiaiya all
on the porch. Luritsao was standing on the ground below them with his toddler jauntily
on his shoulders. Klowi and Leno were arguing—of course—but in a controlled way. Lit-
tle Menetjua, playing near where I was standing, fell down hard but didn’t cry. I snapped
a quick photo then brushed the sand off his face. I finished the movie film on the three
young girls on Kwaien’s porch and it ended with little Menetjua suddenly running to-
wards the camera and me.
As I was walking home, Luritsao joined me, saying I must not listen to Nakwane’s talk
to report the men’s argument to the ‘kiap.’ I assured him that I would not, that I didn’t
come to live with them to cause trouble but to learn their ways. Klowi followed me to my
‘haus kuk’ where he sat down smiling, relaxed and happy; Mari was already there quietly
smoking his two-piece Lujere pipe.
Tsaime came by a few days later, as I was finishing typing up my notes on the “bow-
and-arrow” confrontation, so I interviewed him on his views of what had happened, and
they jibed with Oria’s. In brief, Klowi was at the upper iron when Yaope told him that
some of the men were saying that Engwe should marry Wewani (Ai’ire’s half-sister) and
that Engwe preferred this too. This incensed Klowi as he already had said that Tsaime’s
sister Wabe would be given in exchange for Nemiai, Leno’s daughter. When Klowi came
with the axe, Yaope told him to chop down the iron, as it was his anyway. The chopping
was not to express anger at Yaope but to the other men; as Yaope was Klowi’s mamaru
he had to support Klowi whose argument was that Wewani was not yet a grown woman,
hence could not get married to anyone. It was Wabe and that was that! The reason the
three brothers surrounded Tsaime was because they had not expressed their anger at him
for “stealing” their mothers’ brother’s daughter, Nemiai. Nimo was especially incensed
over this. Feeling cheated with a twice-widowed middle-aged wife, he aimed, but didn’t
shoot, an arrow at Tsaime’s feet. Nakwane then got into the act telling them to all calm
down and get this thing settled.

310
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

A rained-out political meeting

Early the same evening, a young, handsome, and compelling man from Tipas, also named
Yaope, came to Wakau to campaign for an Ambunti man running for the House of As-
sembly. He called a meeting and the villagers gradually gathered by gender in the lower
village shortly before dark; the males on the iron’s narrow veranda and in near proximity
while the females were mostly sitting randomly in the plaza. While waiting I chatted
with Nauwen, who said that Engwe’s wanting Wewani for a wife was impossible as she
was Unei’s sister and must be exchanged for his wife. Smiling, he added that Leno told
Nakwane that he wanted Wabe to go to Kunai, of all people, but everyone agreed that he
was too old for her.
The meeting began with Yaope inferring that he had been sent by the ‘kiap,’ (not true)
and that he could arbitrate our marriage problems that he had heard about, adding, ar-
rogantly I thought, that if we don’t get this Tsaime matter settled, he would report us to
the ‘kiap,’ and that, if we don’t settle this matter now, it will end up in court and some of
us will go to jail. He exclaimed that he found Tsaime’s ‘lain’ in the clear; that he personally
had many sisters and did not demand an exchange or money for them; he just let them
get married as they wished. Then he intimated that the ‘kiap’ will ‘kot’ Gwidami village
because they did not show up for his meeting but were all away in the bush. By then, I
was beginning to find this self-important guy to be a royal pain. He also tried to get Nau-
wen’s sister to ‘kot’ her husband, but she replied she wouldn’t do it; she felt sorry for him.
During Yaope’s arrogant speech making, I finished a roll of black-and-white film on
our gathering. It started to rain, then heavily, and everyone ran for cover. I dashed up
the wet incline towards home in my flip-flops, slipped, fell awkwardly, and was splayed
across the muddy path, unhurt but a mess. When I had cleaned up, I joined Nauwen
who was cooking dinner. He said that Mari once told him that Yaope’s new wife, Ya-
owitjha, desired him but he didn’t want her because of her bad eye. Klowi, just the day
before, also told Nauwen that Nemiai had wanted him and had brought him sago. Nau-
wen was surprised that Klowi mentioned this to him. Regardless, Nauwen said that he
had forbidden any woman to come to the ‘haus kuk’ at night (where he liked to sleep
instead of the iron) because he was afraid of the gossip that would be directed towards
him. Marriage, as it often did, occupied Nauwen’s mind, but unfortunately, he had no
sister to exchange.

The closing nuptial exchange

Finally, Engwe’s marital exchange was established; his wife would come from Mauwi, not
Wakau, so in all, there were three couples married, not just two. Here is how it worked.
Instead of Engwe accepting Tsaime’s sister Wabe, he gave her to Waien of Mauwi and
Waien gave his sister, Warare, to Engwe. Although all three marriages were affected by
the sister exchanges, the ritual ‘ring-moni’ exchange would be between just Engwe’s and
Kwaien’s brothers. It was agreed that rather than the traditional exchange of shell wealth,
each side would collect about twenty dollars from kinsmen and villagers and, after the
exchange of coins and bills, each contributor to the exchange would receive back the exact
amount he had “donated.” This kind of exchange—where wealth changes hands while as-
suring the maintenance of the status quo—was a clever way to economically involve the

311
 A Witch’s Hand

grooms’ kinsmen and friends as supporters of his marriage but without anyone actually
giving away anything of value. In American slang, these were wedding gifts, “not.”
I was told that the money exchange for Engwe’s marriage would probably occur the
following day, but it didn’t. It was just over a month later before it happened. The day
before, Nauwen and Oria took our contributions down to Waniyo’s house. I gave two
dollars, Oria five dollars, and Nauwen five dollars and ninety cents: a total of twelve dol-
lars and ninety cents or, ‘sikispela paun na nainpela siling.’ When they returned, Oria said
that Waniyo was very impressed and pleased. He told Oria, “Bill’s boys gave the most!”
The exchange would be the following day in Mauwi; I wanted to go but Betty Gillam,
the CMML missionary nurse based in Lumi who earlier with Jalman had conducted
the health clinic and, at my request, weighed and measured all the Wakau villagers, was
making her last hike out to Wakau and returning back to the mission before dark. For
that earlier visit I had put her up in my office tent on one of the children’s comfort-
able cots. This time she had planned to come out Saturday and return Sunday but had
received a note before she left from one of the mission women asking her, please not to.
She didn’t want Betty’s Wakau visit to harm the “witness of the mission” in the area by
staying overnight in my house. If she did decide to stay over, her colleague asked her to
sleep in a native house. But if she did that, having been a guest in my house before, vil-
lagers might wonder what happened that I had thrown her out! I marveled that all of
this moral hectoring out in the middle of “nowhere” was about villagers with not a single
Christian among them. It was what my Kansas mother would have called being “nasty
nice”—an old expression indicating that a speaker’s moral rectitude did not mask her
dissolute thoughts.
Initially I was more amused than affronted by the mission’s self-righteous prudery, but
Betty was very provoked and probably hurt that her colleagues would so seriously ques-
tion her judgment. As a result, she had decided to come out just for the day and would
do no more infant welfare patrols in the area. Betty arrived the next morning around 9:00
and, as planned, we spent most of the day discussing the Lujere; she was seeking informa-
tion to use as a participant in an upcoming missionary culture conference in Lumi. Just
then, it seemed there were no two foreigners who knew more about the Lujere than we
did, she clinically, me ethnographically, and who never tired talking about them. In spite
of the mission’s officiousness, it was a day of delight for each of us. In the meantime, while
Betty and I were conferring about the Lujere, the less abstract exchange of Engwe’s mar-
riage money happened up in Mauwi without a hitch. The system worked and, eventually,
I even got my two dollars back.

Nauwen and Kunai’s Marital Woes

When Nauwen returned from his second term as an indentured laborer the year before
I arrived, old Nanu of Iwani’s Aukwom hamlet on the Sepik, sent word to him that he
had a daughter Nauwen could marry if he would send him ‘bilas,’ that is, new clothes
or ornaments, apparently as an act of good faith. Nauwen gave Nanu a small amount of
money, a good knife, and a new waistcloth, among a few other items. Then later the word
came back to him that the deal was off, that only another woman in exchange would be
satisfactory. Nauwen was disgusted because he had been swindled. He showed me a let-
ter he had written to the licensed gun owner in Aukwom asking him to find out Nanu’s

312
 Clanship, Kinship, and Marriage

intentions. He periodically talked about taking Nanu to court to get his money back but
for some reason, seemed very cautious. When I left Wakau, nothing had happened.
Kunai, slight, funny-faced, and humorous, was also vexed by Nanu’s behavior as he
was the ‘waspapa’ or foster father of Leaurwe, a Mauwi woman Kunai wanted to marry.
She was originally married to a Mauwi man in a sister exchange, but he did not like her,
went off as an indentured laborer, and never returned. Kunai had no respect for Leaurwe,
called her a ‘bladi puk puk meri,’ that is, a bloody ugly woman, who was almost an old
woman to him as her breasts had just recently fallen down. Kunai was clear that he didn’t
want to marry her so much for sex, but to have someone to prepare his food for him. But
neither Nanu nor her brother Kowlie would give her to him. Kowlie was so disgusted
with Kunai’s constant badgering him regarding marrying his sister that a Mauwi woman
reported that he wouldn’t visit Wakau anymore.
One day in December after lunch, Kunai came by and, as I was visiting with Nauwen
and Kunai, each explained their “girl” problem; they wanted me to know as each hoped
to bring it up to the ‘kiap’ if he came on patrol. Kunai then launched into a negative
lecture—as only he would do—on how backward the Iwani villagers were, that all of
the other villages both trade and buy women, but we only want to trade sisters like our
ancestors. And, if you try to buck the system, you might get killed by ‘sanguma.’ Now
really wound up, he self-abusively exclaimed, “Mipela kanaka yet; mipela no savi gut, no
sindaun gut; no harim tok bilong misin nau ol masta; mipela no skulim gut yet,” in other
words, “We are just bush Natives, we don’t understand how to behave, we don’t listen to
what the missionaries or other White men tell us, we are uneducated.”
No anthropologist wants to hear colonialist-inspired self-deprecating remarks from
his informant friends. Fortunately, Kunai quickly switched expressive gears into a hu-
morous, even silly, mode. He began making funny but disparaging remarks about the
woman he desires, that her skin was like that of a snake, then tops that with, that it was
more like the leg of a cassowary! Nauwen and I couldn’t help but laugh at his outrageous
descriptions of the woman he wanted to marry—but never would. Informants like Kunai
are somewhat rare in my New Guinea experience. If they appear a bit unhinged, it’s as if
they lack the usual censors to keep the culture’s id in check. If you listen, sometimes you
can learn a lot.

313
chapter thirteen

Into the Bush: The Quest for Food

The Lujere people literally subsist by interaction within their forest.

Elizabeth “Betty” Gillam, CMML nurse (1983: 8)

They live on a diet of sago and game with small quantities

of green vegetables collected from the bush.
PO R. K. Treutlein, (1962: 14)

The Lujere’s iconic ecological niches, ‘bus,’ ‘baret,’ and ‘tais’ (forest, creeks, and swamps),
are each a significant food source.1 The forest was the primary location for Lujere gar-
dens and the game and birds they hunted. The creeks and ponds contained fish and frogs
and the swampland was the thriving domain for sago palms. As the Lujere had a surfeit
of land to exploit, a relatively industrious family should never go hungry. Still, the nutri-
tional value of much of their diet was often sorely lacking. The two staple foods of the
Lujere were sago (na), processed from the sago palm, and bananas (nar). Almost every
meal was based around one or the other; thus, if you ate bananas with a meal, you would
not also eat sago, like we don’t eat rice with potatoes. Although more meals were centered
on sago starch, it is notoriously lacking in food values excepting carbohydrates where it
excels. Betty Gillam, one of the CMML nurses during my fieldwork that you already
have met and who later made two important studies on Lujere nutrition (Gillam 1983,
1996), nicely summarizes the Lujere approach to food getting:2

1. The fourth important ecological niche, the ‘kunai’ or expansive wet grasslands, were not a sig-
nificant source of food. However, during a dry period, a section of a ‘kunai’ might be set afire
to rout out any small animals for slaughter.
2. This section has benefited from Betty Gillam’s (1983, 1996) detailed Lujere nutritional studies
plus our conversations about her understanding of their food ways gleaned from her numer-
ous maternal and childcare health patrols to their villages.

315
 A Witch’s Hand

When the Lujere people work at obtaining food they do not divide their time equally
among tasks. If the weather pattern is not too hot and fine they will go hunting. When
the rivers are low they fish; they will prepare a garden when it has not rained for a
while. Gathering seems to persist in all weathers, as does the processing of sago. (Gil-
lam 1983: 82)

Sago, the Lujere Staff of Life

Classifying sago is a rather slippery act as it has an ambiguous identity. Is sago horticul-
ture, foraging, silviculture, all of these, or perhaps something else? I once seriously raised
this question (Mitchell 1991), but here my interest is solely in the place of sago in the
Lujere food chain. As it has a unique and major role in Lujere food practices, how it is
classified is immaterial. More significant is that the Lujere recognize seventeen named
varieties of domesticated sago as well as the wild sago palm, each identifiable according
to a palm’s color, size, thorns, leaves, and ecological setting, for instance.3 Digging up a
shoot and transplanting it in a wet area propagates any variety. Pests avoid it and it has
no known diseases. A palm takes from ten to fifteen years to mature at which time it is
felled just before efflorescence when the starch within the trunk is at maximum. A single
sago palm will produce from 200 to 700 pounds of sago flour and, while it is superlative as
an energy provider, it fails as a nutritional source (Lea 1972: 14–15). In the Sepik region
men usually fell the palm and women process all sago varieties the same way. Here is a
classic and succinct description of sago processing:

Men fell a sago palm, and when the trunk is lying on the ground the bark is removed
to expose the pith which is dug out from the trunk. The men or their wives then carry
the pith to a washing trough set up at the edge of the nearest stream. In the trough
the pith is kneaded with water to release flour from the fibre. Suspended in water, the
sago flour passes through a crude filter lower down the trough into a container below.
It settles to the bottom, and the water flows away over the sides. The flour is wrapped
in leaves, then baked or smoked prior to being stored. (McArthur 1972: 444)

The wrapped sago can be stored under mud and water for a couple of months.
Kairapowe, the good-natured wife of Nauwen and Oria’s father’s brother Ukai, showed
me how the sago pith was broken up and washed. Her sago trough apparatus (fig. 33) was
ubiquitous in lowland New Guinea. A culinary bonus is sago grubs, a succulent delicacy,
harvested later from the log’s exposed pith.
The Lujere had several ways of cooking sago: wrapped in a long leaf cooked in a fire,
cooked raw on an open fire, wrapped around a very hot stone (‘hatwara’ described earlier),
and in a tin over fire.4 If the fruit of a citrus tree were available, its juice might be used

3. For a demographic study of sago in another Sepik society, see Townsend (1974).
4. In the Torricelli Mountains larger species of bamboo grew that I did not see in Lujereland. A
favorite way for some Wape people to eat sago, and definitely mine, was to put the sago into
a large empty bamboo node and cook it on the fire; this solidified the gelatinous texture, and
the bamboo imparted a flavor that reminded me of popcorn.

316
 Into the Bush: The Quest for Food

Figure 33. Kairapowe washing sago by the Sand River with Oria’s daughter Womkau.

to flavor the sago. The amount of sago eaten at a meal was large in comparison to the
meat, fish, or greens that might accompany it. While raw sago cooked on a fire or in a leaf
might be eaten alone as a snack on the trail, the gelatinous dumpling (‘hatwara’) needed
to be eaten with other foods to make it more palatable. The former patrol officer and coast
watcher, Erich Feldt, gives sago this negative culinary review.5

The sago palm grows in profusion, its rough trunk crowned by repulsive, spine-covered
fronds, its roots in the mud. . . . However cooked, it is glutinous and tasteless and, to
those not inured to it by years of consumption, unsatisfying, leaving the belly distended
but with the feeling of hunger unappeased. (Feldt 1946: 172)

The Lujere believed that three of the domesticated sago varieties caused older people
‘sotwin’ or shortness of breath and regardless of age, if a person had ‘sotwin,’ eating these
varieties would exacerbate the condition. According to Eine, Luritsao got his ‘sotwin’
from breaking this taboo. As a consequence, Eine, although younger than Luritsao, also
observed the taboo to avoid getting ‘sotwin’ as he aged. Furthermore, if a close relative
dies, a person will not eat ‘hatwara’ for many months, the length of time depending upon
the mourner. The death of parents, their siblings, and one’s own siblings are especially
honored with this mourning practice. Then there is the taboo mentioned earlier that a
man is forbidden to eat sago from the palms he has planted because sickness, specifically

5. Gill (1996) provides a succinct biography of his colorful life.

317
 A Witch’s Hand

‘sotwin’ and body aches, will follow. But sago palms aren’t just utilized for food, they also
provide important building materials. The roof thatch for Lujere houses is made from
sago palm leaves and house walls often are made from their strong hard stems.

Relentless Gatherers

The gathering of food—almost anything anywhere—was a perpetual incidental activity

that was carried out by adults and children alike. Whether moving through the bush or
across grasslands, regardless of the intent of the journey, they were also casual gatherers
with an alert eye for some or all of the following, for example, grasshoppers, crickets,
caterpillars, tadpoles, frogs, bush rats, snakes, turtles, lizards, bush turkey eggs, nuts, ferns,
wild greens, fungi, and leaves for wrapping food. As Knauft (1985: 18) observed for the
Gebusi of Western Province, “In general, anything that is digestible—and almost every-
thing over an inch long that moves—is eaten.” The item collected might be cooked and
eaten as a snack or used to augment a meal. Scanning the terrain when afoot for any wild
food source to gather was a generic Lujere trait learned at an early age and practiced
throughout life. Betty Gillam was especially impressed with the gathering zeal of children.

Usually the boys went off in one direction with small bows and arrows and a bush knife
between them. The girls would go in another direction with a bush knife and string
bags. . . . The ages ranged for these groups from approximately two and a half years to
ten to twelve years of age. (Gillam 1983: 55)

Reluctant Gardeners
Compared with many New Guinea societies, especially in the Highlands, that plant large,
fenced gardens, it is a stretch to call the Lujere “gardeners.” That certainly was the finding
of PO Treutlein on his patrol of the Lujere villages:

Often they will plant a small garden with taro and kaukau, and then they will leave it
to its own devices, unfenced. When, after a couple of months they return, pigs have
usually rooted out all the plants and they are left with nothing. As a result they say
that there is no use in gardening. This attitude is the chief problem that will have to
be overcome, if these people are ever to have a sound economy. (Treutlein 1962: 21)

Nevertheless, the small slash-and-burn fenceless gardens that are prepared by the men
do provide a variety of foodstuff that augments their swamp-grown sago. At best, they
might be called indifferent shifting horticulturalists.6 Bananas were the most prevalent
planting in almost every Wakau garden I saw. Depending on the variety, banana plants

6. The one part of Lujereland I did not visit was the northwest with the villages of Yawari and
Mantopai, about seven hours’ walk north up the Sand River from Wakau. These Lujere may not
garden but subsist exclusively on gathering, processing sago and hunting. Betty Gillam, who
visited the area four times on health patrols, wrote that she always met villagers returning from

318
 Into the Bush: The Quest for Food

bear fruit in between four and eight months while a few varieties take as long as ten
months. Thus, the planting of banana shoots is a constant activity to assure a steady sup-
ply of the fruit as bananas, unlike sago, cannot be stored. In Wakau, there was no ritual in-
volved in planting either bananas or sago palms. A stick is thrust into the ground, worked
around a bit, withdrawn, the plant inserted, and then the ground tamped down. Hoeing,
tilling, and composting were not practiced. Bananas, while primarily planted in gardens,
were also sometimes planted on the edges of the village. Gardening for my Wakau hosts
was, at best, a tedious job; certainly no one got credit for being a good gardener the way
men were singled out for esteem if an excellent hunter. Betty Gillam, who had spent far
more time in numerous Lujere villagers’ gardens than I, had the same impression flatly
stating, “Gardening for the Lujere is a chore, no-one enjoys it much” (Gillam 1983: 78).
Gardening tools consisted of an axe, a bush knife, and a digging stick. A garden was of-
ten planted in an old garden area that had reverted to secondary forest thus lessening the
felling of large trees. Once an area had been more or less cleared of trees with an axe and
the underbrush slashed away with a bush knife, the residue was dried in the sun and set
afire. When the smoke, embers, and ashes were completely dissipated, a digging stick was
easily cut with a bush knife and planting could begin. Both banana and sago shoots were
planted this way and no ritual was involved. A ritual accompanied only tobacco planting.
The Lujere recognized thirty named types of banana plants—not that surprising, as
the banana was first domesticated in Southeast Asia and New Guinea. “Recent archaeo-
logical and paleoenvironmental evidence at Kuk Swamp in the Western Highlands Prov-
ince of Papua New Guinea suggests banana cultivation there goes back to at least 4000
BCE, and possibly to 8000 BCE.”7 Wakau villagers ate nineteen banana varieties cooked
on a fire, nine varieties were eaten raw, and three varieties were eaten both ways. Twenty-
two varieties were said to have originated with their ancestors, while returned laborers
introduced the other eight varieties. Regardless of the variety, bananas were never mixed
with other foods but eaten separately alongside grubs, fish, or meat. There were no taboos
associated with the eating of bananas. Babies, I was told, were never fed bananas because
of the fear of it catching in the throat and strangulation. However, if a baby were sick, it
might be given a little masticated banana for added nourishment.
Some of the little gardens I visited contained only bananas and tobacco. Others also
were growing a few sweet potato plants (ipomeoa batatas). The bachelors Aria and Mey-
awali had a joint garden plot, but their plants were clearly separated. It had more diversity
than most with sweet potatoes, several yam vines growing up long sticks, and one pump-
kin vine. In another garden I also saw a single taro plant (xanthosoma); occasionally sugar
cane (sacchrun officinorum) was planted, but all gardens had multiple banana plants. I was
most surprised to see a few corn stalks—a new world plant far from home—with several
small mature ears. With no fences, the pigs, as Treutlein recorded, could easily dig up the
root crops but ignored the bananas, sugar cane, and corn. In some of the village gardens
nearer to the mission a wider variety of food products were grown, such as melons, papa-
yas, beans, and pandanus.

hunting “with full game bags. Also, the bush rang with the chorus of birds like hornbills, parrots
and pigeons” (Gillam 1983: 142). She saw no gardens and locals told her they did not garden.
7. “Banana,” Wikipedia, https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana, accessed October 26, 2016.

319
 A Witch’s Hand

An important green to accompany a meal was the fresh leaves and seeds from the
‘tulip’ tree (gnetum gneom) whose Tok Pisin name attests that its leaves grow in pairs. It’s
found wild in the primary forests and is planted in secondary forest near a village. Women
also use the bark to make string for their skirts, bags, fishnets, and rope. Other food trees
sometimes found near or in a village were the breadfruit (artocapus altilis), which takes
three to six years to produce fruit and whose big leaves, if handy, made an improvised
umbrella for the copious rains. The fruit of the papaya tree (carica papaya), so deliciously
moist and a favorite of mine, was a rarity in Wakau. Coconut palms, of course, were the
most prominent botanical feature of every village, towering over the houses, and a reliable
beacon from the air signaling human habitation. A green coconut was valued for its cool
liquid and both green and ripe coconuts were valued for their meat. When villagers went
into the bush for extended periods, they usually warned others not to molest a tree, like
a coconut or betel nut, by tying dry palm fronds around the trunk at eye-level or higher.
Similar taboo signs were also sometimes seen in the gardens as warnings against stealing.
Most Lujere like to smoke either using their traditional mero or tobacco rolled in
newsprint. Tobacco is very valuable and was carefully cultivated and cured. It was grown
in small amounts in a garden area and often near a person’s house where it could be more
easily tended—or pinched, as old Leno tended to do. After the leaves are large and full,
they are picked and seeds are sometimes saved for later planting. Leaves are dried in
various ways, such as being hung in the sun to dry, hung on a stick near a fire, or placed
under the roof over a fire. Once they are more or less dry, the leaves are often crumpled
then placed outside in the sun or over an open fire to get even drier. McCarthy observed
on his 1936 patrol that the Yellow River villagers smoked their tobacco on the green side
but, at least in Wakau, they seemed to prefer a crisper cut.

The Fervor of the Hunt

While the grasslands were distinctly bounded, the forests and swamps at times lapped
into each other and weren’t as clearly delineated. But to a hunter pursuing a pig or casso-
wary, as long as he was within his or an approved territory, it mattered little, as it was the
chase and killing his quarry that was important, not the locale. In men’s quest for food,
hunting was the most important and exciting activity, and it was the killing of wild pigs
and cassowaries that earned a man the highest prestige as an expert hunter (see fig. 34). It
was also the topic among men that assured both participants and listeners. Gilbert Lewis’
statement about the Gnau he lived with in the Torricelli Mountains could just as well be
applied to the Lujere: “Talk about hunts was drawn out, animated and assertive: it was
perhaps the most congenial subject at gatherings of men” (Lewis 1975: 342).
A man’s longbow and his clutch of broad-blade bamboo arrows for killing large game,
unchanged since McCarthy first described them, were the largest and most impressive
Lujere artifacts created, once fight shields and ‘garamuts’ were no longer made.8 Little boys
made their own little bows and arrows and went into the nearby ‘bus’ and ‘kunai’ to hunt

8. Unlike the medieval longbows, which were made of fibers, the Lujere bowstring was made
from a strip of cane whose comparative rigidity lessened its draw force. While medieval ar-
rows had feather fletches, the Lujere arrows had none.

320
 Into the Bush: The Quest for Food

Figure 34. Men carry a wild boar shot by Klowi to the ‘kunai’ house.

for small animals and edible insects. As soon as they were big enough and knew how to es-
cape an attacking wild boar by clambering up a tree, they joined their father or other close
clansmen on a hunt, perhaps carrying a torch if it were night. The other weapon sometimes
used in hunting larger game was the spear, but it was not as common as the bow and arrow.
Before the mission came, according to Mangko, when a man killed a pig, he put some of
the pig’s blood on his bow before putting it away in the iron. They discontinued this prac-
tice, but Arakwaki volunteered it was their decision to stop, not a taboo from the mission.
Techniques for finding game were mainly tracking or taking a stand, sometimes in a
tree, especially if hunting birds, or on the ground near a tree to quickly climb if attacked
by a wild boar. There were stories of men being gored by pig tusks or lethally eviscerated
by a swipe of a cassowary’s spreading claw. Whenever I was with the men on a bush trail
they usually spoke out if they saw pig or cassowary tracks, sometimes with detailed in-
formation on the age of the track and the size and speed of the animal. As Gillam notes,
the Lujere men liked to hunt.

In the dry season they will light fires on the grasslands and drive the wild life to wait-
ing hunters. At night time, they use torches and flares to hunt flying foxes [large fruit
bats], bandicoots and marsupials. They will patrol at night time, watching gardens,
fresh pith from sago processing, fallen berries and bait for pigs to come and feed. They
will climb trees and wait for birds to come and feed on berries. They will hide behind
cut branches and wait for those birds that eat at ground level. For all the time and
energy used in this, the catches are usually small, but this recreation is always enjoyed.
(Gillam 1983: 64)

321
 A Witch’s Hand

All birds were hunted, including parrots, cockatoos, bush hens, and the Victoria
crowned pigeon as well as the large fruit bats that flew into the village at night. One
night I was on my back veranda with Arakwaki and several boys when we heard fruit bats
screeching around the trees. I shined my big flashlight up into the towering arima tree
near my house and before we knew it, Klowi was there with his shotgun. He neatly shot
one dead through the neck; earlier in the day he said he had killed two cassowaries and
one Victoria crowned pigeon (fig. 35).

Figure 35. Klowi in the upper village with a recently shot Victoria crowned pigeon.

It was considered taboo for anyone to eat bat meat unless they had killed game. Unlike
the Wape who considered the bat wing a delicacy, the Lujere ate only the flesh. While
Klowi had his shotgun, other village men had only their bow and arrows for hunting
birds. One of their favorite tactics was to take a stand in the forest and await their luck.
It was also taboo for a father to eat any game his son killed. If he did, he would go blind
and his son would have no luck in hunting. A father also risks getting sick if he helps his
son butcher a pig he killed. A son with a successful kill might trade a bit of the meat for
fish that he would then give his father.
As important as hunting was to the male ethos, Oria said that there were six Wakau men
who had never killed a pig or cassowary, namely, Meyawali, Poke, Kunai, Aria, Mari, and
Unei, although Unei was still trying. The village’s most successful hunters were Arakwaki,

322
 Into the Bush: The Quest for Food

Waniyo, Kwoien and Ukai. Of the younger men, Oria said he and Mangko had good suc-
cess, adding that while many of the village men had killed pigs, it was more unusual to kill
a cassowary. Eine, for example, who was an excellent hunter, had never killed one. Mangko
killed the only one I actually saw with his bow and an arrow (see fig. 36). The Lujere, like
numerous other New Guinea societies including the Wape, tabooed the successful hunter
from eating any of his kill. To do so could jeopardize his hunting prowess. It was explained
that the spirit of the killed animal would cause the hunter to aim badly in subsequent
hunts. To avoid such a disastrous consequence, the hunter always divided his prey among
others. It is an interesting custom that redistributes protein among a group, while assuring
the hunter that the men who have eaten from his kill will reciprocate in kind.

Figure 36. Mangko with boys and the cassowary he shot with his bow and arrow.

Sometimes, the distribution of a hunter’s game is a point of disagreement, as related

in chapter 11 regarding Oria’s award of a pig’s tail. If a man or woman, for whatever rea-
son, is angry about the portion of game given to them and scolds the hunter or similarly
makes a rumpus, it can also ruin the hunter’s prowess. The angry accuser can rectify the
jinx only by mixing shavings of his or her fingernails with betel that is given to the hunter
to chew.
Compared to the Wape, the Lujere had little ritual regarding the actual hunt. There
was no ritual in the butchering of a pig, just a general procedure for cutting it up. But

323
 A Witch’s Hand

when a youth kills his first pig, his father performs an important ritual: he cuts out the
pig’s heart and gives it to a close male relative who is a successful hunter to cook and eat.
This custom is related to a similar one among the Wape men. The difference was that
whenever any Wape man killed a pig—not just a youth’s first pig—the heart was always
given to an old successful hunter. Another Lujere custom associated with a youth’s first
pig kill was, if his father knew the ritual words—Oria’s father didn’t—to make cuts on
the tendon side of the pig’s four legs with a new ‘hapmambu’ (small bamboo knife) that
he then gave to his son. Although Oria wasn’t sure, he suspected that some of the older
men, like Klowi, Menetjua, and Kwoien, knew the ritual words. This rather indifferent
approach to ritual was unlike the Wape, whose approach to ritual, any ritual, was with a
sense of sureness and vital necessity.

Ginger’s Magical Power and Use

One day I noticed that Klowi had a cord around his neck with three strands of ginger
attached to it. In a whisper he told me that it was for success in hunting. Before he goes
hunting, he must rub his eyes and joints with it. This would give him success in killing
many pigs; it also blinds the pig to his presence. Mangko, he added, also uses this ginger
when he hunts. It was secretly planted near Klowi’s house but the women in his house
didn’t know about it. Once while I was interviewing Oria on some of the magical uses of
ginger—there are a lot—he mentioned the same ginger-related hunting custom indicat-
ing that it was widespread. The Lujere recognize four ginger varieties: kwere, a low grow-
ing plant—lots grew around my house— with small leaves and a lovely small orchid-like
flower; aiewa, a common wild ginger that also was around my house and looked like what
the Wape called kaflaf in Olo; yuwowi, that grew near the Sand River; and lamari (Nau-
wen said the correct pronunciation was lama, that his brother’s was wrong), which grew
in the forest. There was no single variety dedicated to a particular kind of magical work;
rather it was the efficacy of a particular plant that was important. Thus, if my father’s fa-
ther told me that the kwere plant near a certain coconut was for hunting success I would
use it for that, while a man who owned another kwere plant might use it to make himself
ferocious and fearless when faced by an adversary.
Ginger had other uses in hunting. When hunting for birds the hunter puts ginger on
the bird’s track to assure success. One way of hunting for pigs was to cut down a sago
palm, as pigs like to eat its pith. After a section of its bark is stripped away a hole is made
in the pith with a stick. The hunter then mixes ginger with sago, spits this into the hole,
and closes the hole with pith. A blind of leaves is made near the felled sago palm and after
four or five nights, the hunter returns at dusk to wait for a pig to come and eat. When it
does, Oria said, you can’t miss. Among ginger’s multiple magical uses is also the power to
cure, discussed in chapters 15 and 18.

Hunting Dogs and Wild and Tame Pigs

Hunting crescendos during the rainy season, which is when I lived in Wakau. There could
be days when the only people in the village were the sick and their caretakers. Once, late

324
 Into the Bush: The Quest for Food

in March, Mowal, Kworu, and Nauwen were still in the village when Nakwane reported
seeing pig tracks and they all took off with a dog to hunt it down. Left in the village
were Aria, who was in the old iron with a painful boil on his upper inner thigh, and Ukai,
who was at home caring for his wife Kairapowe, sick with pneumonia. The men returned
later, flushed with success; but it was the dog that got the pig. Dogs are primarily kept
for hunting, and all have names; some names are humorous and remind the owner of an
incident about a person the owner dislikes, while others are descriptively common, for
instance, in translation, “Spot” or “Blackie.”
One day Eine was sitting with his hunting dog, and I uneasily watched as he hesi-
tantly lifted his bush knife over the dog’s tail and then suddenly dropped it, cutting off
about three inches of its tail. Although the dog was fully grown, Eine explained this
would make the dog stronger and heavier. His wife picked up the rather dazed dog and
carried him to Oria’s abandoned house next door and fed him a fetal pig she had stored.
. The same tail surgery was also supposed to make a pig get bigger, as was castration. I
was intrigued with their notion that losing something physically induced strength and
growth; then I learned that a man can get bigger if he shaves the hair of his legs and arms.
This, however, was not an Indigenous idea. Unei had picked up this idea from “Sepiks” in
Wewak when he and Oria were rejected from signing as contract laborers; both he and
Nauwen were staunch adherents of the new custom.
Talking with Mowal later, I learned it was not taboo to discuss a planned hunt or to
ask questions of others regarding a hunt, which were all forbidden by the Wape. The only
time you couldn’t ask was when a Lujere man was going to take a stand at a blind by a
fallen and rotting sago palm. Then it was tabooed, but not when going on other hunts or
when going to a bird blind. My assumption was that the Wape, unlike the Lujere, had a
scarcity of game and had created numerous hunting taboos to both abet a successful hunt
and to explain a failed one.
While most of the pigs the Wakau men killed were wild, the villagers also had domes-
ticated pigs identifiable by cutting off part of the ear that easily distinguished them in the
bush from a wild pig. All village male pigs were also castrated when young, but they mer-
cifully did not blind their pigs with a smoking firebrand the way the Wape did to keep
them from wandering away. I was once commandeered along with several other Wape
men to help hold down a thrashing pig (huge in my memory) as it was being blinded—a
vivid fieldwork experience I didn’t need. A number of Wakau men had been skilled in
castrating a pig but, with the deaths of Oria’s father and his two brothers, only Waniyo,
Klowi, and Ukai were considered competent during my stay. Village sows mated with the
wild boars, so all pigs were of a single gene pool. Some of the village’s domesticated pigs
were originally young wild piglets captured in the bush and brought to the village. The
piglet was bound in a net bag with just its head free and fed sago, insects, fish, banana,
and other foods until it was tamed. When it got older it had to forage for itself in the
bush, but occasionally was given food by its owner, usually the scraps of a meal. Families
that went to the bush for several weeks or months left their pigs at home to fend for
themselves. As they got bigger, they came to the village less and less, becoming semi-wild;
eventually they were killed and eaten. Unlike the Wape’s food-challenged blind pigs, a
Wakau pig never came to its owner’s house and bawled for food. When villagers returned
to the village after being in the forest all day, they might report on a village pig they had
seen; but if a village pig hadn’t been seen more or less regularly, there was no serious

325
 A Witch’s Hand

search for it as among the Wape who had a lack of pigs, both wild and domesticated.
As there was so much conversation, both casual and serious, about pigs among the men,
I easily added the following terms to my auditory Namia lexicon: dwai (pig), waladwai
(village pig), and manudwai (wild pig).
Wakau’s domesticated pigs numbered ten, all males except one. Five were considered
semi-wild and rarely, if ever, came into the village. Women owned two of the pigs. All the
pigs had names and, in a few cases, were called to come by name but more frequently by a
guttural “aaak!” I got the pigs’ names from Mangko—along with some laughs—and they
ranged from the ordinary such as the pig’s color, Olku (black), War (white); or a geograph-
ic name like Laritja (a creek), Wakau (the village); to “joke” names, such as Adlowawe (a
woman’s hymen, referencing a story of a man who tried to have sex with a certain woman
but her hymen was too strong), and Parupowe (an expression for ‘no gat’ or “all gone,” for
when a man is distributing pig meat and comes to the end and says “parupowe!” to those
still waiting). There were several other joke names and, like the other two, they were based
on some form of deprivation.
The sometime levity about a village pig’s name was indicative of the relative unim-
portance of domestic pigs in Lujere exchange. Pigs or pig meat were not part of Lujere
marriage exchanges but were important in the curing festivals described in chapter 15.
An exchange of pig meat and traditional wealth between a man and his mother’s brother
once had been important but, according to Oria, was rare today. In this exchange a man
with a pig must wait for his mother’s brother to mark the pig as his, signaling that later
he will give rings—now rings and money—for the pig. In buying the pig the mother’s
brother was helped by his relatives who, in turn, would get a portion of pork. Oria had
a large male pig over six years old that no maternal relative had asked for—and was not
likely to, because it was now worth so much. These exchanges were usually done when the
pig was young, about two years old. As the going rate for a pig was fourteen dollars for
each year of its life, no one, Oria assured me, would buy an old pig, his or anyone else’s.

Finding Fish
Wakau villagers, although near the Sand River, did no line fishing although the people
of villages located directly on the Sand, Yellow, and Sepik Rivers occasionally did. There
were many creeks of diverse sizes in Wakau’s domain, as well as ponds and lagoons left
when rivers changed their course, all homes of fish and other aquatic creatures. When
ponds were low, the woody derris vine (derris elliptica) was used to obtain fish, as its roots
contained rotenone, an odorless crystalline substance used commercially as the active
ingredient in some insecticides. Two methods were used. The simpler method was to
pound the derris root in the water; the other method was to dry the root, grind it into a
powder, and throw it into the water. Either method stunned the fish, which were easily
scooped up as they floated to the pond’s surface. Those not eaten while fresh were smoked
and kept up to six weeks for later consumption.9 One night I saw several burning torches

9. The use of the derris root to stun fish occurred throughout the Papua New Guinea mainland;
I even saw it used successfully in the Bismarck Sea by locals on Ali Island off Aitape.

326
 Into the Bush: The Quest for Food

crossing the open grassland beyond the village and learned that these were women re-
turning from night fishing. They had visited a shallow pond and, as a fish became visible,
clubbed it with a knife or sliced its head off. Both women and men fished this way.
Stretches of some creeks, as noted earlier, were the property of individual men and
fished only by family members unless permission was given. But the very small creeks
leading into the larger appropriated ones could be fished by any of the men attached to
that area. When a creek or brooklet was not in flood, it could be partially dammed and
a fish trap set in the dam. This was the most popular way to fish in Wakau. A dam was
made by sticking sticks upright across the creek and, for example, affixing sago leaves
to keep the fish from escaping while allowing some of the water through. Towards the
bottom of the dam, a long weir woven from split cane was placed with its open mouth
pointing upstream and its terminus, narrow and long, on the other side of the dam point-
ing downstream. The fish swam into the weir and were trapped in the narrow end, un-
able to turn around and swim out. The size of the weir varied according to the size of
the creek and the number of fishes to be entrapped. On the larger Iwop Creek the weirs
were longer—perhaps five feet or so—than on the small creeks, where they might be just
over two feet in length. The smaller the weir the more frequently it should be monitored.
Weirs were often checked when family members returned from the bush in the hope
of providing a substantial dinner. There was no separate word to distinguish rivers from
creeks; all were called iju.
The Sepik River, as I noted in my patrol with Joyce, is a lucrative source of fish for
those Lujere who live on the river. Betty Gillam observed on one of her health patrols to
Tipas,

There were about forty people milling around the area. Six canoes were noted each
with two to four people. They all brought from their canoes as much fish as they could
carry. The varieties of fish they carried were ‘kol pis,’ a herring ‘maus gras,’ and ‘bik
maus,’ (pidgen terms) varieties of cat fish. That night the village had a strong aroma
of fish being cooked and smoked. No other village was ever seen to have such an over
abundance of fish, and their catches were much smaller. (Gillam 1983: 110)

Ginger was also used in fishing, as in hunting, to promote success. Women sometimes
used a small round net to scoop up fish. However, to ensure that the fish would not hide,
ginger was first spit into the net. ‘Savolim pis,’ a favorite way for both men and women
to fish, was to first scoop out a lot of water in a little swamp pond several feet across. This
was done with the stem part of a sago palm leaf but first, ginger was spit onto the “shovel”
to ensure success in finding fish after much of the water was scooped out. Only men or
boys speared fish. Their weapon was a multipronged spear, and to be successful, they had
to first spit ginger into the water. Frogs, and there often were lots of them, were a rela-
tively easy quarry.10 I once saw Oria shortly after he had shot ten of them with his bow
in a small pond near the Sand, and I photographed one, a brilliant green, which filled his
hand. He wrapped them individually in leaves, put them on a fire to cook, then ate the
entire creature—stomach and all—with sago. I love frog legs but never worked up the
appetite to try frogs Wakau-style.

10. See the myth “The Origin of Frogs” in chapter 14.

327
 A Witch’s Hand

To sum up the Lujere approach to the food quest: they are a society that relentlessly
processes sago and plants banana shoots, avidly gathers what is available, fishes and hunts
with gusto, and dutifully practices a little gardening on the side.

The Omnipresence of Food Taboos

For many New Guineans, food usually has complicated cultural implications. Gilbert
Lewis noted,

For the Gnau few foods are neutral, just food and always food to all persons. Nearly
all have valencies which make their use right or wrong for certain kinds of persons or
for persons in particular relationships or for persons in particular situations. . . . Such
views on susceptibility make one person’s food another’s poisin. (Lewis 1995: 172)

It was the same for the Lujere. The Wakau villagers had many food taboos; I have
already mentioned some in passing, but there were so many that I was still learning new
ones when I departed. A food taboo could depend on a variety of factors, particularly the
person’s sex, age, and health. Betty Gillam’s (1983, 1996) nutritional studies of the Lujere
were especially concerned with how food taboos affected nutrition, noting that, “Food
taboos are many and varied. They affect pregnancy, child bearing, child rearing, puberty,
illness, death and some aspects of hunting and gardening” (Gillam 1996: 28). Among
the Lujere, there were two main types of food taboos: (1) deprivation taboos that usu-
ally honor a dead person and (2) debilitating taboos that may affect a person’s well-being
(Ego’s or another’s) if the proscribed food is eaten.
The primary example of a deprivation taboo was that the death of a close relative, as
mentioned earlier, imposed a taboo on eating sago dumplings. If the deceased were a
parent, the self-imposed taboo might extend to six months or more. Most food taboos,
however, were of the debilitating type. For example, boys at puberty knew that if they
ate any big fish or eel, they would be failed hunters as men. Girls at puberty were at risk
of later malnutrition if they ate any opossum or tortoise meat. A pregnant woman’s diet
was restricted to sago dumplings, ferns, leaves, small fish, and small pieces of pig meat;
the eating of other foods could cause the infant’s death. During the woman’s postpartum
period, the whole family had a diet restricted to sago dumplings and greens until her
lochia discharge had ceased and the infant was washed. To ingest other foods then would
threaten the baby’s life. Gillam (1996: 30) also notes during this brief postpartum period
that the males of the household who left on a food quest risked becoming emaciated and
sick. To assure that the infant would grow strong, it was washed in a new ‘limbum’ filled
with water in which a small bundle of ginger leaves had first been swished about. Lactat-
ing mothers in need of good nutrition nevertheless risked their baby’s death if they ate
any meat, large fish, eels, and leaves from the ‘tulip’ tree; and drinking coconut milk could
cause the infant to have breathing problems. These perceived risks persisted until the baby
left the breast at two or three years old or a sibling was born. Children not suckling had
few restrictions, but an illness could impose a food taboo.
Men could not eat the products of palms (e.g., coconuts or betel nuts) they planted for
their progeny or else they would get backaches, have weak knees, and body and stomach

328
 Into the Bush: The Quest for Food

aches. The penalty was even worse for a man who ate sago from a sago palm he planted:
he would go blind. Young men couldn’t eat cassowary eggs, though older men with chil-
dren can; nor could they eat fetal pigs, though women can. Violating this taboo meant
his skin would become old and flabby, although Nauwen told me that Poke ate cassowary
eggs and was healthy. According to Oria, most of the food taboos were for young unmar-
ried males and females: for instance, young women couldn’t eat wallaby meat, or they
would continue to lose weight until they were skin and bones and would never gain the
weight back. There were fewer taboos for a couple with children, but here is an example of
one: Oria’s beautiful year-old son Nakwane had a fever for a couple of days so his mother,
Pourame, took him down to the Sand River where her brother, an imoulu, was to treat
him at his camp. When he finished, he told her that a lizard was causing the fever. Al-
though it was taboo for parents with young children to eat lizard, Oria said he had done
so, hence his son’s illness. It appeared that almost any food, in particular circumstances,
could cause illness or death. Old people, however, could eat almost anything they wanted.
The cruel irony was that few lived long enough to enjoy their gastronomic license.

329
part three

Magic, Murder, and the Lujere Imagination

The imagination of man knows no limits, and we must expect

great varieties of form in mythical beings and happenings.
Franz Boas (1914: 380)

If the whole community does not believe in the efficacy

of a group of actions, they cannot be magical.
Marcel Mauss (1975: 19)

331
chapter fourteen

Stories from an Imaginary Past

Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes

a happening from generation to generation.
Walter Benjamin (2007: 98)

Mental Worlds
One of the distinct privileges of living with the Wakau villagers in the early 1970s was
that their ideas about how life was organized and should be lived were primarily their
own, as were their notions about the composition of the world they inhabited. Impor-
tantly, their colonial masters had not dispossessed them of their Indigenous beliefs and
attitudes. Their cosmological, ontological, and epistemological propositions and practices
remained primarily those of their parents and grandparents. “Conquered and colonized
societies, to take the obvious example, were never simply made over in the European
image” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xi). In two probing papers contrasting African
traditional thought and Western science, Robin Horton wrote:

It is that in traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the

established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures, such
awareness is highly developed. It is this difference we refer to when we say that tradition-
al cultures are “closed” and scientifically oriented cultures “open.” (Horton 1967: 155)

For the Wakau villagers, the penetrating lances of doubt and skepticism that can
puncture an intellectually sealed society were not present. Although they had been under
foreign hegemony for almost ninety years, they had dwelt, both literally and figuratively,
in a remote New Guinea in cerebral and behavioral worlds unexposed to missionary
beliefs in God, sin, heaven, and hell. While they had adjusted some customs to satisfy
a patrol officer’s demands during rare visits, such as digging latrines (which they then

333
 A Witch’s Hand

ignored) or burying their dead, their one major moral adjustment in response to colonial
domination was to abandon revenge killings with enemy villages, a change they wel-
comed and which complemented their basically pacific ethos.
Explicit in the concept of magic is that it refers to phenomena that, like the Lujere
spirit beliefs considered in chapter 15, cannot be scientifically validated.1 Magic is real
only to those who believe it is real; to others, it is at best spurious, not physically actual
or even possible. Like beauty, magic is in the eye of the beholder. While the Lujere and
I shared a world of ordinary village life, for them that world of explicable everydayness
was interspersed with another world of magical possibilities that I found inexplicable.
This included talking animals, humans living in the earth, spirits and animals transform-
ing into and out of human beings, and ‘sanguma,’ men we both knew but whom they
believed could fly through the air or slash a victim’s flesh without scarring, then set the
day for their death. It was a florid magical world I had once intimately known and deeply
believed in—but in a very different cultural version—from my early Kansas childhood of
tooth fairies, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus to my later childhood and young adult-
hood of Sunday school and church stories of spectacular biblical miracles.
Although the villagers and I were, in a daily sense, physically alone together, our enor-
mous mental domains of information, knowledge, and experience were vastly different.
More important for our mindfulness, while we each were initially socialized into intel-
lectual and emotional worlds where magic and supernatural beliefs passed as “natural,” I
had gradually discarded them while growing up in a society of contested belief systems.2
To attempt an appreciation of the individual consciousness of a Lujere person is a
radical undertaking: one must eliminate words like “magic” and “occult,” as they have
no matching concepts in their worldview. For example, I viewed the wowi curing rituals
discussed in the next chapter as a form of magical treatment whose efficacy existed only
on a symbolic level, but a Lujere man would perceive them as acts with genuine efficacy
and as real as a conversation with me. Gilbert Lewis, who has written a searching essay
on magic, writes, “An act may look like magic from the outside, but you cannot tell the
thought behind an action purely by the look alone” (1986: 421). It is important, he adds,
to know “about personal attitudes or convictions or beliefs” as well. So, if I watch a wowi
ritual that is alleged to cure, I perceive it as a magical act—that is, one that implicates the
supernatural; whereas Nauwen or Oria watching alongside me would perceive the ritual
as practical behavior intended to cure. Their belief system is not saturated with leeriness
of the paranormal like that of a secular Westerner. Evans-Pritchard in his pioneering
ethnography on Azande witchcraft and magic similarly noted,

There is no incentive to agnosticism. All their beliefs hang together. . . . In this web of
belief every strand depends upon every other strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its
meshes because this is the only world he knows. The web is not an external structure in

1. Books and definitions regarding magic are almost unlimited. For a big book that deals with
a big subject, see O’Keefe (1982). See also Schultz (2017) for a fascinating article that chal-
lenges our ontological assumptions about the real and the imagined.
2. Peter Pels’s introduction to Magic and Modernity (2003), is one of the best critical summary
explorations of the anthropological history of magic in all of its semantic guises.

334
 Stories from an Imaginary Past

which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he cannot think that his thought is
wrong. (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 194; my emphases)

It is the same for the Lujere or anyone else, whether a villager in a staunchly tra-
ditional society or a charismatic Christian in a postmodern society, when one’s belief
system is closed to challenge. We will have occasion to return to this problem of altering
perceptions of what is “real” and “not real” in the following chapters.
My Lujere fieldwork was before the digital age of computers and cell phones that
are now commonplace. But today both the Lujere and Wape have cell phone towers
while the little Vermont valley where I live is still awaiting one. My cell phone is use-
less at home but ironically, they can call my landline from a cell phone in New Guinea’s
forests and swamps. In the 1970s, mechanical and analogue electronic technology was
sparse and spotty in New Guinea. Other than face-to-face contact, Europeans primarily
accessed information and knowledge via paper media—books, letters, newspapers, maga-
zines, journals, telegrams, and files—as well as radios and, less frequently, via movies and
telephones. Even in the bush I had lots to read, cassette tapes of my favorite music, Tok
Pisin’s Radio Wewak in the daytime and, if I chose, erratic shortwave Australian radio
stations at night for international news and music. Most days after lunch I read a bit in
an escapist novel—Somerset Maugham was perfect—just to jump momentarily into an-
other cultural and emotional world and meet new people. It was almost as delightful as
taking a shower.3 But none of the above-mentioned modes of communication, with the
exception of face-to-face contact, were available to Wakau villagers. It made me curious
to know what it was like to carry, as they did, everything in your head and to have only
people, mostly one’s family and neighbors, for information and entertainment.
Another irony was that, while my primary reason for being in Wakau was to seek
entry into and understanding of the villagers’ mental and behavioral worlds, they seemed
little interested in mine beyond how it might impact my immediate behavior towards
them. It was almost comic: while I exhibited a blatant non-stop curiosity about them,
they were singularly incurious about my previous life and where I came from. Although I
know that they were astute and studious observers of my behavior, once I had explained
why I wanted to live with them and they had met Joyce and the children, they seemed
content to just accept me without questions—I mean no questions at all. It still puzzles
me.4

3. While looking for examples of ‘sanguma,’ I chanced on my original edition of F. E. Williams’s

Orokaiva Society, which I bought for a few dollars when a graduate student, and was delighted
to read in the preface the pleasure he took, back in the early 1920s, in lunchtime escapist
literature. Thus, after a few hours’ work, “an alfresco lunch spread out on a banana-leaf table-
cloth; and beguiled by some reading (always, I confess far removed from anthropology and
Papua)” (1930: vi). My copy of Williams’s book once belonged to J. G. Frazer of The Golden
Bough fame, and throughout the three hundred and fifty pages are his tiny, exquisitely penned
marginalia.
4. In 1961–63, Karl Heider lived with the Dani in the Central Highlands of then West Irian
Province of Indonesia and had a similar experience. He notes that the Dani “had no touch of
the ethnographer in them. . . . They were just not curious about other ways of life” (1979: 12).
The people, while friendly, were singularly uninterested in his past or even his possessions.

335
 A Witch’s Hand

This, did, however, cause me to also wonder about the Lujere imagination and their
creative sensitivities because, unlike many New Guinea societies, they had not invested
thought or time in creating, for example, elaborate artistic constructions, complex ini-
tiation cycles, millenarian and messianic movements, or systems of intricate exchange.
True, they had once carved slit gongs and made handsome fight shields, but those artistic
activities were gradually abandoned with the arrival of the ‘kiaps’ and Australian rule in
the early 1930s.5 Unlike the Middle Sepik River societies of the Iatmul or Abelam that
enthused in creating material and ceremonial complexity and competitiveness, to the
extent of sometimes approaching that of a ranked society, the Lujere, other than their
small curing festivals, appeared to have simplified existence by concentrating their ener-
gies on subsistence and family. Of course their language, being a Papuan one, was very
complex, but it was invented many hundreds of years ago. From my outsider’s perspective,
their recent creativity seemed to be specially channeled into (1) traditional stories—wal-
kali—told in the men’s iron, and (2) combating sickness and death related, in part, to an
obsession with the terrors of ‘sanguma’. This chapter will explore the Lujere imagination
in terms of their traditional stories, content that will overlap, and in some ways prefigure,
the book’s concluding chapters that explore the cultural and personal queries inherent in
‘sanguma,’ the vagaries of sickness, and the inevitability of death.

The Storytellers’ Tales

Most of the Wakau males were very interested in their stories and more than willing,
often unasked, to relate them to me.6 They seemed to approach the task with the same
keen attention that a film-buff friend might exhibit when relating the plot of a new or
favorite movie. Of course, an individual’s skill in telling a Lujere story and the narrated
detail could vary. I usually tape-recorded these stories, and several other males often were
hanging around listening. If an important detail or story section were omitted, someone
quickly interjected a correction. But if there were just the two of us and the storyteller was
a youth, I might hear a (mercifully) short “shaggy-dog story” with no apparent point, as
if something were left out. But regardless of the storyteller, there were some conventions
each observed.
There is a custom among all Sepik area informants I’ve worked with to make the time
line of the story itself isomorphic with the time line of its telling.7 Thus, instead of saying
“they went a long way up the Sepik River,” they might slowly say, ‘ol i go, i go, i go, i go,
i go, i go, i go, i go, long wara Sepik.’ While it produces an almost ritual cadence of at-
tenuation, it usually triggered in me an acute sense of impatience I had to squelch before

5. Unfortunately, slit gongs were never collected or photographed nor, from what I can deter-
mine, did any of the early Western visitors to Lujereland, including Robinson and McCarthy,
mention them.
6. Four other ancestors’ stories are in chapter 8 (“A Man, His Son, and a Dog Go Up the Sepik”
and “Male Initiation”), chapter 9 (“Tsila Village Massacre”), and chapter 17 (“The Origin of
‘Sanguma’”).
7. See Fortune (1942: 147), translating from the Arapesh: “‘Not yet’ he waits he stays he stays he
stays.”

336
 Stories from an Imaginary Past

trying to surrender to the tale. I admit I was not always successful. Another convention
was that a section of a story might be repeated several times; for example, if a protagonist
must return to the village for different reasons, the return trip itself was narrated in detail
each time. Boas, who had a deep interest in traditional stories, noted that the convention
of repetition was worldwide. He also noted its “intolerable” quality to a European but the
pleasure it gave the Indigenous listener.8 Since I also took notes during the storytelling,
those pages are occasionally littered with weird doodles and goofy faces to keep me in
the game. So, to hear these stories properly, one should be lying around at night in a dark
and smoky iron, tired after a day in the bush, and with nothing else to do. In 1936, Walter
Benjamin wrote a provocative essay called “The Storyteller,” setting up the atmosphere in
which he thinks storytelling flourishes and then marking its decline in the modern world.
To remember a story, he writes,

requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of
physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream
bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His
nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—are already
extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for lis-
tening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. . . . The more self-forgetful
the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory.
(Benjamin 2007: 91)

If boredom, as Benjamin avers, is a precursor for remembering stories, the iron at

night is the archetypical setting for mental relaxation. And, if a story were repetitive and
drawn out, that was fine; after all, it wasn’t as if there were other TV channels to switch to.
Benjamin, I am sure, would be dismayed by our preoccupation with our multiple digital
devices.
Anthropologists have always been interested in people’s oral stories, and there is a
varied vocabulary that refers to them—myths, tales, folklore, fables, yarns, sagas, legends,
and anecdotes, not to mention the related massive and oft-controversial critical literature
on the various terms. A fable, for instance, is didactic, as it is always making a moral point.
But “definitions of myth have been debated since primitive religion became a topic of
scholarly attention” (Lessa and Vogt 1972: 249). Anthropology’s seminal pioneer Edward
Tylor, in mentioning the problems historians have had with myths, notes, “Myth is not
to be looked on as mere error and folly, but as an interesting product of the human mind”
(1881: 387). But he wants to be clear that in his use of the term, myth does not represent

8. Here is how Boas explained it:

I believe the liking for the frequent repletion of single motives is in part due to the
pleasure given by rhythmic repletion. For example, the tales of the Chinook Indians
are always so constructed that five brothers, one after another, have the same adventure.
The four eldest ones perish while the youngest one comes out successful. The tale is
repeated verbatim for all the brothers, and its length, which to our ear and to our taste
is intolerable, probably gives pleasure by the repeated form. (Boas 1925: 330)

337
 A Witch’s Hand

actuality; rather, “It is sham history, the fictitious narrative of events that never happened”
(1881: 387).9 For Tylor, and many others, myth is fiction.10 Most Lujere think otherwise.
If you recall the Iwani’s bloody raid on the Tsila hamlet in chapter 9, I raised questions
concerning Kaiera’s story. While there is little doubt that the Iwani men, including the
Wakau men, attacked Tsila more than once, the detailed story account of the specific raid
that Kaiera told me is probably not a good example of Tylor’s “sham history,” though it
does contain some mythic elements, such as raiders knowing things they could not have
known. To avoid the thorny ontological problem of determining if a story is mythic or
not, for the Lujere tales I use the more inclusive neutral term, “traditional story.”11 In Tok
Pisin, the storytellers classified their tales as ‘stori bilong ol tumbuna,’ that is, a story from
the ancestors or in Namia, walkali. As far as I could tell, no modern tellers purposely cre-
ated new stories. Certainly, the stories told to me describe a precontact era; no colonial
characters or events are portrayed in them. One story, however, does mention a modern
dug grave, an innovation stipulated by the colonial powers, although the dead spirit (aok-
wae) that disappeared into it was their own concept.
None of the stories I listened to, regardless of how unbelievable to me, were presented
as sham history but as real events of the past, in the same way that some miraculous sto-
ries in the Old and New Testaments are literally true to many Christians. Some stories
are concerned with the Lujere spirit world that is discussed in the following chapter.
What follows is a sampling of the stories—I like to think of them as Lujere short sto-
ries—that the males of Wakau told me. More precisely, they are really “men’s adventure
stories,” created by males for male diversion. Most stories feature violence, especially
murder and/or forced sex, and there is a pattern of who violates whom and how, but this
is not the place for a detailed analysis of the stories or their relation to other world story
genres. The intent here is only to present the Lujere imagination at play to attain a richer
understanding of the villagers’ expansive humanness in one of its varied guises.
Thirteen different storytellers recorded their tales in Tok Pisin on tape at various times
during my fieldwork. The thanks I offered was usually a piece of coveted newspaper from
my copy of the weekly Papua New Guinea Post Courier that they then used for rolling
their cigarettes. Most of the stories were recorded during the day but occasionally, when

9. Myths and folktales, like humor (Mitchell 1992: viii), today occupy the periphery of anthro-
pological studies. Nevertheless, a contentious literature has developed through the years over
the proper referent for the first two terms. The British classicist G. S. Kirk (1969: 34) notes,
“there is no greater agreement on the nature of folktales than on the nature of myths.” The
disagreements between and among the folklorists, classicists, and anthropologists are myriad.
Kirk (1969) has a lucid chapter, “The Relation of Myths to Folktales,” which cuts through
some of the semantic brush, and Carrol (1996) on myth and Cohen (1996) on folktales also
clarify some of the controversies. For a succinct critical review of myth’s relation to ritual, see
de Waal Malefijt (1968: 172–95).
10. The anthropologist’s viewpoint is epitomized by Leach’s comment (1969: 7): “The non-ra-
tionality of myth is its very essence, for religion requires a demonstration of faith by the
suspension of critical doubt.”
11. Kirk’s (1970: 37) cogent discussion of myth and folktales uses the term “traditional tales” as a
lumping term for myths and folktales and Colby and Peacock (1973: 615) employ “traditional
prose narrative” in a similar way.

338
 Stories from an Imaginary Past

most of the village had gone to bed and I was typing up my notes late at night in my
screen tent under the welcoming glow of an Aladdin lamp, a restive villager, maybe Eine
or Nakwane, joined me and wanted to tell me a story. I never refused, as it was a welcome
change from my lonely typing on a mechanical typewriter to turn on the tape recorder,
grab my notebook, and be entertained, Wakau style.
Several of the men had a large repertoire of stories and liked to go immediately from
story to story. As I’ve indicated, their ability to captivate my ear varied. Most were in-
teresting storytellers while others like Kunai, who possessed a seemingly endless font of
fantastic tales, spoke them in a rapid and non-expressive style, or Kaiera, whose lagging
cadence amid the afternoon heat and the cicadas’ slow rhythmic droning, set my eyelids
aflutter. But regardless of the raconteur, the stories were always told in the present tense
and, almost always, were long, drawn-out affairs, even when the plot was simple. There
were numerous untranslatable filler terms like ‘orait’ and ‘olsem,’ often used in a pause
or to signal a change in action, that might pepper a taped rendition. In translating the
stories from Tok Pisin, I have stuck to the story line using informal, even vulgar English
in an attempt to capture the flavor of the original, but I have spared the reader the tedi-
ous repetitive sections, only occasionally indicating where they occurred. The storyteller
sometimes initially suggested what the story was about but more often didn’t and, even
when I was told what it was about, the subject often seemed to be tangential. At any rate,
the titles of the oral short stories presented here are mostly my creation.
In terms of its cast of characters’ whereabouts and their comings and goings, a story
was not always logical; for example, a couple might return to the village when you never
knew they had gone away. These small logical inconsistencies never bothered the sto-
ryteller or other listeners (as they did me) who, I assumed, already had heard the story
multiple times and mentally provided the connection. When confused I avoided stop-
ping a storyteller with a query, in the hope that clarity would come as the story unfolded;
sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. The occasional question mark in my notebook
or scribbled “I don’t get it” documents that I was trying to relax and go with the flow. The
main problem was that spoken Tok Pisin is often quite rapid, so a pronoun may get sepa-
rated from its persona and, in a story with multiple persons, if one’s attention wanders,
confusion reigns.
These Lujere oral short stories, presented here in their near-natural state, are best
enjoyed in lazy leisure—preferably in the dark—and are not for the compulsive logical
nitpicker, the hurried, or the harried. It also helps if schadenfreude humor enlivens you.
Story interjections from my field notes are in parentheses, while comments made when
writing this chapter are in brackets.

Why Dogs Eat Shit

Storyteller: Yaope

A wallaby and a dog were arguing about food. The wallaby asks the dog, “What do you
eat?” The dog answers, “I eat nuts, I eat these,” and points to some shit on the ground and
the surprised wallaby says, “You eat what?!” The dog, annoyed, says, “You can’t keep asking
me what I eat, you go find your own food!” The wallaby suggests they go into the forest
and look for some food together. They come to a breadfruit tree with some fruit on the

339
 A Witch’s Hand

ground but the wallaby doesn’t tell the dog. The dog sees some shit and begins to eat it
while the wallaby eats the breadfruit. The wallaby says, “You find your food on the path!”
and begins to laugh as he watches the dog eat more shit. The dog looks up and wonders,
“Why does he always laugh at me?” Then he says to the wallaby, “Why are you laughing
at me!? We’ve both eaten, what are you laughing about?” The wallaby explains that while
he is eating good food, the dog is eating bad food. This angers the dog and the two begin
to fight. They fight and fight and fight [many repeats] and finally the wallaby runs away
and the dog chases after him. They run up and down three mountains and the wallaby
is so exhausted he is about to die, but the dog then runs out of breath and never catches
him. That is why dogs eat shit and the wallaby is to blame. [The logic of this moral still
eludes me.]12

A Pond Python Eats a Mother and Her Baby

Storyteller: Kunai
A woman is pregnant and she and her husband go to cut down a sago palm. Two very
large snakes live in the pond. A big rain- and windstorm comes up and one of the big
snakes comes out of the water, kills the woman, then eats both her and her baby. The hus-
band sees what has happened and rushes back to the village to tell them what happened.
A group of villagers returns to the pond with him and they put hot stones into the pond
until the water boils. One by one, the two snakes die. They cut open the snake that had
eaten the woman and her child and she is still alive, but the baby is dead. They then burn
the snakes and the reunited couple eats of them. [Kunai ends the tale saying,] “We don’t
have snakes that big now.”

Filial Love: The Cassowary Mother and Her Human Son

Storyteller: Nakwane (Listeners: Eine and Nauwen)
A man named Skruma and his wife go to the forest to have sex. When they finish, they
see a nearby fig tree whose fruit is ripe, so she climbs the tree to get the figs while he waits
below. She is still naked with no skirt to cover her vulva. One of the figs has fallen to the
ground. As she moves around, unbeknownst to the couple, some of Skruma’s ejaculate
seeps out of her and lands on the fallen fig. She climbs down the tree with the picked
fruit and they return home. Later a cassowary comes along, sees the fallen fig and swal-
lows it whole.13 The cassowary becomes pregnant and has a baby boy, a Black baby boy.

12. In Mead’s (1940: 366) second version of an Arapesh story, “The Dog and the Rat,” the rat
mocks the dog for eating feces and, after other humiliating misadventures, the dog kills the
rat and eats it. (True to myth form, this story demonstrates that Mead, like her mentor Boas,
had to listen to a lot of repeats. Also, in Mead’s story, the rat tricks the dog into eating feces; if
the wallaby had similarly tricked the dog into eating feces, that would help provide the logic
I seek for the Lujere story’s final sentence.)
13. The cassowary is an important character in the stories and rituals of many Sepik area socie-
ties, for example, among the Wape in the Torricelli Mountains (Mitchell 1988). Among the

340
 Stories from an Imaginary Past

When she hears the baby’s loud cry, she is frightened and runs away but comes back. She
takes care of the baby as its mother and they go everywhere together. The baby grows and
learns to walk.
One day Skruma is in the bush and sees a small child’s footprints alongside a casso-
wary’s. When he returns home, after eating and while smoking and chewing betelnuts,
he tells the villagers and his wife what he saw. They decide to try and catch the child. The
cassowary and her son are sleeping in the wild sugar cane, so the next morning the vil-
lagers get up to go hunt for them. But both escape. The villagers return three successive
days to surround the wild sugar cane (repeated in detail) and each time the cassowary
and child elude them. Finally, on the fifth day, they capture the little boy but his mother
escapes. After the villagers eat, they start back to the village but they keep the boy sur-
rounded so the cassowary, who follows them, is not able to rescue her little son. She
doesn’t go back to her home but remains in the area.
Back in the village, Skruma and his wife and his old father watch the boy so he won’t
run away. They give him food but he doesn’t know how to eat. In the forest, he and his
mother only ate nuts. After he learns how to eat human food like meat, sago, and cooked
insects, his parents go to make sago in the bush and leave him with his grandfather and
his two older siblings. But his siblings won’t give him any meat or sago and he is very
hungry. They tell him, “This isn’t your kind of food, you just eat the nuts from the forest!”
While they are away, he gathers together some food and climbs up to the top of the house
and calls out to his mother. He calls and calls. Finally, he hears an answer from the Sand
River. He continues to call to her. Each time she answers his call she is closer. Finally, she
is as near as Waniyo’s house. When she arrives at Skruma’s house, he climbs up her leg,
puts his things on her neck, sits on her back as he is still a little boy, then they run away.
The grandfather grabs a stick to strike the cassowary, but she and her son have already
escaped.
When the couple returns from making sago and hear what has happened, she cries
and cries at the loss of her new son. The boy and his cassowary mother come to a small
pond by a little hill like Mauwi. He makes a little temporary house with one bed, gets
some fish from the pond and some wild sugar cane for his mother. They go to sleep and
the next day get up and travel until they come to a mountain. The cassowary tells her son
to make this his place. He makes a shelter to sleep but the next day he builds a big house
and, with his two stone adzes, cuts down the little trees, then the big trees, and sets them
all on fire. Now he makes a garden, as it was dry-weather time. Then he makes a ritual for
wind and rain. His mother sleeps under his big house. The garden comes up overnight
and his two dogs, one male and one female, are now full grown. Then he makes an even
bigger house. He also makes weapons for hunting and shoots two pigs and two cassowar-
ies. He brings them home, butchers them and smokes them. The next day he kills one pig
and three cassowaries.
His mother finds two girls near the Sepik River by a pond. The girls’ skirts are hanging
up so she eats them. The girls want to strike her but she runs away and they follow her.
They come to the boy’s mountain home and the three of them go on top to the house.

Waina (Gell 1975) and Amanab ( Juillerat 1996) in the Border Mountains, it evoked a pro-
vocative discussion on a cassowary-related ritual cycle ( Juillerat 1992). See also Tuzin’s (1980:
1–8) Ilahita Arapesh myth of the cassowary/woman.

341
 A Witch’s Hand

The boy is out hunting so the cassowary hangs up the girl’s things and gives them food.
The boy returns from hunting with one pig and one cassowary and, coming inside, sees
the two girls. [They think he is a spirit boy and he thinks they are spirit girls and they
ask each other what they eat to assure the other is not a demon or spirit.14 It is a stand-
ard verbal exchange in many stories, among the Wape too.] They tell him how they met
the cassowary at the pond and came back here with her and that she carried all of their
things. He then explains that the cassowary is his true mother. He decides to marry both
of the girls and they all first eat, then chew betel and smoke tobacco.
The next day he goes hunting while the two girls, who are sisters with the same
mother, make sago. In time, one sister has a baby boy, the other a baby girl. The sisters
continue to have children and when they grow up, the boys marry their own sisters. They
can’t exchange sisters with other men because there are no other villages nearby.
One day the cassowary goes to a pond but a hunter is hiding in wait and he kills her.
Her son is waiting for her to come home but by dark she does not appear. The next day he
gets his weapons and, on finding the man that killed his mother, he kills him. Once back
home, he beat the slit gong to announce his victory over his enemy.
[This story wound down rather rapidly. It had started to rain unusually hard, was al-
most 11:00 p.m., and I know that Nakwane got soaked dashing home.]
The next story was the first one I collected from the Lujere; at eighty minutes, it was
also the longest.

The Turtle Moon and the Naughty Children

Storyteller: Oria (Listeners: Nakwani, Nauwen, Yaope, Iwi, and Kairapowe)
A woman finds a turtle by the river, puts a hole in its shell, then hangs it up. She had
no sago to eat with it, so she and her husband go to the bush to cut down a sago palm
and make sago flour but their small son and daughter remain at home with their father’s
mother. The children go to the river to bathe and play with the turtle, then bring it back to
the village and place it at the base of a big black palm. It climbs up the tree but the grand-
mother sees it and climbs after it, catches it, then takes it back to the river and fastens it
with a strong vine. Two more times the children take the turtle to the village and each
time the grandmother climbs up the tree, catches it, and returns it to the river where she
fastens it with a strong vine. But the fourth time when the grandmother sees the turtle
going up into the fronds of the palm, she does not go after it as her chest and breasts are
so badly bruised from climbing up and down the tree. The turtle continues to climb, goes
up into the clouds, and then becomes the moon. The grandmother then makes a false
turtle out of a wild taro leaf and puts it by the river.
The parents come home in the afternoon and the mother makes sago dumplings from
the new flour. The grandmother says nothing about the turtle. When the mother fin-
ishes the dumpling, she gets the turtle, breaks it open and cooks it on the fire. When it
is cooked she tastes it but it tastes awful. She tries it again and it is still terrible and she
throws it away in disgust. The grandmother then tells her the story of what happened to

14. Mark Pendergrast (2017: 155–210) interestingly deals with demons in contemporary society
as aspects of psychiatry and psychotherapy.

342
 Stories from an Imaginary Past

the turtle, how she caught it three times after the children released it but the fourth time
it got away because her chest was too badly scraped to climb the palm again. The mother
does not say anything about this to the children.
Early the next morning the father goes hunting for pigs in the wild sugar cane with
some other men. The children and the two women stay home. The mother says that she
wants to pick some breadfruit and the two children want to go with her. She says as soon
as it is light they can go with her. They set out together and the mother cuts the flower
sheaths from three big palms for three big baskets and also cuts some vines. She collects
shoots of coconuts, bananas, breadfruit, sago palms, and tulip trees, as well as yams and
all the other kinds of food they plant to eat. She also has a female and male puppy. She
then climbs a breadfruit tree and throws the fruit down, chops some firewood, cooks the
breadfruit, removes the skins and feeds the breadfruit to her children. She asks them if
they are sleepy and suggests they rest in the baskets. She has them lie down, each with a
head at either end; soon they are sound asleep.
The mother takes the vines and ties the children into the baskets, then makes a raft
and puts it into the river. She places the sleeping children on the raft, then puts all of the
plants and trees aboard with the two puppies. She also puts some sago and meat on board
and ties everything down securely. She walks with the raft towards the middle of the river,
pushes it downstream, and returns to the shore.
The children float down the river on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on,
and on, [etc.]. For four days and four nights they drift down the river then, towards even-
ing, they are washed ashore by a wave (Oria wonders how a wave got into the story; there
are only waves on the ocean!). The boy wakes up and with a shell in his net bag cuts a hole
in the basket and gets out. He wakes his sister and tells her what their mother has done
to them. But she says, “We can’t cry; we ruined her turtle so she has ruined us!” They eat
the food she provided for them, smoke, then make a shelter.
Their father returns from his hunt after killing five pigs and asks, “Where are the chil-
dren?” His wife answers that they are out playing and he tells her to call them to come
and eat his meat. She says she doesn’t know where they are and for him to call them. He
becomes annoyed and tells her strongly to go and find his children. She goes outside and
pretends to look for them. When she returns, she says she could not find them. The man’s
mother then tells him what his wife did with the children. The father says nothing. He
gets his bow and shoots his wife dead with an arrow.
The children wake up the next morning at 6:00 and find themselves at the base of a
big mountain. They look at the mountain and decide, “This is our place!” There are no
people there but lots of wildlife: pigs, cassowaries, bush fowl, [etc.]. The children eat, feed
the dogs, then climb up the mountain to find a place to make a house. They find some
cassowary eggs and a place for the house. He cuts down all of the trees, then they return
to their shelter. But first they put poison in a brook to kill the fish. They stay up all night
smoking the many fish. In the morning he tells his sister, “You smoke fish today and I’ll
go and make our little house [myriad details of his getting the supporting posts, cross-
beams, etc.]. At five o’clock he goes back home. He asks his sister, “Have you eaten?” and
she answers, “No.” The two eat together, feed the dogs, and go to sleep. At six o’clock the
boy gets up and cuts some branches of the wild coconut palm to enclose the top front of
the house while his sister remains to smoke more fish. His sister makes the clay hearth
in the house and a place to smoke the fish. Both are now big and robust; “We’re all right

343
 A Witch’s Hand

now!” (Oria makes an aside here, saying they cannot eat cassowary eggs; only a married
man with children can. They can just eat the eggs of the bush fowl.) They go down to the
raft and bring all of the things on it up to the house. They then clear land for a garden and
burn it off with a very bright fire. The fire is so big that people from far away see it burning
on the mountain and wonder. It burns steadily for six days and goes out on the seventh.
The children make a rain ritual and the rain comes down. Now they plant all of the
plants and trees they brought with them [all are named individually, one by one, and
planted one by one]. At dusk they eat some sago dumplings and eggs and, when it is
dark, they go to sleep. But during the night, the boy gets up and, looking at the garden,
sees that everything [all are named one by one] has grown big. He gets his sister up, the
dogs wake up too, then they eat a bite, have a smoke, and go back to sleep. The boy is up
with the sun and, as he looks around, again sees how everything they planted has come
up. Then he gets his sister up, “This is different from our place; there we didn’t have plenty
of everything like here.” The sister gets a stone to cut a flower sheath for washing sago
and dries it in the sun. They cut some bananas to eat and cut some tobacco leaves to dry.
They try everything. They make a big house that is larger than our [Wakau’s] old men’s
house and move in.
The boy goes pig hunting with his two dogs that are good hunters. The boy and girl
are in the bush and he shoots a pig. There is another man pig hunting, shoots a pig, and
the boy sees him and asks, “Where do you come from?” [Then the usual back and forth,
are you a man or a demon questioning.] The two males have a smoke and make a fire.
The man that shot the pig butchers it and gives him a front and hind leg and a shoulder,
then asks him, “Are you single or married?” The two males separate and when the boy
gets home, his sister comes from washing sago and he tells her that a bush demon gave
him the pig parts. Earlier, the hunter told the boy to come to his place in four days. He
goes to his house, then they mark the day for the hunter to go to the boy’s place. When
he arrives, the boy says that the woman is his sister, not his wife. The hunter says that his
place is no good, that he lives in the fens, doesn’t have a garden; it is all forest. He wants
to exchange sisters, saying they can do it. “We will collect food first then, after the third
night, exchange sisters.” He says on the fourth day they will meet at the boy’s place; it is
a good place. They make a big feast, and each shoots two pigs. They decide to live on the
boy’s mountain. After the two couples marry, numerous children are born and they decide
they need a men’s house and build one.
[The Wape have a similar moon story with disobedient children exiled by their moth-
er. I tried to explore this with Oria and his listeners, but they weren’t interested.]

The Selfish Husband and a Magical Skirt

Storyteller: Kaiera
A village was having a ‘sing-sing’, but a husband told his wife that he would go alone
because they did not have the shell rings to give them for meat and sago.15 His wife,
however, protested; it was her birth village and she wanted to go, too. “No!” he said, “Only

15. The festival referred to is the more important of the two na wowi festivals where a village ac-
cumulates a large amount of smoked meat and sago for the exchange of the visitors’ shell rings.

344
 Stories from an Imaginary Past

I will go and you cannot follow me!” So, she made a new skirt for herself and that night,
after fastening the door tight, she made a hole in the roof of the house. She then put on
her new skirt and was transformed into a bird of paradise. When her husband returned
home the next morning from the all-night ‘sing-sing,’ he tried and tried to get in. He
called out repeatedly for her to open the door but she had flown away.
[After the story was over, Kaiera added that men can no longer make their wives stay
at home when there is a ‘sing-sing’; now they go with them.]

A Cannibal Demon and the Villagers’ Revenge

Storyteller: Yaope (he learned the story from his father, old Menethua)

One night a man named Ilemelo was alone at his bush camp when he heard a pig, then
went outside and shot it. With a lighted torch, he followed its blood and eventually
found it dead. He fastened its legs together, then covered it over with some leaves. He
was hungry and wanted a frog to eat so he killed two little green ones and brought them
back to his bush camp to cook and eat. He looked for his sago but it was gone because a
demon named Souku had eaten it. Souku did not hide but called out, “Sago! Sago! Sago!”
Ilemelo answered, “Who ate my sago dumplings and sago cakes?” Ilemelo sees Souku
and they begin to fight but Souku wins. First he rips off Ilemelo’s balls, then his penis,
and immediately eats them; he then proceeds to eat the rest of him until nothing is left
but his bones.
It was almost dawn when Souku went into a rotten black palm tree and stood up in-
side of it. Back in the village, Ilemelo’s wife wonders why her husband has not returned
and if a wild pig has killed him. She tells the villagers that her husband is missing and
goes to find him with their young son who didn’t want to go with her. They arrive at their
bush camp but when she sees no smoke, she knows he is not there. “Where is he?” She
hasn’t yet seen his bones. Then on the veranda she sees his bones and begins to wail, as she
knows a demon has killed and eaten him. Then their son also begins to wail.
The two of them now go to look for the demon. He walks like a crocodile and they
follow his tracks to the black palm tree. From inside, Souku asks, “Who are you looking
for?” and she answers, “My husband,” and wants to know who ate him. “See my stomach?”
he says, “I ate him!” She says she is going back to the village and tells him to come with
her but he says, “This is my house, I am not going anywhere! I’m too full to walk.” She and
her son begin wailing again and head for home where the villagers hear them approach-
ing. The villagers ask why are they wailing and she tells them that she saw her husband’s
bones and that a demon had eaten him. “Did you see the demon?” they ask. “Yes,” she
answers, “I saw him and talked to him. He is in a black palm tree.” All of the village men
get their weapons and go back with her to the camp, and then she takes them to the dead
black palm. Souku sees them and begins to laugh, saying, “I can eat all of you!”
The village men take sago and wild coconut leaves and pile them up around the palm
then they cut it down. The demon in the top of the palm falls and begins to fight with the
men. But the men win and kill the demon. They take his body and put it on the leaves and
set it all ablaze. His stomach explodes and they throw some frogs and ants into the fire.
Only the ashes remain. The village men return to the camp but Ilemelo’s wife wants to
find out if her husband shot a pig so she goes to the sago tree [?] and sees the pig’s blood.

345
 A Witch’s Hand

She returns and tells the men about the pig. The men cut up the pig and carry it back to
the village and present it to their mothers’ relatives to eat.

Wararu and the Spirit Woman

Storyteller: Oria

This story is about a man, Wararu, from Wakau and a woman named Wetabe from Gwid-
ami village. Gwidami is having a na wowi curing festival, the one you saw in Mauwi [an
aside to me], and Wararu goes to it because he lusts for Wetabe and assumes she will
be there. Both are single. He doesn’t eat; he just lusts for this girl. He says, “Just give me
tobacco and betel nuts, that is my kind of food!” The next day Wetabe sleeps until the
afternoon and plans to go netting for fish with a girlfriend. A man in the village warns
her not to go as Wararu lusts for her and might try to abduct her. She disagrees and goes
off with her friend to a local pond to catch fish. Wararu sees their footprints and follows
them to the pond. Wararu talks with Wetabe and tells her to come with him. She asks
him to wait awhile longer so she can catch more fish. [He repeats his request numerous
times with the same avoiding answer.] Now Wararu is furious with her and taking his
bow, shoots an arrow into her stomach and she dies.
Wetabe’s spirit follows him and materializes into her physical self. She is now the
same as a real woman. She tells him to wait for her but he sees a red tree, breaks the bark
open and goes inside of it to hide from her. When she looks for him and can’t find him,
she calls, “Where are you hiding?” and then finds him. He comes out and says, “You are a
spirit!” but she denies that he shot her and says that he missed! Meanwhile her girlfriend
ran back to the village and told how Wararu had shot and killed Wetabe. [Oria retells the
story to here as the girlfriend would tell the villagers what happened.]
They return together to the village and he tells everyone that she is really a spirit but
she says that she is not a spirit but really Wetabe. The two of them have sex and she has
a baby boy and they settle down in her village. Their next baby is a girl. Wetabe has a
younger sister and she and the spirit Wetabe are at another na wowi curing festival. The
spirit Wetabe asks her sister to come with her to the privy, as she has to shit. The sister
is carrying Watebe’s baby and on the way, she shows her sister where they buried her,
whereupon the spirit leaves her and goes down into the grave. When the sister returns
to the festival, they all are angry with her and tell her that now she must care for the
baby and become Wararu’s wife. So she becomes his wife and they move back to his
village.

The Origin of Frogs

Storyteller: Kaiera (Listener: Oria)

There was a single man named Manu with an older married brother and a woman named
Tabilyeh. Once Tabilyeh went to cut firewood but when she cut it, it called out, “Manu,
Manu!” She started to cut the firewood again, and again it called Manu’s name. Manu
heard his name being called, went to where the woman was and they had sex; then each
went home. The next day the same thing happened and this was repeated many times,

346
 Stories from an Imaginary Past

day, after day, after day, after day. Finally, Tabilykan’eh got tired of having sex with Manu
so she took the fruit of a tree, stuck a long sago thorn into it, and placed it in her vagina.
Manu hears his name being called, goes to Tabilyeh but when they have sex, the thorn
goes up into his penis’s opening and causes great pain. “What are you doing to me?” he
cries, “What did your vagina do to me?” (Oria is here and he is helping out with this story,
making it a little more dramatic than quiet Kaiera would.) Tebilyeh stood up, picked up
her firewood, and went home but Manu’s penis began to swell. It continued to swell up
to the size of a tree.
Manu’s brother’s wife always gave food to Manu but his penis was too big now for
him to wear a gourd or walk about so his brother brought him his food. This continued
for two months with her calling out to Manu that his food was ready, his answer that
he can’t walk with this terrible boil, then his brother would bring him the food. Finally,
Manu’s brother told his wife to make two ‘limbums’ of sago dumplings, then call Manu
to come get them but to leave her string skirt very loose so it would expose her vagina,
explaining that when his brother came for the food, he would see her, then get an
erection that would break the swelling in his penis. She did as her husband instructed,
then called to Manu to come but he resisted, exclaiming about his bad boil. She kept
calling for him to come then, after saying her husband said it was all right for him to
come, he did. He watched her make the second batch of sago dumplings and he saw her
exposed vagina. Manu’s penis immediately becomes erect and breaks the swelling with
the sound of a gun. (Oria adds the gun metaphor.) The pus splatters all over the sago
dumplings, the fire, and all over Manu. But his brother’s wife said, “Don’t be embar-
rassed, your brother himself asked me to do this because you have been sick for such a
long time.”
After Manu’s sore healed, he decided to get even with Tabilyeh for causing him so
much distress. He takes an old piece of bamboo and puts it up in the roof of the house
above the fire to dry thoroughly then sharpens it. He hears Tabilyeh’s firewood calling his
name and taking his piece of sharp bamboo, goes to where she is breaking firewood. He
goes up to her and says, “All right, you and I can have sex again.” She replies, “What’s the
matter, why did you go away for so long? My firewood kept calling out your name but
you never came.” But he doesn’t answer her; he was thinking, “You caused me a great deal
of pain before and I have no sympathy for you.” Then he said, “You can lie down now.”
Manu told her to open her legs wide so that he could get a good look inside her vagina
adding, “I’m not taking any chances that you repeat what you did to me before!” Tabilyeh
replied, “I only did that once. I wouldn’t do it again”. So she lay down and opened her
vagina for him. But Manu took his bamboo knife and slit her open from her vagina up to
her stomach, killing her. Then he dug a hole and buried her in it. Tabilyeh’s mother and
father waited for her to come home but she never did. They searched for her day, after day,
after day, then decided she had been killed and began to mourn her.
A village was going to have a curing festival and the men went hunting for the meat.
Both Manu’s and Tabilyeh’s villages knew about the festival and Tabilyeh’s parents go to
it. Manu tells his brother that he is going to the festival alone and his brother’s wife made
a very long piece of twine from the bark of the tulip tree for him. He fastens one end of
it to a post of his house and then, carrying the rest of it wound up, starts for the festival
village atop a hill. The villagers sing and dance all night long, then at daybreak, Manu
begins his own song (Kaiera sings it for me) and it mentions the name of Tabilyeh. Her

347
 A Witch’s Hand

parents hear Manu singing and hurriedly sharpen some sago bark, then using a magical
spell, begin to cut down the hill. The hill breaks down and water gradually rises but the
villagers continue dancing, wondering where all the water is coming from. The water
covers up all of the villagers but Manu escapes with four girls who had been dancing
with him by holding the twine to his penis sheath. Manu flies into the air with the four
girls and returns to his brother’s house. Once home, his brother asks him where he got
the four girls and he gives him one for a wife and takes the other three for his wives.
Back in the flooded village, the dancers have all drowned and have been transformed
into frogs.
Kaiera explained that some of the frogs were very noisy, others less so, and it was re-
lated to how noisy they were as people. He then gave me the Namia name for different
kinds of frogs and imitated each one’s croaking sounds. He added that a villager who had
been away during the festival returned home but saw that the place had been transformed
into a pond. He heard all the frogs croaking and, rather sadly, departed to start another
village.

A Tale of Two Brothers

Storyteller: Nauwen
Two brothers live alone in the forest. The big brother makes a bird blind up in a tree. He
goes into his blind and kills many birds. The last one was a cockatoo and it fell to earth.
An old woman nearby is washing sago. She sees the bird fall, gets its, plucks out it feathers
and puts it in her bag. The big brother climbs down and is surprised to see the old woman.
“Oh,” he says, “I think you are a spirit woman!” “No,” she replies, “I am a real woman! I
think you are a spirit man!” He assures her that he is a real man and won’t eat her, then
she asks, “Are you hungry?” He is and they both eat some sago. She sees a snake and the
brother kills it. A nearby pandanus tree is ripe with fruit. He mentions this to the woman
and she tells him to get two of the fruits but not to throw them down. He climbs up in
the tree and brings two of the fruits back to her. She puts the two fruits by a tree and they
become two young women, real women. They wrap some of the sago the old woman has
made, then the two girls go home with the big brother. When the little brother sees the
two girls, he asks his big brother for one of them. He says no, but tomorrow morning you
can hunt from my bird blind.
The next morning, the little brother gets up early and goes to the bird blind and shoots
a cockatoo like his brother and it falls to the ground. The old woman gets it, plucks its
feathers and puts it into her bag. He climbs down to get his bird and sees the old woman
washing sago.
Alarmed, he says, “Oh, I think you are a bad spirit. You mustn’t eat me!” She replies,
“I can’t eat you, I’m not a spirit woman!” Then he asks her, “Did you see a cockatoo fall
down around here?” “Yes,” she replies, “You can have it.” Then she asks, “Are you hungry?”
“Yes, I’m hungry,” he replies. She cooks some sago and they eat it. The little brother sees
the pandanus tree with its ripe fruit. She tells him to climb up and get two, but not to
toss them down. He climbs up and returns with the fruit. He then kills a snake just like
his big brother. Again, the two pandanus fruits become young women. They tell the little
brother that the old woman is their mother. He then takes the two women home with

348
 Stories from an Imaginary Past

him. Once home, the little brother says to his big brother they should exchange women,
but the brother doesn’t want to.
The little brother goes hunting for fruit bats. The big brother makes a very large hole
in the ground to make a new house under the ground. His two wives make sago and col-
lect food while he makes the house underground. He repeatedly calls out to them from
down in the hole but they don’t hear him. He comes up and says, “I called and called to
you. I called very loud!” But they tell him they never heard him calling. The big brother is
worried that his little brother wants to harm him.
The two brothers go hunting early in the morning for fruit bats. The big brother’s
wives finish making sago, then go into the hole down to the house he has made for them.
The little brother kills some bats and his big brother climbs into an ironwood tree to kill
some more. He puts his hand in a tree hole but it becomes firmly stuck. The little brother
calls up to him that he will now marry his two wives. The little brother collects all of the
dead bats, breaks his brother’s bow, and goes home. Once home, he asks his two wives
where his brother’s wives are and they say they haven’t come home yet. He sends his wives
to look for them but they go to where they were washing sago but come back without
them. He accuses them of trying to fool him, but they deny it.
A man named Tsamu, a stranger [I found out later he really is a fruit bat], finds the big
brother with his hand stuck in a hole up in the tree. He asks Tsamu to get him some betel
nuts, lime, and betel pepper vine but Tsamu returns with wild betel nuts, fire ash, and
another vine. The brother tells him these aren’t right, then tells him where to get the real
items and Tsamu returns with them. Hungry for a banana, he asks Tsamu to bring him a
ripe one but he returns with not a true banana. He tells Tsamu where a good banana tree
is and Tsamu gets a ripe one for him. Tsamu tells the brother that if something happens,
he mustn’t be afraid. The brother assures him that he won’t be. Tsamu then calls for all of
the birds and snakes to come and they gather together on the ironwood tree. One very
large bird comes and breaks the tree and releases the brother’s hand. All the little snakes
make a ladder so the two men can climb down out of the tree. On the ground, the big
brother talks out to all the birds and snakes and says, “When my hand is healed, I’ll repay
you.” In the meantime, his two wives mourn for him in their house in the ground.
Tsamu and the big brother go down into the hole to his house to tell his wives what
has happened and show them his badly injured hand. His two wives feed them meat and
sago dumplings then Tsamu treats his hand. He tells his wives that they must no longer
eat birds and snakes. Tsamu tells the big brother that he will stay and take care of him un-
til his hand is good again. He treats the brother’s hand many times until it is completely
healed. After his hand is healed, he goes to see his little brother who says, “I thought you
were dead!” The two brothers go fishing but the wives first get together all the sago, meat,
and sago grubs. Tsamu speaks out to all the birds and snakes. The brothers begin to try
and scoop up the fish. The little brother keeps trying to scoop up the fish. Two big snakes
come up out of the pond. The water rises and the little brother thinks it is a big fish. But
he is getting tired and decides to rest. Now the big brother and his two wives begin fish-
ing. But the two big snakes attack the little brother, wrap around him and kill him. All
the fish and snakes become very active.
The big brother tells the little brother’s wives that they can’t feel sorry about his death.
After all, “He was to blame for my badly injured hand.” All the little snakes come out of
the pond. Then the big brother takes his little brother’s two wives to be his.

349
 A Witch’s Hand

Water-Snake Woman Is a Good Wife

Storyteller: Kunai

Twenty men go to a mountain, one is as young as Iwi, the rest are adults. They make a
house, make sago, and hunt game. The boy goes hunting, makes a bird blind and sees
twenty women in a bamboo grove. The next day he again goes to hunt birds from his
blind and again sees the women. They are getting water; he runs away to the men’s house.
The women then all go up to the men’s house and all of the men get a wife. But the boy’s
wife doesn’t like him. Even when he is fully grown, his wife still doesn’t like him. She
won’t cook for him or accept the game that he brings her.
In a nearby pond, there is a black poisonous snake that turns into a woman. He goes
to the pond to get water and catches the snake-woman. He goes with her down into the
water. There she cooks food for him and makes him stay with her. But after a year he goes
back up to visit everyone. He asks for his wife; now she wants him but he doesn’t want
her. He makes a slit gong and strikes it and his parents and all his relatives come. Then he
and his snake-wife go back down into the water. His first wife never did remarry but he
and his snake-wife had many children.

350
chapter fifteen

The Lujere Curing Festivals

Magical practices are not entirely without sense.

Marcel Mauss (1975: 60)

Magic in general is a very blind fool.

Reo Fortune (1932: 289)

Modes of Therapeutic Intervention

It is a truism that cultures are never neutral about human existence. Inasmuch as cultures
are arrangements for living, each has opinionated beliefs about what is acceptable and
good and what is unacceptable and bad.1 It is this strong ethical stance about what con-
stitutes a good life that permeates cultural behavior. It is also the human ability to arrive
at varied and conflicting community mores that so vividly distinguishes humans from
other primate species. Within any one culture the “good” and the “bad” are polarized
opposites yet, paradoxically, therein lies the intimacy of their ontological relationship.
For knowledge of what is good and bad is a contrasting process; one helps to define and
determine the other.
In any society, remedial actions directed towards individual human beings tend to take
one of three therapeutic modes: to instruct, to punish, or to heal. The three are alike only
in their goal—to change the bad to good, the negative to the positive. But their strategies
for inducing change are radically different. As indicated, a positive change is attempted
by (1) corrective teaching, (2) inflicting suffering, or (3) alleviating suffering. These thera-
peutic modes are not necessarily mutually exclusive and two of them, or all three, may be
implemented simultaneously. In our own society a person may be jailed (punishing) but

1. This section draws extensively from my paper, “Culturally Contrasting Therapeutic Systems of
the West Sepik: The Lujere” (Mitchell 1975).

351
 A Witch’s Hand

while in jail may attend vocational training classes (instructing) and participate in group
psychotherapy (healing), all in an effort to make her or him over into a law-abiding citi-
zen. And always, as Gilbert Lewis has observed, “Meaning is present not in things but in
people’s minds” (1980: 222).
The therapeutic mode chosen to correct a perceived problem will depend upon the
specific circumstances and the culture’s values. Always, it is the intervention’s cultural
rationale, not the intervention itself, which classifies the therapeutic act. For example,
amputation may be a healing intervention in an American hospital but a punitive inter-
vention in Libya, when a thief ’s hand or an armed robber’s left foot is amputated (Peck
1973: 16). So, it is not enough to know just the therapeutic act; its intent must be known
as well.
But what happens when two cultures, for example, colonial Australia and the Lujere,
with contrasting traditions about the “good” and the “bad” come into continued contact?
Are the remedial systems for changing the bad to the good—always a major cultural
concern—complementary or in conflict? And what is the intrasystemic nature of this
relationship? Is it a simple and separable interface, or do discordant values and behavior
become intermeshed in the lives of the people and, if so, with what consequences for the
individual as well as the culture? These were some of the broad questions on culturally
contrasting therapeutic systems I asked as a way of orienting my research while living
with both the Wape and Lujere.2 We have seen partial answers to some of these ques-
tions for the Lujere in the previous pages. But my basic finding was that in the early
1970s, the Lujere, especially the Wakau villagers that I knew best, were only modestly
impacted by the value systems of colonial Australia, except for the welcomed suspen-
sion of warfare. They mostly just ignored Christianity but some appreciated and used
the introduced health services as adjunctive amenities. Other than a shared idealistic
desire for a ‘kiap’-staffed patrol post that would suppress alleged ‘sanguma’ murders and
provide work when they needed money, Lujere villagers tended to look culturally inward,
not outward. As A. D. C. Broadhurst astutely wrote, “The people show a complete lack
of interest in anything that is going on in the outside world” (1970: 2). Families actually
looked forward to spending weeks, if not months, out of the village and in their forest
hunting camps.
Of the three modes of remedial action I have outlined, I will have little to say regard-
ing the mode of corrective instruction, usually a non-traumatic form of intervention that
I did not deliberately pursue. Here, however, are a few examples. The Australian ‘kiaps’ on
village patrol spent considerable time, as already suggested, instructing villagers on West-
ern notions of order such as laying out a neatly arranged village, and notions of hygiene,
for example, the digging and use of latrines. You might recall how PO Hutchins found
Iwani village in shambles, then remained three nights to instruct and talk with them. As
far as examples of villagers’ corrective instructions towards others are concerned, I have
little data. I was only occasionally aware of a parent quietly redirecting a child’s behavior
but more often of a raised voice or body slap. Among adults in an egalitarian society
like the Lujere without a tradition of developmental initiatory grades for either sex or a

2. For a probing book that deals with these questions using the concept “medical pluralism” in a
dozen Papua New Guinea societies, see Frankel and Lewis (1989).

352
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

plethora of hierarchical statuses that can validate corrective intrusions, the observational
challenge of citing examples obviously was even greater.
But there is no lack of data on punitive interventions on both the administration and
village level. Many of these involving the administration were presented in chapter 11
in a discussion of “colonial offenses” and cited the specific transgression and penalty im-
posed. But regardless of the nature of the offense, the administration imposed only two
forms of negative sanction: the denial of freedom and/or hard labor. Physical punishment
was outlawed and fines, although an important form of reprimand in Australia, were dis-
allowed in the Territory. Consequently, the most common forms of punishment imposed
by the local ‘kiap’ for a Lujere’s perceived transgression of Administration policy were
jailing or cutting grass around the base camp.
Within the village, punitive sanctions included women withholding food from a
strong young man like Samaun to chastise his laziness and alleged sorcery, or an enraged
villager setting fire to the house of a man whom he believed had wronged him—a prac-
tice less common than in the past but still used as a threat—or a dueling stick fight over
a disagreement, like that between old Leno and Kowali in chapter 12. But of the three
therapeutic modes I have mentioned, healing concerns us the most. The principle thrust
of my Lujere research was to identify and understand both Indigenous healing therapies
and those of scientific medicine introduced by Australian colonizers. Of the two, the
former is the more challenging undertaking so that is where we will begin.

The Lujere View of Sickness

How do the Lujere perceive sickness? What are their abiding views about the causes of
bodily injury and illness? While a minor injury or illness might be discounted as ‘sik nat-
ing’ or “not really sick,”3 a graver situation is usually attributable to one of three causes:
‘sanguma,’ sorcery, or spirits. ‘Sanguma,’ a death from which there is no recourse, is, as you
know, executed by men, nakwolu, who are believed to physically and lethally attack their
lone victims. Nakwolu are also believed to travel furtively, either afoot or flying, through
the forest and might sneak into a village at night to shoot small items, such as bits of a
razor blade, into a victim’s body, causing sickness and probable death if not removed.
Examples of sorcery (‘posin,’ paumei) are spells, hexes, or charms that anyone can per-
form if they know the process. There are however, many conflicting local beliefs regarding
sorcery. Tsaime believed that only the person who made the sorcery could undo it, while
other men thought that was wrong. In Wakau, some men blamed S____ for working a
spell to give villagers a bad cold with coughing. Both ‘sanguma’ and sorcery are considered
more fully in the following chapters.
The third important cause of illness was believed to be spirits. This brings us to the
focus of this chapter—the wowi curing festivals—that are centered on malevolent spirits.
In Tok Pisin, they are called ‘masalai,’ “malevolent spirits,” but this was not a term the
Lujere seemed to use, preferring the Namia term aokwae, a concept elaborated on in the

3. But see Roscoe’s (1989) nuanced discussion of ‘sik nating’ among the Boiken of the Yangoru
Subdistrict of the East Sepik Province, where the concept is more complex than among the
Wakau villagers.

353
 A Witch’s Hand

next section. I characterize the Lujere’s traditional curing ceremonials as “curing festivals”
because they involve (1) specific curing rituals, (2) the coming together of the patient’s
family and close relatives from other villages, and (3) the provision of food. However,
before we can describe them, we must first examine the Lujere beliefs about spirits, those
unseen, incorporeal entities that inhabit and/or activate aspects of a villager’s physical and
perceptual domains.

The Lujere Spirit World

On a stormy morning late in January, I finally got a breakthrough into Lujere spirit
beliefs and practices, a topic I had been dancing around since I arrived. Among the Lu-
jere, heavy rain is perfect for data collection as men who happened to be in the village
preferred to stay put rather than get drenched going to the bush. While working with
Oria, I asked him an offhand question, whether the nakwolu were possessed by aokwae.
“Oh, yes!” he eagerly replied and the data began to tumble out. Oria was the perfect
informant; in appreciation of my vast ignorance, he seemed to delight in filling the void
with local knowledge. After our long interview he went home, luckily nearby, as the rain
continued to noisily strike my ‘morata’ roof. Soon, Tsaime and Yaope eagerly climbed the
ladder steps to my ‘ofis’ to escape the downpour. It was perfect timing. I could run by my
visitors some of what I had just learned from Oria for confirmation and/or elaboration.
But neither that day nor later did I succeed in resolving all of the spirit-belief inconsist-
encies among my data.4 However, the logical niceties I sought were as irrelevant to my
informants as those I mentioned earlier on “kinship.” The Lujere’s preternatural beliefs
and concepts were not as neatly distinct as those I had found among the Wape.5 Here,
I was constantly challenged by the uncanny. What follows, then, is a wary distillation of
my understanding of the Wakau version of Lujere spirit beliefs and magical practices.

Souls, Spirits, and Ghouls

A person’s spirit or soul is called poketaiyup (pronounced quickly). It is what animates a
person and departs the body at death via the anus, when the sphincter and bladder mus-
cles relax, expelling feces and urine. Once freed of a person’s body, it is called an aokwae
with, at times, some monstrous characteristics, discussed below, of a ghoul. After a vil-
lager’s death, a nakwolu must perform a private ritual before the aokwae is free to leave
the area. At night and alone he goes to the village’s open plaza and, holding out his hand,

4. Gilbert Lewis identifies a similar problem with Gnau ideas about spirits in the person of
“Malyi,” who perhaps had afflicted a sick villager, when he asks, “Is the sickness Malyi itself or
caused by Malyi?” (2000: 127). For an article that plays imaginatively with the idea of the su-
pernatural and plumbs its ontological problems by citing research on the ranking of fantastic
beasts, see Schultz (2017).
5. Nils Bubandt has a footnote in his witchcraft book (2014: 249, n. 10) where he cites Evans-
Pritchard’s (1937: 540) frank admission that the coherency he found in Zande witchcraft
beliefs was of his own creation and “. . . that order and coherence were actually an effect of his
academic inscription.”

354
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

the aokwae comes and licks it, then, after also licking his legs, it is freed to wander. If the
nakwolu neglects to perform the ritual, the aokwae will come to his house at night and
throw little stones and sticks against it.6
A new aokwae is called an aokwae naki (spirit new) and many of the old spirits (aokwae
bidami), especially those of her or his dead parents and relatives, come into the village
to meet it. First, they ask it, “Are you really dead and have come to join us or are you
playing tricks on us?” The aokwae naki answers, “I have really come to join you, this isn’t
a trick. Now give me some food! You must feed me as I am hungry.” If you imagine all
the village’s aokwae flying into the village to meet and greet their new dead relative and
neighbor, it is an almost sweet “welcome wagon” image, but to the living residents it is a
terrifying one to consider. Aokwae can be menacing. They have sharp fingernails several
inches long that can easily rip apart a person’s flesh, teeth set in a creepy grimace, and
big protruding eyes. Informants loved to imitate an aokwae’s scary expression but those
watching became immediately anxious, squirmed and yelped with a true shudder. They
enjoyed the burlesque but the laughter was tinged with fear. Aokwae were real.
Here, I again want to emphasize the nature of the phenomenological world of the
Lujere. The preliterate societies of New Guinea for tens of thousands of years were geo-
graphically and socially isolated from the world’s complex civilizations. For these socie-
ties, as Goode observed, “The supernatural is as real as what we call the empirical, and
the world does not stop at the borderline of the Western scientist’s senses” (1951: 50).
This includes their dead family members and even their ancestors whom they didn’t know
personally. The challenge for the fieldworker, as it is for the reader, is to float over that
borderline and wander into the Lujere consciousness where the unseen, like electricity
and Wi-Fi beams, are active and alive.
As the stories in the last chapter demonstrated, aokwae relish eating humans and their
habit of eating flesh raw is considered especially odious. They are also versatile in chang-
ing into and out of human form—hence the standard query on meeting a total stranger,
whether they are human or an aokwae—and a sure sign of the latter is being seen eat-
ing raw meat. Another ominous trait of an aokwae is fire coming from under the arms,
the groin, and the area behind the knees. A frequent event in a traditional story is for
an aokwae to trick a villager to hunt or work sago with him or her by saying he or she is
another villager. Then when the two are walking along the path with the aokwae in front,
the victim suddenly notices the fire from the aokwae’s legs or armpits.
If a villager was in the bush when they learned that someone died, it was imperative
to return to the village. If found out there, or even while out walking alone at night in
a sleeping village, an aokwae naki might rip off a man’s genitalia and gouge out his eyes
and eat them or, if a woman, her vaginal area would be attacked and eaten as well as her
eyes. Even in the village, after a person dies people tend to stay in their houses at night
for at least a month, not that they wander nocturnally much otherwise. The dual threat
of aokwae and nakwolu potentially menacing a village results in individuals rarely being
alone in the bush, night or day, or on foot in the village at night. My village presence
might have modified that custom a bit as my ‘ofis’ was open on three sides and, as I spent
most nights there until almost midnight typing up data from my note books, my Aladdin
lamp thrust a welcoming light in what otherwise was a darkened village. But even on a

6. This is the only licking ritual I recorded among the Lujere or the Wape.

355
 A Witch’s Hand

bright moonlit night, when Wape villagers would be visiting and laughing on their roomy
verandas, Wakau villagers were mostly securely indoors.
Because of an aokwae, and especially an aokwae naki’s possible murdering vengeance,
it was of upmost importance for villagers to be particularly cautious if they had offended
or were ungenerous to the recent dead. Thus, a son who had not given sufficient food
to his old father might be attacked by his father’s angry aokwae naki and devoured. The
fact that no one could supply an instance of such an act did not diminish the belief. It
was the same with parental neglect of a child: if it died its aokwae naki would try to kill
its mother and father. This fear of the recent dead was a strong motive in the attention
given to the sick and dying, especially when genuine affection was lacking. Moreover, for
a people who seemed to spend as much time, if not more, out of the village than in it, the
probability of these frightful attacks helps to emphasize the importance of the village to
its residents as a place of refuge and solidarity, not only against the homicidal enemies
of yore, but also against the unseen aokwae and nakwolu that continued to threaten a vil-
lager’s life.
There is, however, a very comforting belief regarding aokwae. The aokwae of one’s par-
ents, or perhaps of an elder brother, can be entreated to help you. If you have been a good
son, your father’s aokwae might come and dwell in your house (my informant looked up
to the roof when he said this) and occasionally make a noise or soft whistle to signal that
he was there and, if a nakwolu came to harm you, he would chase him away. Or it could
be the aokwae of your mother, or a grandparent (aokwae aitwa) you knew; these people
never can forget you. They must stay and look after you forever. So there are always these
beneficent aokwae who have your back while the others are mostly out to do you in.
In an interview with Alomiaiya and Yaope,7 two bright and affable youths who were
hanging out at my ‘ofis’ one day, I was trying to discover the extent of the requests you
could make of family aokwae. I knew they were important in hunting but these young men
also emphasized that when seeking a wife your aokwae could help turn a girl’s affection
towards you or, more instrumentally, help you cut down a big tree. When I asked about
gardens, Yaope replied with an interesting example (here translated from Tok Pisin):

Suppose your mother and father die at the same time. Your mother’s aokwae will go
to your garden and look after it. If any person comes to steal, she will hit them and
make them vomit and they will become very sick. All right, the nakwolu that treats
this sick person will ask him if he has been in someone’s garden and if he says, “Yes,”
the nakwolu will say, “Well, that’s what it is; you were in his garden and his aokwae has
made you sick.” Then the nakwolu will talk out to the aokwae and tell it to make the
sickness go away.”

When I asked them both if my father’s aokwae didn’t hear my pleas or answer my
requests, could I be cross with him or must I remain silent, the answer, as I had predicted,
was that I could be cross with him but, they cautioned, you never can hear it speak,
you only hear it whistle. Then, pressing to see if aokwae thinking had been extended
into modern and introduced materials, I asked in Tok Pisin, “What if I want some new

7. The youth Yaope, the son of Walbi, died when he was little and is not to be confused with the
older Yaope whose marriage was described in chapter twelve.

356
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

clothes, can I ask my aokwae to help me get them?” The thoughtful reply was, ‘Mi no
harim gut yet,’ or, “I haven’t yet heard about this.”
In many societies that believe in ancestor spirits, it is necessary to offer them food
but, according to my two young informants, this is not the case with the Lujere. “No,
you give them nothing. He isn’t like you and me sitting down here. You only see him in
your dreams. In the morning you might get up and tell your wife, ‘Oh, last night I saw my
aokwae, we talked together” (my emphasis). I also wanted to know if these benevolent
family or ancestral aokwae we had talked about were the same aokwae that (1) shoot little
spears into people and break their small bones that I had watched nakwolu either remove
or mend, as well as those aokwae that (2) sit atop big tress and terrorize people like in the
ancestral stories. Yes, I was assured, they are all the same aokwae, it just depends if they
are friendly, or not, to you.
The most ubiquitous of the several kinds of aokwae are those of the villagers’ dead rela-
tives that inhabit and protect their descendants’ lands and waters. There are a lot of beliefs
regarding the nature of aokwae, and, depending to whom you are talking, some of the
beliefs appear contradictory; for example, if a stranger is hunting on someone else’s bush,
a resident aokwae might help him find a pig or a murak but it also might make the in-
truder sick and induce vomiting. If a man has been on another’s land and is vomiting, he
will go to the owner and ask him to rub his skin with stinging nettles and speak out to his
aokwae. Kin-aokwae, as noted, will aid a relative in the hunt and in getting fish, but they
might also turn against a living relative. Some aokwae like to sit in the tops of big trees
and if a man, whether a relative or not, happens to cut down the tree where it is sitting,
it might shoot him with a little arrow causing his chest to pain or to make him vomit. To
cure his illness, he must seek a nakwolu or, more correctly, an imoulu for treatment.
In the Lujere consciousness, aokwae are everywhere and the explanation for myriad
phenomena. A child’s crying for no discernable reason might be attributed to a dead
grandfather visiting his grandchild or other small children he knew. Oria gave me this
example. His father who was a nakwolu, died several months before I arrived, and his
aokwae might go to a villager’s house and unwittingly scare the resident baby, making it
cry. Then Oria must go to the baby and, blowing gently into its ear, speak out telling his
father’s aokwae to leave the child alone. Once when Eine’s daughter Imani was wailing
loudly for food, Nauwen joked that he thought she was an aokwae’s child. But Oria said
that there were no aokwae involved in her constant crying; she just wanted meat The
other form of crying, he explained, was episodic or unusual.
In usage, the term aokwae is a multivalent term with multiple referents. Besides the
kin-aokwae are those spirits in service to a nakwolu and assumed to have been his victims.
They help empower his treatment stratagems, look after him, and protect him from the
attacks of other nakwolu. The next chapter focuses on the beliefs about and the behavior
of nakwolu both as alleged killers and recognized curers, imoulu, and reviews their pres-
ence in other societies including Aboriginal Australia. The more I learned about aokwae
the more unstable the concept became. Another kind of aokwae, unrelated to dead hu-
mans, are the aijan aokwae, spirit entities associated with natural phenomena like ponds
(ena aokwae), streams (iju aokwae), swamps (lei aokwae), or anything of unusual size, for
example, a very large coconut tree with lots of coconuts or a very large sago palm. There
were also aokwae associated with specific places like a hill, or who dwelled underfoot,
down in the ground.

357
 A Witch’s Hand

But regardless of the kind of aokwae, they all have the power to cause sickness. Thus,
if a woman beats derris root into a pond to kill the fish, a resident aokwae might be an-
gered and shoot something into her body, causing a sickness. As a sick person she usually
would initially go to an imoulu for a diagnosis and treatment. In my observations of many
imoulu treatment sessions, they were persistently extracting bits of this or that, usually not
shown, shot into the body by an aokwae or nakwolu.
Any aokwae also has the potential to steal a person’s poketaiyup, an act resulting in
sickness. To return the poketaiyup, an adept must dream they have gone to secure it
from the aokwae and brought it back to the person. In Wakau, Klowi once had this
skill but since obtaining a gun has lost the ability. Tsaime explained that the loud
noise of the gun’s firing had chased “it” away, “it” apparently being the skill. The youth
Yaope’s widowed mother also had this soul-procurement dreaming skill but she left
Wakau when she remarried a Gwidami man. When a Wakau villager thought, or was
told by an imoulu, that soul loss was the cause of a sickness, he or she either went to
Yaope’s mother in Gwidami or to one of several individuals in the Edwaki area who
had the skill. When the adept dreamed that the soul had returned, they either told the
person or sent a message regarding the success. But my favorite reference to aokwae
was that a colorful rainbow (aokwae nebu) arched across the sky was the road of the
aokwae.

Tracking Down the Wowi Spirits

I had lived in Wakau only two weeks and was still a neophyte in terms of understanding
what was happening around me—especially regarding the magical spirit world—when I
saw my first curing festival. This was a na wowi curing festival in Mauwi near the end of
November. Then in February, I observed two aewal wowi (stinging nettles wowi) curing
festivals, one in neighboring Mokadami and the other in Wakau, and in early March,
another in Wakau. But try as I would, I could get no translation for the generic term
wowi. Finally, near the end of my fieldwork when Kaiera began telling me the old Lujere
stories of their forefathers, I got an answer. Like so much of fieldwork, it was a seren-
dipitous event and, being in the form of a story, somewhat implicit. Also, it appeared to
be a story not as widely known in Wakau as in Mauwi, where Kaiera had lived most of
his life.
Kaiera’s story began with a Kwieftim woman in the bush being bothered by two fly-
ing insects that buzzed around her head as she was making sago. They were two wowi
who, after transforming themselves into men, murdered her. Her son, who was hiding,
watched as they cut up her body, drank her blood, and then wrapped her parts in a ‘lim-
bum’. Finally, they carried it to a tree with a hole near its base into which they all disap-
peared. The tree was filled with wowi. The boy hurried home, told his relatives what he
had seen, and they returned together to the wowi’s tree and built a great fire at its base.
Threatened by the raging flames, the wowi all flew away to different villages. Na (sago)
wowi went to Tsila; ithu (water) wowi went to Marpel [?]; anapi (bow) wowi 8 flew away

8. I was unsuccessful in discovering the cultural significance of the qualifying terms, na, ithu, and
anapi in the wowi names.

358
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

to Kelnom; piaba (untranslatable) wowi stayed in Kwieftim; and yokwar (untranslatable)

wowi flew to Maurom.9
Once in Tsila, na wowi put his erect penis into a long gourd and began to dance. Two
women working sago heard, as he danced, the noise of the gourd striking the Job’s tears
seed necklace on his chest. They liked the sound and wondered what made it but, every
time they approached the sound, it would stop. Finally they sneaked around behind the
noise and saw him dancing. When he saw the two women, he immediately dropped his
gourd and flew away.
The women went to the spot from where he had flown away and found the gourd
on the ground, ginger that gave him a continuous erection, and the paint with which
he had decorated his legs. One of the women stuck the front of her skirt into the gourd
and began to perform, but it wasn’t the same. Then the other woman tried and she also
failed. But when one of their husbands donned the gourd and began to dance, he was
very good. The women decided it was something for men, not for women. Their finding
was confirmed in a dream when the wowi told them the same thing. Finally, in the ashes
of the wowi’s burned tree, three kinds of banana plants came up and some wowi ginger.10
As Kaiera finished the story, he said the two women felt that the na wowi still be-
longed to them as they had found it! Interestingly, the na wowi curing festival is the only
one of the wowi curing ceremonials I observed that women could witness in its entirety,
a seeming confirmation of male acknowledgment of the women’s rights by discovery. In
the two aewal wowi festivals I observed, there were strategic times when women had
to cover their heads to protect themselves from the harm that visual knowledge of the
proceedings would incur.
Although Kaiera’s story about the vicious wowi finally established for me a Lujere
referent for the term, it was obvious that the story wasn’t well known; as mentioned, my
Wakau informants, couldn’t tell me what the word “wowi” meant. As an example, one
informant told me, ‘em i samting nating,’ in other words, of no importance. As this evil
entity called a wowi who could change from a flying insect into a human was not a part of
my Wakau informants’ consciousness I, like my informants, focused my attention on the
na wowi and aewal wowi phenomena and, although no one seemed to know where they
came from, what they were, or even cared, there was agreement that it was their aokwae
that made people sick. Thus, when Oria’s wife became sick, as will be reviewed in chapter
18, it was clear to him that it was the aokwae of the aewal wowi that had shot something
into her.

The Ways of Ritual

While knowledge of a society’s beliefs about the supernatural is necessary for an overall
grasp of their way of life, it is just as important to know about the related ritual practices.

9. Maurom was located in the Torricelli foothills just north of Lujereland. I had visited the vil-
lage earlier in 1971 when seeking a new research site and saw masks in the men’s house called
“Yokwar” or a term very close to that. Marpel seems to have been a hamlet or village that no
longer exists.
10. Kaiera explained that they are tabooed from eating one of the bananas during a na wowi fes-
tival but could give no rationale.

359
 A Witch’s Hand

Ritual, which Wallace (1966: 233) characterized as “stereotyped communication,” in the

most general sense connotes a customary repetitive action. More specifically, it can de-
note social etiquette such as greetings, the repetitive obsessive acts of a neurotic person,
the mating performances of some insects and animals (including homo sapiens), secular
acts like the morning brushing of one’s teeth, and routinized actions towards supernatu-
ral beings. Already I have used the term multiple times in the previous pages, mainly in
the latter sense.11 The rest of this chapter examines Lujere curing rituals performed in a
festival context. These are community shared curing rites whereby villagers relate and/or
appeal to preternatural forces—unseen but presumed to exist—with the intent of effect-
ing a change in a victim’s life status from sickness to health.

The Wowi-Spirit Curing Festivals

The Wakau villagers celebrate three kinds of curing festivals: na wowi, aewal wowi, and
aokwae wowi. All are primarily but, in practice, not exclusively concerned with a certain
kind of affliction, specifically, na wowi with sores; aewal wowi with ‘skin i lus’ or, in
American vernacular, being “run down” or “sickly”; and aokwae wowi with ‘sot win’ or
pulmonary disorders. Festival rites are dedicated to restoring health to the afflicted and
are, in Geertz’s terms, “a kind of religious psychodrama” (1966: 19).
There are two kinds of na wowi festivals, but only the second kind involves sickness.
The first, and communally more important, was performed in the western area, mainly
in Mokodami, Aiendami, and Mantopai, but Oria said he saw it once in Mauwi. This
festival has nothing to do with sickness but is involved with the trading of smoked meat
for shell rings or money. The village giving the festival goes to the bush to hunt for several
months; when they return laden with smoked meat, they stage their festival with other
villages coming to trade their rings for the meat.12 This festival lasts several days, with all-
night celebrating. Na wowi masks participate but perform only in the daytime. I never
saw this festival but while living in Wakau I later heard that Norambalip staged one and
that Ces Parish had attended.13 This sounds similar to a festival celebrating a new men’s
iron that the Feldpauschs (1988: 30–31) report on for Yaru village. The other kind of na
wowi festival that involves curing is discussed below.
Curing festivals are small-scale communal events that usually include a few relatives
of the afflicted person from other villages and the offering of food. The sponsor of the
curing festival is usually a close relative of the sick person and must provide a meal,

11. The anthropological literature on ritual is enormous and controversial; for an array of critical
data on approaches, see, for example, Van Gennep (1960), Leach (1968), Turner (1969), La
Fontaine (1972), Vizedom (1976), and Lewis (1980). I have chosen to stay out of the “bitter
arguments in the social sciences over the nature and meaning of ritual” ( Jean and John Co-
maroff, 1993: xix).
12. “The Selfish Husband and a Magical Skirt,” a story in chapter 14, was about this type of na
wowi festival.
13. Unfortunately, I have no details regarding this festival or know if they still used rings or, as I
suspect, substituted money. There was a good motorbike track from the mission up to Noram-
balip, the main reason I didn’t consider it for a research site.

360
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

usually with help from relatives, for all the participants in the ritual plus visiting guests.
In Wakau, this would include sago dumplings and cakes, and meat, either fresh and/or
smoked. Usually they would try to kill a wild pig or cassowary but, if they had no luck and
owned a pig, it might be butchered. If no meat were available, at the very least, cooked
insects and/or fish would have to be offered.
None of the three kinds of curing festivals was their own invention but borrowed
from cultures west of them, although some of the related chants they considered their
own. Interestingly, they continued to borrow, as Mokadami did for the aewal wowi curing
festival described below. Eine said that the aewal wowi ‘sing-sing’ was new in his father’s
time, that their ancestors did not know it and it came from Tsila village before the Yellow
River missionaries arrived (that is, before the mid–1950s), adding, ‘mi lik lik yet,’ that he
was a little boy.14 Earlier, they already had imported the na wowi ‘sing-sing’ from appar-
ently both Tsila and Wagu.
When I asked Eine about the aokwae wowi ‘sing-sing’ that I had never seen, he replied
that it was given for individuals who were sick with sores or had difficulty in breathing. It
was performed in the afternoon, food was distributed, and it ended before dark with no all-
night ‘sing-sing.’ The mask was similar to the na wowi with the same big gourd phallus. This
curing festival also came from Tsila, whose villagers got it from further west. Sometimes the
aewal wowi and agwai wowi curing festivals were combined in a conjoined festival.
The aokwae wowi festival was the only one where I received an unequivocal statement
that, if you had ‘sot win,’ an aokwae had gone inside of the sick person, grabbed its heart,
shook it over and over and pulled it about so violently that it became increasingly dif-
ficult to breathe; eventually the person would die. To my questioning, Oria said that this
aokwae was tiny and that only an imoulu could see it. As I knew that Luritsao had serious
‘sot win,’ I wondered why his brother Enewan didn’t have an aokwae wowi curing festival
to exorcise the malicious aokwae threatening his life. The answer was that Enewan had
had no luck in finding game for the festival and his Naroli clansmen didn’t seem inter-
ested in helping him. From Oria’s data, this curing festival was rarely given. He had seen
it in Mokadami when he was still single and another time for his father’s brother, Ukai. I
photographed, filmed and tape-recorded all of the curing festivals I attended and villag-
ers were usually keen to hear any play-back of the proceedings that I offered (see fig. 24).
After I had listened to Kaiera’s tale about the evil wowi, I thought I would hear a lot
about them as I interviewed and asked questions regarding the various curing festivals.
But no one ever mentioned the insect-flying, human-transforming, blood-drinking mur-
derous wowi that terrorized the villagers in Kaiera’s wowi story. In fact, the term wowi
was never mentioned as a catalyst in causing illness. Almost always, it was the aokwae
who was blamable for the malady.

Mauwi’s Na Wowi Curing Festival

I had moved into my new house the night before and was still disorganized when I heard
that a curing ceremony would occur that afternoon in nearby Mauwi hamlet. I only knew

14. As this was about the same time that Wakau village was first visited by a patrol officer (1956),
it indicates that at least some Lujere had peaceful ties to Tsila village, perhaps in trade, like
documented in chapter nine for the Lujere and their foes across the Sepik, the Sawiyano.

361
 A Witch’s Hand

that it involved a na wowi mask—whatever that was—so, after paying off the men at
noon for building my house, at around one thirty we heard the beating of ‘kundus’ com-
ing from Mauwi signaling the ensuing na wowi curing ceremony.15 In my rush to prepare
my recording gear and get men to help carry it up the little mountain, the afternoon heat
and humidity seemed unusually oppressive. We set out just after 2:30 p.m. for the steep
ascent and arrived on top in the Mauwi plaza at 3:20, at which point I was panting and
in a sweat. A Mauwi man, seeing the little group from Wakau approaching for the cer-
emony, yelled out in Namia that I was coming and to dress up good.
This is not the first time that I have mentioned the top of Mauwi hill: the Mosstroops
had a base up there for a time during 1943; CPO Orwin visited in 1951 while searching
for a Yellow River air strip site, as did PO Oakes for his pioneering 1956 census; Barry
Craig collected artifacts there in 1969 and had men paint their artifact designs for him;
on a 1970 visit PO Hutchins 1970 found the “place in shambles” and stayed three nights
to shape it up; Joyce’s and my July 1971 visit; and finally, Kaiera’s origin story of the Lu-
jere when Walwin, his son, and their dog Mauwi first arrived atop the hill in legendary
times.
Once my friends and I were in Mauwi, as I looked around, I couldn’t help but notice
that a number of houses were in such miserable repair that PO Hutchins would have
despairingly shaken his head. The sick man was Lijeria, a Mauwi bachelor who was born
mute. He used a sign language for talking with people but most of it was simply point-
ing. Although orally disabled, he was very alert and an excellent hunter. His brother was
a few years younger than he and had cared for him during his illness. Lijeria had been
sick for about three months and his complaints included a swollen arm, an unsteady and/
or very fast heart beat (‘klok I tanim tanim nabaut’) and pains in his back. He also ap-
peared emaciated, walked with a staff and, during the two days of the rituals, I never saw
him without a mournful expression. He had been in the ‘haus sik’ in Edwaki then, about
a month before, had returned to the village. It was brotherly concern that prompted the
organization of this na wowi curing festival to end Lijeria’s sickness.
While the phrase “curing festival” is appropriate, in “festival” parlance this was a small
one. The concept of “ritual drama” (Radin 1957: 289–306) is also a fitting description of
the na wowi ceremonies that were divided into five parts over two days: (1) The na wowi
masks were made in the forest; (2) The masks, joined by village celebrants, entered the
village in late evening to prance around the sick person while food for the ritual feast was
brought, piled up, and distributed; (3) An all-night chanting, drumming and parading
vigil was held by the young people; (4) Final curing rituals were enacted at daybreak, then
the masks were thrown into the forest; and (5) A purifying ritual bathing was performed
by the mask carriers.

15. Feeling challenged by the disorder around me, I decided not to take my large awkward tripod-
bound sync-sound Bolex 16 mm camera with its Tandberg recorder or my Leica camera with
Kodachrome film. Keeping things simple, I would take instead the smaller hand-held Bell
and Howell 16 mm camera, the Uher tape recorder with its light windproof mike, the Leica
camera with b/w film, and, as always, my notebook. I regret not taking the Kodachrome-
dedicated Leica but, just then, not strapping another small but heavy camera around my neck
seemed like a wonderful idea.

362
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

Day one: Preparations

While the stoic patient and the prancing masks were the ritual center of the curing fes-
tival, it was also a time for feasting, chanting, and dancing (more akin to parading), par-
ticularly enjoyed by the young people. But when we arrived midafternoon in Mauwi’s dirt
plaza, not much was happening, although it was obviously a holiday as far more villagers
were about than usual. Front verandas were peopled with mothers and children, and other
villagers were moving about on errands or just killing time standing around or sitting
visiting. The skies remained cloudy and overcast all day. After setting up my Tandberg
recorder and microphone by the platform of a partially demolished house where Nauwen,
Tsaime, and the other Wakau males had settled down, I went into the forest just under
the top of the hill to where the na wowi masks were made earlier that day. They were cre-
ated by a group of youths, some just boys, whose faces were thickly painted white across
the entire forehead, down the sides of the face and under the chin (fig. 37). The white
paint was from a mixture of ashes and water and paint from red mud was around their
eyes. Several had ‘kundus’ that they occasionally struck. When I later asked why only boys
and youths were involved in the ritual preparations, Klowi explained that boys were not
vulnerable to the na wowi mask the way men were.
The mask was comprised of two long pieces of sago spathes painted in designs and
laced to two pieces of soft ‘pangal’ sticks to which lengths of ‘kanda’ had been stuck. At-
tached to the kanda sticks were feathers attached to small sticks. Most of the feathers ap-
peared old and those of the lesser bird of paradise predominated. The mask designs were
painted with three colors: white, store bought; black, from batteries; and brown, from red
earth. The rather disordered designs had been painted with sticks about five inches long
with unwieldy pithy ends that, along with the youth of the painters, accounted for the un-
tidy results.16 The masks still had to be dressed with a nearby long skirt of shredded sago
leaves but, overall, compared to Wape masks I was disappointed with their ordinariness.
Later, examining my developed photos with several Wakau men, I tried to discover the
iconography of the designs but learned little beyond that the white dots were stars and
the wavy lines were snakes; there was nothing uniquely referencing the na wowi persona
and exegesis was nil.
When I returned to the village some of the youngest boys came too, and I set to work
recording the scene, taking casual pictures with both my still and movie cameras of things
like visiting men smoking their unique pipes, mothers with their inquiring babies, the
mask-making boys horsing around beating their ‘kundus,’ and far below, the area where
Wakau lay hidden in the forest just off the ‘kunai.’ Throughout this activity, Lijeria now
sat, silently waiting on a ‘pangal’ mat (fig. 38). He was wearing a bright white, obviously
new ‘laplap’.17 I noticed a man, one of only a handful wearing a penis sheath, with a

16. Barry Craig, you might recall, complained about how some of the Mauwi men executed
their designs for him. With this foreknowledge about the designs themselves, when he saw
my photograph of the na wowi mask he commented on its “rather disorganised design” and
wondered—correctly—if the painters were “unskilled” (personal communication, November
28, 2016).
17. Without money for soap, white cloth was unusual; Lujere clothes mostly looked as if they had
been dipped in tea.

363
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 37. The boys and youths who created the na wowi masks.

364
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

Figure 38. Lijeria quietly awaits the beginning of his na wowi curing festival.

365
 A Witch’s Hand

swollen hand and asked him how it happened. He said that he had given Klowi some
cartridges and went hunting with him and they got a pig but when he returned home
his hand, which had been slightly swollen earlier, was then very swollen. He saw a curer
who removed a part of a razor blade and a piece of spear and appeared satisfied with the
treatment.
Shortly after four-thirty, Aiyuk strode into the plaza yelling and accusing the villag-
ers of killing his hunting dog. Mauwi, of course, was his natal village, but his continuing
anger with their ‘sanguma’ had motivated him to move his large family to Wakau, where
his mother had been born. By five o’clock the daylight was beginning to fade and I was
told that the masks would soon enter.
Lijeria, supported by a long narrow staff, was already standing alone in the plaza. Then
eight boys ran nosily across the plaza, with one youth holding a bow drawn up towards
the sky, another blowing a wooden trumpet (waniwani), and others beating hand drums
(tiramli). A group of girls running in string skirts with blouses or towels on top against
the evening dampness were followed immediately by a group of youths in shorts as they
ran back and forth across the plaza crying, “Wo, wo!” over and over. Amid this sudden
uproar, the two masks came prancing in on flattened bare feet, preceded by their giant
gourd phalluses (meru) tossing majestically up and down. Throughout the excitement, Li-
jeria continued to stand silently, moving only if a roving pig came too close or when a boy
spat healing ginger upon him. Only when they arrived did he sit (fig. 39). Transformed
by such dramatic action, the masks that had seemed to me as disappointedly ordinary in
the bush were now exotically spectacular.18 The towering feathered and painted headdress
hid the mask carrier’s head and the long body skirt of shredded sago leaves covered him
except frontally. Holding his drum high, he struck it repeatedly as the gourd phallus si-
multaneously soared up towards his chest, striking a brace of Job’s tears seeds with a clack,
the sound that had intrigued the two legendary Kwieftim women. When a masker felt
he was losing his erection, he left the clearing and another youth assumed his costume
and returned to play his role. Mothers warned their children not to stare at the oscillating
phalluses to ensure the masks would dance longer. Kaiera once laughingly told me that
his mother had thus warned him and how, as a child, he felt constrained to only look at
the towering headdress.
Near six o’clock, the masks paraded three times around Lijeria, then left the clear-
ing. Someone told me that it was Mangko’s mother’s sister’s son who spat the ginger on
Lijeria reminding me, once again, of the multiple ties among the villagers. Men, women,
and children then began bringing large bundles of food wrapped in leaves, mostly sago
dumplings, to Lijeria’s brother. The food was roughly stacked along an unfinished house’s
platform with portions of meat placed on top. The masks reappeared for a while in the
plaza to circle Lijeria, then departed again. When the food was distributed, all thoughts
had turned to dinner and the only noise was that of multiple conversations with an oc-
casional shout for someone. Throughout the day’s activities I had been filming and taking
photos, not just of the masks and the youthful revelers, but also of the bystanders, men
conversing and smoking their extraordinary pipes and women playing with their babies
as the masks came and went.

18. See Craig (1975: 421) for his sketches of two Yegerapi village na wowi masks, each with a
different sago-spathe design.

366
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

Figure 39. One of the na wowi masks approaches Lijeria, seated.

367
 A Witch’s Hand

By a quarter after six the light was beginning to fade and I stopped filming. As I
began to put the equipment away, I visited with Mangko and Nauwen about the day’s
events. Oria appeared with a large bundle of food, but this was not like an American pic-
nic; there was no communal eating of the gift food. Like the others, Oria would take the
food home. One mask surprisingly reentered the plaza, but did not linger and departed
almost as quickly to a very fast drumbeat. Other men of our Wakau group gradually
appeared with gift food. Mangko and Unei decided to stay in Mauwi and ‘sing-sing’ all
night, which would entail a lot of running back and forth across the plaza with other
young people in gender segregated groups. There would be chanting and drum beating,
but no ritual; the masks would not appear. The rest of us would return to Wakau, then
come back in early morning for the reappearance of the na wowi masks and Lijeria’s final
curing.
None of the chants for any of the curing festivals I attended or recorded were translat-
able in toto and some not at all. At best, a Namia word was identified here or there, but
the overall meaning of the chant was left to speculation. Once when recording various
chants by Oria, I asked him for translations. Here is an example of the level of transla-
tion available for one chant: He identified a word for a leaf that grows along the Sepik
River that sago dumplings are laid upon. Another word was for a flying tree insect that
he imitated. The chant ended with the words, “turning, turning.” What it all meant, he
didn’t know. Villages sometimes have their own chants for a common curing ritual like
the na wowi; Mauwi and Wakau have different chants for the na wowi curing festival.
The one Oria chanted for me was untranslatable. The chant Wakau does for their aewal
wowi curing rituals, he said, was learned from Green River men of the Upper Sepik River
during plantation work. But Nakwane, who was with us, then recorded for me another
aewal wowi chant that came from Tsila. All he knew was that it was about a bird called
arame or, in Namia, koworo.
Sometime after 6:30 p.m.—it was almost dark—we left the plaza, but on the steep
forested path down to Wakau it was night and I stumbled along, following Nimo. Later
that night, as I prepared the film for the morning climax of the rituals, Klowi stopped
by. He said that Wakau would soon have a curing ‘sing-sing’ for Ukai, the brother of
Nauwen and Oria’s recently dead father. However, they first must make the sago and
kill the game to be distributed. He said it would be the aokwae wowi ‘sing-sing’ that
had a similar but smaller mask than the na wowi. But even after Ukai fell dangerously
ill, I heard no more about it and left Wakau without having seen it. Lying in bed, not
quite asleep, I could faintly hear the distant all-night revelers up in Mauwi chanting
and drumming.

Day two: The exorcism

At five forty-five a.m. I had finished breakfast and was ready with the equipment and
helpers to return up to Mauwi. A slight pervasive fog hung in the air. When I arrived
in Mauwi about an hour later, the young were still celebrating but they were no longer
running back and forth across the plaza; the fact that they were even parading at a walk
was impressive. I counted sixteen youths and twenty-two girls; like the day before, the
groups, while adjoining, were gender segregated. Only the males were chanting as they
struck their ‘kundus.’

368
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

Figure 40. Na wowi mask carriers, Iwowari, Purkenitobu, and Katweli, practicing their moves.

The masks had not appeared and I, interested in talking with their carriers, went
“backstage” to the steep ascent where the masks were hidden behind a screen of palm
fronds, a taboo area for all females. I quickly knew why. Three young men— Purkeni-
tobu and Katweli from Papei, and Iwowari, from Mauwi but currently living in Papei,
all incongruously wearing shorts and long gourd phalluses, were practicing the na wowi’s
pelvic thrusting movements on the steep path. Even in New Guinea it was an astonishing
scene to run into, especially so early in the morning.19 I photographed them practicing
and learned some secrets of their art (see fig. 40). There was no cult involved with the na
wowi rituals and any male could carry the mask, providing he could sustain an erection
and do the phallic moves; one way to get and maintain the erection was to drink a lot of
water and avoid urination. Unfortunately, there was no magic wowi ginger as in the story
to help them out. While participating in the ritual the mask carriers were restricted from
the village unless masked and could not be with women or children. After the rituals
were concluded and the masks thrown into the forest, they must bathe in a stream to be
purified before returning to normal life. There was an easy camaraderie amongst the three
young men who were having fun with their ritual tasks.

19. The big bouncing phalluses had a clownish quality to me, but not to the villagers. I was re-
minded of a photo in Ronald Berndt’s (1962: 299) book of two naked youths in body paint at
an Eastern Highlands festival ostentatiously exhibiting their eighteen-inch bark phalluses in
a ceremonial farce.

369
 A Witch’s Hand

By seven-twenty I was back in the village visiting with Iwani’s ‘luluai,’ who held gently
in one hand a very small, beautifully colored parrot he caught in the forest. He offered it
to me but I declined the gift, not seeking another responsibility. Near us were two men
who were joking with one another. One grabbed the other and said in Tok Pisin, “You’re
my wife!” as his companion laughingly responded by grabbing his “husband’s” buttocks.
The ‘luluai’ explained that the two men could joke because the first man was married to
the second man’s sister, that is, they were brothers-in-law. It was the first ritual joking I
had seen and, without even trying, I had received some insight into Lujere joking rela-
tions (considered earlier in chapter 12).
Lijeria already was in the clearing sitting motionless on a ‘pangal’ mat. I was told
that he stayed up all night, then someone else said he didn’t think so. Regardless, it was
obvious he was sitting down and taking it easy that morning. The fog had lifted a bit and
just after seven-thirty the two masks came prancing into the village but their entrance
was not as noisy as the day before. The masks and the faithful, if tired, young celebrants
raggedly circled Lijeria, and I filmed a long sequence. The mask carriers did not have
good visibility and when one started to go astray, a nearby boy guided him back in line.
Finally, at ten minutes to eight, the climaxing curing ritual began (see fig. 41). While
one mask looked on, Lijeria was almost surrounded by the celebrants as the other mask
approached him from behind and, kneeling down, bent over with its ornate headdress
next to him. The top of the mask continued to shake slightly as those around Lijeria took
the mask’s still fresh paint and swabbed it on his back and head with their fingers. These
were the moments when the sickness was fated to leave his body, an action validated to
onlookers by the patient’s slight trembling.20 I was told that Lijeria did shake but many
months later, when I reviewed the film footage back in Vermont, I detected no bodily
tremors.
After the curing, the masks advanced separately toward the edge of the clearing, fol-
lowed by yelling celebrants, the horn blowing, and energetic drumbeating. I followed
the masks into the forest where they were eagerly tossed over the carriers’ heads into
the bush. I returned to the clearing where, with the festivities finished, my Wakau mates
were ready to go home. They told me that Lijeria would now be all right—‘sik i pinis’
is the stock phrase. However, about two weeks later three imoulu curers from the Weari
villages visited Wakau for two days of healing sessions at the lower iron.21 I was filming
the procedures with my hand-held camera when I suddenly realized the patient in my
lens was Lijeria. The na wowi curing festival apparently was not the success he and his
brother had hoped for.

An outsider’s perspective

The purpose of a na wowi curing festival is to cure a sick person via a series of rituals.
As close kin of the afflicted person, the sponsor/producer of the festival has multiple
responsibilities, including: (1) selecting males to create the na wowi masks; (2) selecting
men to carry the masks; and (3) providing feast food, especially meat, for the creators,

20. The Wape had a similar custom of the patient trembling when exorcised.
21. This curing session is discussed in chapter eighteen.

370
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

Figure 41. A na wowi mask kneels next to Lijeria for the curing climax.

371
 A Witch’s Hand

performers, and guests. It is interesting that those concerned with the na wowi mask
creation and performance were young single men, youths, or even boys, because the inti-
mate involvement of older married men with na wowi endangered their health.
David Napier, in an absorbing book on masks that ranges deep and wide, writes,
“Masks are hypothetical and make-believe. They are paradoxical” (Napier 1986: 4). The
na wowi masks were all of that. Each was a mask without a face, a towering prancing
presence preceded by an enormous phallus bouncing skyward to rhythmically strike a
necklace of hard seeds. It was an arresting and strange creation. Its dancing phallus ap-
peared to my Western eyes as more suggestive of a fertility rite than a curing one. The
na wowi story Kaiera told me was the festival’s single piece of Indigenous exegesis I
obtained. However, at least amongst my informants, the evil na wowi character of the
tale did not appear as a personalized force causing sickness but more as an amorphous
negative power.
Some summarizing comments on the festival with Kaiera’s story in mind could in-
clude the following: The murdered woman as well as the women who found the wowi’s
gourd were all making sago or na, hence the mask’s name, na wowi. The myth acknowl-
edges na wowi’s erection-sustaining ginger, but the only ginger in the curing was some
spat by a boy on the sick man. While the mythic na wowi left behind paint for his legs,
the Mauwi, Kwieftim, and Abrau na wowi did not use body paint. The important paint
in the Mauwi curing was the paint from the na wowi’s headdress that the youths rubbed
on Lijeria as part of the cure. Regarding the three banana plants that emerged from
the tree’s ashes, they apparently had no explicit or symbolic significance for the festival
beyond, perhaps, a banana’s phallic shape. At least to me, the wowi myth as exegesis for
the curing festival provided little beyond identifying the destructive features of the three
villages’ na wowi festivals.
I wasn’t surprised that local exegesis for the na wowi curing festival was virtually
nonexistent. There wasn’t much mystery to explain if you believed that the na wowi mask
represented malicious forces that afflict humans. Thus, it would make sense to create an
attractive, even awesome mask and bring it prancing into the village with ceremonial
regard amid trumpet calls, drums beats, energetic chanting, and the tireless parading by
young people in the village plaza (see front cover, lower right figure). The ensuing ex-
change was a reciprocal one: villagers showed their enthusiastic deference to the na wowi
mask and in response the detrimental grip on the patient was released, an event that was
actualized at dawn the following morning when the na wowi knelt over the sick man and
paint from its body was smeared on the patient’s body as a possible form of immuniza-
tion. Finally, the na wowi’s hyper-masculine effigy was characterized by his big thrusting
phallus as a declaration of his supremacy over humans, men as well as women; in a similar
way, the traditional Lujere male’s penis-enhancing phallocrypt signaled his supremacy
over females. At least one can make those assumptions, but a Lujere’s response might be
either wry or puzzled bemusement.

Ritual phallocrypts in the upper Sepik Basin

When New Guinea’s early twentieth century German explorers reached the Upper
Sepik Basin, they observed that the standard costume for most men was the gourd penis
sheath, while nut and shell phallocrypts were also worn in some locales; a finding later

372
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

substantiated and ethnographically augmented by patrolling ‘kiaps’ and anthropologists.

Although the Star Mountains and the Border Mountains bounded the Sepik Basin to
the west and turned the ascending river back on itself, the penis-sheath custom extended
over the mountains, westward along the island’s Central Cordillera towards the neck of
the Vogelkop (Doberai), and northward along the coast of the Bismarck Sea (Gell 1971:
166)22. A Lujere man’s gourd phallocrypt might be oval, straight, curvy, or curly depending
on local style or the wearer’s whim and was serviceable for several months. It was, how-
ever, a relatively modest penile accessory compared to the large tubular gourd (Lagenaria
sieceria) so theatrically carried on a masker’s erect penis in the na wowi curing rites and,
while also useful as a food as well as a partial smoking device, was sartorially restricted
to a ceremonial context. As the na wowi ritual with its huge phallus seemed not to have
originated with the Lujere, I was curious about its origins and regional distribution.
Prime suspects were the ritually elaborate fertility and regeneration ceremonials of the
Border Mountain societies. If Thurnwald had visited them during his pioneering patrols,
he probably would have included them with the Green River people whom he found had
“greater vivacity, curiosity and interest,” in contrast to the “dullness” of the other Upper
Sepik people. Both the Administration and missionaries were slow to establish their
influence in this geographically isolated, jurisdictionally ambiguous international border
area, inhabited by a people with few metal tools. The political transfer of West Irian to
Indonesia by the Netherlands in 1962 transformed the region into a politically sensitive
area, especially after the border was fixed and agitation for independence from Indonesia
became an issue for some villagers on the Indonesian side. The Australian political re-
sponse was to build a couple of airstrips and patrol posts in the Border Mountains area.
Anthropological fieldwork began in 1969, followed by publications of highly imaginative
fertility-regeneration ritual festivals by Alfred Gell (1975) for Umeda village (Umeda
language), Bernard Juillerat (1996 [1986], 1990) for Yafar village (Amanab language) and
Peter Huber (1980, 1990) for the Anggor language villages. It is striking, for example, the
difference in ritual elaboration between the twenty named and masked figures in Umeda
village’s ida festival, compared to the two identical ritual figures in Mauwi village’s na
wowi festival. Unlike the relative simplicity of Lujere’s wowi curing festivals, the repro-
ductive cultural dramas acted out in the Border Mountains were of great ceremonial and
dramatic complexity.
When I lived with the Lujere, they were the only society I knew firsthand with a
masked performer sporting a ritual phallocrypt of long tubular proportions. In the same
year that I first wrote about the Lujere na wowi curing festival (Mitchell 1975), Antje
and Heinz Kelm’s book (1975) appeared in German, with a section titled “Das Wowi-
Fest.” It documented wowi curing festivals in the two villages they studied in 1969–70,
namely Abrau (Awun language) and Kwieftim (Ak language). Their descriptions of the
wowi curing festival were versions of the one described above. According to the Kelms,
the Abrau people had recently acquired their wowi curing festival from neighboring
Maurom village (Pouye language), located slightly to the northwest. Their wowi costume
was essentially the same as the one I had seen in Mauwi, except that it was taller, more
carefully painted, festooned with numerous feathers including the lesser bird of paradise,

22. For a detailed article on the worldwide distribution of penis sheaths with close attention to
New Guinea, see Ucko (1970).

373
 A Witch’s Hand

Victoria crown pigeon, and cockatoo, and topped with a large plume of cassowary feath-
ers (fig. 42). Around the skirt-top was a circle of orange fruit. The masker wore a long
dark phallic gourd that, as he performed, noisily struck a belt.23 The masks arrived in the
village at dawn then, at the sick man’s house, they smeared his feet with mud and encir-
cled his wound with pale ochre mud. There were three males to alternate the carrying of
the masks; from time to time a mask would leave the village to return with a fresh per-
former. The patient was a clan and village elder whose son was one of the mask carriers,
and whose youngest son was the principal mask maker. Instead of throwing both masks
into the forest to rot at the end of the festival, one was sold to the Lujere village of Nami
(located on Ljuereland’s eastern border) for seven Australian dollars, adding yet another
village to the spread of this curing custom. The authors contend that the sick man’s health,
unlike Lijeria’s in Mauwi, improved after the ritual (Kelm and Kelm 1980: 381–85).
Kwieftim’s wowi curing festival reportedly came from the Upper Sepik area and was
more elaborate; for example, up to ten masks might participate in a curing festival, each
with a hand drum. Another difference was that the mask wearer’s dancing phallus made
no percussive noise as in the wowi myth and at the performances in Abau and Mauwi.
The patient was treated with a paste of earth and ground-up plants, then was struck a
couple of times with stinging nettles. The climax of the treatment was also different. The
masked performer carried a bow and, fastening the nettles to a war arrow, pulled back the
arrow to prance in a circle around the patient before suddenly shooting it high into the
air to land in the forest beyond the village. Thus, the cause of the sickness was removed
from the patient’s body and sent back whence it came.
The shooting of an arrow into the forest to end the ritual in Kwieftim is reminiscent
of the climax of the ida festival in Umeda, where the strategic ipela red bowmen end the
festival by sending their arrows high into the air above the forest (Gell 1975; 206-7)24.
The wowi ritual, of course, is concerned with sickness and the ida ritual with fertility and
regeneration so, while the rationales for the two festivals are different, there are ritual acts
like the arrow maneuver that are the same. Besides the shooting arrow in Kwieftim and
Umeda that separately ends the wowi and ida festivals, a dancing ritual gourd phallocrypt
is worn as an important festival feature in both the Border Mountain villages of Yafar
and Umeda and the Sepik plains villages of Mauwi, Kwieftim, and Abrau. A difference,
however, is that the phallocrypt in the Border Mountains’ fertility festivals are large ovoid
gourds that noisily strike a waist high decoration, whereas the long tubular gourds in
the Sepik plains curing festivals strike at chest level. In both instances, the two types of
gourds are worn exclusively in ritual situations and never for everyday use (see also Gell
1971: 174).
Leaving the lowlands, there is also a wowi-like curing ceremony among the Au speak-
ers in the Torricelli foothills north of Abrau village. Lewis describes a ritual told to him
that was performed by Winalum villagers (Au language) who came to Rauit village
(Gnau language) to treat a man named Kantyi:

23. See Kelm and Kelm (1980: 186) for a drawing of an Abrau ritual gourd or “Kult-Peniskale-
basse.”
24. See Juillerat (1992: 44–45) for photos of the ida bowmen.

374
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

Figure 42. A na wowi mask parades across the village plaza, followed by chanting children and
women.
375
 A Witch’s Hand

For the treatment rites, they brought big ‘limbums’ of water and put them down, began
their Au songs . . . then two by two they came out of the men’s house dancing with
gourds (tu’anit, a dried Cucurbit squash) tied on their penises so that, as they danced,
the gourds clicked against the shells or dogs’ teeth on their belts. They said that the
men dancing were either “cassowaries” or “pigs”—if tall, cassowaries, and if short, pigs.
One of the “cassowaries” held a spear and threw it to split a round orange dapati [a
decorative inedible fruit] fixed under water in the big ‘limbum’. The split dapati bobbed
up to the surface. Kantyi did not in fact get better until they had carried out this ritual.
(Lewis 2000: 163)

It is significant that in another publication, Lewis describes the ritual gourds as “long
phallocrypts which are made to bounce up and down clicking against the belt. In this
respect they resemble the dancing described by Alfred Gell from the Waina Sawonda”
(1975: 193). Thus, based on the documented evidence reported by the Kelms and myself,
the wowi curing rite may have a regional significance. It is present in Tsila (Yale lan-
guage); Wagu (Abau language); Mauwi, Wakau, and Nami (Namia language); Kwieftim
(Ak languge) Maurom (Pouye language) and Abrau (Awun language), all in the Sepik
plains of the Upper Sepik Basin,25 as well as among the nearby Torricelli Au speakers, for
a total of six language areas. The idea for the wowi curing rite’s long tubular ritual gourd
may have come from the Kwomtari language area located in the Sepik plains just east of
the Border Mountains. The data are in a letter that Juillerat wrote to Gell after the latter
had returned to England. It concerns ritual phallocrypts he saw in the Oweniak village
(Kwomtari language) area located on the Sepik plains east of Amanab. He writes,

In the ritual house of the Wongu I have seen the penis sheaths used in “phallic” danc-
ing; these sheaths are very long oblong gourds, brown and without designs, with holes
at both ends and measuring at least 30–35 cm [12–14”]. It is interesting to note that
they serve at other times as cigarette-holders, being held between the smoker’s lips and
the cigar which is rolled in a leaf and held at the other end.26 ( Juillerat 1971: 180; my
emphasis)

Unfortunately, Juillerat does not identify the gourd’s ritual context, but it was likely a
curing ritual like the na wowi curing festival as none of the Sepik plains societies, as far as
we know, have anything resembling the Border Mountains’ multifaceted and attenuated

25. For total geographic accuracy, Maurom village at 200 meters is just off the Sepik plains in the
beginning broken country of the Torricelli Mountains.
26. A hole in the gourd big enough to hold an erect penis would necessitate a rather large cigar
composed of clumsy native tobacco and I think unlikely. The Upper Sepik Basin smoking
tubes I have seen were composed of two tubes: first, an apical tubular gourd for sucking in the
smoke, and a secondary thin bamboo tube inserted at the gourd’s terminal end that climaxed
with a small clutch of tobacco. The dual use of the same gourd in both ritual and quotidian
contexts would be highly unusual and, identifying the gourd’s extremities as both penile and
oral, even alarming. Further evidence that Juillerat’s assumption regarding a dual performing
ritual/smoking gourd was in error is that Barry Craig collected a tubular ritual phallocrypt (43
cm x 6 cm diameter) and a tubular smoking gourd (47 cm x 4.5 cm diameter) in Biaki village
south of Oweniak village, both Kwomtari language.

376
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

fertility and regeneration festivals. Seeking data to test this supposition, I consulted the
material culture collections digitized in Barry Craig’s excellent “Upper SepikCentral
New Guinea Project” website that provides a color photograph and measurements for
each artifact. I found at least one long tubular ritual phallocrypt collected in each of the
following villages: Biaki village (Biaki language, a sub Kwomtari language); Yenabi village
(Kwomtari language); Hogru village (Abau language); and Bamblediam village (Abau
language).27 Thus, it is very possible that a wowi-type curing ritual is also prevalent in
some Kwomtari villages, as well as being more extensive amongst Abau speakers than
originally indicated. If true, that would locate the na wowi curing ritual not only in some
Ak, Awun, Abau, Pouye, Namia, and Yale villages, but also in Kwomtari villages, giving
the ritual a Sepik plains regional provenance as well as a foothold in the Torricelli foot-
hills among the Au speakers. That would be an interesting finding, but more research is
necessary to establish it.

Mokadami’s Aewal Wowi Curing Festival

There was no masked figure in the aewal wowi curing festival to personify what had
stricken its victims, but there were bamboo ritual horns gaily festooned with white feath-
ers—the first I had ever seen or even heard about in a New Guinea ritual—that were
intimately associated with the aewal wowi ritual, the same as the na wowi mask was with
its ritual. In other words, the horns had the same association with sickness that character-
ized the na wowi mask, a difference being that women and small children were especially
vulnerable to the horns’ strong ritual powers and, for their safety, remained out of their
physical and visual proximity. The only exception was the afflicted women involved in the
curing rituals. Of necessity they had physical proximity to the horns, but they covered
their heads to avoid visual contact.

Preparations
The middle of February I went to Mokadami (Gwidami) for my first aewal wowi curing
festival; Nimo’s and Eine’s brother-in-law, Anwani, was one of the ailing. I would need
most of my recording equipment to chronicle the event so I recruited the youthful males,
Akami, Unei, Akau, Newai, Iwi, and Warajak to help carry it and Oria and Nauwen
also came along. Mauwi and Mokadami were the two geographically closest villages to
Wakau and the ones with which they had the most marital ties. Mokadami lay on the
east bank of the Sand River about two hours’ walk upriver. The Mokadami track crossed
two large beautiful ‘kunai’ meadows that CPO Orwin would have visited in his 1951
search for an airstrip site. The first ‘kunai’ had a few poles still visible from a hamlet that
burned down in a grass fire. Nearer Wakau there were several gardens of mostly bananas
including Oria’s and Nakwane’s, then a couple of Arawaki’s gardens further on. Much
of the walk was heavily forested, mostly secondary growth. It was a typical lowland level
track but with enough interesting contrasts, like several tricky slippery fallen-tree bridges

27. Barry Craig collected the ritual phallocrypts except the one for Yenabi village collected by
Bernard Juillerat.

377
 A Witch’s Hand

across swampy brooks. As long as I was wearing a pair of spiked canvas golf shoes that
the Catholic mission sold in Lumi, the log bridges were almost fun.
Mokadami had three hamlets and the one we stayed in was Mokwebe. It had the gov-
ernment rest houses, one for the ‘kiap’ and another for his ‘polis,’ and we claimed the latter
for the night. The abandoned old village was across the Sand to the west. Mokadami’s
main hamlet was about the size of Wakau, probably one hundred or so people, with about
fifteen houses in various states of disintegration and situated in a pleasantly haphazard
way around a very large central plaza where the curing festival would be held. The houses,
however, appeared makeshift in design with most walls of ‘pangal’ stems tied with ‘kanda,’
unlike Wakau houses that usually followed a more traditional design.
Just four days earlier I had made my first visit to Mokadami with Kworu and Eine and
we immediately went to Eine’s sister’s house and I met her husband Anwani with whom
I visited, off and on, during the next several hours. We were there because Eine was sick;
he already had been treated by three different imoulu and was still feeling bad, so while he
was at his sister’s house a local imoulu, Oriak, would try his hand.
Anwani was an impressive and somewhat peculiar man. He was in his early thirties
with a strong physique and was an important nakwolu. He certainly did not look as if
he were on his deathbed as some proclaimed. His ailment was not only a puzzle to me,
but to some of the villagers as well. Several months earlier he had been released from his
indentured job in New Ireland and seemed to have some form of epilepsy. I was told that
his legs could go weak and sometimes he would become unconscious and tremor. He also
slept a great deal and needed support when walking.
When I came in, Anwani was sitting on a typical man’s elevated bed and never moved
from it. He sat on a long plastic bag and said that was all he brought back with him,
except for two blankets and fifty dollars he distributed to relatives. After he was released
from his labor contract, he said he was in a New Ireland hospital for several months but
they found nothing wrong with him. Then in Wewak on the way home, he was examined
at the regional hospital and they told him the same thing. As both were modern Western
hospitals, his ailment apparently was ‘sik nating,’ indicating some behavioral disturbance.
But Anwani told me his illness was due to the sorcery of a New Ireland man—he gave me
his name—who worked ‘posin’ on him but no local treatments had cured him. Already his
family had mounted two aewal wowi curing festivals for him, one around Christmas and
another in January, and numerous imoulu had treated him, all to no avail.
The house was filled with people sitting with him, men, women, and children. Anwani
was obviously a respected man and, according to comments, he and his brother had taken
care of a number of orphans, much as Klowi had done. His big concern speaking to me
was what would happen to his family when he died. His face was continuously serious
and everything he talked about was in the negative, especially his sickness, but he did, at
one point, take pains to show me his two wives—the second was Warajak’s mother—and
the two children each wife was holding.
I left for a short time to make a first visit to neighboring Aiendami hamlet, a fifteen-
minute walk and, arriving unexpectedly, I startled the women in their Native skirts and
several men in penis sheaths who all scurried into their houses. Seeing men run from
me was a new experience. The men immediately reappeared wearing either shorts or ‘lap
laps’ but one man had slapped his ‘lap lap’ around without removing his penis sheath,
creating an amusingly lewd costume. After a visit to their flimsy iron, which was open

378
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

at both ends, I returned to Mokadami; Anwani’s position was unchanged, his visage still
tragic. It was the only time in New Guinea when someone told me they were physi-
cally sick that I clearly thought that they were not. It was usually just the opposite; New
Guineans endure pain and fevers with astonishing fortitude and stoicism. I did, however,
think that Anwani was clinically depressed with the same type of blunted affect that
had sometimes characterized Samaun, but Samaun’s despair seemed to make more sense
than Anwani’s. Samaun was a strong young man with no prospect of a wife or children
and a projected lifetime of dependency on other males’ wives for food. Yes, sleeping
his life away was a convenient escape. The only times I saw him take initiative and join
in with creative enthusiasm was in all-night curing festivals when he would lead the
chanting. But these were infrequent affairs. Anwani’s despair was less fathomable to me.
In Lujere terms, he appeared to have everything: good looks, a strong-appearing body,
two wives, children, supporting kin, and a valued healing skill. Perhaps the New Ireland
sorcerer was the actual source of his illness; at least if the victim accepts the victim role
and surrenders his personal autonomy to a belief in the pernicious power of the other,
the affliction is real.
That initial visit to Mokadami had been instructive, but now I was back again, four
days later in the midafternoon, this time with my Wakau friends for an aewal wowi cur-
ing festival. The ritual curing climax with the horns would be in the evening, followed
by distribution of food, then an all-night ‘sing-sing.’ Although Anwani was not one of
the central sufferers in this curing festival, he would be a participant. We again went im-
mediately to Anwani’s wives’ house as they had fed me on my recent visit and I wanted
to reciprocate with some coveted trade store tobacco. Anwani was lying down when we
entered; he looked strong and healthy but there was no smile. He said that the day before
he had started again with diarrhea.
The main recipients for the planned curing ritual were Orana, the wife of the imoulu
Oriak who earlier had treated Eine, and a man called Loku. Both Orana and Loku had
become afflicted in the same way. While having intercourse with their respective spouses,
some of their sexual fluids apparently fell to the ground and was stolen by aewal wowi’s
aokwae, who then made them sick. Loku and his wife had had sex in their house and
Orana and her husband in the bush near the river. Anwani and another woman, Mane,
with a chronic condition, would also participate in the curing but tangentially. Mane had
been sick with the aewal wowi for a very long time; for both Anwani and Mane, this
ritual curing would be more like a “booster shot” to reinforce their earlier aewal wowi
curing rituals.
As usual, things seemed slow to get underway. I took some photos of a young father
in traditional dress bathing his two small children in the village stream emptying into
the Sand, then of several girls washing pig entrails downstream, and of boys gingerly
crossing the log bridge over the stream into the village. Earlier I watched the licensed
gun owner enter the village carrying his shotgun followed by a man carrying a huge pig
on his back, literally piggyback. For the curing festival, two wild pigs and one village pig
already had been butchered. I wandered back to check my filming equipment set up on
the plaza; fortunately, I had an excellent Angenieux zoom lens on my cine camera so,
regardless of where the center of activity was—and with the Wape it rarely was where
they said it would be—I could zoom in and out to catch the action. The goal for my field
recording, whether with pen and paper, tape recorder, or still and cine cameras, was to be

379
 A Witch’s Hand

as nonintrusive as possible to record an event in its authenticity without any direction or

interference from me, the exact opposite of a Hollywood film or TV shoot. As I wandered
about, Newai and Warajak kept me company. I had noticed that the Mokadami women’s
skirts were different from Wakau and they explained that here, although hips were bare
in both villages, the women put yellow strands made from the tulip tree over the common
brown strings made from the sago tree.

The aewal wowi ritual horns

I had not yet seen the aewal wowi horns that were at the ritual center of the curing rites,
so around 5:00, Nauwen and a couple of Mokadami men and I went a short walk away
into the forest between the village and the Sand River. There they lay, already decorated,
on the grass in a small clearing near the bank of the river with about a half dozen men
sitting around smoking and chewing betel. Four of the men would carry the horns and all
were friendly except one older, very small man, the only one not in cloth but in traditional
dress that included arm bands, a phallocrypt, and a “Daniel Boone”–style cap I had not
seen before, made from the mottled fur of a wallaby. He neither spoke nor smiled and
later when I took some Kodachrome photos, he frowned and moved away quickly, to the
other men’s amusement. It was obvious that, while accepting him, they considered him
a ‘buskanaka,’ a man of the bush who had never left home, did not speak Tok Pisin, and
had not even marginally adapted to modern ways.
Earlier in the day the men, newly following Tsila village custom, had made four ritual
horns—Wakau only made three—from green bamboo; each was two feet or so long, with
a small hole in the apical end and open at the terminal end. All but one was decorated,
and that was the “grandfather” horn—the older unsmiling man would carry it—and the
others were the “children” horns (see fig. 43). These were numbered one, two, and three,
and the amount of decoration declined as the number increased.

Figure 43. Men playing aewal wowi horns encircle afflicted victims. The “grandfather” horn is the
undecorated one and the others known as the “children.”

380
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

The first horn was an extraordinary looking construction that terminated in a large
squarish “parrot’s nest” made by winding the aromatic under-bark of a particular tree
around four corner sticks, then spitting betel nut juice over it. Finally, feathers, mostly
white ones, including the lesser bird of paradise, were attached to sticks and stuck verti-
cally around the nest. The bird’s-nest decoration for a horn was new and came from Tsila
village. No one knew what the nest stood for or, as usual, cared. As I have mentioned
before, the Lujere were not big on exegesis; they simply liked the nest idea and adopted
it. The same under-bark was wound around the ends of horns two and three, bespat with
ginger, then decorated with many mostly long white feathers, some well-used.
When the men learned I had not seen bamboo horns played before, they offered to
give me a demonstration. The person playing the grandfather horn would not participate
and walked sourly away as another man wordlessly took his place. Like the performers
in the na wowi festival, there was no special ritual status involved with playing the horns,
just the ability to perform the relevant routines. The men lined up numerically left to
right, legs wide apart, holding the horns to their mouths with two hands—horn one
with the nest looked awkwardly heavy—and bent over from the waist with heads tilted
leftward. Hopping sideways to the left on flat feet, they emitted a yelping sound each
time then, after several hops, stopped completely and made two consecutive, drawn-out,
and descending “woooo” sounds as they raised their horns. They then returned to their
original positions and repeated the sequence several times.
It was about five-twenty when the men heard a certain bird’s call, indicating it was
time to bring the horns into the expansive village plaza, already empty of women and
children. I returned to my filming and recording equipment, then heard a commotion
under Loku’s house. Men struck the supporting house posts to scare away any aokwae,
then dug up some earth under the area of the house where Orana and her husband had
had intercourse. Some dirt previously dug up from the spot would be used in their curing
rituals. Later in an interview with Oria on the Mokadami festival, I questioned him on
the significance of the dug-up earth. Oria said it was just the husband’s semen that the
aokwae were after in the earth, while Nauwen insisted it was the sexual fluids of both.
But I already had learned that in Lujereland, where the unseen was concerned, versions
of “truth” could vary greatly.
Around five-thirty Orana, her head shrouded, took her place sitting on a pad of ‘pan-
gal’ laid on the ground, and I took my first cine shot as others gathered around the curing
site. Less than fifteen minutes later, I saw the men with their horns approach the plaza
from the right. I had set up my equipment thinking they would approach from the riv-
erside where I’d seen the horns earlier. Anwani was there standing in a ‘lap lap’ holding
the wrist of his his second wife—Warajak’s mother—apparently for physical support, and
Loku was standing near the seated Orana. Mane had been there but left before the horns
entered, then reappeared for the final ritual curing.
For almost a half hour, the horn men performed the basic ritual routine they had
shown me while at least two men struck their hand drums. About a dozen local men be-
gan to circle the victims counterclockwise, voicing the untranslatable aewal wowi chant.
At the same time, the horn men would approach the victims, back off, approach again,
back off, and each time take a different position. At one point they gradually circled the
victims clockwise, always “yipping” into their horns as they hopped, and then wailing af-
ter they stopped. When they finally circled the victims and were actually facing me, I got

381
 A Witch’s Hand

the best-filmed sequence of their ritual performance and the lifting of the horns. How-
ever, their actions as a chorus were ragged at best, as at times they bumbled back and forth
into each other. The grandfather horn especially appeared to feel the tempo differently.

The concluding rituals

At 5:55 p.m., my camera jammed but the horn men had just finished their performance
and placed their horns on the ground near where the victims sat and stood. The chanting
men continued to circle them, then gradually stopped. Several final rituals (see fig. 44)
were performed on the victims in the presence of the horns; sweat from the hornist’s bod-
ies was transferred to the victims and a small leaf-packet of betel nut was pressed against
their bodies. I also watched as the grandfather hornist rubbed Loku’s back and between
his knees with his horn.
Young boys then picked up the horns and carried them out of the village so the
women and children could safely return, but there was a final important ritual only
for Orana and Loku. It was just after six o’clock, Mane and Anwani and his wife had
left the curing arena, and Orana had uncovered her head. Separate muddy pastes had
been made from the sexualized dirt collected earlier and with it, circles were painted on
Orana’s hips, elbows, and knees. The painting of circles on Loku was more extensive,
eleven in all: two each on his chest, knees, elbows, shoulder blades, upper buttocks, and
one on his belly.
The curing rites were over and I packed up my gear. As we headed back to the ‘haus
polis,’ I noticed a pile of sago dumplings wrapped in leaves with a few pieces of pork
placed on top—a reward for the men who performed the rituals—near where Orana
was still sitting. Visitors, like my little group of Wakau males, also were separately gifted
with food. It was getting dark but there was still time for Nauwen, Iwi, and me to have
a refreshing plunge in the Sand River before dinner. We still had to attend an all-night
‘sing-sing.’
Around eight thirty we could hear the men’s aewal wowi chanting and we returned
to the plaza. Orana was still on her ‘pangal’ bed but lying down and five of her women
relatives had joined her; a small fire burned nearby. Villagers were walking counterclock-
wise around her in a big spread-out circle, men and youths first, followed by women and
children in a strung-out group. It was a large contingent of villagers, probably seventy or
eighty. The males walked in darkness with no fire or lanterns, but several of the women
carried blazing torches made from the stems of sago leaves tied together with vine; some
were five or six feet long. Periodically a torch was put to the ground to clear away the
burned material and keep it ablaze, sending brilliant sparks flying. All of the women were
in traditional skirts, some carried babies or had toddlers on their shoulders, and other
babies were in cloth slings. None of the women or little girls were holding hands as the
Wape do but, to my surprise, some of the men were walking hand in hand, something
Wape men never did. Traditionally, the men would have paraded carrying their weapons
but only a few did. Occasionally, five or six little boys would run ahead of the men with
glowing, not burning, torches, waving them wildly around sending sparks flying into the
night, like American children with their Fourth of July sparklers. The children generally
were livelier than the adults who walked round and round in the incessant circle at the
same rather poky gait. Several times while I observed, the circle would begin to crumble

382
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

Figure 44. Orana and Anwani are treated near the four aewal wowi placed on the ground.

383
 A Witch’s Hand

apart as some took a rest, but always some of the men continued and eventually the large
circling group would re-form.
At one point I went into the unfinished house where my equipment was stored and
my right leg crashed through a partially covered hearth hole; I was down and shaken but
uninjured. More annoying was being covered with little flying insects crawling all over
my bare skin. Earlier I had begun a sound recording on my Uher as the men’s chanting
was haunting and a fascinating juxtaposition to the women’s very high “wup, wup, wup”
that reminded me of the chirping of baby chicks. I was impressed how community-
focused this curing festival was compared to the na wowi one in Mauwi that only the
young really celebrated. Here, almost everyone except the very old were staying up and
parading thorough the night. Also, in this curing festival, there was no “moment of truth”
when the victim was supposedly “cured” of his or her affliction. Instead there was a series
of ritual actions each of which, if I understood the logic of what was explained to me,
could be curative.
By 10:30 p.m., the bugs were getting worse, but some Mokadami men had joined me;
one was home from Wewak where he now lived, and he hoped I could make a record-
ing for Radio Wewak to play. He also knew by name all of the participants in the ritual
and he verified or clarified my earlier spotty data. By 11:00, the bugs were intolerable. I
watched a mother carrying a baby leave the group to walk towards her six-year-old son
sitting on the sidelines with other little boys and men. Forcefully taking his hand, she
pulled him, struggling and yelling, into the circle to join her in the parade.
Orana’s fire was dying and someone brought firewood to rekindle it. It was almost
11:30 p.m., and the circling, drumming, and chanting continued unabated. Sometimes I
could surrender to the repetitive monotony and slip into a trance-like state like the cel-
ebrants, but not that night. I yearned to escape the bugs and for just a half-note change in
the men’s repetitive chanting. When my tape finished recording, I packed up and stored
the recorder with the rest of my gear in the house where I had crashed through the floor
and, with Nauwen and Newai, left the village by the log bridge and returned to the ‘haus
polis.’ Then they and the others, with the exception of Warajak who slept at his mother’s
house, cooked some of the gift pork. But I eagerly crawled into my blissful mosquito net
and soon was asleep.
When we awakened the next morning the ‘sing-sing’ had ended and by 8:00 a.m., we
all were on our way home. By the time we reached Wakau, I had a rare raging headache.
I immediately fell into bed and slept most of the day. That evening I felt better and dif-
ferent conjectures were floated by my local friends as to what had struck me down in
Mokadami. What it was that hit me, I would never really know.

Wakau’s Aewal Wowi Curing Festivals

Not all aewal wowi curing festivals were as large as Mokadami’s. A week after I had re-
turned from Mokadami, Wakau had a small aewal wowi curing festival for Marawami,
the daughter of the widow Debrai, who lived with the brothers Waniyo and Nimo’s fami-
lies in the house on the ‘kunai.’ Marawami was married to a Mauwi man who was away as
an indentured laborer and, as she lived in Mauwi, I didn’t personally know her. Unei told
me she became sick in a bush camp and was so ill that Mangko and old Menetjua, both
nakwolu, were going out to treat her. The next morning, I heard that Menetjua didn’t go

384
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

but that Mangko and Poke did. There was also talk about carrying her back to the village
but no one knew for sure. I was busy with Ces Parrish who had surprised me with a visit
but had made cursory notes about her illness.
Debrai’s two older sons were away as indentured laborers, but her four young sons
lived with her, as well as the wife of an older absent son. So, when Marawami became
seriously ill in the bush, it was easier to carry her to Waniyo’s ‘kunai’ house where her
mother lived, rather than up the steep hill to her husband’s family in Mauwi. She had
been sick for four nights and became delirious, spurring Waniyo and Nimo to organize
her rescue. They, rotating with Mangko, Poke, Unei, and Kunai, would carry her back on
an improvised stretcher. Shortly before four, I started walking towards the ‘kunai’ house
to see if they had arrived and saw them approaching on the plain.

The first curing festival

The ‘kunai’ house was larger than most, with four cooking hearths; the rear male sec-
tion was raised. When they came in, Marawami was prostrate and wearing just a small
traditional pubic cover. Her temperature was 101.5 and I gave Nimo some sulpha tablets
and two aspirin to give her. I suspected pneumonia. Kaiera came in with Marawami’s
husband’s father Klene wearing a phallocrypt, followed shortly by Oria, but no one went
toward her. Then Enewan, Nauwen, and Alomiaiya come in, but Alomiaiya immediately
went to her side and, taking sweat from under his arm, gently wiped her with it.
When some water arrived, they helped her sit up and Nimo gave her my medicine
then poured some water in her mouth from an old tin cup. She coughed but swallowed it.
Around 4:30 p.m., I started for home, joined briefly by Klowi who told me that Aiendami
men had threatened to kill him with ‘sanguma’ because he wants them to give Mangko
a wife. Once on the path, I heard the plane chartered by the ‘kiap’ take off from Yellow
River for Mageleri.
Around 8:30 p.m., the now familiar aewal wowi chanting came drifting through the
village from the vicinity of the upper iron. I returned to the ‘kunai’ house to give Marawa-
mi more medicine; this time it was Waniyo who supported her. Although her mother
and other women were around, I was heartened to see men other than very close kin in
such a personal and caring role. Only later did I learn that Waniyo and Nimo were her
mamaru.28 Klowi and Menetjua both had treated her during the afternoon. She was still
sick, but her temperature was down and her skin cool. Marawami’s case was a good exam-
ple of the Lujere eclectic temperament with its penchant for things useful, whatever the
source. Engwe was in the room asleep but Mangko pointed out to me Engwe’s new wife.
Although an aewal wowi curing festival for Marawami was definitely under way, tonight
she would eschew the chanting and parading and sleep at home.
The following evening a hefty bonfire was built in front of the upper iron and a hand-
ful of males chanted and circled around it, counterclockwise. Samaun was definitely the
lead singer, joined by Akami, Iwi, and Kworu, and preceded by a number of lively little
boys. No women participated, but two little girls followed the men and another little girl
carrying a torch joined them as she pulled a much smaller little naked girl to bring up the

28. The mamaru kin term is described in chapter 12.

385
 A Witch’s Hand

end. I visited with Eine on the iron’s veranda while tape recording but by eleven o’clock I
was home. Before I went to sleep, I listened briefly on my wireless radio and learned that
Nixon had begun his famous trip to China.
The next morning when I visited Marawami with antibiotics, she was sitting up but
her temperature had climbed a bit and Waniyo and her mother were still concerned. On
the way home, I stopped in the lower iron, where Tsaime was being treated for a big boil
on the right side of his back—it had been cut open and was a mess. He had hung a strap
from the house roof so he could gently pull himself up and down. He said that Warajak,
Newai, and another youth had gone to the bush to cut the bamboo horns and their wild
decorations. Then early in the afternoon Mangko reported that Marawami had put on a
skirt, was eating and talking more, but was still sick. By 5:30 p.m., village men were be-
ginning to gather near the upper iron. I set up my filming and recording equipment, then
strung a string around it and announced to the boys watching me that the inside area
was now ‘tambu’ (taboo). It was a Tok Pisin word as well as an Indigenous concept they
all understood; even if I left the village, I knew nothing would be touched. As I waited
for some action, I watched two boys skin the wings of a big fruit bat. Finally Akami and
Turai, the controversial Mauwi licensed gun owner married to Oria’s sister, arrived carry-
ing Marawami on her stretcher. Once it was lowered to the ground, Klowi began to treat
her.The village already was devoid of women and children.
Eventually the assembling men and youths began to parade and chant against the
fast beat of several hand drums. Klowi continued her treatments until we got the word
that the aewal wowi horns were arriving and Marawami covered her head.29 To my sur-
prise, four, not three men with their charmed aewal wowi horns dramatically entered the
area, performing the musical and movement routines I had witnessed and described for
Mokadami. Apparently Wakau also was adopting Tsila’s four horns, with the principal
difference that the first horn did not terminate in a parrot’s-nest design but in an effu-
sion of white feathers and greenery. The chanting men paraded counterclockwise and the
aewal wowi horns clockwise, when they weren’t moving in and out, towards and away
from Marawami.
Marawami was carefully helped to her feet. As she stood assisted, the ritual horns—
elaborately decorated with white bird feathers, stinging nettles, and aromatic leaves, then
bespelled with a mixture of spittle, chewed betel nut, and aewal wowi ginger, and the
aromatic inner bark of a special tree—moved in closer and closer, while a small packet of
heated pungent leaves was put on the ground beneath her.
According to the youth Yaope, one of the most powerful of these leaves was from a
type of rree called lami, but it was the lami aokwae, or the tree’s spirit, together with its
pungent aroma, that made it powerful. Yaope almost whispered the names, as they are
especially detrimental to females; just to hear the words could cause severe sickness in a

29. Oria told me in an interview on the Mokadami aewal wowi festival that it was custom to be-
gin the festival by burning bamboo for its explosions just before the horns appeared. But the
Mokadami festival I saw was following current Tsila custom, hence the four, not three, horns,
and the lack of exploding bamboo. However, at the first aewal wowi festival for Anwani they
did set off firecrackers from Wewak. No bamboo was exploded at either of the Wakau aewal
wowi festivals and I neglected to ask why. Oria thought the rational for the exploding bamboo
was to frighten away the aokwae of the aewal wowi causing the sickness.

386
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

female. Interestingly, it is the extremely strong aroma of the various ritualized substances
that is believed to waft into and cure the sick person’s body, rather like a bush form of
trendy Western aromatherapy. Then the patient might shake slightly, verifying the cause
of the sickness, as Marawami apparently did. In a final rite, Klowi chewed some special
betel nut and spat a symbolic amount on her head.
By 6:40 p.m., the horn-men had departed but the local men continued their parading
and chanting. Klowi and Newai helped me pack up the cine equipment and I headed
home for a respite. When I got home, I found that Nauwen was very sick with a high
fever. Earlier in the day I had given him some chloroquine as we both thought it was ma-
laria but now his chest hurt when he coughed and that sounded like pneumonia. It was
interesting that during the year and a half that I lived with the Wape, I seldom intervened
medically as they had easier access to aid-post and hospital services. But living with the
Lujere was very different. Here, acute respiratory infections—the commonest cause of
morbidity New Guineans experience (Riley et al. 1992: 281)—especially pneumonia,
could be a death sentence without antibiotics.
When I returned to the festival after 9:00 p.m., the ‘sing-sing’ was going strong. It
just happened to be Saturday night, an American’s night to party, and here I was with
fifty or so village celebrants, almost all locals, parading and vigorously chanting the same
three-note interval, over and over and over. Marawami was wearing a skirt and blouse
and lying on a ‘limbum’ mat in front of Akami’s new house where I had filmed the curing
rituals earlier. There was a small fire by her and sitting nearby were her mother, Waniyo,
and others from his family. The chanting males led the parading, passing in front of her,
not around her; most carried their bows and arrows. They were followed by the women
and girls carrying their babies and a few torches. As usual, the men carried no light. I
had brought a small kerosene lantern and had set it down as I wandered around. I had
essentially abandoned the lamp and Klowi, forever enterprising like few others, hung it
on a stick in the middle of the circling celebrants. I was delighted, as no one else, includ-
ing me, would have thought to do that. When I walked around to where Marawami was
lying, Kunai came up to me and earnestly insisted that I give her medicine again tonight,
as she wasn’t yet well. Sitting by her now were both Waniyo and Nimo, her nurturing
mamaru. At about 10:30 p.m., I took a short break to go home and unload the two heavy
Leica cameras hanging around my neck and get Marawami’s medicine while checking
on Nauwen.
Eine had joined me and he talked about the ‘sing-sing’ as we walked. Then he added
that next Monday Mokadami was having another aewal wowi curing festival for Orana,
and her husband already had the ‘binatangs’—probably the grubs found in rotting sago
palm logs and considered a delicacy—to reward the performers. It would not, however,
include any of the other victims as before.
Marawami’s curing festival was dwindling in size although the chanting and drum-
ming continued unabated; two more small fires had been started where several women
and children rested. Marawami sat up with difficulty and Waniyo gave her the medicine.
When my last tape recording ended at 11:24 p.m., I went home with my recording gear,
but my kerosene lamp would remain to cast long shadows of the circling celebrants until
the kerosene was gone and the flame finally died.
After midnight I was still up and heard loud talking and shouting up at the ‘sing-sing.’
Nauwen, who had been sleeping in the ‘haus kuk,’ was awake and explained that it was

387
 A Witch’s Hand

Samaun accusing Klowi of making ‘kawawar nogut’, that is, casting an evil spell with gin-
ger, while Klowi protested that he didn’t want to make any one sick or die; that he wanted
us to stay strong. Then he reminded any listeners that if Klowi threw away the cartridges
the villagers gave him, there would be no more meat from his gun!
At 6:30 the following morning, the festival was over, and I gave Klowi the medicine
to give to Marawami. Later Oria explained that the reason he didn’t participate in all
night ‘sing-sings’ was because his uncle Ukai’s adopted son died at station last year and
that if your brother, real or classified, were to die, you could never again ‘sing-sing’ in
your own village. Around 8:00, I heard that Mowal’s wife was in labor; then just before
10:00, Klowi told Eine and Nauwen at the ‘haus kuk’ that Mowal’s wife had a baby girl
and named her Kairapowe. He had been there and helped with the delivery. Such an
incident defies interpretation as childbirth is anathema to Lujere men and can endanger
their hunting prowess, not to mention their lives. But it documents the extent of Klowi’s
unique character and his unassailable belief in himself that, while very much a part of his
community and culture, he epically transcended both.30s

The second curing festival

Marawame’s health quickly improved and within a week she had resumed her normal
activities, though she remained living with her mother and Waniyo’s family. Was her re-
covery because of the tetracycline I was giving her, or the magical curative powers of the
aewal wowi ritual horns? Such an either/or question was not a relevant one to the prag-
matic Lujere; both interventions were accepted as instrumental but there was no question
that the ritual of the aewal wowi festival was the curative one. However, there was still
some question as to just how well she was, so I wasn’t completely surprised when, two
weeks later, I heard talk of a new festival for her; Waniyo’s household was large enough
that it could easily sponsor another one soon after the first. I was, however, convinced she
no longer had pneumonia.
On a Friday, Yaope told me that a new aewal wowi curing festival for Marawami
would begin that day and Engwe and Poke had gone to the forest to cut the bamboo
horns. That evening Klowi, Yaope, and Samaun energetically began the chanting and
drumming, but Waniyo heard them from the ‘kunai’ house and sent word for them to
stop, as he had not given them permission to begin. They reluctantly stopped, but Klowi
and Yaope said that if Waniyo wanted them to shut up, then they would stay shut up,
truculently adding that they wouldn’t join the ‘sing-sing’ when it did start! The following
day, Saturday, Waniyo gave his approval for Marawami’s curing festival to begin, and by
ten p.m. it was underway, but a ten-thirty rainstorm aborted it as everyone ran for shelter.
Early Sunday evening women were bringing food to the men’s iron for their husbands’
dinners, Nakwane and Kunai returned from the bush, and Newai killed a local pig. At
6:25 p.m., Arakwaki arrived, having just killed a large wild boar with his bow and arrow,
followed shortly by Nauwen carrying it piggyback. Women began bringing food to be
distributed to the performers and arriving guests from Mokadami, Aukwom, and Mauwi,

30. He was one of the most fascinating and enigmatic persons I have ever known and, if I had re-
mained in the community longer, I would have collected data for a biography to see if I could
understand his exceptionalness.

388
 The Lujere Curing Festivals

Figure 45. Decorated aewal wowi horns perform for Maruwami’s curing rituals.

389
 A Witch’s Hand

including Sakome and her children, whom I hadn’t seen since she fled to her brother
Kowali’s house in Mauwi to escape Samaun’s harassment. K____ and his family also had
come.
By six forty-five, the women and children had disappeared and Marawame arrived
in a traditional string skirt and took her place on a ‘limbum’ pad. Men, including Klowi
and Yaope, were already chanting and drumming, with most carrying a bow and arrows
or an adze over the shoulder. The bamboo horns, some elaborately decorated with bird of
paradise feathers, bright fruit, shell bands, and greenery (fig. 45), entered and began their
ritual performance as the men circled, chanting and drumming, and the curing rites were
performed.
This time there was no night rain and, once the ritual horns had departed, the women
returned and the energetic ‘sing-sing’ went until dawn. The Wakau men that chanted and
paraded off and on all night were Klowi, Nimo, Samaun, Meyawali, Engwe, Alomiaiya,
Akami, Kunai, Unei, Warajak, Newai, Poke, Mangko, Kwoien, and Iwi. A number of
boys also lasted all night and I was astonished mid-morning to see five of them having
a high-energy mock fight in the lower village. But most of their fellow male celebrants
were dead asleep in an iron.

390
chapter sixteen

‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

It is not the practice of sorcery that does the harm,

but rather the belief in it, and especially the fear of it.
F. E. Williams (1928: 215)

Who or what is sangguma?

Georg Höltker (Koster and Höltker 1942: 213)

Many societies, including the Lujere, are culturally enmeshed in beliefs in magic and the
supernatural1 It was my curiosity about ‘sanguma,’ a logically puzzling form of magical
ritual murder sometimes called “assault sorcery” that had lured me from the pleasant, but
rainy, Torricelli Mountains down to the Yellow River swamps where I met the Lujere.
They, and tens of thousands of others in New Guinea and the adjoining islands, were
terrified by the possibility of a violent ‘sanguma’ attack that marked its victim for certain
death. In this chapter and the next, based on what I learned about ‘sanguma’ from my
fieldwork and from what others have written, several questions will be considered. This
chapter is the more wide-ranging one; it is an inquiry into the extent of geocultural dis-
tribution of ‘sanguma.’

‘Sanguma’ as Magical Ritual Murder

‘Sanguma’ is the Tok Pisin term for a form of magical ritual murder of an extreme trans-
gressive type that is widely distributed in Oceania but called by its own Indigenous term in

1. Kapferer (2002) provides an excellent yet short historical and critical review of magic and
sorcery in anthropology.

391
 A Witch’s Hand

each culture.2 On Dobu Island it was called mawari, in the Southern Highlands maua, and
among the Motu and Koita of the Port Moresby area vada, a term used by some early eth-
nographers (e.g., Fortune 1932: 284), to discuss the phenomenon cross-culturally. How-
ever, because of Tok Pisin’s prevalence in much of Papua New Guinea and its status as
one of the country’s two official languages, for my comparative discussion in this chapter
I will use ‘sanguma’ while cogently aware it is synonymous with vada. Regardless of where
‘sanguma’ is known, “it inspires horror; it provides the bogeyman for small children; it is
feared, reviled and despised. Its use is always antisocial and illegitimate” (Lewis 1987: 998).
While many ethnographic categories and their vocabularies are straightforward and
unambiguous—no one argues about the types of hunting or fishing—the vocabulary per-
taining to the supernatural is slippery and often contested. Hence, I will define my terms
to help find our way through the lexical haze confronting most inquiries about the occult.
First, analytical terms like “supernatural” or “occult,” which identify our subject, are not
Indigenous concepts in New Guinea languages. Unlike English, New Guinean languages
do not have a special term equivalent to “occult.” Something I might identify as inex-
plicable or unfathomable, indicating there is no explanation short of the supernatural,
for many Indigenous persons is fathomable, because they don’t question its authenticity.
Thus, in my usage, magic is a set of beliefs and actions that can’t be objectively validated
and is a characteristic of nonmodern societies like the Lujere, whereas modern socie-
ties tend towards secularism.3 I say they “tend towards secularism” because, under some
conditions, as Jones reminds us, “occult phenomena have not only persisted but prolifer-
ated under the postmodern, postcolonial, postsocialist conditions of global capitalism”
( Jones 2017:17). Pioneer ethnographers such as W. Lloyd Warner also distinguish be-
tween “black magic,” which allegedly kills (like ‘sanguma’ and sorcery), and “white magic,”
which allegedly cures, a central concern of chapter 18.

Sorcery and Witchcraft

While the spirits, ghosts, and ghouls discussed in the last chapter are intangible, sorcerers
and witches are human beings, albeit with reputations for dealing with the intangible and
supernatural. I define sorcery as an individual’s actions or thoughts intended to magically
bring harm to others. Here are some Lujere examples: placing in house thatch bespelled
leaves whose aroma is believed to cause illness; heating something associated with the
victim’s mouth, such as a small piece of their leftover food, cigarette, or betel cud that first
must be enclosed in some dried mud. In the latter method, the encased item is placed on
a cooking hearth. With the many hearth fires, the victim becomes sick, and after losing
much weight, will die. The antidote is for the victim to repeatedly send his brother to the

2. It is puzzling that two such experienced researchers as Peter Lawrence and Mervin Meggitt
(1965) make no mention of ‘sanguma’ in the introduction to their multiauthor exploration of
Melanesian religious beliefs, including witchcraft and sorcery.
3. The decline in magic and the supernatural has been steady since the Enlightenment and many
writers have documented and commented on this change. Here I will cite only one influential
study (Thomas 1973) relevant to English-speaking countries.

392
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

suspected sorcerer and eventually the sorcerer might relent and accompany the brother to
wipe his curative sweat upon the victim’s body.
Another old sorcery practice is to isolate your victim’s footprint on a path and thrust
a spear into it, then put the spear in the ‘morata’ of your house, above the hearth to make
it hot. The victim will first have a pain in the legs that becomes more diffused, then will
continuously lose weight and die. The antidote is the same, with the addition that the
offending spear must be thrown into a brook or pond. A sorcery technique some men
learned as indentured laborers was to place a small personal item of a victim on the fan or
fan belt of an automobile or airplane. When the motor starts the victim will become sick
and die before the night is over. There is no antidote for this.
One need not be labeled a sorcerer to do sorcery; anyone can. All that is needed is
knowledge of the spell and/or to think the damaging thought. Witchcraft, as defined by
a committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, is very
different, however, as discussed by Seligman: “Witchcraft is distinguished from sorcery in
that it is generally believed to be a power, more for evil than for good, lodged in an individual
himself or herself (the witch). It may be inborn, hereditary or acquired by undergoing spe-
cial rites” (B. Seligman 1954: 189).4
Thus, once initiated, Lujere nakwolu, in anthropological analytical terms, are witches—
the only ones in Lujereland. “Witch beliefs,” as Monika Wilson has written about Africa,
are “the standardized nightmare of a group” (1951: 313) and ‘sanguma’ was the Lujere’s
number one nightmare. Writing about ‘sanguma,’ however, presents epistemological prob-
lems for the ethnographer who, as an experientially oriented scientist, is challenged to write
about actions in X society that appear to be miraculous and empirically impossible, while
the members of X society accept the same actions as real and truthful. In other words, the
referenced actions do not contest the sense of the real and plausible for the locals as they do

4. Glick’s understanding of sorcery and witchcraft is similar:

“A sorcerer’s capacity to harm . . . depends on his ability to control powers extrinsic to
himself: whereas a witch, who can inflict sickness or death on others simply by star-
ing at them or willing evil on them, possesses powers—inherited or acquired—as an
intrinsic part of his or her person (1972: 1080; my emphasis).
Seemingly diametrically opposed to this is Kapferer’s statement, “Sorcery is the work
of specialists, whereas witchcraft may be practiced by anyone and everyone” (1997:
6). Some anthropologists, following Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) influential description
of Zande witchcraft beliefs restrict the term “witch” to someone who is innately and
involuntarily possessed of evil and mysterious powers. In reviews of Evans-Pritchard’s
work, Middleton and Winter (1963) suggest it is a witch’s possession of evil supernat-
ural powers, not how they were acquired, that is the essential characteristic of a witch.
This is the usage I have followed. A cogent example of the referential diversity regard-
ing witchcraft is made by Aletta Biersack (2017) in her afterward to an edited volume
on Pentecostalism and witchcraft in Melanesia (Rio, MacCarthy, and Blanes 2017),
where she notes “the distinction frequently drawn between sorcery, which involves con-
scious acts of malevolence, and witchcraft, which bears on unconscious attempts to harm”
(my emphases). However, she then records that the editors of that volume “adopt the
term witchcraft to mean acts of occult malevolence, conscious or not” (2017: 294). For
a detailed discussion of sorcery and witchcraft with multiple examples, see Stephen
(1987) and Mitchell (1989).

393
 A Witch’s Hand

for the ethnographer. Mead, in an early comment on vada, was well aware of this problem:
“The whole nature of the practice [vada] is such that it is very difficult for the field-worker
to distinguish between phantasy and myth, on the one hand, and the actual practice re-
sulting in the death of specific persons on the other” (1938: 174). One solution, and the
usual one, is for the ethnographer to describe the event from the local perspective, being
careful not to let one’s own disbelief skew the account. Adam Ashforth, who has written
perceptively on witchcraft in South Africa and Soweto specifically, lays out the challenge:

Perhaps the most difficult challenge I have faced in dealing with issues of spiritual in-
security has arisen from the necessity of taking seriously (and by this, I mean treating as
literal statements) propositions about witchcraft that seem evidently absurd and non-
sensical without thereby denigrating the people who utter them as idiotic or stupid. . . .
Tolerant secular humanists, such as myself, find it extremely difficult to accept that
otherwise reasonable people really believe as literally true impossibilities such as prop-
ositions about virgin birth, spaceships behind the Hale-Bopp comet, or healers living
seven years under the water of a lake. . . . But unless we make the imaginative leap to
treat propositions about invisible forces seriously, the social and political dynamics of
vast portions of humanity will remain incomprehensible. (Ashforth 2005: xiv)

Nils Burbandt, in his book The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian
Island, takes exception with the approach to witchcraft beliefs exemplified by Evans-
Pritchard, who accepts witchcraft as “explanation.” Fatefully, contends Burbandt, “When
witchcraft becomes belief and meaning, doubt is sidelined” (2014: 7). While Burbandt is
undoubtedly correct that there are societies with witchcraft, as the one he studied, where
some challenge the belief in it, the Lujere are not one of them. Their beliefs in ‘sanguma’
were as solidly grounded and unchallenged as their beliefs about sago and pigs. For them,
‘sanguma’ does explain sickness and death. Yes, there might be debate and doubt regard-
ing which ‘sanguma’ witch killed a neighbor but rarely regarding the cause of death, as
most adults are thought to be killed by a ‘sanguma’ attack.
In my reading of many anthropological accounts of ‘sanguma,’ I was often aware of the
tension between the writer accepting that the ‘sanguma’ witch was not a phantom spirit
but a living and breathing human being, yet preposterous and unbelievable events were
ascribed to him. How could a real person kill another person then restore him or her to
life? How could a real person remove another person’s muscle tissue or organs without
scarring? Or even more mind-boggling to me, how could a Lujere witch himself believe
that he actually did such things? Remember the young Tolai policeman, William, at the
Yellow River Base Camp who told me that ‘sanguma’ men weren’t like Jesus and could cut
up people, then seal them back together like nothing had happened? Well, if you believe
that ‘sanguma’ men can do that, from your point of view, they can! Just as in my society
many evangelical Christians believe that Jesus literally fed a crowd of five thousand from
five loaves and two fishes and raised a very dead Lazarus back to life, not to mention
that he himself rose from the dead. They would agree that these were miraculous events,
but insist on their actual occurrence. I will return to the paradoxical phenomenological
dilemma inherent in ‘sanguma’ in chapter 17.
The phenomenon I have identified as ‘sanguma’ is, according to informants, performed
by a human being and not by the likes of a spirit, ghost, or forest demon. While varying

394
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

in detail, the usual features of this magical murder are: (1) one or more ‘sanguma’ witches
attack the lone victim and render him or her unconscious; (2) the skin is cut and bodily
properties removed; (3) the incisions are closed without scarring; (4) the victim is re-
turned to consciousness without memory of the event; and (5) is sent home to a doomed
death, typically in a predetermined number of days. There is no counter magic against
‘sanguma’; death is inevitable. The only steps that are not indisputably magical are one
and two. It is this unusual mixture of physical and magical brutality that has influenced
some, such as Glick (1972: 1029), to call it “assault sorcery,” and that made it paradoxical
to a critical thinker. The above complex of descriptive behaviors is what I am concerned
with in the following section, irrespective of what it is called locally. The Tok Pisin word
‘sanguma’ references this way of magical killing; the fact that a Lujere ‘sanguma’ witch is
also a curer is irrelevant, as some ‘sanguma’ men in other societies are not.

Geocultural Distribution of ‘Sanguma’

The thrust of this chapter is to indicate the geocultural distribution of ‘sanguma’ as a
cultural belief system, starting with the earliest accounts I could find in the literature.
This is not an exhaustive catalogue of where ‘sanguma’ occurs but is intended to show the
extensiveness of its distribution cross-culturally, primarily in Oceania, and how research-
ers have written about it. The term “description” used in the headings means that the
researcher has given a general description of ‘sanguma’; the term “account” means that the
writer has given an informant’s first-hand account of a ‘sanguma’ incident. Most of the
examples of ‘sanguma’ are from the colonial era; the single example from the twenty-first
century is to document that ‘sanguma’—albeit redefined—is still perceived as a menace,
further elaborated in the next chapter. In these ethnographic examples, what the perpe-
trator of the deadly deed is called—witch, sorcerer, wizard, or a local name—is irrelevant;
it is the ‘sanguma’ features of the magical ritual murder outlined above that are analyti-
cally significant. The geocultural data will be presented in the following sequence: Papua
New Guinea, Indonesia, and Australia.
Note: Readers should be forewarned that much of the content in ‘sanguma’ accounts is ex-
tremely disturbing; those who are sensitive to descriptions of violence and assaults may do well
to avoid reading these accounts.

Ethnographic Descriptions of ‘Sanguma’ in Papua New Guinea

The first descriptions by Codrington and Seligman

The British Anglican missionary R. H. Codrington, pioneering ethnographer of the

Melanesian islands east of New Guinea, was the first to describe in his 1891 (1969)
book, The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk-lore, a form of magical mur-
der similar to ‘sanguma’ as the Lujere understood it.5 He mentions it by different words

5. Codrington, son of an Anglican priest, schooled at Oxford, ordained in 1857, an immigrant

to New Zealand, joined the Melanesian mission in 1866, and worked as a missionary mostly
in the Solomon and Banks Islands and on Norfolk Island in mission schools until 1877.

395
 A Witch’s Hand

in his sketchy descriptions for the Solomon Islands, naming it vele for Florida and Savo,
and hele for Guadalcanal and Malanta. He gives a more focused account from the nearby
New Hebrides Islands where it is called gagaleve:

At Lepers’ [Aoba] Island, in the New Hebrides [today Vanuatu], . . . The wizard
overcomes his victim with his charms, so that the man cannot distinctly see him or
defend himself; then he shoots him with a little bow and arrow made of some charmed
material, and strikes him with the arrow. The man does not know what is done to him, but
he goes home, falls ill, and dies; he can remember nothing to tell his friends, but they see the
wound in his head where he was struck, and in his side where he was shot, and know
what has happened. (Codrington 1969: 207; my italics)

All that is missing for an apt description of Sepik ‘sanguma’ is cutting into the victim’s
flesh to remove some aspect of the body and closing the incisions without a scar.
The other pioneering ethnographic survey work on New Guinea was by C. G. Selig-
man. Trained as a physician, he volunteered for the famous Cambridge Anthropological
Expedition to Torres Straits in 1898 led by A. C. Haddon, and became enamored with
anthropology. He returned to New Guinea in 1904 with the Daniels Ethnological Ex-
pedition to New Guinea and in 1910 published his classic book, The Melanesians of Brit-
ish New Guinea. His main informant for the Koita in the Port Moresby area was Ahuia
Ao, the hereditary chief of his group and literate in English. Ahuia gave the following
account of one method of killing people by magic, the sorcerers practicing this method
being called vada, though they were clearly not spirits or other nonhumans:

One or more (often two or three) men who were sorcerers would follow their intended
victim to his garden, or into the bush. There he would be speared and clubbed, and
when dead cut to pieces. One end of a length of rope is then looped round the dead
man’s hand or knee, while the opposite end is steeped in certain “medicine” (gorto).
This ‘go along rope make man get up,’ [badly rendered Tok Pisin] i.e., the virtue in the
medicine passing along the rope to the dead man would restore him to life. . . . The
dead man on his revival is dazed, ‘he mad,’ and knows not where he is, or what has
befallen him. He is told that he will die shortly; he does not subsequently remember
this, but manages to return to his village [obviously reassembled], where his friends
know what has happened to him by reason of his feeble, silly condition, though the
victim himself does not know, and can give no account of what has occurred. (Selig-
man 1910: 170–171)

Seligman doesn’t affirm that the victim dies, but we can assume that he does. Inter-
estingly, Sir Hubert Murray (1912: 216), who was British New Guinea’s first Lieuten-
ant Governor from 1908 until his death in 1940, also published a brief description of

Although not a trained linguist, in 1885 Oxford University Press published his The Mela-
nesian Languages. In 1888, at fifty-eight years old, he returned to England where in 1891
he published his pioneering ethnography, The Melanesians, quoted here. Ernest Beaglehole
(1968), in a précis of his biography, notes that “Codrington’s erudition is both powerful and
impressive. . . . The master of Melanesian ethnography died suddenly—old in years [92], wise
in theology, honored in scholarship—on September 11, 1922.”

396
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

‘sanguma’ with the term vada for the Koiari people just interior of Port Moresby.6 Vada
quickly became the first term used by different researchers to identify this form of magi-
cal murder (that I gloss as ‘sanguma’) and was used by Patterson (1974–75: 142–43) in
her seminal study that describes in detail one of the three types of “sorcery techniques”
used in Melanesia. What follows are field workers’ examples of ‘sanguma’ arranged by
geographic area, first Papua New Guinea, then Indonesia and Australia.

‘Sanguma’ in the eastern islands

Hogbin’s Guadalcanal description
In 1933, the Australian anthropologist Ian Hogbin (1937) visited the hill people of
northeastern Guadalcanal. He spent ten days in an inland hill village and learned about
another more complicated form of ‘sanguma’ sorcery called vele:

Vele differs from piro [sorcery] in that it is always fatal. . . . The victim looks in the
direction from which the sound came, and as soon as the sorcerer catches his eye, he
begins to wave the charm in front of his face. The man’s head begins to swim at once,
and in a few moments he falls to the ground unconscious. The sorcerer then takes the
bone of a flying fox7 and, bending over him, makes a small incision at the tips of all
his fingers and toes. Next he recites a spell which causes a bird to fly down from a tree
nearby and perch on his shoulder. He puts a portion of the blood from each wound in
its beak and then rubs the man’s skin with a smooth shell, reciting a spell as he does so
with the result that all the holes close up at once, leaving no trace. All is now ready for
the awakening of the victim. His eyelids flutter, and soon it sits up. He always has an
unpleasant taste in his mouth, and his nose is filled with an abominable stench. This
makes him spit, and as soon as he does, he forgets everything that has occurred.
He returns home as if nothing had happened, and for a few days continues in per-
fect health until one morning he hears the sorcerer calling him. He goes to meet him,
suspecting nothing, and receives from him a small package, the contents of which he
eats. This is the real vele poison. At once he begins to feel ill, and within a few days he
is dead. (79–80)

What with the waved charm, blood-eating bird, bad smells, spitting to forget, and
actual poisin, this was one of the most unusual magical murders I found in the literature.
Consequently, I wasn’t surprised to read that when Hogbin returned to the coast from

6. Murray, a thoughtful colonial administrator, still took a typically jaundiced view of native
culture. He wrote, “I must confess that, to me, many of these customs seem unutterably fool-
ish, just as even the best of native art appears to me crude and entirely lacking in inspiration;
but probably if I were less ignorant I should be more appreciative” (Hides 1936: xiii). As this
book is primarily oriented to the section of New Guinea that became German New Guinea,
the history of British New Guinea has been slighted. For an authoritative but short history
see Legge (1971).
7. This is a large fruit bat that, as Coiffier (2020) explains, is an important icon in New Guinea
art, especially that of the Sepik region, and is often intimately related to food, human sexuality
and procreation.

397
 A Witch’s Hand

the village, he “was able to investigate the subject of sorcery thoroughly and came to the
conclusion that, despite native beliefs, it was never carried out (Hogbin 1937: 80).

Ludvigson’s Espiritu Santo Island description

In 1974–76, anthropologist Tomas Ludvigson spent seventeen months with the Kiai-
speaking people of the upper Ari valley in central Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, gathering data
for his Auckland University doctorate. In this unusual version the victim is not physically
attacked by a real person but by his spirit and spirit helpers.

Patua is a form of assault sorcery. The sorcerer has two little spirit children (patua),
invisible to others, who come to him when he is asleep. The patua want liver and en-
trails to eat, and will go hunting with their master. Together with his spirit they enter
a house where someone is asleep and cut open his stomach. After the patua have eaten
the victim’s insides, they stuff the cavity with leaves and seal up the wound so that it
does not show. In the morning there is no trace of the operation, but the victim will be
dead within a day. (1985: 57)

In almost every case of death, patua was thought to be the cause. The sorcerer also can
assume the shapes of animals and, if he is killed when in his animal appearance, he will
be dead within a day.8

Fortune’s Dobu account

For the first ethnographically authenticated “eyewitness” description of ‘sanguma,’ or
vada as it was then characterized in the anthropological literature, we must jump back to
the early 1930s and Reo Fortune’s New Guinea field work from before he was married
to Margaret Mead. They had met on shipboard in 1926 after her first fieldwork in Samoa
on her return home to her husband Luther Cressman, and Fortune was en route from
his native New Zealand to England for a two-year graduate fellowship in psychology
at Cambridge.9 As Mead remembers the voyage, “we were falling in love” (Mead 1972:
161). At Cambridge, Fortune was uninspired by his psychology professors and gravitated
towards anthropology and Professor A. C. Haddon, with thoughts of fieldwork in New
Guinea. “He had decided to leave Cambridge and hoped to get an anthropological grant
through A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who was developing a lively research center at the Uni-
versity of Sydney in Australia” (Mead 1972: 164). He succeeded, and in 1927–28 Fortune
spent six months on tiny Tawara and Dobu Islands in the D’Entrecasteaux Islands, north

8. Knut Rio (2002: 141) also describes a ‘sanguma’ magical murder called abio for Vanuatu’s
Ambrym Island.
9. Fortune (1927) published in England his book The Mind in Sleep that examines personal am-
bivalence via dreams that contradict one’s waking opinions. See Lohmann’s (2009) insightful
article on Fortune’s dream study. In 1928 he married Margaret Mead followed by their 1930’s
fieldwork together in the Sepik region of New Guinea. For more on their relationship, see
Dobrin and Bashkow (2010).

398
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

of New Guinea’s northeastern tip, followed in 1932 with the publication of his classic
Sorcerers of Dobu, where he gives the first full description of a ‘sanguma’ murder.
Once Malinowski had published his celebrated first book (1922) on his extended
stay with the Trobriand Islanders, the peripatetic survey work in which Codrington and
Seligman excelled was largely abandoned. Fortune lived in a village and stridently avoided
contact with all Europeans, especially missionaries and government officials. One night,
when Fortune and his most reliable and trustworthy informant Christopher (Fortune’s
pseudonym) were alone in his hut conversing in Dobu,

Christopher let fall a hint of a piece of work in the black art quite accidentally. I fol-
lowed it up and with some pressure got it out of him. He began with reluctance, but
soon his eyes were half starting from his head and he was rolling and writhing on the
floor of my hut in active description of a thing too vigorous for words to do justice
to—obviously re-living the scene he described with a thoroughly ugly intensity. (For-
tune 1932: 161)

The incident begins with a man insulting Christopher’s wife’s mother’s brother, a not-
ed sorcerer who in Fortune’s story is called Y. In seeking revenge for the insult, Y, on the
basis of his affinal kinship tie to Christopher, persuaded him to accompany him as his
assistant and lookout.

The intended victim, all unknowing, went alone to his garden in the early morning. Y
and Christopher set out. . . . The two performed the logau, a charm which is believed
to make the man who utters it invisible. Christopher circled three times round the
foot of a convenient coco-nut palm while he did the logau. Y and Christopher could
see each other, being both charmed together. Others could not see them. Neverthe-
less, Christopher climbed the palm to keep watch against possible intruders. From this
height he also directed the movements of Y by signs towards the unconscious solitary
gardener.
Y moved in concealment, charming with spells towards the gardener and charming
his sorcerer’s lime spatula. Then with the gardener facing him, and nearby where he
crouched concealed, he burst forth with the sorcerer’s screaming shout. Christopher
saw the gardener fall to the ground and lie writhing convulsively under the sorcerer’s
attentions. (Christopher had a painful filarial swelling in his groin approaching burst-
ing point—but here he hurled himself down on the floor of my hut and writhed,
groaning horribly—re-living the scene in his excitement.)
The sorcerer feinted to rap his victim gently over the body with his lime spatula.
The body lay still. He cut open the body with the charmed spatula, removed entrails,
heart, and lungs, and tapped the body again with the spatula, restoring its appearance
to apparent wholeness (here my informant speaks from what he apparently believes
his own eyes saw in the cleared garden space below). The sorcerer’s attentions here left
the body of the victim, and transferred to charming the lime spatula anew. The body
rose. Y said, “You name me.” The body mumbled incoherently and received a feint at a
gentle rap on the temples from the spatula. Again, “You name me,” aggressively. Again
an incoherent mumble, and another feinted rap. So a third time. Y said, “You go.” The
man went to the village and arrived raving, leaving his personal goods and tools in the
garden. His children went to bring them. The man lay down writhing, groaning, and

399
 A Witch’s Hand

calling on his abstracted vital parts by name—by this time it was mid-day. So he lay
that day and night. Next day the sun climbed to its zenith and he lay dead. (Fortune
1932: 162–63)

Fascinated by Christopher’s account, Fortune adds, “So firm was his [Christopher’s]
belief that he used the language of an eye witness of the removal of the entrails, heart, and
lungs of the victim.” As a commentary on the sorcerer and victim’s behavior he notes, “It
is clear the sorcerer’s procedure is hypnotic in nature, the fear apparently being paralysing
[to the victim]” (1932: 163). 10 Then Fortune writes,

I believe that Christopher’s account of his adventure . . . was no fabrication. He had

no need to implicate himself so closely if he was spinning a tale. I have never seen a
human being so possessed with emotion as my informant, yet retaining his sanity. He
appeared to see everything that he described once again, and I felt toward him much as
I did towards a man that ran amuck with a spear in my village and raved, threatening
to cut my throat and eat me, stuffing rubbish into his mouth to illustrate his inten-
tion, after I got him disarmed and was proceeding to truss him up. My informant was
equally ugly in manner, and more powerfully so in that he was not in any pathological
state. He was, however, so strongly excited that I would be inclined to connect run-
ning amuck . . . with the state of mind engendered by witchcraft and sorcery. (Fortune
1932: 163)

In the Dobu language that’s spoken on both Tawara and Dobu islands, ‘sanguma’ is
called mawari because the sorcerer shouts, “Mawari!” as he attacks his terrorized vic-
tim. Fortune, however, titles his analytically provocative eleven-page Appendix II “Vada,”
which I will later discuss in relationship to the territories’ laws against sorcery and
witchcraft.

‘Sanguma’ in the Sepik region

Bateson’s Iatmul account

Four years after Fortune published his informant’s allegedly eyewitness ‘sanguma’
account, Gregory Bateson published one too, but it is less emotional than Christo-
pher’s narrative. Bateson’s Iatmul informant was Tshava of Kankanamun village whose
mother, Nyakala, had died of sorcery. Her brother was Malikindjin, a renowned sor-
cerer who Bateson said was the greatest man in Kankanamun village. Intensely hated
by some and feared by all for his sorcery, Bateson admired him as “an astonishingly
vivid dramatic orator” (1936: 164–65). Regarding Nyakala, Tshava told Bateson in
some detail about the incident where he and his uncle Malikindjin brutally avenged
her death:

10. Patterson (1974–75: 143) takes exception to the assumption that the victim is hypnotized, as
Wright (1959: 209) claims, since there was no custom of hypnosis among Fortune’s islanders.

400
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

When Malikindjin was mourning for Nyakala he came to me and said to me, “We will
go down to such and such a piece of bush.” We went there and found a man named
Tamwia. Malikindjin said, “Now we are going to take vengeance for your mother on
this man.” He told me to hide myself and he used magic to make Tamwia unable to
see him. Tamwia was “in the dark” and Malikindjin made him “cold.” He did not cry
out. Malikindjin came straight up to him and broke his neck and head with an adze.
He killed him. He cut off his head and put in its place a head made of nggelakavwi (a
tuberous plant, Mymecodia sp.). He threw the real head away.
We each took an arm and hid the body in the elephant grass. Malikindjin said,
“Don’t talk about this, but there is no fear of trouble. We are only taking vengeance.”
Then I went away to work on Malikindjin’s garden, and came back to find the man
Tamwia lying sick and groaning. Malikindjin woke him up and said, “Are you asleep?”
and Tamwia said, “Yes.” Malikindjin said, “What have I been doing to you?” and Tam-
wia said, “I was asleep and you woke me up.” Malikindjin said, “Right. That is the way
to talk. Now go away.”
Malikindjin also told him, “You cannot cry out with sickness soon. You will stay
awhile first,” and he gave him a date—five days thence. “You cannot mention me. It
is not good for you to live in Kankanamun. You had better die.” . . . The poor man,
Tamwia, soon died. (Bateson 1936: 59–60)

In a footnote, Bateson alludes to the similarity of Fortune’s account, noting that both
of their informants participated as lookouts and that “the magic was of the type called
‘vada.’ In it the victim is first killed and then brought back to life only to die later” (Bate-
son 1936: 59, n. 2). Bateson also observed that in Fortune’s account, it was the heart that
was removed instead of the head. He was impressed that “Dr. Fortune’s informant was
moved almost to hysteria in the narration of the story, whereas my informant described
the events in as cool and as detached a manner as he would have described a magical
procedure for the improvement of yams” (1936: 59, n. 2).

Roscoe’s Yangoru Boiken description

In Roscoe’s account, alien young married men from eastern Boiken who are secretly initi-
ated in occult rites to carry out homicidal magical attacks are called maiyire:

In choosing a victim, maiyire are said to make no distinction by age, sex, or skin color,
picking on anyone who happens to be alone. . . . They immobilize their hapless prey
by pointing at them or breathing on them with their magically potent breath. . . . The
maiyire then split open the body to feast on the heart or smash the arm and leg bones,
before magically resealing the flesh to mask the destruction. . . . The victim is revived
and a time and date appointed in the near future for their death. . . . The victim is then
set free and returns home remembering nothing of the attack. (Roscoe 1986: 182)11

11. Roscoe’s paper is of special interest as it reports a much more complex set of beliefs and be-
haviors related to maiyire than in most other ‘sanguma’ descriptions including, for example,
seasonality of the attack, cannibalism, giving an emetic to a collapsed victim, trance-like states,
and maiyire as a culture-bound syndrome.

401
 A Witch’s Hand

Gesch’s Yamuk village (Middle Sepik) description

This is a contemporary account of ‘sanguma’ in the Middle Sepik. Yamuk (Yamok) is an

Ndu language village located inland, directly east of the Sepik River village of Pagui. Pat-
rick F. Gesch, a Divine Word Mission priest who spent many years in the Sepik region
and received his doctorate at University of Sydney with a thesis (1985) on a movement in
the Sepik similar to a cargo cult, describes ‘sanguma’ as follows:

The sanguma knock the victim out, generally expressed as “killing” him, and then oper-
ate on him by removing some of his internal organs, parts of his major muscles, his
penis or other meat. This meat will be kept and dried as a powerful agent of sanguma
work. When the sanguma next wants to work, he will scrape this piece of meat with his
teeth or breathe his spells over it. The sanguma will revive the man they have “killed,”
and ask him if he recognizes them. If he does recognize them and what they did, he
will be knocked out again and revived until finally he does not know the sanguma
who have terminated his life. The victim is then sent away with knowledge of the day
and the circumstances under which he will finally die, but with no recognition of the
sanguma men who have killed him. (Gesch 2015: 118)

Kulick’s Gapun and Juillerat’s Yafar descriptions

Bateson’s early account of ‘sanguma’ was for the Iatmul in the Middle Sepik. Here, from
more recent fieldworkers, are two more descriptions at opposite ends of the Sepik River.
In 1986–87, Don Kulick worked in Gapun village between the mouths of the Sepik and
Ramu Rivers and gives a succinct description of ‘sanguma’ as it was presented to him. He
attests that the Ramu River villages

are feared for their powerful sorcery and sangguma men (aŋgwar). These sangguma men
are considered to be especially horrific because of the way they kill their victims. First
they ambush and mesmerize them. Then they rip out the victims’ entrails with their
fingers, which are long and clawed. The entrails are replaced with leaves and grass, and
the still-dazed victim is sewn up and sent back to his or her village. Before the victim
goes, the sangguma men whisper in his ear the exact day and time when he will die.
And, at the appointed time, he dies. (Kulick 1992: 31)

Kulick, who was focusing his fieldwork on language shift and not sorcery, makes only
one other allusion to ‘sanguma,’ regarding its use as a frightening threat to keep young
children within or near their home, the equivalent to my childhood’s “boogeyman.” I
heard the same threat while living with the Lujere, but using the local term. This scare
technique to control a child’s behavior provokes a fright internalized at a tender age and
helps to account for the overwhelming dread of vada, gagaleve, numoin—or whatever it is
locally called—that is carried into adulthood and old age with such tenacity by so many
New Guineans.
The French anthropologist Bernard Juillerat found a variant form of ‘sanguma’ while
working in 1970–71 among the Yafar in the Border Mountains next to Indonesia’s Papua
Province:

402
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

The sorcerer or sorcerers surprise their victim, usually in a lonely spot (clearing, forest)
where he may be with his family. The sysiri [sorcerer] holds a piece of nefôkêg [magic
plant] clenched in his teeth, having tied some of its leaves to his bow and arrow. This
makes the sorcerer and his weapons invisible to any witnesses who may be with the
victim, but not to the latter, who is nevertheless incapable of crying out, paralysed by
both the action of the [magic plant] and by fear. The oncoming arrow will therefore
be visible to him, but will quickly vanish into his body without leaving a wound and
without causing immediate death or incapacity: the wounded person will not dare say
a word about what has happened for fear of retaliation and will go back home—not
without having lost consciousness for a time—and die a few weeks later of illness.
As he is about to die—and only at that moment—the victim may reveal that he has
been killed by an aysiri and identify the sorcerer if he has recognized him. ( Juillerat
1996: 467)

Scorza’s Tumentonik village (Torricelli Mountains) description

David and Jackie Scorza lived in Tumantonik for fifteen years and translated the New
Testament into the Au language. The following description is from a letter he wrote to
me on February 28, 1974:

There are at least one or two [‘sanguma’ men] left, but the real feared ones were almost
all gone when we got here, and the last two of those died about 1970. . . . We have
what is called Hiwak (sanguma) who never disclose if they are this type or not. . . . The
Hiwak are usually in numbers of four or more, and they grab the victim, hold him
down and jam something into his mouth so he can’t scream out, then they squeeze the
testicles and rub them between their hands til he loses consciousness. They stick him
with the thorns, then when he regains his senses, they make him dance. If he dances
well, they club him until he is senseless, then they send him back to his village [to die].
You only do this to someone who isn’t related.

Morren’s Telefolmin description

The Miyanmin at the headwaters of the Sepik River apparently had no ‘sanguma’ men but
their neighbors, the Telefolmin, did. George Morren, who worked with the Miyanmin in
the late 1960s and again in 1980–81, writes,

The Miyanmin identify two varieties of lethal sorcery, one a Telefolmin patent, the
other practiced among the Miyanmin themselves. The Telefolmin type, which the Mi-
yanmin call usem, is widely reported in New Guinea and Australia and resembles felo-
nious assault. Typically, the male or female victim is ambushed alone in some isolated
bush location, wrestled or beaten to the ground, and held while bamboo or (now) steel
needles are driven into the body. The victim returns home with no memory of the at-
tack, sickens, and dies. . . . an adult death in a southern Miyanmin parish sets off a
hysteria of phantom Telefolmin sightings, and numerous suspected sorcery attempts
are brought to public notice. (Morren 1986: 211)

403
 A Witch’s Hand

‘Sanguma’ in Papua (former British New Guinea)

Knauft’s Gebusi (Western Province) description

The Gebusi, who were studied by Bruce Knauft and his wife Eileen Cantrell in the early
1980s, are a cultural and linguistic group of 450 persons living on the Strickland Plain
east of the Strickland River. Knauft says that “ogowili is a variant of classic ‘sanguma’ or
vada assault sorcery.”

An ogowili is a semi-invisible warrior form taken on by a real man. . . . Ogowilis,

either singly or in groups, are said to stalk a victim in the forest until they find him or
her alone. . . . When ogowilis find a person who has been careless or unwise enough
to stray from his or her companions, the attack is swift. The victim is said to be shot
with arrows or hit over the head until dead. The body is believed to be butchered by
the ogowilis, with the flesh removed and the skin flayed and wrung out over leaves so
that the blood does not leave telltale marks on the forest floor. . . . The attackers then
replace the victim’s skin, make him or her whole again, and give him or her amnesia so
that the attack is forgotten. . . . The ogowilis return home with their bags full of human
flesh to eat. Meanwhile, their victim goes weakly back to his or her own settlement and
soon becomes very sick. When the ogowilis excrete the eaten meat of the victim, he
or she dies. . . . ogowili afflictions cannot be diagnosed prior to death itself; a genuine
attack is always swift and fatal. (Knauft 1985: 104)

Burton-Bradley and Julius’ Motu village (Port Moresby) description

The psychiatrist B. G. Burton-Bradley and ethnologist Charles Julius describe an urban
form of ‘sanguma.’ They do not, however, indicate that death is inevitable; apparently, they
just assume that it is.

In the Motu village of Tatana (Port Moresby), side pains . . . are attributed to a type
of sorcerer known as vada. Such men are believed to work in groups of three. . . . One
group renders the victim unconscious; the next group opens his body, removes some
internal organ and replaces it with some other substance; the third group closes the
wound and revives the man, making him forget what has happened. (Bradley and
Julius 1965: 14)

Malinowski’s Mailu description

Like Bateson and Fortune, Malinowski also found ‘sanguma’ on his first field trip in
1914–15 to tiny Mailu Island, off New Guinea’s southeast coast:

Sorcerers throughout the Massim are called Bara’u, and the same word is used in
Mailu, while the Motu [Port Moresby area] use the reduplicated Babara’u. The ma-
gicians in these parts use such powerful methods as those of killing the victim first,
opening up the body, removing, lacerating or charming the inside, then bringing the
victim to life again, only that he may soon sicken and eventually die. (Malinowski
1922: 42)

404
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

Under the heading “Nature of the Dreaded Beings; the Babará’u,”12 Malinowski gives
early evidence of his later dedication to the ethnographic detail in his Trobriand books as
he discusses multiple aspects of the Mailu form of magical murder, first noting that it was
“the exact counterpart of the Váda of the Central District.” While he clearly establishes
that the islanders believed the Babará’u was a man, not a spirit, he also notes that “he
smears himself all over with some magical herbs, and mutters some spells and becomes
invisible.” Adding that the Babará’u is invisible only from the front but remains visible
from behind, this explains “why people see often mysterious shadows moving in the
dark.” More than some writers, Malinowski highlights discrepancies among his “inform-
ants’ statements in respect to details” and provides examples. Barbará’u are present in all
villages but travel away for their killings; going great distances, “They come like the wind,
quickly and invisible,” but there is no consensus among his informants as “to the exact
method of these aerial flights” (1988 [1915]: 647 passim).
As is common for fieldworkers in New Guinea, information about the dark side of
Mailu culture was initially withheld from Malinowski. His research base was a disused
mission house where his cook-boy and some village lads also slept until the news spread
that the house had ghosts. One night when Malinowski was listening to some Mailu
men and his cook-boy was visiting in Motu, the conversation veered to the house’s resi-
dent ghosts. Malinowski, “seeing that they took the matter very seriously and expressed
views very valuable to the ethnologist,” eventually entered the conversation. He “asserted
emphatically that, as a white man, I was afraid only of ghosts, but I added that, not know-
ing the habits of the local evil powers, I would like to know what I had to fear and how
I should best protect myself.” His companions, aware of Malinowski’s concern for his
safety, began to explain and describe what, until then, he had no knowledge of. Ghosts,
he was told, “are absolutely innocuous” and can neither talk nor make noise. But footsteps
and noises had been heard in his house; to sleep alone as he did, and in the dark without
a hurricane lamp, “was a plain invitation to the Bará’u to come and do his horrible work”
(1988 [1915]: 273).13

12. Malinowski’s 1915 study of the Mailu was reissued (Malinowski 1988) with light editing by
Michael Young and a masterful introduction.
13. On Rossel Island at the eastern end of the Louisiade Archipelago off the eastern end of New
Guinea, W. E. Armstrong gives an interesting account of a custom of ritual assault without
magic done at night. Armstrong got the data from PO Bell who, in 1908, had conducted a
patrol of about three weeks on Rossel.
It depends on the strength of the person to be killed whether the party consists of one
or more. They enter his house, and if four are in the party one will hold the lower limbs,
another grasps the throat, another holds his hands over the person’s mouth to prevent
him calling out, and the other breaks two or three ribs with his hands. It appears the
trachea or the gullet in most cases is injured, as the person complains of his throat
afterwards. They do not attempt anything beyond this, apparently being quite satisfied
the person must die, which of course must take place, the native himself realising it.
Death occurs usually the next day, the man suffering great pain and unable to take any
food. (Armstrong 1928: 222)

405
 A Witch’s Hand

‘Sanguma’ in the north coastal region

St. Lehner’s Markham-Ramu plain description

In an article translated from the German, Höltker refers to a Divine Word missionary
by the name of St. Lehner, who wrote an article in a German journal about the Azera
people on the Markham-Ramu Plain, where men called garam opa practice Todeszauber
or death magic:

The garam opa always sees to it to impede the person only when he is alone without
any escort. After the first physical contact the person loses consciousness immediately,
then the garam opa opens his body, deprives him of his liver and fills the gap with foli-
age which will immediately heal in such a way, that one cannot even see the slightest
scar. The person wakes up, but has no recollection of the incident, walks into the village
where he will die the next day or the day after. (Höltker 1942: 215)

Hogbin’s Wogeo Island description

Wogeo is one of the Schouten Islands located off the coast of Wewak and where Ian
Hogbin spent the whole of 1934 and again for a few weeks in 1948. He was the first and
only European resident on the island during his stay. Assault sorcery on Wogeo is called
yabou and according to Hogbin (1970: 14), was allegedly so common in the Sepik area
“that the residents have coined a term in pidgin English for it, sangguma.” His account
includes the sorcerer and assistants finding a victim, then,

the assistants at once take him (or her) from behind and blindfold him with a strip
of barkcloth. The sorcerer thereupon emerges from the bushes and recites a spell that
has the effect of rendering the person unconscious. He falls backwards on the ground
with eyes rolled upwards beyond the lids; but he still breathes, and his heart continues
beating. The sorcerer then removes the clothing from the prostrate body and places it
on the ground behind. Next the assistants hammer the neck, shoulders, chest, back,
and legs with a stone till these are black with bruises. They move to one side, and again
the sorcerer takes over. He drives his needle into the person’s left side under the ribs;
or he may push it into the anus or urethra; and he may even remove some vital organ,
such as a lung or kidney, and replace it with a stone, earth, or leaves. He also cuts the
ligament under the tongue. Any blood he wipes away before rubbing the wounds with
bespelled “medicines,” an action that causes them to close up or disappear—not a
single cut is visible, not a single bruise. Finally, standing behind the victim, he places
other ‘medicines’ on the eyes and mouth and recites further spells to restore him to
life and destroy all memory of what has taken place. Sorcerer and assistants then hide
behind bushes. If the victim, however dizzy, goes straight to the pile of clothing and
replaces the garments the sorcery is working—he will attend to the day’s task as usual
and probably make plans for the future. But if he is so ill as to be indifferent to his
nakedness, this means that he is aware of having been bewitched and of the identity
of the assailants. Then the whole process has to be repeated. . . . The victim completes
his (or her) work, but that night begins to feel ill. . . . All too soon he dies. (Hogbin
1970: 149–50)

406
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

Hogbin, unlike some ethnographers, goes out of his way to point out the logical im-
possibility of such attacks being real.14

Koster’s Banara (Bogia area) description

During much of the 1930s, Father G. J. Koster served at the missionary station of Banara
on New Guinea’s north coast, about eighteen miles east of Bogio and southeast of the
volcanic island of Manam. Besides hearing reports about ‘sanguma,’ Father Koster also
had occasion to examine a victim of ‘sanguma’ shortly after an assault, described in chap-
ter 17 of this volume. Below he summarizes his understanding of ‘sanguma’.

The sangguma men unexpectedly attack an isolated native either in the forest, trave-
ling, or in his gardens, or any place where he happens to be, as long as there are no
witnesses nearby, and then maltreat him in such a way that death must occur within a
couple of days. In order to make themselves unrecognizable the sangguma killers paint
themselves all over with a black pigment. . . . the murderers know how to orchestrate
their maltreatment in such a way as to allow the victim after the attack to reach of his
own accord his closest friends and next of kin, or the nearest village after which he will
die within several days. (Koster 1942: 218) 15

Koster is vague regarding the nature of the “maltreatment,” and thus downplays the
magical elements related in other accounts. I believe this is because of an attack for which
he has factual evidence. However, he does recount what one informant told him regard-
ing physical abuse of a victim:

One man named Pake, about forty years old (in 1936) and originating from Monumbo,
told me a lot about sangguma. He also told me that at times the sangguma men would
insert a long object into the victim’s anus. In order to do so they would take a pointed
dry stem of a coconut leaf, from which they removed the foliage, leaving only the tough
stem. The stem was then inserted through the anus into the intestines, turned around,
and taken out again. No need to say that the intestines suffered greatly. He told me
that in these modern times iron wire is also used. After this gruesome maltreatment,
they would try to make the victim regain consciousness, in case he fainted. If they do
not succeed, the actual sangguma is considered a failure. People will then say that the
victim was murdered. (Koster 1970: 149–50)

14. Hogbin’s account of yabou is much more culturally nuanced than most, including data on how
a sorcerer learns to kill this way and that it is the Headmen who are the alleged sorcerers, but
not the one in your own village. But yabou men are only allegedly about magically killing;
there is no concomitant magical curing role. Hogbin (1935a; 326–28) earlier gives a much
simpler description of ‘sanguma’ for Wogeo.
15. Father Koster’s ‘sanguma’ paper is translated from the Dutch. I am indebted to Dr. Risto
Gobius who sent me a taped translation from New Guinea in 1973. Later my brother-in-law,
John Slayton, who was living in the Netherlands, sent me a typescript translation by a Dutch
friend.

407
 A Witch’s Hand

‘Sanguma’ in the Highlands

Berndt’s Jate (eastern Central Highlands) description

‘Sanguma,’ defined as a form of assault sorcery, does not appear to be as prevalent in New
Guinea’s Highlands as it does in its lowlands and the islands to the east. However, Ronald
Berndt (1962) reports its presence in the Eastern Highlands where in the early 1950s
he worked with the Jate and adjoining groups. He describes several cases of ‘sanguma’
(tunakafia in Jate) told to him but in none of them does he describe in detail the cutting
into the body and the restoring of the flesh without scarring. However, he notes, “We are
not dealing solely with magic but with a physical operation under the guise of magic,” and
footnotes the sentence with Seligman’s and Fortune’s accounts of vada, adding, “To ac-
count for this type of sorcery [including the Jate], I am postulating a form of hypnosis or
suggestion used in conjunction with aggressive physical action” (1962: 224). Below is one
of Berndt’s cases concerning five ‘sanguma’ men from Ifusa village. (Note: this account
may be especially disturbing for some readers.)

It is said that, setting out for Keniju [village], they . . . found a young woman
named Jogulgakiza at work. They dragged her into the long grass, threw her upon
the ground, and tore off her skirts ready for sangguma. But as they looked at her,
they changed their minds and instead copulated with her in turn. Then they told
her to return the following day for the same purpose but not to tell anyone else or
they would work sangguma on her. Next day she again came alone to the garden
and was soon joined by the five Ifusa men, who proceeded to behave as before. This
continued for several days until one of the men became impatient. “We are sang-
guma men,” he told the others, “Do we not shoot with tunakafiagaijona (nails)? Or
do we use only our penes for this sorcery? We must kill people! All you do is to
copulate with this woman. But I shall kill her, alone.” On the following morning
he left without his companions and found her waiting. He took her into the grass,
choked her into unconsciousness, and proceeded to carry out sangguma. The victim
walked back to her house; as she was dying, she described what had happened but
without revealing the men’s identity. This was discovered only afterward. (Berndt
1962: 227–28)

Stewart and Strathern’s Wiru and Hewa (Southern Highlands) descriptions

In the Southern Highlands province, Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern write that
among the Wiru speakers in the Pangia area,

The sorcerer waylays his victim, projecting an aura of heat which stops the victim in his
or her tracks. Numbers of maua men may “hunt” victims together. If they find a woman
in her garden, they call to her from the bush, she goes over, and they copulate with her
repeatedly before killing her. . . . The sorcerer simply cuts open the victim’s stomach,
pulls out the kidneys, places one in the victim’s mouth, stuffs the exposed insides with
leaves, sews the skin up by magical touch, and sends the person home, telling him or
her to cook the kidney and eat it. Where the relatives recognize the signs of maua,
they will not even attempt medical treatment nor is there any Indigenous ritual care

408
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

available. The victim will simply die within the period stated by the sorcerer. (Stewart
and Strathern 2010: 111)

Regarding the Hewa people also of the Southern Highlands province, Stewart and
Strathern comment that “The Hewa witch (pisai) was said to cannibalize the viscera of
the victim by opening the body, eating the organs, and closing the body again so that the
attacked person died several weeks later” (Stewart and Strathern 2004: 126).

Ethnographic Descriptions of ‘Sanguma’ in Indonesia

‘Sanguma’ in North Maluku province

‘Sanguma,’ called suangi (suanggi, suwangi, swangi) in eastern Indonesia, is the compara-
ble Malay term that, according to anthropologist Nils Bubandt (2014: 26), is known and
feared along an arc that stretches from the islands of Sumba, Flores, Roti, and Timor,
across North Sulawesi, Maluku, and North Maluku provinces, east to the Bird’s Head
region of West Papua province, and into the borderlands between Papua province and
Papua New Guinea. When I discovered that ‘sanguma’ was in eastern Indonesia, I won-
dered if it were also in western Indonesia and the southern Philippines. I made a cursory
search but did not find it in those areas.

Bubandt’s Halmahera Island description

Nils Bubandt’s recent book (2014) about witchcraft and doubt centers on the Buli village
area on the east coast of Halmahera in the northern Moluccas. In earlier days it was un-
der the rule of the Sultan of Tidore, then the Dutch, and today it is called North Maluku
and is Indonesia’s poorest province. Witches are a community scourge; they are human
and anyone might be one and not even know it—so witch fear, like ‘sanguma’ fear, is a
pervasive state. One lives among witches but never knows exactly who they are.16 Villag-
ers say that they are greedy, stingy, and arrogant.17 What follows is Bubandt’s description
of a gua (witch) attack that in most respects is similar to classical ‘sanguma’. (Note: read-
ers should be aware that this account contains disturbing sexual violence.)

The gua approaches its victim stealthily, and almost always from behind. It then knocks
the victim unconscious by kicking or punching him—evicting the person’s gurumin
(the human shadow-cum-awareness). Victims are also said to lose their “inside”—their
emotions and feelings—at the mere sight of the gua. With both his protective shadow
and his ‘inside” (ulór) gone, the victim is helpless and essentially lifeless in the hands
of the witch. The gua then proceeds to open the victim’s abdomen to get at his liver
(yatai). Squatting on top of the inert body, either in its human shape or in the shape
of one of its animal familiars (a dog, certain birds, a pig, or an insect), the gua feasts
on the raw and bloody liver before molesting the body, sexually as well as physically.

16. While this is true for some societies, among the Lujere the ‘sanguma’ witches are known to all.
17. This view is very reminiscent of that of the Kaguru of central Tanzania, as reported by Beidel-
man (1986: 156): “Witches epitomize selfishness, greed, and contempt for others.”

409
 A Witch’s Hand

After extracting the liver, it seals the wound with water, or by licking it with its long
tongue. The wound closes completely and becomes invisible to the human eye. The gua
may also spear its victim with whatever is at hand—a piece of wood, a sago branch, or
a spear brought along for that purpose—and such a wound will later cause a piercing
pain (know as lebet). In its frenzy, it may even beat the victim, causing black-and-blue
marks where the punches have fallen, choke it, or try to drown it in a pool of water,
which will result in breathing problems during the subsequent illness. A frequent gua
hallmark is sexual molestation directed at the victim’s genitals (nyawa). A male gua
will often rape a female victim and sometimes does so very violently, which is why one
frequent sign of a gua attack is said to be the laceration of the rectovaginal septum.
The genitals of male victims are also often beaten and molested. Swollen and painful
testicles are therefore also a frequent symptom of a gua attack. (Bubandt 2014: 120)

Although believed to be humans, guas are said to be faceless or unrecognizable.18 “Vic-

tims of witchcraft attacks report that the face of the witch was ‘clouded’ (cocomá) or ‘dark’
(dororam)” (Bubandt 2014: 121). It is interesting, however, that this fear of the attacking
witch, hungry for flesh, is thematic in Indonesia while absent or negligible in the culture
areas of Micronesia and Polynesia to the north and east of Melanesia and Australia. Here
is Bubandt’s brief summary of a local account of a nine-year-old girl’s death. (Note: the
violence described is especially graphic and disturbing.)

Witchcraft is nothing if not horrible; and a large part of its horror is visceral. Hilda’s
death after a female gua [witch] had assaulted her, eaten her liver, and forced a piece of
firewood through her body from her private parts to her mouth—preventing her from
urinating and from speaking during the last day of her life—was a total destruction of
Hilda’s embodied being. (Bubandt 2014: 119)

‘Sanguma’ in West Papua province

Held’s Waropen description
Garrit Jan Held took his PhD at Leiden under Josselin de Jong and soon after went to
Dutch New Guinea with his wife, never to return. He was initially sponsored by the
Netherlands Bible Society at Amsterdam and settled among the Waropen on Geelvink
Bay to study their language and culture. Unlike the Sepik missionaries whom the Japa-
nese killed, the Helds, as well as his manuscript for The Papuas of Waropen completed in
1942, all survived the Japanese occupation; the book was published posthumously two

18. Sulawesi, the wonderfully strange shaped island with four wandering peninsulas, lies just west
of the Moluccas and is where Jane Atkinson found a ‘sanguma’ among the Wana that was a
“demon,” not a human, that was reminesent of a s witch’s attack. Explaining a young man’s
death, she writes,
The posthumous explanation was that a demon had attacked the youth in the forest,
cut open his chest, and eaten his liver, then closed up the wound. The victim, not re-
membering what had transpired, lived on for a while. On the day of his death he went
out birdhunting, returned to the house, and cooked his catch, but he did not live to eat
it. (Atkinson 1989: 110–11)

410
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

years after his death in 1957. The interest for us is that the version of ‘sanguma’ he records
is related to the sorcery beliefs of the Molluca Islands, or “Spice Islands,” immediately
west of New Guinea.

The most dreaded form of evil magic is the “suangi” (sema) which is feared throughout
the Moluccas. Here the sema are true specialists whose sole object is to kill others.
It is said of them that they have an insatiable desire after human flesh. . . . They are
able to approach their victim unobserved, quickly making a cut in his body and then
proceeding to devour him inside. Then they touch the wound with their leaves (sema-
rana), whereupon the wound is closed and becomes invisible. The victim is completely
unconscious of these happenings and from then on, he is completely at the mercy of
the sema, who compel him, for instance, to dance for them or to have sexual intercourse
with them. In the long run the unfortunate person cannot continue to live, his body
being devoured from inside.
Often the sema tries to divert people’s attention by seemingly reviving his victim,
after having emptied him inside, and ordering him to drown after some time, or to fall
out of a tree. This is the reason that even in these cases the Waropen do not think in the
first place of a fatal accident, but rather try to establish which sema could have caused
this death. Another result of this attitude is that the Waropen set little store by render-
ing first aid, as they argue that of course nobody can have an accident if he had not been
first killed by the sema, being alive in appearance only when the accident occurred. So
what sense would there be in treating somebody who is actually dead? (1957: 258–59)

‘Sanguma’ in Papua province

Wirz’s Marind-Anim description
The notable Swiss anthropologist, collector, and photographer Paul Wirz provides an
early description of ‘sanguma’ from his fieldwork between 1916 and 1922 among the
Marind-Anim living in the southeast part of today’s Indonesian Papua province border-
ing Papua New Guinea.19 The Dutch anthropologist Jan Van Baal’s (1966) single bulky
volume on the Marind-Anim is a reformulation with other material from Wirz’s two
bulky volumes in German. He writes,

Wirz’s informants gave the following description of the act of kambara . . . Then, from
behind, they hit him on the head with a club. He falls down, unconscious, his heart
“being small,” i.e. beating faintly. Presently, without damaging the skin, they cut his
muscles and intestines. With the thorny tail of a sting-ray they tear shreds of flesh out
his body. Throughout, his heart keeps beating faintly. When they have finished, they
bring him to again by beating him with croton-twigs, by blowing in his ears and by
calling ku, ku, ku, ku! to his heart so as to quicken its beat. Finally he wakes up. The
kambara-anim have disappeared and without realizing what has happened to him he
continues on his way. That very night he feels indisposed. He has a headache, develops

19. Also see related descriptions of ‘sanguma’ in Papua Province by Hans Nevermann (1941: 33)
for the Je-nan people located on the international border above coastal Merauka and by J. W.
Schoorl (1993: 62) for the Muyu people in the plains and hills of the Digul and Star Mountains.

411
 A Witch’s Hand

a fever, cannot get any food down and before long he has a bout of diarrhea. He spends
a restless night and the next day he is dead. (Van Baal 1966: 906)

Ethnographic Descriptions of ‘Sanguma’ in Australia

Benjamin R. Smith’s (2016) article on “Sorcery and the Dividual in Australia” indicates
the extent of the data available on ‘sanguma’ in the country’s Aboriginal societies.

Other forms of [‘sanguma’/vada-type] sorcery recall those described by Keen and

other Arnhem Land ethnographers (e.g., Reid 1982; Thomson 1961; Warner [1937]
1958). These attacks by shadowy, often semi-human figures . . . held to lurk in un-
inhabited areas or along deserted stretches of road, waiting to ‘catch’ those who are
foolish enough to venture there alone. These malevolent figures feature in disturbing
accounts of magical assaults in which the wapa hypnotizes his victim, operating on his
or her body to remove blood, organs, and other substances, stitching the wounds and
reviving the victim. Unable to tell others what has happened, victims are said to have
collapsed and died several days afterwards as a result of such attacks (cf. McKnight
1982: 498; Taylor 1984: 242-3). (Smith 2016: 670–87)

‘Sanguma’ in South Australia

Spencer and Gillen’s Arunta description
Those who know the Australian Aboriginal cultures will recognize the following ac-
count of Kurdaitcha magical murder among the Arunta tribe as a form of ‘sanguma.’ The
description is in Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s classic ethnography of the Central
Australian tribes. In their account the murder is to avenge a death and is carried out by
two men; one is the avenger or Kurdaitcha—referred to by some ethnologists as “feather-
feet killers” (Tonkinson 1974; 80) —who must wear shoes formed of a thick pad of emu
feathers matted together with human blood to disguise their tracks, and the other is a
medicine man with magical powers. Both carry shields, spears, and Churingas; the last
is believed to give them strength and courage plus make them invisible to their victim.

Followed by the medicine man the Kurdaitcha takes the lead until the enemy is sight-
ed. Then the medicine man falls into the rear while the Kurdaitcha stealthily creeps
forward towards his quarry and suddenly rising up, spears him before he is aware of
the presence of an enemy. Both the medicine man and Kurdaitcha have meanwhile
put the sacred Churinga between their teeth and when they are thus armed the spear
cannot fail to strike the victim. As soon as this is done the Kurdaitcha man goes away
to some little distance from the fallen man and from which he cannot see the opera-
tions of the medicine man who now approaches and performs his share in the work.
By aid of his magic powers and by means of the Atnongara stones he heals the victim.
These Atnongara stones are small crystalline structures which every medicine man is
supposed to be able to produce at will from his own body. . . . Into the spear wound
he rubs a white greasy substance called Ernia which he obtains by pressure of the skin
glands on the outside of the nostril. After all external traces of the wound have disap-
peared, he goes quietly away and, together with the Kurdaitcha man returns to his own

412
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

country. Having been touched by the Atnongara stones, the victim comes to life, but is
completely ignorant of all that has taken place. He returns to camp and in a short time
sickens and dies. (Spencer and Gillen 1968 [1899], 480–81)

‘Sanguma’ in Western Australia

Tokinson’s Jigalong description

Fieldworkers among the aborigines throughout Australia have reported extensively on

this Australian form of ‘sanguma.’ Robert Tonkinson, working among the Jigalong of
Western Australia writes,

Many deaths are attributed to the malicious and deadly activities of featherfeet ritual
killers. . . . Featherfeet are said to be men, not spirits, who come from distant areas and
lie in wait for their victims, whom they ambush, kill, revive magically, then send back to
Camp. The victim is said to remember nothing of the attack and has no visible wounds,
yet dies within days and is unable to name his attackers. (Tonkinson 1972: 79–80)

‘Sanguma’ in the Northern Territory

Reid’s and Warner’s Murngin accounts
The Stanford-trained Australian anthropologist Janice Reid has worked in the Aborigi-
nal land of the Northern Territory. Termed Arnhem Land, it is where W. Lloyd Warner
studied the Murngin people in 1926–29. Reid’s fieldwork almost fifty years later found
that the galka were still feared for their ‘sanguma’-style homicidal assaults; she summa-
rizes the attack’s stages:

First of all the galka either waylays his victim in a secluded place or draws him there.
Second he puts the victim to sleep, cuts his body open, removes or mutilates his organs
and drains away his blood. Third, he induces amnesia in his victim to ensure that he
is either unable to remember or unable to tell anything about the attack. Fourth, the
victim dies, usually within hours or days of returning home. (Reid 1983: 37)

Warner ([1937] 1958) succeeded where all other Oceania researchers have seemingly
failed in obtaining firsthand accounts of a sorcerer’s murderous assaults. His informant
for the account below of the killing of Bom-li-tjir-i-li’s wife was Laindjura who, as a
practitioner of “black magic,” was one of the most famed “killers” in the southeastern
Murngin country. He had several wives and numerous children and was both a good
wood carver and an excellent hunter. Warner emphasizes that in everyday life he was an
ordinary man, “There was nothing sinister, peculiar, or psychopathic about him; he was
perfectly normal in all of his behavior” (1958: 198). Below is his translation of Laindjura’s
detailed account of a magical killing, obtained on his second field trip. (Note: readers are
warned about the violent content in what follows.)

All of us were camping at Marunga Island. We were looking for oysters. This woman I
was about to kill was hunting for oysters that day, for the other women had gone another

413
 A Witch’s Hand

way to search for oysters. I carried a hatchet with me and watched her. The woman
gathered her lily bulbs, then left the swamp, went back on the sandy land and lay down
in the shade. She covered herself with paper bark to keep warm because she had been in
the lily pond and felt cold. Only her head came out from the bark. She could not see me.
I sneaked up and hit her between the eyes with the head of a tomahawk. She kicked
and tried to rise up but she couldn’t. Her eyes turned up like she was dead. I picked
up under the arms and dragged her to a mangrove jungle and laid her down. She was
a young girl.
I split a mangrove stick from off a tree and sharpened it. I took some djel-kurk
(orchid bulb) first and got it ready. I did not have my spear-thrower with me, so I took
the handle off my tomahawk and jabbed about the skin on her Mount of Venus which
was attached to her vagina and pushed it back. I pushed the skin up to her navel.
Her large intestine protruded as though it were red calico. I covered my arm with
orchid juice. I covered the killing stick with it, too. I put the stick in the palm of my
hand so that I could push the point upward with my thumb. When she inhaled I
pushed my arm in a little. When she exhaled I stopped. Little by little I got my hand
inside her. Finally I touched her heart. I pushed the killing stick with my thumb up
over the palm, which pressed the stick against my fingers, into her heart. She had a very
large heart and I had to push harder than usual.
I pulled the stick out. I stood back of her and held her up with her breasts in my
hands. She was in a squatting position.
Her heart’s blood ran in to the paper-bark basket I had left to catch it in. It ran
slower and slower and then stopped. I laid her down and took the blood away. I hid
it. I came back and broke a net of green ants off a tree. I laid it near her. I put the live
aunts on her skin. I did not squeeze them, for I was in a hurry because I was afraid her
relatives would come looking for her. The skin, when bitten by the ants, moved by itself
downward from her navel and covered her bones over her Mount of Venus.
I then took some dry mud from an old lily pond. I put my sweat on the mud and
warmed it over the fire. I put it against her to heal the wound so that no trace would
be left of what I had done. I was careful none of her pubic hair would be left inside her
vagina so that it would be felt by her husband or seen by the women. I kept up the mud
applications until the vagina looked as it did before. I put blood and sweat in the mud
and warmed it and put it inside the uterus. I did this again, using the mud, sweat, and
blood. I did this six or eight times. The inside now was like it was before.
I turned her over. Her large intestine stuck out several feet. I shook some green ants
on it. It went in some little way. I shook some more on, and a little receded. I shook some
more, and all of it went in. Everything was all right now. There was no trace of the wound.
I took the tomahawk handle which had the heart’s blood on it. I whirled it around
her head. Her head moved slowly. I whirled it again. She moved some more. The spirit
that belonged to the dead women went into my heart then. I felt it go in. I whirled the
stick again and she gasped for breath. I jumped over her and straightened her toes and
fingers. She blew some breath out of her mouth and was all right.
It was noontime. I said to her, “You go eat some lilies.” The woman got up and
walked away. She went around another way. I said to that woman, “You will live two
days. One day you will be happy, the next day you will be sick.” The woman went to
the place where I found her. She went to sleep. I took her blood and went away. The
other women came from where they had been gathering oysters. They were laughing

414
 ‘Sanguma’: The Terror of Magical Ritual Murder in Oceania

and talking. They awakened the girl. She picked up her lily bulbs and went to the camp
with the women.
The next day she walked around and played, laughed, talked, and made fun and
gathered a lot of oysters and lilies. She came back to camp that night. She brought the
things she had gathered into camp. She lay down and died that night. (Warner [1937]
1958: 199–200)

This is quite an astonishing report told by an informant to his ethnographer friend.

What is more astonishing, this is but one of several equally detailed firsthand reports
of killings that Warner recorded and published. What is the ethnographer—and the
reader—to make of such firsthand reports told by the informant, whether it is Fortune’s
Christopher, Bateson’s Tshava, or Warner’s Laindjura? Warner is acutely aware of this
conundrum and comments on the ontological problem that bedevils all purportedly first-
hand accounts of magic:

It is impossible definitely to evaluate how far Laindjura and other killers believed
the case histories which they gave me. There was no doubt in my own thinking that
Laindjura believed a great part of them. Since he was constantly credited and blamed
by friends and enemies for certain deaths, he may at first have taken an attitude “as if ”
if he had done these things and ultimately have come to believe that he had actually
performed the operations he claimed he had. A black sorcerer who is credited with
many killings has a rather difficult time among the people surrounding his own group,
and under most circumstances it is more difficult and unpleasant to be so classed than
as an ordinary man; hence a man would not practice such complete duplicity as these
stories might indicate unless the setting were extraordinary from our point of view.
(Warner [1937] 1958: 198–99)

I think Warner is saying that, since Laindjura’s stories are not “extraordinary” from his
culture’s point of view, at least for Laindjura they could certainly be true, I would add, be-
cause they feel true. This brings me to a very insightful article by Victoria Burbank (2000),
where she relates the act of a serial sex killer in Western society to Warner’s sorcerer
Laindjura’s account of his lustful murder of the “young girl.” She also emphasizes the role
of fantasy and daydreaming to each genre. The role of fantasy is obvious in Laindjura’s
account and Burbank cites research indicating that fantasy is the prime motivator in se-
rial sexual homicide. “The primary difference”, she observes, “between this serial killer
[Laindjura] and the Western variety is that one murders in fantasy, whereas the other
murders in fact” (Burbank 2000: 415). To summarize, I would argue that fantasy, illusion,
and imagination are significant personal elements in perhaps all of the previous detailed
descriptions of ‘sanguma,’ a point we will return to in the next chapter.

Conclusion: The Cultural Extent and Mapping of ‘Sanguma’

Heretofore, the cultural and geographic extent of ‘sanguma’ as a form of sorcery or witch-
craft was not known or even explored. I have documented here the extensive distribution
of ‘sanguma’ as a major belief system from Eastern Indonesia across the island of New

415
 A Witch’s Hand

Guinea into eastern Island Melanesia and south into and across parts of Australia. From
this geocultural mapping, it is not possible to determine where the ‘sanguma’ belief origi-
nated or how it spread. However, we do know from ethnographic accounts in Melanesia
and Australia that ‘sanguma’ has been present there since the late nineteenth century and
that the north-central coast of Papua New Guinea appears to have been an important
twentieth century distribution point via indentured laborers from diverse cultures and the
facility of Tok Pisin. Hopefully, from these beginnings, other researchers eventually will
be able to augment and deepen our historical understanding of the origins of ‘sanguma’
and ethnographic odyssey.

416
chapter seventeen

‘Sanguma’ and Society

This area is notorious for Sanguma.

Lumi ADC A. S. Wright (Wafingian 1972: 5)

Sanguma beliefs are absolute rubbish.

PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill (2018)

In the last chapter, ‘sanguma’ as a form of magical murder was shown to have a cultural
distribution from Indonesia’s eastern islands, through New Guinea, to the islands of east-
ern Melanesia, and south to the continent of Australia. This chapter continues the exami-
nation of ‘sanguma’ with the following questions: (1) What are the Lujere ‘sanguma’ tra-
ditions? (2) What is the etymology of ‘sanguma’? (3) Is ‘sanguma’ real or a cultural fiction?
(4) What are the Territory’s laws regarding sorcery and witchcraft related to ‘sanguma’?
and (5) What is the influence of these laws on villagers’ behavior?

Lujere ‘Sanguma’
I had lived in Wakau almost two and a half weeks before I decided to ask about ‘sanguma.’
My first tasks, as you already know, had been to map and census the village house by
house, start learning the villagers’ names, and build a house to create a comfortable camp
for my research. I initially was randomly told that Wakau had no ‘sanguma’ witches, not
that surprising as the government had outlawed the practice of both witchcraft and sor-
cery. So, my tentative hypothesis that ‘sanguma’ might be just magical beliefs unsubstan-
tiated by observable facts remained untested. However, before I began my questioning
about ‘sanguma,’ I thought it prudent to first get a feel for the village and the individual
men. This also gave them time to help evaluate my trustworthiness. After all, just before

417
 A Witch’s Hand

moving to Wakau I had lived at base camp, in the house belonging to the ‘kiap’ while he
was on patrol, and I occasionally visited with the resident police.
The time seemed right one night when Arakwaki stopped by my ‘ofis’ to visit. As we
chatted, I asked him how a man becomes a ‘sanguma’-man, and he seemed perfectly at
ease with the question. Right then I thought it was because we were alone, but now I
know differently. There seemed to be no community secrets about ‘sanguma’; the beliefs
about it were widely shared in a very matter-of-fact way. It is, rather, the Westerner who
is initially hesitant. I believe the magical aspects of a cold-blooded ‘sanguma’-murder
spook the Westerner and cause the intellectual tension that make it so disturbing. Astute
villagers must have sensed this and, hoping that this American would bring wealth in
the form of jobs to Wakau, dissembled regarding their own ‘sanguma’ men; they didn’t
want to scare me away. It is one thing to describe ‘sanguma’ to me as Arakwaki did, or to
dismiss the witches as alien to reassure the newcomer—like my first night in Wakau in
the old abandoned iron—but quite another thing to tell me outright that Wakau has its
own resident ‘sanguma’ men and that some are my close neighbors.

The Apprenticeship of a ‘Sangumaman’

Arakwaki’s answer to my question, “How does a man learn to be a ‘sanguma’ man,” was
a very basic answer and unlike more detailed ones I later heard. First the novice needs a
teacher, a ‘sanguma’ man, a nakwolu, to instruct him. This can be anyone qualified in his
own or another village who will take him on as an apprentice; often it’s a man’s father or a
relative. Unless a man teaches his son, a fee of around two Australian dollars is expected.
At night the two catch a lizard, cut it, remove some of the flesh onto a leaf, say an incanta-
tion to close the cuts, say another incantation to mark its death for tomorrow, then release
it. The next day they return to the tree and find the lizard dead. Good, now they will try to
kill a dog. They repeat the same steps and if they return and find the dog dead, they will
kill an old woman, except that blood is taken from the human victim. If that death is a
success, the novice’s training is finished. ‘Em i savi olgera nau!’ Arakwaki exclaimed, “He
understands how to kill by ‘sanguma’!”
Arakwaki then explained the important ritual value of the victim’s blood to village
men. First it is poured into small bamboo tubes; when dried it is mixed with other ingre-
dients, an egg of the bush hen, grubs, aromatic leaves or a bit of eel or catfish. It is then
packed into small leaf packets. Now a valued commodity, it is sold to men to feed to their
hunting dogs for hunting success and, I later learned, may be eaten by the hunter himself
to give him prowess with his weapons. Pleased with Arakwaki’s explanations and feeling
I was “on my way,” I didn’t press for further information. But I was beginning to think
that maybe these Lujere ‘sanguma’ witches were real.
Two days later Joyce and the children flew down to Yellow River for a four-night stay
to see my new Wakau digs and to say goodbye before they went to Australia to await the
completion of my fieldwork. Just after they had returned to Lumi, T___, a bright-eyed
boy from Mauwi whom I knew, came by my ‘ofis’ to watch. I was typing up an interview
and we chatted sporadically as I worked. He had attended some of the mission’s Tok Pisin
Bible literacy classes and was fluent in Tok Pisin. I had remembered him from Joyce’s and
my earlier visit to Mauwi as he stood out from the other children for his alert attractive-
ness. T____ was one of several children, and his older sister was married to a Wakau

418
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

resident. Sometimes I took advantage of these moments of quiet intimacy to ask about
troubling research problems. Winging it, I asked him who were the nakwolu in one of the
villages. Counting them on his fingers he said, “J___, M____, B____, and H____.” Then
he mentioned P____, who had died a few months earlier.1 I think I expressed surprise
regarding one of the men who was much younger than the others. He continued with the
names of the nakwolu in another village: T____, W____, W____, and E____.
Off-handedly he then said that a nakwolu had two kinds of work: ‘Mekim sik nau
wokim skin.’ The men who were reviled for their brutal attacks and for causing sickness
and death were the same men that villagers sought for treatment when they and their
children were sick. It struck me as a bizarre, maybe cruel, cultural oxymoron, but there it
was: the men the Lujere believed to be heinous killers were also their life-saving curers.2
It was a major bit of knowledge that I knew would help shape the rest of my Lujere
research.
A few days before Joyce and the children visited me, Ai’ire was sick with diarrhea,
looked terrible, but no one alerted me when W____ came to the village Mauwi to treat
him. I found out after it was over but Wami, a strong, animated man who knew I had
not seen a local treatment, explained to me in detail what he had done. Then, just before
T____ found me typing in my ‘ofis,’ I had been watching J____ treat a woman, totally
unaware of his and W___’s related but oppositional nakwolu role, namely, murdering
their victims by the dreaded ‘sanguma’ magical ritual.3
For the next couple of days, though I did not reveal where I got my new knowledge,
it was obvious to those who knew me best by my comments and questions that I knew
the names of some nakwolu. I had treated my new knowledge casually as ordinary infor-
mation, the same way they did among themselves. In the next weeks, by observing and
ceaseless questioning, my information and understanding of ‘sanguma’ flourished. But it
all began thanks to T____’s revelations that the magical rituals for killing, curing, and
hunting were all in nakwolu hands. At least I was still assuming that the killings were
magical but kept it as an open question; there were those packets of a supposed victim’s
flesh and blood used in hunting. When I typed up T____’s information, I added, “What
would one do without children to fill you in? Because once you begin getting details, you
can drop these around the grown men and they, seeing you already know, a lot feel freer
to talk. Odd, but it always works.”
It was S____ who gave me a deeper understanding of a nakwolu initiation. First, he
said, you have to apprentice to an established nakwolu, the way M____ did with J____.
The relationship is kept confidential. The novice accompanies his tutor on three private
killing exploits in the forest. On all three killings, the novice does not make the person

1. Later I learned that P___ as a sometime nakwolu; he had received some instruction but never
completed his ritual initiation in magical killing. I never saw him cure and rarely heard him
referenced as a curer or imoulu when someone was sick and seeking help.
2. Just as killing and curing were seen as complementary, not competing opposites in much
of Melanesia, Whitehead observes that for Amazonian shamanism, “Killing and curing are
complementary opposites, not antagonistic or exclusive possibilities” (2002: 203).
3. Since information about alleged practitioners of ‘sanguma’ has recently led to vigilante attacks
on them, I opt to protect the identity of these men, who may well be entirely innocent of such
accusations, by withholding their names and using arbitrarily chosen initials instead.

419
 A Witch’s Hand

unconscious, perform the bloodletting, or cut slices of flesh from the victim. He does,
however, put his hand on the nakwolu’s elbow to follow his motions. He described six
places where the cuts are made for the slivers of flesh, specifically the fleshly portions of
the lower arms, the inner thighs, and the calves of the leg. These incisions are made with
a razor or a small knife or, as formerly, with a piece of razor-sharp bamboo. I drew differ-
ent lengths for him to select from and the cuts were about one half to an inch long. Small
portions of flesh are removed from these incisions and placed in a bamboo tube or, today,
maybe a small bottle or tin. Then two separate incisions (one on each side) are made in
the area between the nipple and the underarm and blood is drained into a small container.
On the first two exploits, only the nakwolu drinks the blood and eats the flesh, but
on the third exploit, they are given to the novice. The initiator stands with his legs apart
behind the novice who squats or sits facing away from him. The novice then lifts his head
facing skyward and the nakwolu drops into his open mouth a small bolus of the victim’s
flesh and blood mixed with a bit of a ginger leaf from a plant designated for this purpose.
It must be swallowed whole immediately, without chewing. From then on, the novice is
able to treat the sick. It is a skill he can never lose even as an old man, although when
old he will give up the ritual killing of victims. (Others told me that it was the spirits of
his multiple victims that gave him his magical powers.) The novice’s initiation to his new
nakwolu status as a killer-cum-curer remained a secret until he treated his first patient.
That public act drastically changed his fellow villagers’ perception of him; he was now
also a feared killer.
Yaope had joined S____ and me and they both were surprised that I did not know that
nakwolus could fly, that they could fly from one place to a distant one if they wanted to.
I specifically asked about J____ and M____; S____ said that J____ had given up flying
as well as killing after having been in the Lumi jail so many times. (Some men from the
upper iron still greatly feared him as an active ‘sanguma’ killer.) Flying was achieved by
eating another bit of ginger leaf just for obtaining this skill. S____ thought that M____
couldn’t fly as we have lost this plant but he assured me that J____, M____, and T____
still could fly. L____ and M____, he said, would be too old.

Positive Roles of a ‘Sangumaman’

The Lujere primarily associated the Tok Pisin term ‘sanguma’ with killing, not curing.
They were adamantly against it and, in their contacts with the colonial administration,
missionaries, and other expats, wished it were eradicated. Hence their long hours of vol-
unteer labor to build a base camp that promised a resident ‘kiap’ and policeman who
would act against the ‘sanguma’ scourge. From a local perspective, the major cause of
death was the vicious attacks of nakwolu on unsuspecting villagers. Namia does not have a
comparable word for “evil” but if they did, I’m sure that they would declare the nakwolu as
its personification.4 Yet these men who were believed able to secretly kill their immediate
village neighbors as well as anyone else they privately encountered, including relatives—
witchcraft is “the dark side of kinship” (Geschiere 2013, xvi)—played several strategic and

4. David Parkin’s (1985: 125) introduction to his book The Anthropology of Evil cogently explores
the nature of evil and its conceptual usefulness to anthropologists as exemplified in their
wide-ranging studies.

420
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

positive roles in village life that tempered their negative status. First, these also were the
men, the curers, the imoulu, who could save you or your child from sickness and death.
This was a very powerful and effective role that marked the villagers’ dependency on the
same men who, at the very least, might shoot deadly objects into your body without your
knowing or, at the other extreme, magically attack you when alone, ensuring your death.5
The nakwolu had other positive functions besides the healing role they offered the
community. It was they who protected the village when foreign nakwolu hid in the vil-
lage’s peripheral brush for a daytime stealth attack on a lone child or adult, or attempted
to furtively enter the village at night. Three different people told me how M____ had
frightened away a nakwolu. It was in May 1971, a few weeks after he had returned to the
village from his indentured labor. One night, M____ heard a nakwolu moving along in
the bush below the village’s knoll. He ran down to the ‘kunai’ to head him off and shot an
arrow in pursuit. One account by a Mauwi youth was that he hit the intruder, as there was
blood on the arrow. Someone told me this might be true, but if so, the rain had washed
off the blood by the time M____ had retrieved the arrow. He added that a nakwolu might
fight another one, as he wouldn’t be afraid like an ordinary man. In the same way, only a
nakwolu would be wandering alone in the forest at night; an ordinary man almost never.
The third way a nakwolu is helpful to his community I have already mentioned. His
little packets of victims’ flesh and blood, described by A____, were of great importance
to hunters. When imbibed by a man and/or his dog they empowered success in the hunt.
The value of these affirmative services to a village was deeply appreciated by all. S____
emphasized to me that a village without nakwolu was in a bad way, adding that the inhab-
itants wouldn’t have game to eat or men to cure their ills and protect them from foreign
nakwolu, thus making them dependent upon other villages.
These locally esteemed cultural roles of the nakwolu help to explain the tenacity of
‘sanguma’ as a social institution among the Lujere, even as they wish it expunged. Al-
though the nakwolu are witches believed to have an inherent power to magically kill,
they are unlike the witches in societies who are are exclusively evil, with no redeeming
community merits.

The Origin Story of Lujere ‘Sanguma’

This was the only origin story I heard about ‘sanguma.’ Kaiera related it and it con-
cerns two mythical men, Abanaki and Awamoliait, from the Iwani hamlet of Iwarwita
(Iwariyo).
Abanaki had built a blind in a tree for shooting birds. One night he dreamed that a
lizard crawled along a branch of the tree and came into his blind. He broke the neck of
the lizard but did not kill it as its body was still warm. The name of this kind of lizard is
ili, which means “yellow.” Abanaki cut out pieces of the lizard’s flesh and also took some
of its blood. He broke the neck of the lizard through a spell that a spirit had given him.
Then he worked another spell to bring the lizard back to life. He sent the lizard on its

5. Although I tried, I never succeeded in getting a good grasp on how this dependency on a
curer who could also kill you would personally feel. Thinking analogously was no help: what
seriously sick American man would go to a doctor he knew was a vicious serial killer? Yet, if
that were your only option . . .

421
 A Witch’s Hand

way and it ran out on the branch it had come in on. It went to sleep on the branch and
Abanaki went to sleep in his house. The lizard and Abanaki slept for two nights. On the
third night Abanaki returned to the tree and went up into his blind to hunt birds. Enter-
ing, he said, “What is that bad smell in my blind?” Then he saw the dead lizard. “Why it’s
that lizard, I thought I sent it out of here and it ran away on that branch. What’s it doing
here?” On reflection, he mused, “I think it is something good! I think it is something truly
good! I think I’ll try this again”.
He tried it one more time with the same results; when he looked, he said, ‘Yes, em i
samting tru,’ that is, it really works. Abanaki then told Awamoliait what had happened,
adding, “I have tried this two times and it has worked.” Then the two began making
‘sanguma.’ They killed many people. Finally, Abanaki killed a brother of Awamoliait.
Then Awamoliait, wherever he would go, would call out Abanaki’s name. (Here, Kaiera
said, “We still hear him crying out in the bush all the time,” and imitated Awamoliait’s
cry.) However, the angry villagers then took off after the two men and surrounded them,
but they flew away and came down at the hamlet of Lawou that is behind Bapei. The
reason they can fly is because they now understood all about ‘sanguma.’ Those are the two
men who originated ‘sanguma,’ Abanaki and Awamoliait.
When I asked Kaiera who it was that taught these two men the art of ‘sanguma’, he
said that it wasn’t anyone. That it was all in their dreams. He wondered if it was the spirit
of the tree that caused the dream and showed them how to work ‘sanguma.’ To my ques-
tion if it were a new or old story, he replied it was a very old one.

An Iwani Sorcery Trial in Lumi

While in the field, I was able to collect data on two very different Iwani trials involving, in
one way or another, ‘sanguma.’ One was a criminal sitting of the Supreme Court held at
Lumi in 1960, where three Iwani male defendants were tried on charges of willful mur-
der, found guilty, and sentenced to death (it is discussed later in this chapter). The other
trial, described below, was in the District Court at Lumi for two accused Iwani nakwolu.
It was by chance that in late June 1971, I attended this trial held four months before I had
decided to study the Lujere. Here are the circumstances.
I still lived in Taute village when I hiked one morning into Lumi to meet the after-
noon plane of an anthropologist friend, Ann Chowning, who planned to visit Joyce and
me. This was a few weeks after I had accompanied ADC Peter Broadhurst on his flying
inspection of the Edwaki Base Camp described in chapter 6. Knowing I was interested
in the Yellow River area as a research possibility, when he heard that I was in Lumi he
thoughtfully sent a note saying, “Bill, I am doing this sorcery case now and it looks in-
teresting. Would you like to come up? Cheers, Peter.” Of course, I immediately replied,
“Yes!”
The courtroom was in a small two-room rectangular wooden building right on the
Lumi airstrip. One room serviced the court, the other was a cargo storage room; a narrow
covered porch along the front connected the two rooms. The courtroom had a single door
and window facing the strip and was sparsely furnished with three file cabinets, a couple
of chairs, an incongruous freezer, and a desk for the magistrate (the ADC) towards the
far wall with shelving behind it. Although I was blissfully unaware of it at the time, this
court case would be some of the first data I collected on the Iwani villagers. Those present

422
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

at the trial were the ADC, four policemen, Iwani’s ‘luluai’ and ‘tultul’, the two accused
defendants, and myself as an observer. I never learned the details of how the case origi-
nated. There had been accusations that W____ and A____, both Iwani ‘sanguma’ men,
two months earlier had allegedly used ‘sanguma’ to kill a young woman from the Iwani
hamlet of Aukwom on the Sepik, which Joyce and I had visited. They were arrested by
the police and flown from Yellow River to stand trial for, from what I could make out,
committing sorcery; it was not a murder trial, as that required a higher court. There was a
pretrial session with the parties in the morning and, after a lunch break, the trial.
When I arrived just before eleven, Peter welcomed me and gave me permission to
record the proceedings on my small portable Hitachi cassette recorder. He was neatly
dressed in the colonial tropical male work-a-day costume of the time: a short sleeve shirt,
shorts, de rigueur knee socks, and shoes. Four policemen lined up informally along the
window wall stood guard throughout the proceedings. They symbolized the majesty and
authority of the administration’s court in their uniform of a light blue shirt, navy shorts, a
big black belt with an embossed coat-of-arms silver buckle, blue knee socks topped with a
red design, and black shoes with black gators. I set up towards the other end of the room
opposite the door in the only other chair. I wore a clean T-shirt and the shorts I hiked in,
but I had washed the mud off my legs and exchanged my muddy but prized Australian
canvas spiked golf shoes that kept me upright on the slippery trails for some flip-flops.
The four Iwani men—two defendants and the administration’s two village officials—
were barefoot; the former sat on the floor opposite the ADC’s desk towards the window
wall and the latter stood in front of his desk. The pretrial session of about an hour that I
attended was spent mostly with the ADC interviewing his Iwani officials in detail about
‘sanguma.’ It was a back-and-forth process with most of the initial questions directed
towards the Iwani ‘luluai,’ Biauwi, sporting his official cap with one red stripe and wear-
ing old green shorts with an ivory plastic belt. The ‘tultul,’ Ariawani (whom I described
in chapter 11 as angrily stomping into Wakau with blackened face and bow and arrows
protesting his sister’s marriage to Yaope) was diminished in this setting in spite of his of-
ficial cap with two red stripes, a long-sleeved striped shirt, shorts and big side burns. He,
too, helped in replying to the ADC’s persistent questions that moved on to a ‘sanguma’
man’s hunting charms made, they said, with the victim’s flesh.
During the ADC’s interview a plane landed, roaring down the grass runway, and a
tractor rumbled noisily by a couple of times. I usually could understand the ADC’s rapid
Tok Pisin but the official’s replies, also rapid, were spoken in a softer, less resonant tone.
Based on what I had learned about ‘sanguma’ from living in Wakau, and then listening
to the trial’s tape recording and reviewing my notes, the only new twists I got were that,
according to the ‘luluai,’ after the victim dies a mark appears on the body, that ‘sanguma’
men either work in threes or twos—one man is not enough—and that they drink the
blood of the victim by sucking it from the cuts. The ADC paused at least once to write
down the ‘sanguma’ information he was eliciting. Towards the end of the interview, he
asked for the Namia word for ‘sanguma’. It was the first time I had heard the word nak-
wolu spoken. I took the liberty to ask if that was the same as ‘posin,’ the Tok Pisin term
for sorcery, and was told “No.” It was noon; Peter said we would adjourn until 1:30. I
turned off my tape recorder and left to have lunch with Joyce and the children.
Earlier in the month Joyce, Ned, and Elizabeth—after a year in the bush with me in
Taute village—had moved to Lumi, into a small timber house that Don McGregor of the

423
 A Witch’s Hand

Lumi CMML had built for us on mission land, with the proviso that the house would
become the mission’s when we returned to America. The house seemed loaded with luxu-
ries, including running water from a tin roof catchment area, a flush toilet that delighted
the children, a fauceted sink, and electric lights several hours each evening. This would
be Joyce’s base as I finished my work among the Wape and then would study a second
culture solo.
After a hot bucket shower and lunch, I returned to the courtroom for the trial. It was
the same cast as in the morning but the focus was now on the two accused Iwani men.
The ADC began by asking them some of the morning questions regarding ‘sanguma.’
There was no oath taking and the ambiance was informal but authoritative.6 There was
no doubt to anyone in the room regarding the ADC’s dominance; it was he, and he alone,
who would hear the case, ask the questions, make a decision of innocent or guilty, and set
the sentence that could extend up to six months in jail; in other words, “The kiaps were
the gods of law” (LiPuma 2001: 157).
A____, the first defendant questioned, was a skinny man in old brown shorts hitched
up with a leather belt. The ADC began by asking him about the alleged attack on the
young woman Nieni. Then W____ was similarly queried. He wore only a black ‘laplap’
and was as powerfully built as A____ was slight; his face was drawn, his unkempt hair
had grass in it, and his right earlobe was slit and carried several small black rings. Earlier
that morning, as the ADC interviewed the ‘luluai’ and ‘tultul,’ he had caught my atten-
tion with his alertness to his surroundings. Several times in apparent response to outside
sounds, he stood up as if to hear and see better. Now the tractor appeared to be parked in
front of the courtroom, roaring as if the motor were going to fly apart, but the questioning
continued; eventually the tractor moved away. When Dr. Lynn Wark appeared, the ADC
called a recess as they conversed on an unrelated matter.
Back in session, both men stood in front of the ADC’s desk and were asked a series
of questions about cutting the victim. The case appeared to have got to the court because
the men had insinuated publicly that they had killed her with ‘sanguma’ in revenge for the
death of relatives. The ADC continued to elicit information on how they had attacked
her, including cutting her skin, but he seemed aware of the impossibility of ‘sanguma’
magic and accused them of ‘tok giaman,’ that is, of lying. This was followed by another
questioning period of the men mostly denying what they had just attested to. The ADC
then forcefully asked them, “Did you kill this woman, true or false?” They both answered,
“False.” He then asked them if others had killed her, and they replied, “Yes.”
A plane roared onto the landing field and the ADC asked his police sergeant to see
if a witness from Yellow River was on it, then he began writing up his report. Soon a lo-
cal man wearing a black ‘lap lap’ with a black belt came in and walked straight up to the
front of the room where the ADC was still writing. He had slightly bulging eyes, shaved
sideburns, and wore a string around his neck and an ornament in his right ear, maybe a
paperclip. No sign of recognition passed between him and the four Iwani men but when
our eyes met, we both smiled. As the ADC continued to write, the plane’s motor revved
up for departure, then roared down the airstrip and into the sky. When the ADC finished
writing he looked up and began to question the witness, the victim’s brother, but soon

6. For detailed information about the law and legal authority of Administration field officers or
‘kiaps,’ see Barnett (1972).

424
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

established that he had neither seen his sister after she died nor was there for her burial.
Aware that there was nothing to be gained by talking with him, he told the police to feed
him and send him back. With the plane now gone, I assumed he would have a very long
walk home.
It was just after 3:00 when the ADC began speaking to the defendants with a re-
sume of his findings. He noted that first they said they had attacked the woman but later
renounced their admission. In other words, they had lied to the court. His sentence was
three months in jail: ‘Yu kalabus pinis’! (you’re going to jail!). Both men quietly nodded.
Now standing, the ADC looked directly at them and began an avuncular lecture: ‘Dispela
pasin no gut long giaman long govman; olosem yu mekim rong, yu mas i go long kalabus
tripela mun’ (It is wrong to lie to the government; you did something wrong and must go
to jail for three months). By 3:20, the court had finished its work.7
I was convinced that Peter had tried to make it clear to both W____ and A____ that
the reason they were going to jail was that they initially told a story to the court that was
untrue, that they had lied. But to the Lujere villagers of 1971, it was a subtle point and, in
terms of this case, those outside of the courtroom undoubtedly would never hear about it
or understand it if they did. Although I did not follow up on this trial as I should have, I
would be surprised if villagers didn’t think that W____ and A____ got off with very light
sentences for their ‘sanguma’ “murder” of the woman.

Etymology of ‘Sanguma’ and Its Conflicting Referents

Leonard B. Glick’s article (1970) on “Sangguma” in the Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea
cogently distinguishes between two types of sorcery: “projective” and “assault.” The for-
mer is where the sorcerer and his victim do not come into direct physical contact but
the quarry is magically stricken from a distance; the latter is where the victim is physi-
cally attacked and allegedly killed in an extended magical ritual. To Glick, ‘sanguma’ is
a form of assault sorcery and “the attack is personal, immediate, and uncompromisingly
vicious. The assailants . . . jab poisons directly into his body, sometimes twist or rip out
organs . . . They are not satisfied until he is thoroughly befuddled, unable to remember
who or what has afflicted him (Glick 1970: 1970: 1029).
The victim returns home and death is inevitable, but Glick omits a critical action in
his account: that after the attack, the victim’s body is magically restored without evidence
of bruising, cutting, or scarring from the assault. Hence a 1970s standard reference de-
scription of ‘sanguma’ for Papua New Guinea was incomplete and misleading.
The Australian linguist Don Laycock was in the Sepik area during much of the time
that I was in the early 1970s, and we met several times to discuss our research, usu-
ally over a few beers or Queensland dark rum. He was interested in ‘sanguma’ both as
a linguistic term and as a form of “sorcery”—or, as we both agreed, better identified as
“witchcraft,” since ‘sanguma’ men were differentiated from other villagers by an intrinsic
quality that in anthropological parlance marked them as witches.

7. For a fascinating comparison in which “Due process had no more meaning for the ‘kiap’ than
it had for the Maring,” see Edward LiPuma’s (2001: 174–80) account of a formal 1980 sorcery
trial, convened independently from the authorities by Maring villagers.

425
 A Witch’s Hand

Don Laycock and ‘Sanguma’

In 1975, with Laycock back at ANU and me back at UVM, I sent him a letter about
‘sanguma’ with a copy of my first paper on the Lujere (Mitchell 1975). In the kind of
long, single-spaced snail-mail letter that scholar friends back then used to send, he
wrote,

Now, on your Lujere article. I was quite impressed with your account of the YR [Yel-
low River] sanguma, as it fits in with my own observations—and, as you are perhaps
aware, runs counter to the views of some anthropologists who do not have Sepik expe-
rience (and even some who have).8 What I maintain is:
(1) While many (all?) societies in the New Guinea area have some form of sorcery, and
some go in for secret killings vaguely resembling sanguma, there is a specific variety of
witchcraft which is endemic to the Sepik (and Western Madang) region, for which the
term sanguma should be reserved. . . . That is, ‘sanguma’ as akin to vada. (my emphasis)

He continued by laying out in envious outline form his provocative thoughts on

‘sanguma’ and Sepik cultural history, including the Lujere’s, interspersed with myriad
details from his extensive knowledge of the Sepik area and New Guinea.
Laycock’s (1996) article on ‘sanguma’ was published posthumously. One of its aims
was to tie down the etymology of the word, which is Tok Pisin. He traced its origins to
Monambo of the Torricelli Phylum, a small Papuan language on the Bogia coast west
of Madang (Lewis et al., 2015: 232).9 However it was Georg Höltker (1942: 213) who
much earlier noted that ‘sanguma’ is derived from tsangumo in the Monumbo (Monam-
bo) language, which refers to the type of supernatural ritual murder already described.10
I’ll return to Höltker’s ‘sanguma’ research shortly. ‘Sanguma’ is unique as the only Tok
Pisin word derived from a Papuan language; this is what provoked Laycock’s linguistic
curiosity regarding its spread throughout the Territory. He wrote,

I can hazard a guess that the transmission process was related to the German
plantations (many of them mission-plantations) along the Bogia-Madang coast-
line. . . . The further extension of plantation labour from Madang to the Gazelle
[Peninsula] would have carried it to that area, and the Sepiks—who had the exten-
sive Sepik Labour-recruiting following World War II . . . The concept, if not the
word . . . is, I think, related to the spread of Tok Pisin, via the plantations. (Laycock
1996: 278)

8. He may have been thinking of Margaret Mead’s early Arapesh definition of “segumeh” or of
Leonard B Glick’s (1972) “Sangguma” article and, while not an anthropologist, perhaps of Fr.
Mihailic’s idiosyncratic dictionary definition. These definitions are presented and discussed
further in this chapter.
9. McCallum (2006: 199), who also wrote on ‘sanguma’ etymology, agrees with Laycock’s finding.
10. The nearby Tangu language has a similar term for sorcery and sorcers, ranguma. Burridge, who
spoke Tangu and wrote in detail about ranguma, discusses killing in this context but not the
particular kind of magical assault murder of ‘sanguma’ (1960: 59–71; 1965: 224–249).

426
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

Laycock notes that he wasted a lot of time unsuccessfully tracking down the term
“sanggoma” from South Africa with an imputed similar meaning to ‘sangoma’ but could
not “find words even remotely like it in a score of African language dictionaries” (1996:
277). Maurice McCallum (2006) was similarly interested in the etymology of ‘sanguma’
but was more successful in finding an African word that is similar in pronunciation but
different in meaning. “Sangoma” is a Zulu word but with no connotations of magical
homicide:11 “It means, not magic itself, but a traditional healer, a person, who uses magi-
cal means more than herbal means—a divine-healer who consults the ancestors and not
just the symptoms and soul of the sick person, and the hundreds of products of the herb
sellers (2006: 196).
It appears to be a quirk of linguistic history that the Zulu and Monambo terms—
worlds apart geographically and culturally—are so similar, as their referents are decidedly
different. Ashforth (2005), as earlier noted, writes in considerable detail about traditional
healers and witchcraft in South Africa and specifically Soweto. However, he identifies
no tradition of a ‘sanguma’ type of magical murder; furthermore, as far as I can tell from
library research and conversations with knowledgeable African researchers, there is no
New Guinea–style ‘sanguma’ in the whole of Africa. ‘Sanguma,’ as a form of ritualized
magical murder, appears to be a cultural tradition limited to the islands of the South Pa-
cific with a very deviant cousin, kanaimà, in South America.

Margaret Mead and ‘Sanguma’

While Laycock and I agreed that ‘sanguma,’ as a vicious form of magical ritual murder
akin to vada, was a widely distributed belief in the Sepik region in the early 1970s, there
were some older, conflicting meanings of the term. Margaret Mead, in the first volume
of her pioneering study of the Mountain Arapesh based on her 1931–32 fieldwork with
Reo Fortune, defined a phenomenon called “sagumeh”:

sagumeh (P.E.) [Pidgin English] A form of combined sorcery and divination, associ-
ated with pointing bones, burial of exuviae, and possession by a spirit of the dead; con-
tains many work-boy elements and is rapidly diffusing through the work-boy population
of the Madang Aitape coast. (Mead 1938: 345; my emphasis)

Mead, who saw the Arapesh as a society with a modicum of Indigenous traditions,
characterized them as “an importing culture” (not unlike the Lujere). The example of the
imported “sagumeh” she gives in the text are of a diviner—there were two in her village
of Alitoa—in a faked trance:

The diviner chewed bone dust and ginger, ran about as if possessed, and finally sank on
the ground in an imitation stupor, out of which he was able to answer questions in a

11. Also see Tomaselli (1989: 6–7), who cites film and video research by Professor Len Hold-
stock—who has worked with sangomas, that is, Indigenous healers, of Soweto—as well as
Holdstock’s films, On Becoming a Sangoma, and Indigenous Healers of Africa that also feature
sangomas.

427
 A Witch’s Hand

strained voice, using many tricks to make the occasion seem eerie, such as referring to
usually unmentionable subjects. (Mead 1938: 345)

Mead’s ‘sagumeh’ as being linked to pointing bones clearly refers to a form of trance
divination. A more confounding description of ‘sanguma,’, published a year earlier in the
Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea, attests that

In the Wewak area, the natives believe in a malign spirit called Sanguma, whose aid is
sometimes invoked by sorcerers. The best-known method of invoking the Sanguma is
to point a dagger of cassowary shin bone at the intended victim. The Sanguma works in
a most mysterious way, and is believed to assume many disguises, human and animal,
to overcome his victim. When he slays all that is left of the victim is a little blood. The
body is never found. (Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea 1937: 417)

In this rendition, ‘sanguma’ is a “malign spirit” capable of manifest transformations to

slay a victim whose body disappears. And then there is Stanhope’s (1968:139) report that
‘sanguma’ for the Rao of the Madang District is a term for “demon-induced illnesses.”
Even as late as 1962, variant understandings of ‘sanguma’ were around. POTreutlein in-
cluded in his patrol report that villagers found one of their group dead in the bush: “They
told me that the Yawari men [eastern Lujere] had ‘marked him with an arrow’ thus put-
ting a wound in his neck, from which he died. . . . quite adamant that he had not actu-
ally been touched at all, the arrow had only been pointed at him from a distance, and
Sanguma had done the rest” (Treutlein 1962: 12).
Exactly how “sanguma had done the rest,” we are not told. Mead (1973), in a paper
on “A Re-Examination of Major Themes of the Sepik Area, Papua, New Guinea,” uses
regionally shared Tok Pisin words to indicate common themes or traits. She does not
mention “sagumeh,” a form of trance divination described in her Arapesh work, as a re-
gional Sepik trait, apparently conceding its areal limitations and/or datedness. Nor does
she cite ‘sanguma’ as a common trait. She writes,

It is also important to recognize that the same term may occasionally cover widely dif-
ferent practices. For example while poisin is widely used as a general term for sorcery,
sanguma, the name for a particular sorcery practice, is sometimes used specifically but
sometimes also encompasses the entire supernaturalistic practice of a people. (Mead 1973:14;
my emphases)

Mead’s methodological problem here is that she acknowledges two referents for
‘sanguma’: one as a specific practice of magical ritual murder, and the other as a compen-
dium of cultural beliefs and practices related to a specific practice of magical ritual mur-
der. The latter sense of ‘sanguma’ is in reference to my work with the Lujere, and one that
we will return to. She then quotes Mihalic’s unusual dictionary definition of ‘sanguma’:

sanguma, (sang-guma) (Melanesian) secret murder committed by orders from sor-

cerers. The victim is waylaid, short poisoned thorns are inserted into the base of his
tongue, causing swelling and loss of speech. Then other thorns (usually from the wild
sago plant) are pushed into vital organs, where they cause infection and eventual death.
(Mihalic 1971: 169)

428
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

This, however, is neither sorcery nor witchcraft. It is just plain murder. It is not
‘sanguma,’ the “magical murder” that Laycock and I encountered as a fervent belief in the
multiple Sepik societies we separately visited in the early nineteen seventies. Although
the Mihalic dictionary was the most scholarly and authoritative source for “Melanesian
Pidgin” when published in 1971, its definition of ‘sanguma’ was, at best, very idiosyncratic,
and in terms of the popular meaning of the term at the time, simply wrong. Steinbauer’s
Neo-Melanesian dictionary of the same time frame as Mihalic’s, while lacking details, is
more accurate, but still wanting: “sanguma, ritual and secret murder by means of sorcery;
telepathic sorcery,” and “sangumaman, secret ritual murderer (often on hire by sorcerers)”
(1969: 166). Mead, commenting on Mihalic’s definition of ‘sanguma,’ says, “Writing in
1935 I used the term vada, which had already been widely used in the literature on Papua,
to discuss this practice [‘sanguma’], but without giving it the naturalistic, matter of fact
explanation [i.e., devoid of magic] which Fr. Mihalic gives it (1973: 14).
Here Mead indicates her recognition of the contemporary equivalence of ‘sanguma’
to vada. Mead visited Joyce and me in Lumi in 1971 (as she also did Rhoda Metraux in
Tambunum and Don Tuzin in Ilahita), just before I moved to the Lujere, and knew from
me the current Sepik understanding of ‘sanguma’ as a dreaded form of magical murder
akin to vada. Early on, she clearly understood the special problems of vada noting, “The
practice is such that it is very difficult for the field-worker to distinguish between phan-
tasy and myth, on the one hand, and actual practice resulting in the death of specific per-
sons on the other” (1938: 174). In my post-fieldwork conversations with her, I described
the way the Lujere ‘sanguma’ man or nakwolu was not just a sorcerer that anyone could be,
but, once magically initiated, became a witch with unique intrinsic powers to magically
kill, cure, fly, make hunting charms and, some said, to become invisible. It was probably
based on this understanding of Lujere ‘sanguma’ that she wrote,

Among the Lujere of the Yellow and Sand Rivers Mitchell found that the term sangu-
ma characterized the entire complex of supernatural practices of sorcery, healing and
hunting. . . . Here we move from a disavowed phantasy to a full time preoccupation,
and to a widespread usage in which the referent does not have the same thematic con-
sistency as the terms that I have selected. (Mead 1973: 15)

While I never used the term ‘sanguma’—and never would—to “characterize” the na-
ture of Lujere society, Mead is correct in acknowledging its interrelations with multiple
parts of their culture. Within a societal context, the extent to which a belief in ‘sanguma’
articulates with other parts of a culture’s beliefs and practices varies enormously, as docu-
mented in the last chapter. I would also question her use of the term “disavowed phan-
tasy,” as without phantasy, there is no conversation regarding ‘sanguma.’ Unfortunately,
when the conference paper was published in a revised version as “The Sepik as a Culture
Area: Comment,” Mead (1978) chose not to include ‘sanguma’ as a regional trait. In the
1970s, there were few men or women born in the Sepik region who were not alarmed by
the frightening features of ‘sanguma.’ Indeed, even today it remains “a matter of concern
in most areas” (Gesch 2015: 112) that is expanded on in later sections. We will also see
how the term ‘sanguma,’ especially in the Highlands provinces, has morphed from the
specific form of magical ritual murder examined here to become a common synonym for
“sorcery.”

429
 A Witch’s Hand

Is ‘Sanguma’ Real?

This is the question that Father Gesch (2015: 115) asked, as has anyone else who has
dealt with the phenomenon. As Ian Hogbin writes,

The account of yabou is so fantastic that one would imagine no European could pos-
sibly accept it as true. Many residents in New Guinea, nevertheless, are so prone to be-
lieve any native tale dealing with the occult that sorcery of the yabou type—the pidgin
term is “sangguma”—is in some quarters solemnly believed in. Amongst the natives, of
course, there are no sceptics. (Hogbin 1935b: 13)

What made ‘sanguma’ initially so insidious for me was its admixture of the implied
physical or “real” violence, and the magical or “unreal.” Near the beginning of this book,
I cited my skepticism of whether ‘sanguma’ even existed as real events. Now I know that
‘sanguma’ magical murders are sometimes attempted but, to date, no credible data exists
to substantiate a single successful one that includes a killing assault of the victim, the
removal of flesh or organs with no scarring, resurrection to life, and a final death soon fol-
lowing. I have, however, attempted to gather information on authenticated actual attacks
and present this below. In some of these cases, the victim died from the initial assault
while in others the victim survived. These data establish that ‘sanguma’ ritualized attacks
are in some circumstances actually attempted and serve to help validate a belief in them
as “real” and the sense of terror that ‘sanguma’ engenders.12

Father G. J. Koster’s Accounts

The fathers and brothers of the Society of Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini or SVD)
were one of the most important missionary groups in the Sepik area before World War
II. An early, if not the first, attempt to identify, describe, and critically discuss ‘sanguma’
was by two SVD priests: G. J. Koster (1942), a missionary who served in the Bogia area
on Papua New Guinea’s north coast just opposite Manam Island, and Georg Höltker,
editor of the international anthropology journal Anthropos. Koster’s article, written in
Dutch, has a preface by Höltker, who was fascinated with ‘sanguma’ and intended a future
publication.13 Höltker writes,

On the occasion of my three-year expedition in New Guinea (1936-39) I have been

able to gather with the aid of competent missionaries from the Bogia district a con-
siderable amount of material on the sanguma subject. . . . To complete my material I

12. The terror I am referring to is strictly psychological, the result of hearing and internalizing
the myriad tales of ‘sanguma’ atrocities and is very different from the terror engendered by
the physical pain from the “rites of terror” that Whitehouse (1996) finds in some Melanesian
initiations.
13. Dr. Risto Gobius generously translated the article for me from the Dutch. Höltker’s later
(1963) publication on ‘sanguma’ (Todeszauber) is in German. See Rüegg (2018) for a review
of Höltker’s work in New Guinea. For another account in German of ‘sanguma,’ see Schmitz
(1959).

430
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

also asked the Banara missionary, Father G. J. Koster to report his experiences in the
sanguma field. . . . Immediately it was clear to me that his observations were of special
significance and therefore earned a separate publication. (Höltker 1942: 214)

The reason Höltker was so interested in Koster’s material is that he had first-hand
experience with ‘sanguma’ attacks, thus firmly establishing that ‘sanguma’ is sometimes
more than Indigenous imaginings. It is Father Koster’s data that concern us next:

The first case dated from around 1936 and involved a young man who is approximately
25 years old. He originated from the coastal area of the Uligan region. He married a
woman from the village of Dalua in the Banara district and lived with her in Dalua.
Another man, approximately 30 years old, happened to fancy that woman, although
he was already married. He used to serve the state as a police-boy. . . . Both men were
Catholics. Therefore, he wanted to operate cleverly. He thought that first the legal
spouse must be dead. Then the woman would be free. Consequently a sanguma attack
was arranged in order to do away with the young man. Regarding the above I heard
and witnessed the following.
In the morning a white stranger happened to drive through the village of Dalua.
When the Dalua women saw him they ran into the forests and fields. Dread and anxi-
ety about the white stranger caused this hasty departure. For someone who knows the
New Guinea people, this was not surprising . . . The women who fled into the forest
all at once saw a number of men painted black. They were sanguma men. . . . The men
realized they had been caught red-handed by the women and fled. Their black shapes
shocked the women. The women fled in another direction and eventually returned to
the village. There they reported to their men that they saw sanguma men in the forest.
At once, the men ran to the described spot in the forest and found the young man,
moaning and complaining. The men picked him up and took him to the village of
Dalua. Mr. Johnson, a planter who lived close to Dalua, soon learned of the sanguma
attack and immediately went to Dalua, where he heard and saw what happened. He
had the young man taken to his home at his plantation.
I arrived at Mr. Johnson’s plantation that very afternoon while I was on my mis-
sionary journey. . . . We examined the young man and actually found some of the
famous little pointing bones in his body. They were in his upper arm and above the
knee. One little bone was sticking out of the skin. We were able to pull that one out
rather quickly. It appeared to be a fishbone and was rough on both sides and denticu-
late. Out of his arm we pulled another similar bone that was smooth; both were ap-
proximately 5 cm long. I had both of the bones for a long time. With our fingers, we
also sensed even more bones that were stuck deeper in the flesh. . . . Later those areas
started to ulcerate and as a result those little bones simultaneously came out. (Koster
1942: 221–22)

The fleeing women had taken the ‘sanguma’ men by surprise while they were attack-
ing the young man, who was able to give a rough report to the authorities of what had
happened to him. He even had an idea who the ‘sanguma’ men were. The suspects were
sent for, tried in court, found guilty, and sentenced to six months in jail. After the victim
recuperated, he and his wife left for his native area of Malala. Koster’s other case, however,
is riddled with hearsay and is not worth reporting on.

431
 A Witch’s Hand

F. E. Williams’s Accounts

Francis Edgar Williams (1893-1943), an Australian educated at University of Adelaide

and Oxford, had the unusual career of being Government Anthropologist for the Territory
of Papua. Appointed initially by Hubert Murray in 1922, he completed studies of a com-
mendable seven distinct and geographically separated societies before dying in a plane crash
in the Owen Stanley Mountains during World War II. His academic cohorts rarely gave his
ethnographies the accolades they deserved; they are knowledgeable, lucid, wryly reflexive
and, however long, gratifying to read. In a paper titled, “Mission Influence Amongst the
Keveri of South-East Papua,” he also describes two cases of substantiated ‘sanguma’ attacks.
Williams notes that the local term was mimi and gives a concise summary of the process.

The distinctive character of the method is that the assailant is believed to kill his vic-
tim first; then bring him to life again; and then send him off more or less dazed and
doomed to die in a short space of time. Many accounts possess such unbelievable fea-
tures as cutting out the liver, even cutting the body to pieces and sewing it up again, and
there is no difficulty in dismissing most of them as figments of imagination. But on the
other hand there are some grounds for supposing that vada sorcery of a less anatomistic
kind may sometimes be actually put into effect. It was especially to test out this possi-
bility that I devoted some time to the subject among the Keveri. (Williams 1944: 106)

The first case he describes is not one of the substantiated ones but based on hearsay.
What he says about the case, however, is interesting:

What seems incredible is that the mimi sorcerers should actually render their victim
unconscious and then revive him. The foregoing case hardly proves that they do so. It
is no more than a typically straightforward case, allegedly successful, as narrated by
two sorcerers who have a reputation to keep up. For it is the theory of mimi that the
sorcerers kill their victim and bring them back to life; the man in the street believes
they can do so; and the sorcerers themselves may say anything to keep this impression
alive. (Williams 1944: 107)

Williams writes, “To appreciate the fact that mimi is actually put into practice, it is
only necessary to examine certain cases in which it has been tried and failed” (1944: 108).
This was the situation in a case where the informant he calls “B” took part.

B is a very fine type of Papuan, vigorous, intelligent and purposeful; a Christian, of

course, and, I have little doubt, a very sincere one. On the whole I took him to be pretty
honest. Some years ago he had gone out on a mimi expedition with five confederates.
He was to play the part of resuscitator and was equipped with all the necessary spells
and medicines, as well as a sheet of bark-cloth with which the victim was to be gagged.
But the party failed to take their man entirely by surprise. Instead of being immedi-
ately over powered he struggled most manfully, and succeeded in wounding the leader
with his knife. Perhaps the sight of blood was too much for their nerve. At any rate one
of their assistants cried out that they had messed up the whole thing, and forthwith
drove his spear clean through the unfortunate man’s body. Naturally the idea of mimi
was abandoned without further ado, and the victim was killed then and there in a most

432
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

thoroughgoing manner—all to the intense disgust of B, who was bent on trying his
skill as a resuscitator.
B seems to have had no luck as a mimi man. Long before this he had been taken
out on his first expedition by O of Uiaku. He was then a mere lad, and this was to be
his initiation. O had instructed him beforehand in mimi methods and he went out in
the full expectation, no doubt mingled with pleasant curiosity, of seeing them put into
effect. But when it came to the point O, instead of proceeding with the half-methods
appropriate to mimi, had delt the victim a blow on the head with his club of such vio-
lence as to crack his skull. In answer to his pupil’s expostulations the master could only
reply that he had lost his head. (Williams 1944: 108)

In reviewing the literature on ‘sanguma,’ I was intrigued when a writer accepted it as

“real” or appeared ambivalent regarding its actuality. Missionaries sometimes appeared
to accept the possibility of its reality as genuine; ethnologists less so. But Williams, who
disparaged aspects of mimi as being possible, totally surprised me in his reporting on one
case by apparently accepting the resurrection of a victim as valid. However, the attackers
obviously had not killed the victim but only stunned him to unconsciousness.

Then again, the victim, so far from dying may live and remember and inform against
his assailants. A case of this nature was recounted by Ma’u of Amau. In company with
another he had waylaid a man named Abanapu from a neighbouring village, allegedly
because he was constantly thieving from their gardens. They had carried out their mimi
and brought him back successfully to life; he . . . apparently failed to recognize them; and
they had gone so far as to assist him part of the way home. But Abanapu was not so
stupefied or stupid as he seemed. On reaching home he revealed who had attacked
him, and his people came to Ma’u’s village on the lookout for vengeance. It appears
they were worsted in the fight which ensued and the matter was allowed to rest. (I see
no reason to disbelieve this story, which was volunteered by my informant; though I
do not feel quite so ready to believe the sequel, that Abanapu died “two days later.”)
(Williams 1944: 109; my italics)

William’s last documented case is a revenge mimi killing in which several of the at-
tackers went to jail. It begins with a man R and his wife going to buy tobacco at a local
plantation, Kauru, and on their way home they were attacked by five Mekeo laborers who
drove off the husband then raped and killed the woman. R then arranged for some mimi
men to avenge his wife’s murder. The group consisted of men from several different vil-
lages and two plantation laborers, totaling nine men including R. They met at dusk at an
old garden where they made a banana-leaf shelter and camped for the night. Some men
had blackened faces veiled with cassowary feathers.

The two local labourers, Y and D, who were in the plot, used to spend their week-ends
at an old house in this garden, and they used to bring with them a Mekeo man (a
signed-on labourer) named W. This man had been selected as the victim (whether he
was actually one of the five rapers I do not know), and now a private message was sent
on to Y and D at Kauru: they were to be sure to visit the garden house next afternoon
(Saturday) bringing W with them; there would be a bunch of bananas in the house for
their supper. . . . After a suitable lapse of time the mimi party crept up in the darkness

433
 A Witch’s Hand

while the victim and the two betrayers were busy eating their bananas. The two leaders
fell on W from behind, a man to each arm and leg. It was [another’s] appointed duty
to hit him about the body while he was held down on the ground. He did so with a
stone club, striking him on the back of the neck, the shoulder blades and the ribs, “till
they were soft,” while another man twisted his head and “broke” his Adam’s apple with
his teeth. W, by now apparently dead, was carried into the house and laid on a bed of
banana leaves near the fire.
The next business was to restore him to life, and this was in the expert hands of R,
himself. But he tried in vain. He used all his spells and medicines, but when they raised
the victim up he just fell limply back. R pulled all his fingers one by one; there was no
response. Then he gave up, saying only, “We must have killed him properly.” (Williams
1944: 111)

One of the laborers confessed when questioned and six of the men were imprisoned—
R, the instigator, for four years. When he returned to the community, he finally paid his
accomplices for their help. Williams was satisfied with his research, commenting “it seems
clear that mimi was sometimes at any rate put into practice—though we may be sure that
it was supposed to be put into practice far more often than it really was” (1944: 111).
Mimi, vada, ‘sanguma,’ or whatever one calls it, is always more than just an initial brutal
assault that kills. The alleged resurrection of the dead victim and his subsequent death a
few days after returning home—both magical acts—are important identifying features.

Dr. Becker’s Surgical ‘Sanguma’ Patient

In Lumi, Dr. Lyn Wark told me that a doctor in Port Moresby had slides of x-rays related
to a ‘sanguma’ attack. I wrote to him soon after returning home and received an imme-
diate answer. The physician was Dr. S. C. Wigley, a fellow of London’s Royal College
of Physicians, and stationed at the General Hospital in Port Moresby as an advisor in
tuberculosis. Earlier, however, he worked at the hospital in Wewak where he obtained the
slides (see fig. 46 for an example).14 His letter, dated July 19, 1973, says, in part,

The request was for concrete evidence of sanguma activities in the Sepik area. I enclose
three photographs of x-ray films of a man admitted to the Wewak General Hospital in
1956 from Ambunti with a story of chest and abdominal pain.
The x-rays speak for themselves. One of the more sophisticated sangumamen on
the River had used sharpened casing wire instead of the traditional bamboo slivers or
saksak thorns.
The wires were removed successfully from the mediastinum and the abdomen by
Dr. A. A. Becker who was at that time the Medical Officer at Wewak, and who left
New Guinea two years ago. He gave me the x-rays years ago. The films have long dis-
appeared but I still have the slides.
The patient recovered uneventfully from what was in fact a most formidable surgi-
cal intervention in the circumstances which obtained in Wewak in 1956.
To my knowledge no “longterm follow-up” was done, and it is not known whether
he is still alive or whether the sangumaman had “another bite at the cherry.”

14. Later he wrote an important paper on tuberculosis and New Guinea (Wigley 1990:167-204).

434
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

Figure 46. Chest x-ray slide of victim’s thoracic cavity with three casing wires.

In spite of the seventeen-year hiatus between the victim’s hospitalization and Dr.
Wigley’s letter, I hoped to get more background data on the victim, especially his village
in the Ambunti area, but was unsuccessful.15 So, without hospital records, we have a man
from the Ambunti area attacked by ‘sanguma’ men, probably knocked unconscious and

15. I wrote to the then-current medical officer at the Wewak hospital, Dr. Risto Gobius, whom I
first befriended on my 1967 stay, and he explained as follows in a letter dated September 19,
1972:
There are only two persons in this Hospital who could possibly remember this particu-
lar event, both being operating room orderlies and though they do remember vaguely
an event of this sort, they are unable to place this particular individual in their memory.
In view of the fact that Dr. Wigley had his X-rays and the move from the old hospital

435
 A Witch’s Hand

held down as the various wires were inserted into his body. The patrol officer at Ambunti
probably arranged for his transfer to the regional hospital in Wewak, where Dr. Becker
operated to remove them. Although I sometimes had heard allegations that ‘sanguma’
men inserted sharpened wire, such as umbrella ribs, into a victim’s body, here was undis-
puted proof that such assaults did actually occur.16

Iwani’s Double ‘Sanguma’ Murder

The innocent victims of the killings in this incident were two older Iwani women,
Prai and Ilowa, who were murdered by three local nakwolu, namely K____, A____,
and S____.17 Two were from Mauwi hamlet and one was from Wakau. Of the three,
only K____ was living during my fieldwork. The killers eventually were apprehended,
tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death, though the sentence was commuted by
the Administrator to four years in prison. The case is interesting as I have three kinds
of information to reconstruct the story: Two I collected in the field, the villagers’ ac-
count of the murders and data from the Lumi Gaol Record. The other data were from
the presiding judge’s detailed report of the trial he submitted to the Administrator in
Port Moresby, which I accessed much later.18 Of special interest is the way the village
and Government accounts of the murders differ, especially the alleged motives for the
killings.

The Queen v. three ‘sangumamen’

The case was heard in September 1961, during the criminal sittings of the Supreme
Court held at Lumi in the Sepik District, by His Honour, the Chief Justice Sir Alan
Mann; presumably in the courtroom by the Lumi airstrip where ten years later Broad-
hurst heard the Iwani sorcery case, already discussed. The Supreme Court of Papua and
New Guinea, regardless of where it convened, respected court conventions: “The robed
judge and counsel may be sitting in a native-material temporary courthouse on the banks

in 1956 to a new Hospital in 1961, I am afraid that any records pertaining to this par-
ticular period have also been lost.
16. Also see Pulsford and Cawte (1972), who write as follows: “Sanguma is sometimes plain mur-
der. Post-mortem examinations conducted by modern medicine have revealed lengths of wire
pushed into the chest, the point of entry camouflaged by a club wound. Alternatively, a fine
sharp bamboo is passed through the anus, perforating the bowel but not marking the anus”
(1972: 95).
The book was written in part as an introduction to medical anthropology for students at
the University of Papua and New Guinea and the Papuan Medical College in Port Moresby.
At the time, Pulsford was Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the Papuan Medical
College and Cawte, with both a M.D. and Ph.D., was Associate Professor at the University
of New South Wales and Director of the New Guinea Islands Psychiatric Research Project.
17. To lessen confusion among the diverse local and formal spelling of the victims’ and accused
names, I have used the spelling as recorded in the chief justice’s trial record, quoted later.
18. I am especially grateful to Peter Broadhurst for helping me gain access to the chief justice’s
official report of the trial.

436
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

of the Sepik River, but they maintain the same formality of address and the same rules of
evidence and cross-examination as their counterparts in Brisbane. The only major break
with Queensland tradition has been the abolition of jury trials” (Barnett 1972: 627).
The following quotations are from Chief Justice Mann’s two-page, single-spaced Brit-
ish foolscap report of the three Iwani men’s trial prepared for the Administrator, dated
September 14, 1961.

Mr. McLoughlin appeared on the trial to prosecute for the Crown and Mr. O’Regan
appeared as Counsel for the accused. . . . The facts were not in dispute, and the ac-
cused have all been perfectly frank about their conduct from the outset. S____’s case
came on first and I entered a plea of Not Guilty to enable the facts to be investigated.
When the second case of K____ and A____ was reached, I accepted a plea of Guilty,
as charged . . . The three accused in the present case . . . all come from the area to the
north and west of the Sepik River. . . . Much of this country is uninhabited and is very
poor and rugged. . . . These people live beyond the area where there is any real Mission
influence, and apart from occasional contact with the Patrol Officer at the Amanab
[should read Lumi] Patrol Post, they do not enjoy much Government influence. . . .
The trouble in the present case was that there were two very old women named
ILOWA and PRAI living together in a house owned by WAIBUKEI. NAMINORO,
who helped to look after the old women, left the village for a period of about six days
to visit a relative. During his absence it appears that WAIBUKEI sent word to the ac-
cused and to at least one of the other men that they should come and kill the two old
women. The men came as instructed, had some sort of discussion amongst themselves,
and then proceeded to the house where the two old women were living. S____ entered
the house first and strangled ILOWA and he was closely followed by the other two
accused, K____ and A____, who killed the other old woman, PRAI. The three men
emerged from the house bearing the bodies of the old women and they threw the bod-
ies into some rough scrub country about thirty yards away from the house. The party
of people then left, and nobody appeared to be concerned to arrange for any funeral or
other ceremonies for the deceased.
It appears that during the absence of NAMINORO the two old women spent
most of their time sleeping, and they were asleep when the three accused entered the
house to kill them. They were in extreme old age, helpless and unable to look after
themselves, . . . had been making a most objectionable mess inside the house so that
the smell was offensive to other people in the vicinity. . . .
Perhaps the intensity of local feeling in the matter is indicated by the fact that
WAIBUKEI, who has since died, but who was the owner of the house and who was
most probably a relative of the old women himself, made his complaint to the accused,
A____, who was in fact the tul-tul of the village. The group of men who discussed the
problem and finally did as WAIBUKEI requested, were all responsible men, and it
seems quite likely that they acted in a matter in which WAIBUKEI, because of some
relationship or obligation, might have felt himself precluded from acting. Nevertheless
he took a leading part in organising the whole excursion, although he did not himself
at any stage touch the victims or their bodies. . . . I respectfully recommend that His
Excellency may be pleased to commute the sentence of Death which was recorded in
respect to the three accused and to substitute a sentence of imprisonment in its place.
If asked to suggest a term which might be suitable, I would respectfully suggest a

437
 A Witch’s Hand

period of four years for each accused, which in the circumstances under which these
people are living at the present time would be regarded as a substantial period of time.

The villagers’ version of the murders

I first learned about the murders when I went to Lumi from Wakau to spend Christmas
with my family and copied all the offenses of Iwani villagers from the Gaol Register for
the Lumi Correctional Institution (discussed in chapter 11) that was essentially a lockup.
Later I did interviews regarding the men’s offenses—there were no female offenders—
and asked Oria for the details of the murder of the two Iwani women. To the villagers,
these were two botched ‘sanguma’ murders as the three men, all nakwolu, could not res-
urrect the women after the initial attack and strangulation. The circumstances from the
villagers’ perspective follow.
It was the dry season when hamlets are even emptier than usual as the low ponds and
streams and a less bogy countryside facilitate fishing and hunting. The women Ilowa and
Prai lived in Iwarwita hamlet and everyone was going down to the Sepik and Aukwom
hamlet on the river to fish but the walk was too far and arduous for them to attempt. They
were supplied with food plus ‘limbum’ containers for toilet needs and were told under no
circumstances to let anyone in until someone returned. The day of the crime, A____ went
to get S____ then, according to Oria, A____’s wife, went to the women’s door and told
them she had climbed a coconut tree to collect nuts and would give them some. When
the old women eventually opened the door, K____ and A____ rushed inside and K____
immediately strangled Ilowa, then S____, who also had entered, strangled Prai. A____ cut
the women under the arms to collect the blood then cut bits of flesh from their legs for
use in hunting amulets. When they tried to make the magic ritual to get them up, neither
rose; both women were dead. Leaving the bodies where they fell, they left the hamlet of
the murders and returned home, S____ to Wakau and K____ and A____ to Mauwi.
When Nanimoro returned from Aukwom, he found the two dead women in the house
and thought they had probably been killed the day before. He dragged the bodies out of
the house and threw them into the bush near the present iron. About three months later
Enwan, a nephew of one of the women, returned from plantation labor near Madang.
He was angry about the killings and with a Papei man went up to Lumi, he said to buy a
knife, and reported the murders. Three police and the police sergeant were sent to inves-
tigate and found the bodies still exposed, now mainly bones. The residents of the murder
hamlet were mostly in Aukwom but the police got all of the Mauwi men together and
eventually A____ confessed that he had cut the bodies but that S____ and K____ had
killed the two women. After A____’s wife was sent to Wakau to get Saime, the three
accused nakwolu returned with the police to Lumi to be indicted and await trial by the
Supreme Court.
I also heard stories that K____ had escaped and disappeared into the great fens to the
west of the Sand River but was eventually captured.19 Indeed, the Lumi Gaol Register
first shows that he was given a month’s sentence for “theft in gaol awaiting Supreme

19. R. K. Treutlein, an Australian patrol officer, devotes a single-spaced typed page to his searches
for K____ and S____ after they escaped from the Lumi Correctional Institution. He organ-
ized two secret raids on Mauwi village at dawn with the police but both failed. He notes,

438
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

Court case for murder,” then collected another six months jail time for two escapes await-
ing trial. All of this notoriety assured him of a fearsome reputation when he returned to
the community after his imprisonment. Even when I lived in Wakau, he was not a man
the villagers would want to run into when alone. I recall once when strong and healthy
Nauwen met K____ alone on a path near the village and was badly shaken when he
reached our ‘haus kuk.’
In comparing the court’s and the villagers’ versions of the murders, several points
are of interest. First, the court version makes no mention of the deaths resulting from a
‘sanguma’ attack by ‘sanguma’ men. The four Lumi police who made the investigation in
situ would have known that the accused were ‘sanguma’ men and that villagers considered
both deaths to be ‘sanguma’ murders. With no transcript of the trial, I can only assume
that there was a major cultural disconnect between the Lumi police and the Adminis-
tration’s imported attorneys, Mr. McLoughlin for the Crown and Mr. O’Regan for the
accused men. The court’s motivation for the murders was by inference: that the Native
people involved were from a remote area with little mission or government influence,
that the two old women were helpless and a filthy and smelly nuisance to their neighbors,
therefore spurring the owner of the house, an inferred relative, to ask the men to kill the
women while the villagers were away.
Although my village informants did not mention Waibukei who allegedly owned the
house, it is more probably that he hired the three nakwolu to murder the old women. Ac-
cording to Oria, the women were not helpless and the reason they were defecating in the
house was their fear of a ‘sanguma’ attack if they left the house while their neighbors were
absent. There also is no agreement between the two versions regarding who killed whom,
but because of the court report’s timeliness, it is assumed accurate on this specific point.
All in all, the homicides appear to have been a classic case of a double ‘sanguma’ ritual
murder, albeit a failed one, inasmuch the three nakwolu could not magically seal the vic-
tim’s cuts or return them to life to meet their subsequent “real” deaths. The details of the
women’s botched deaths verified once again that ‘sanguma’ as ritualized magical murder
was not a reality but just a Lujere belief.20 At the same time, the case documented that
there were nakwolu who attempted such magical murders but failed.21 However, such in-
contestable evidence regarding the impossibility of returning a murdered dead person to

The Iwani’s unwillingness to help in apprehending the two escapees is due to the death
of their Luluai at Lumi last year. He died at the Lumi Hospital and they are convinced
that he died as a result of Sanguma. They are afraid that the same thing will happen to
K____ and S____. (Treutlein 1962: 18)
20. In 1969, the year before I went to New Guinea, Jeanne Favret-Saada moved to the Bocage
region of rural Western France to study witchcraft. Her finding regarding the prevalence of
actual witchcraft practice was similar to mine regarding actual ‘sanguma’ assaults among the
Lujere. She writes that, in spite of the regional prevalence of witchcraft beliefs, “I nevertheless
got the impression that there are no witches actually performing the bewitchment rituals at-
tributed to them, or that they are extremely rare” (1977: 135).
21. Lastly, Mary Patterson reports without detail that “I have a number of accounts of attempted
but failed vada-type sorcery from my own fieldwork in . . . the New Hebrides,” and also that
“[Ruth] Craig volunteered the information that in a Telefomin village where she worked a
number of men of the village assaulted a victim in the bush to try out a sanguma (the New

439
 A Witch’s Hand

life was locally ignored or understood as an error in ritual. All of my Wakau informants
believed that K____ could and did commit ‘sanguma’ murders at will. Magical thinking
is an all-pervasive and mentally enveloping way to interpret one’s experiential world, and
in that kind of closed world, a culturally entrenched belief, however logically dubious or
ridiculous to the non-believer, always trumps hard evidence that challenges it.

‘Sanguma’ and the Law

The laws against sorcery were an important feature of colonial Papua New Guinea. Reo
Fortune, more than most early anthropologists, was deeply concerned about them, as
his six-and-a-half-page Appendix III, “Administration and Sorcery” in Sorcerers of Dobu
attests. It is a revealing documentation of the thinking that he surprisingly and challeng-
ingly shared with the Australian Territory of Papua’s top official, Lieutenant-Governor
J. H. P. Murray, in a series of testy exchanges that Geoffrey Gray (1999) has highlighted
and clarified. Here I am not concerned with Fortune’s challenge to the lieutenant gov-
ernor, as historically critical as it was, but more directly with Fortune’s critique of the
Administration’s sorcery laws in terms of villagers’ beliefs.22

Reo Fortune’s 1932 Critique of the Sorcery Ordinance of 1893

According to Fortune, “The Native Ordinance declares: ‘Sorcery is only deceit, the lies
of the sorcerer frighten many people; therefore, the sorcerer must be punished’” (1963
[1932]: 288). He notes, however, that a conviction was usually less than a year’s imprison-
ment. Fortune was strongly critical of the law in a country where “sorcery is an integral
part of the supernatural system of the people” and where most everyone knows at least a
destructive spell or two (1963: 288). He thought the law should be rewritten: “If the Or-
dinance were amended to ‘sorcery is a part of a supernatural system which causes much
social damage and fear, but which is practiced in secret by all members of a Papuan com-
munity,’ the truth would be more fairly represented (1963: 289).
The most damning part of the original ordinance was that it made the Administra-
tion an accessory to the crime by elevating magic to a reality.23 As to how to diminish or
eradicate the universal belief in sorcery, he felt that ridicule was the way and that “This is
gradually happening in some areas exposed to civilization” (290). Nevertheless,

Guinea pidgin term) technique [for vada] and succeeded in sticking needles in the man be-
fore he managed to escape” (1974–75: 143).
22. According to Gray (1999), Murray initially was well disposed to anthropologists but, after his
negative experience with Fortune, only permitted his government anthropologist, F. E. Wil-
liams, to work on the mainland and never sent any patrol officers to Radcliffe-Brown’s applied
anthropology course in Sydney.
23. Hogbin, aware of Fortune’s critique, writes,“Finally if we do wish the belief in sorcery to be
eventually eliminated are we not defeating our own ends by punishing sorcerers? The natives
do not realize that these men are paying the price of their deceit, but imagine instead that
we regard them as evil-doers because we also believe in the efficacy of their rites and spells”
(1935b: 31).

440
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

so long as sorcery is a crime, as murder, assault, rape, theft, and the like are crimes,
it will hardly prove possible to ridicule the natives away from it [i. e., sorcery]. Does
not the Administration treat it seriously! There is no doubt that it does, and there is
equally no doubt that Administration is a powerful ally of the native sorcerer against
all would-be educative agencies (Fortune 1963: 290).

This is a very commanding and convincing argument against any sorcery law. But
Fortune is not finished. Here’s his coup de grace: “A native imprisoned for sorcery will
never learn to take the view that he is imprisoned for creating bad social feeling. He and
all others inevitably take the view that the white man shares in his conception of sorcery as
actually and directly powerful” (1963:290; my emphasis).
Here, I agree completely with Fortune. When I lived with the Lujere I saw that the
men who were accused, tried, or jailed in relation to sorcery by Administration officials
had their reputations enhanced as men to be feared. Fortune’s defaming charge is that
“the worst aspect of the law against sorcery is . . . that it tends to strengthen the practice
of sorcery” (1963: 289). Further, he advances that “it is not questionable that Administra-
tion supports belief in it [sorcery] by treating it so seriously as to hold long court cases
upon suspected instances of it, and to convict supposed sorcerers to a term in gaol” (1963:
293). From the villager’s viewpoint, can you think of a better way to empirically validate
the mythic power of sorcery than the colonial administration’s jailing those who allegedly
practice it?

The Sorcery Act of 1971

In 1971 an Indigenous elected member of the House of Assembly introduced a new
Sorcery Ordinance that was aimed at punishing “harmful” sorcery and compensating
the victims.24 It passed with little debate although its implications for the future were
significant. In order to demonstrate proof of an act of sorcery, it took account of the vic-
tim’s belief but the onus was placed on the alleged perpetrator to establish his innocence,
standing, as it were, Western justice on its head. T. E. Barnett, an expert on Papua New
Guinea law, critically commented that if the alleged perpetrator

fails to discharge this onus he is to be punished severely and, if some harm subsequent-
ly does occur to the intended victim or one of his relatives, it can be deemed to result
from the sorcery and the accused must pay compensation. . . . As unexplained death,
sickness, and disaster are attributed to sorcery, the fear of it is regularly reinforced by
natural events. For the law to be so locally oriented, however, as to reflect these beliefs is to

24. It needs to be emphasized how much the concept of ‘sanguma’ was a part of the national
culture in the 1970s. For instance, in 1977, in the University of Papua New Guinea’s Mu-
sic Department, “Eight students, calling themselves Sanguma (magic sorcery men), created
PNG’s first grass roots rock band. Performing in traditional dress (bilas), they won acclaim in
PNG and overseas for their quintessential sound of modern PNG, combining contemporary
musical forms with traditional words, melody, and beat” (Rossi 1991: 21). Their music may be
sampled at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZGu8OxPFT4.

441
 A Witch’s Hand

grant sorcery official recognition. The beliefs will be confirmed when courts imprison ‘sor-
cerers’ who are ‘deemed’ to have caused harm by magic. (1972: 627–28; my emphasis)

Forty years after Fortune’s Appendix III exposed how the administration was in bed
with sorcerers and their bogus spells, Barnett had to reiterate the point after the House of
Assembly passed a new and even more absurd law about magic. Until the ’71 Sorcery Act
was passed, the law recognized sorcery only as nefarious but now there was a distinction
between “evil” and “innocent” sorcery (black and white magic) to complicate litigation.
The Preamble’s following sentence, written in wonderland legalese, sets forth the law’s
dubious logic:

There is no reason why a person who uses or pretends or tries to use sorcery to do, or to
try to do, evil things should not be punished just as if sorcery and the powers of sorcer-
ers were real, since it is just as evil to do or to try to do evil things by sorcery as it would
be to do them, or to try to do them, in any other way. (Zocca and Urame 2008: 175)25

By this specious reasoning, it is as bad to wish someone dead as to murder them out-
right, but even Jimmy Carter knew the difference between committing adultery in one’s
heart and committing it in bed.26

‘Sanguma’ Witch Hunts in Papua New Guinea Today

The hunting down and killing of alleged witches occurs sporadically in the contempo-
rary world. At the turn of the present century, in a small corner of eastern Java, “Over
a three-month period, some 120 villagers were accused of sorcery and summarily killed
by their neighbors, their mutilated bodies left by roadsides” (Hefner 2007). Today,
Papua New Guinea also has become notorious for the proliferation of ‘sanguma’ witch
hunts, especially against women accused of sorcery, that is, ‘sanguma’ or ‘posin’.27 This
contemporary use of the term ‘sanguma’, particularly in the Enga and Western High-
lands provinces, is as a vague blanket term equivalent to sorcery or ‘posin’ and used to
label individuals accused of magically killing or injuring other humans and/or their
possessions, both living and inanimate. The brutal public murder and burning of inno-
cent women as witches unjustly blamed for local deaths by lawless mobs played a ma-
jor part in finally repealing the controversial 1971 Sorcery Act. One of the most active
and nationally well-connected web sites focused on preventing violence emanating from
these ‘sanguma’ sorcery accusations against Papua New Guineans, especially women, is

25. A copy of the Sorcery Act 1971 appears as an appendix in Zocca and Urame (2008:175–188).
26. “I’ve looked on many women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. God
knows I will do this and forgives me.” —Jimmy Carter, Playboy magazine, November 1976, 86.
27. There are many books on witch hunts, from generalized histories to witch hunts in spe-
cific countries. For witch hunts in Europe, see especially Goodare (2016), Pavlac, (2010), and
Barstow (1994). In our own time there have been “witch hunt” allegations of large-scale child
sexual abuse in England (Webster 2005) and the United States (Pendergrast 2017), with le-
gions of unsubstantiated claims that condemned innocent individuals to terrible ordeals. For
a recent collection of articles on Pentecostalism and witchcraft, see Rio et al. (2017).

442
 ‘Sanguma’ and Society

www.stopsorceryviolence.org/the project/. This usage of ‘sanguma’ is usually unrelated to

the term as I have defined and explored it in this book.

The 2015 Repeal of the Sorcery Act

After years of dissention, the 1971 Sorcery Act was finally repealed in 2015.28 One mur-
der that figured in its repeal was the beheading of an older former PNG teacher by a
mob accusing her of witchcraft in the killing of a colleague that, in turn, provoked inter-
national condemnation and embarrassment to Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s govern-
ment. The ’71 law recognized the accusation of sorcery or ‘sanguma’ against the victim as
a defense in murder cases but this was revoked under the 2015 amendments. Now the
killing of an alleged sorcerer is considered murder and, like rape and robbery, could draw
a death sentence. While many applauded the repeal of the Sorcery Act, others reviled it
as augmenting the death penalty. The New York Times reported on the following sorcery
incidents from the Western Highlands province:

Papua New Guinea has come under increased international pressure to end a growing
trend of vigilante violence against people accused of sorcery. Last July, police officers
arrested 20 members of a witch-hunting gang who were killing and cannibalizing
people they suspected of being sorcerers.
The killing in February [2013] of Kepari Leniata, 20, who was stripped, tortured,
doused with gasoline and set ablaze, caused an international outcry. The United Nations
said it was deeply disturbed by her killing, which was reportedly carried out by relatives
of a 6-year-old boy who, they claimed, had been killed by her sorcery. . . . Amnesty In-
ternational, which has campaigned loudly against sorcery-related violence in Papua New
Guinea, praised the repeal of the Sorcery Act but assailed the reintroduction of the death
penalty. (“Papua New Guinea Acts to Repeal Sorcery Law after Strife,” May 29, 2013)

Many educated Papua New Guineans are deeply concerned regarding the existence
and increase of “witch hunting” and ‘sanguma’ killings within their country. Several prob-
ing books with multiple authors and case descriptions address both the seriousness and
geographic extensiveness of the problem, for example, Zocca (2009), Zocca and Urame
(2008), and Forsyth and Eves (2015). To graphically dramatize that the problem of
witch hunting and killing continues, in 2017, the martyred Kepari Leniata’s six-year-old
daughter was accused of ‘sanguma’ and maimed and tortured. On January 4, 2018, The
Guardian reported that

In Sirunki, Enga Province, a six-year old girl was accused of sanguma and tortured with
hot knives. She survived after Lutheran missionary and Highlands resident Anton Lutz
convinced the community to release her and her guardian. She was taken to hospital and
treated for her injuries. Pictures of her tiny burned body shamed the populace. Politicians
stepped up and condemned the attack. Newspapers wrote strident editorials. Enough was
finally enough. The prime minister, Peter O’Neill, labeled the alleged torturers “cowards

28. For excellent historical reviews of New Guinea’s sorcery laws see, Keenan (2015) and Forsyth
(2015).

443
 A Witch’s Hand

who are looking for someone to blame because of their own failure in life. Let’s be clear
sanguma beliefs are absolute rubbish,” he said. . . . The last time PNG had been this upset
about a sorcery-accusation was in 2013, when the young girl’s mother, Kepari Leniata,
was burned alive on a stack of tyres. “Because of the mother, they believed the child was
a probable suspect for anything that happened in the village,” Lutz says. “So when there
were repeated illnesses in the village, and even a death, it was blamed on the child.” The
mother’s death prompted a long overdue change in PNG law—until that year suspecting
someone of sorcery was a legitimate legal defence for murder. But since then little has
changed. In fact the frequency of attacks appears to be increasing. (“‘Bloodlust Hysteria’:
Sorcery Accusations and a Brutal Death Sentence in Papua New Guinea”)

The report of the child’s torture in The Diplomat (“Why Is Papua New Guinea Still
Hunting Witches?,” January 17, 2018) said that the locals believed she had used sorcery
to remove the victim’s heart to eat but, when the man recovered, they believed their tor-
ture had incentivized her to return his heart, thus prompting them to release her to the
missionary. He, of course, did not return her to the community.
By far, the majority of Papua New Guineans believe in sorcery, making it difficult
for police—who may also believe in sorcery—to cooperate in making arrests among a
vigilante group of perpetrators. In one study at Australian National University of perpe-
trators cited in the newspapers, Dr. Miranda Forsyth said, “Looking at all of those cases,
about 15,000 perpetrators have been involved and of those only 115 individuals received
sentences.” The extent of the national problem is indicated not only geographically but
socioeconomically by the fact that a few days after the above account of the child tortured
as a witch was published, The Guardian reported that Papua New Guinea’s Chief Justice
had been threatened at a roadblock and his car stoned because an alleged sorcerer’s killing
by his tribe had not been compensated.29

29. In an article entitled “Papua New Guinea Chief Justice Attacked as Sorcery-Related Violence
Escalates” ( January 10, 2018), Helen Davidson reported that:
Chief Justice Sir Salamo Injia was traveling from his home in Enga province’s Wapena-
manda district on Monday when he and his police escort were stopped at a makeshift
roadblock. The acting police commander, Epenes Nili, said both vehicles were attacked
by a large group of men in what he believed was a preplanned ambush. They didn’t listen
to the police (trying to move the crowd on) and started attacking the police vehicle and
throwing stones and rocks at the Chief Justice’s vehicle, he told Guardian Australia.
The cars fled the scene and returned to Injia’s home, Nili said. The Chief Justice was not
hurt but was shaken after the incident. Injia was targeted because his tribe had not paid
compensation for the death of a man said to have been killed with sorcery, Nili said.
On June 2, 2018, the BBC put up a new web site, www.bbc.com/news/av/world-
asia-44333447/the-witch-hunts-of-papua-new-guinea about a Papua New Guinea woman
who can magically identify a sorcerer who performs Sanguma, a policeman who tries to
prevent the maiming or killing of people accused of Sanguma, and a school teacher who
tells how his sister-in-law killed his daughter by destroying her insides with Sanguma. In
2019, Philip Gibbs and Maria Sagrista put their 58-minute film (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=12AnEwRIF90) on ‘sanguma’ in the PNG Highlands on YouTube, but readers
should be warned that it contains scenes of actual torture.

444
chapter eighteen

The Afflicted and their Curers

It is true that the magic of healing often goes

hand in hand with that of killing.
F. E. Williams (1936: 338)

In Melanesia this mode of production of disease by the projection

of material objects into the body seems to be exceptional.
W. H. R. Rivers (2001 [1924]: 12)

Patients’ Curing Options

When a Wakau villager was self-described as sick, he or she had access to three kinds of
therapeutic intervention: (1) traditional “home” remedies; (2) Indigenous therapies based
on magic, like curing festivals and imoulu (a.k.a. nakwolu) curers; and (3) Western thera-
pies based on biomedical research, like those available at an aid post or through infant
welfare nursing patrols, both introduced by the Australians. As Rivers (1924: 76) notes,
for most societies, home remedies, if applicable, are resorted to first. In Lujereland, If the
health problem persisted, an imoulu, or a succession of them, would be visited or brought
to the patient to identify and remove the cause of the sickness. Depending on the patient’s
wish and the nature of their health issue, they also at any time might seek treatment at an
aid post, but in Wakau, it was seldom a first choice. The aid post orderly’s explanations and
diagnoses of sickness and disease were foreign and unrelated to the local cultural beliefs
regarding illness etiology and curing. To the villager, the imoulu were the only cultur-
ally authentic diagnosticians and practitioners. As they and the villagers shared the same
theory of sickness and disease, only the imoulu could identify the root cause of an illness

445
 A Witch’s Hand

and remove it; they alone got credit for the cure.1 While most villagers did not believe
that the aid post worker could cure serious ilness, they acknowledged he had powerful
medicines that could alleviate suffering, even keep a person alive until a cure by an imoulu
was achieved. Thus, in the history of a person’s illness there was often a weaving back
and forth in the implementation of the three different types of therapeutic intervention.
Appendix documents over months one such case history—that of Ai’ire of Wakau village.
The last resort for a local healing intervention was a curing festival, as described in
chapter 15. It was also the most infrequent as it depended on concerned family members,
not the patient, for its organization and sponsorship. Similarly, among Western forms of
medical intervention, transfer of a patient to a regional hospital was unusual as the trans-
fer in a MAF plane was dependent on the mission’s arrangement.

Medical Services through the Administration and Mission

In these pages I have, on occasion, citedthe introduced role of medical practitioners in
Lujereland whose services are based on scientific medicine. Thus, (1) the two local aid
posts in Akwom and Yegerape provided villagers with access to limited medical treat-
ment; (2) Rosemary Ace offered clinical nursing skills at the CMML Mission; (3) the
Admin sponsored maternal and child care village patrols carried out by visiting CMML
missionary nurses; (4) the administration established Native people’s hospitals, in Lumi
under CMML missionary Dr. Lyn Wark and in Anguganak under Dr. John Sturt, and
(5) the administration had a large coastal back-up hospital in Wewak and a smaller one
in coastal Vanimo for patients requiring medical services the bush hospitals couldn’t pro-
vide. For infrequent peripatetic attention, the ‘kiap’ might be accompanied on patrol by a
medical technician, or an aid post orderly might offer a village medical patrol. Below is an
account of a medical patrol to Wakau by the Yegarapi aid post orderly, Litabagi.

Litabagi’s Wakau Medical Patrol

This was the only medical patrol Yegerapi’s aid post orderly, Litabagi, held in Wakau
while I lived there. He arrived just before noon with one of his wives who spoke flu-
ent Tok Pisin and an adopted son. A man with sartorial style—something unusual in
Lujereland—he wore a colorful shirt, neat shorts, sported an Aussie-style felt hat deco-
rated with a clutch of beautiful dusty blue feathers from a Victoria crowned pigeon, and
proudly carried his shotgun. It was a one-day patrol; after examining the Wakau families
he would repeat the process in Mauwi hamlet, then return home.
Litabagi and I had a friendly, almost jocular, relationship but he still surprised me
with a gift of two coconuts from trees in Wakau that were planted for him years earlier
by Nauwen and Oria’s father.2 After a brief rain shower, the shout ‘ol i lain’ was heard,

1. An exception to this generality were a few women who took their sick infant directly to Rose-
mary Ace at the mission for help as she was known to save an infant’s life.
2. Litabagi and Oria, as of course their fathers, all belonged to the Apilami patriclan.

446
 The Afflicted and their Curers

and villagers began assembling in front of my house where Litabagi was situated, since
I had set up my Bolex movie camera to film the action and take photos with my Leica.
As usual, without direction males including boys fell into a staggered line in front and
women with babies and daughters several yards behind (fig. 47).

Figure 47. Partial lineup of Wakau families for Litabagi’s medical patrol; Mowal far left, next to
Mangko and Kairapowe chatting.

Reviewing the film and photos so many years later was far more interesting and in-
formative than my originally being there. As Litabagi sauntered down the two spread-
out lines, first past the males then the females, he would have known most everyone by
name, how he was related to them, if at all, and would have rapidly read how they stood,
looked, and acted for signs of illness. Like a practiced physician who can tell as you walk
into his space what might be wrong, Litabagi asked questions, answered a few, touched
some, took a child by the hand as he spoke, all while making a mental list of who needed
his attention.
He told Enewan and Eine they both had pneumonia and must come to his ‘haus sik’
for medicine. Eine’s daughter Emani and Mari’s daughter Lelaware both had sores that
needed treating. A few others he treated in situ, as Oria’s sister’s baby (see fig. 48). Then I
went with him to see Ime, Sakome’s daughter who was too sick to attend the clinic. He
immediately diagnosed pneumonia, started her on sulpha tablets and gave me a supply
to continue her treatment to assure her recovery. Three days earlier, she had suffered a
brutal imoulu curing session with K____, described later in this chapter. Ime’s illness was
one of the first serious cases that I became involved with. Although I was trying not to
give villagers medicine because of my research design, I relented after witnessing Ime’s

447
 A Witch’s Hand

pain-fraught curing session with K____ and knowing she was too sick to walk to the aid
post for Litabagi’s help. I had been told that her sickness began with a fever and shaking
so I misdiagnosed malaria and started her on chloroquine, but her temperature remained
high. Fortunately, Litabagi surprisingly arrived the next day with his practiced clinician’s
eye and modern medicines. With Litabagi, Ime lucked out with a more expert bush diag-
nostician than either K____ or me and gradually recovered. Several days later, Eine and
the two girls went to the aid post for treatment, but Enewan never did.

Figure 48. Aid post orderly Litabagi gives oral amodiaquine to Oria’s sister’s baby.

Home Remedies, Physical and Ritual

When a villager had an unusual physical condition or felt rotten, they sometimes resorted
to home remedies before seeking professional help, such as going to the aid post or an
imoulu—whom they usually must pay—to treat them. The Namia vocabulary regarding
sickness is small; there are no names for specific types of afflictions, just descriptions. The
word for sick is pai, but they did differentiate between a sore, ila, and an abscess or boil,
wan. Home treatments were performed by the patient or by a family member for minor
ailments, or before a progressive sickness became grave. The Lujere distinguished those
illnesses that were external and visible to the eye, like sores, wounds, and injuries, from
the more mysterious internal illnesses, like pains, fevers, vomiting, diarrhea, and malaise.
The former usually were treated by home remedies, at least initially, and the latter by
imoulu. When men went away as indentured laborers, they took their local treatment
notions with them but might not always have the correct item at hand. Ginger, for ex-
ample, was used in many treatments but not just any ginger; it must be a specific species,

448
 The Afflicted and their Curers

often growing in a specific place. While Waripe was away working, having left his wife
Sakome with five children to care for, only to be harassed by Samaun, he sent a letter to
Alomiaiya saying that he was very sick and to send some aiwar wowi ginger as soon as
possible. Oria said that the ginger plant belonged to Kwoien and he thinks he got it from
Gwidami village.
Here are a few examples of home treatments. When Yaope was sick all week with a
headache his only remedy was to tie a piece of cloth tightly around his forehead. He also
had a cold. He blamed his condition on the ‘ton’ tree (Pometia pinnata) and its small
fruits he had eaten. When the ‘ton’ tree bears its fruit, he explained, ‘em i taim belong kus,’
that is, colds become prevalent. But other villagers had been eating ‘ton’ fruit for a couple
of weeks, and Yaope was the only one apparently affected.
Another remedy for pain was bleeding—for instance, making small cuts in one’s fore-
head to cure a headache. One night when visiting the lower iron, I noticed caked rivulets
of blood on Klowi’s right leg. Before I could ask, he explained that his legs had ached
while he was hunting and he had asked his wife to make small incisions on the lower part
of his right calf. Letting the bad blood out, he added, eased the pain. Another of the most
common remedies for aching muscles was applying a counterirritant of stinging nettles.
Boils, a type of painful abscess, are infections of a hair follicle or oil gland, and were
an occasional complaint of males in the lower iron where I was a frequent visitor. Their
treatment usually was to endure the discomfort and eventually lance it to drain the pus.
Tsaime had a particularly bad one and, once he had lanced it, he went to the aid post to
have it bandaged. Oria explained to me that the reason the males in the lower village have
boils is from stepping on a species of wild ginger that flourishes on the ‘kunai’ near the
Sand River, an area they frequently visited.
Ringworm or tinea is a contagious fungal infection of the top layer of the skin and
was especially disliked by both males and females. In some cases, it could cover much of
a person’s body and was considered disfiguring. In Wakau, there were nine men, six boys,
seven women, and three girls afflicted, totaling twenty-five villagers. There was no belief
regarding its origins; they thought some skins resisted it while others succumbed. Oria
said that as children, he, Nauwen, and their sister were afflicted. Their father’s treatment
for it was to rub the affected skin with part of a pig’s or fish’s liver; this worked for his sons
but his sister was still covered with tinea. Another local treatment was to rub the affected
areas with pig blood or to take a shoot of the moru shrub, crush it and mix it with lime.
This turned it red and the residue was spread over the tinea.
I was surprised how often a sick villager would not resort to an alleviating treatment but
just suffered it through, especially if the ailment were not considered life-threatening. For
about a week I observed Enmauwi suffering from what looked like pinkeye or conjunc-
tivitis. He carried an old rag to occasionally wipe his eyes or shield them from the bright
light. Most of the day he stayed inside. Eventually he went to a woman in Gwidami for a
cure but on his return, he wasn’t in a mood to give me any details so I let it drop. His eyes
cleared up in a few more days, but this is also about the length of time pinkeye lasts. There
were a few more cases of pinkeye but no one else visited the Gwidami woman nor did I
ever elicit a cause for the ailment. It also was one of several very annoying minor illnesses
that weren’t taken to an imoulu for diagnosis and treatment—no one ever died of pinkeye.
Other than physical home treatments there were also ritual home treatments. A fa-
ther—in this case Oria—with a baby screaming in the middle of the night might cut

449
 A Witch’s Hand

down a black palm because earlier he inadvertently stepped upon a branch that fell from
it. Then at night, when the wind blew and shook the palm’s branches, the baby would cry;
only by felling the palm could he quiet his child. Another reason for a crying baby might
be that a dead grandparent’s aokwae had returned to the village to see his or her grand-
child. Then the baby’s parent must blow into each of the baby’s ears while imploring the
aokwae to leave it in peace.
Once when Oria’s wife Pourame was sick and running a fever, and already had been
treated by Mangko and another imoulu, Oria decided to try something one of the Mok-
adami curers had advised him to do for her when we attended their aewal wowi curing
festival. The day after our return, Warajak and I accompanied Oria a short way down the
slope behind my house into the bush to collect the prescribed potent botanical items for
an aewal wowi curing packet. As he collected each specific item, he described it, then
gave me its Namia word, thus: layer under a tree’s bark laumi; vine leaf, awoiwai; a tree
leaf, miwai; small plant leaf, monawanu; tree shoot, naulere; moss from a ‘kwila’ trunk,
naminami; white betel pepper, pulakari; ginger, iwowi; aromatic bark, yaparna; swamp
leaf, anabirnakiewai; and a mushroom, unware. He then assembled the items on a large
leaf and neatly tied the bundle together (fig. 49).

Figure 49. Oria makes an aewal wowi curing bundle for his sick wife.

After Oria went to get his wife, they arrived with Oria carrying one-year old Nak-
wane and Pourame looking very sick and weak. Giving his wife the baby, he covered their
heads with a cloth to protect them from seeing the powerful packet (fig. 50). He then
held Nakwane as Warajak rubbed the packet on different parts of her body.

450
 The Afflicted and their Curers

Figure 50. Oria covers Pourame for the curing ritual.

451
 A Witch’s Hand

Oria then returned their son to Pourame, knelt, and gently stroked her legs (fig. 51)
before making several small cuts on her left foot—she didn’t flinch—with a new razor
blade I had loaned him. Seeing the blood, Oria said to me, ‘Blut i kapsait, nau sik i pinis,’
that is, “the blood flowed, now her sickness is cured.” The entire ritual took about ten
minutes and throughout Pourame said nothing. After Oria removed the cloth from her
head, they left for home. Later he optimistically commented to me how dark her blood
had been; it was a good sign for a recovery.

Pourame and Oria’s Family Health Crisis

But Pourame did not get better. Two days later I was tape recording Oria about his curing
ritual for Pourame and Tsaime happened to join us. I already had learned that she was
still sick and had only eaten a small amount of sago dumpling. I asked if there were other
ritual cures for her sickness and he replied, “No, just the aewi wowi and we have tried
that and it didn’t work.” Then he startled me by coldly saying, “Let her be; suppose she
dies, it is alright!” Alarmed, I wondered who would feed and care for the children if she
died and he replied, ‘Wantoks,’ friends. Tsaime laughed lightly, then protesting, said, “No
way, friends won’t look after the children the way a mother would!” and I immediately
agreed. Oria’s apparent callousness was troubling to both Tsaime and me; Tsaime looked
at me with a worried look and slightly shook his head as if to say, “Man, what is he do-
ing!” Then Oria abruptly admitted that he was very worried and, talking rapidly, outlined
a plan as if Pourame were dead, saying that he would first find a woman to take care of the
children, then find himself another wife so he could take the children back and care for
them himself. He also said something about going to the ‘haus sik’ with his children but
that he would tell Nauwen and me first. Speaking non-stop, he admitted he would like to
sit down and talk with his wife but that now she just wanted to die. Tsaime, now visibly
upset, exclaimed, “I don’t want her to die!” I asked if her brother (married to Oria’s sister)
in Mauwi had been down to see her and was told, “No,” and Tsaime added that he didn’t
think they knew she was so sick. Then I recalled that her brother was in Wakau well over
a week ago when Pourame was sick and he did not go into her house but visited me to
see if I had a job for him, which I didn’t. Oria added that he had sent a message to him
yesterday to come see them, but so far, he hadn’t.
Oria then began to get more distraught. He was disgusted with this kind of sickness.
Plenty of men had tried to cure her and she was not one bit better. He wants a sickness
to be cured after at least two imoulu, or at the most three, have tried, but that her kind
of sickness seemed to be incurable; it won’t go away. I agreed that Pourame now seemed
seriously ill. Oria exclaimed that he didn’t know what caused her sickness; he can’t look
inside of her, and then indicated that it was ‘sanguma,’ that a nakwolu had ruined her. He
thought they had taken a part of her backsides then cooked and eaten it. When I asked
how, he replied it’s just like you take the hindquarters of a pig and cook them. Tsaime
seemed uncomfortable regarding this entire discussion and smiled nervously. Oria knew
it was her backsides because since she had been sick, she could not sit down. All she could
do was lie down but couldn’t sit up. She was, however, able to go outside for bodily needs.
The conversation then shifted to Ai’ire’s sickness as he had gone to the ‘haus sik’ because
his urine had turned red.

452
 The Afflicted and their Curers

Figure 51. Warajak helps Oria complete the aewal wowi curing ritual for Pourame.

453
 A Witch’s Hand

I had decided that Pourame had pneumonia and, as she was now too sick to go to the
aid post, started her on a regime of sulpha and she gradually recovered. But Oria’s anxiety
regarding Pourame’s illness and how he handled it has never left me; his initial chilling
response, then the almost panic he experienced at the thought of her death. Tsaime’s
response, which so mirrored mine, was probably why I liked him so much; we shared a
similar affective reaction to life.

Magical Curers

While magical curing prevails in many nonlliterate societies like the Lujere, it is still
a part of some contemporary Western societies’ religious groups, although greatly di-
minished in importance from the seventeenth century, when healing by magical touch,
especially by the monarch, was prevalent. Charles II is known to have ministered to over
ninety thousand persons in the twenty years, 1669–64 and 1667–83 when 8,577 entries
appear in the King’s Register of Healing. Queen Anne (1665–1714), whose patients in-
cluded the infant Samuel Johnson, was the last English ruler to heal by touch. (Thomas
1971: 228.) The Lujere also have an impressive roster of male healers or imoulu who are
locally renowned for their magical hands; we will now turn our attention to them.

Male Magical Curers

Earlier I identified the nakwolu as witches and described the vicious ‘sanguma’ murders
attributed to them that the Lujere believed were real, although no one had actually wit-
nessed one. It was always a surprise assault on a lone person. Although unseen, the terri-
fying verbal descriptions of a brutal ‘sanguma’ battering with strangulation, flesh slashing,
blood collection, and a doomed death flooded the awareness of every man, woman, and
child in Lujereland. Ironically, and to me a tragic irony, ‘sanguma’ in its detailed flores-
cence of evil was usually no more than a frightening but magical linguistic trope. The
complex acts of a ‘sanguma’ killing—especially the several impossible magical ones—were
just factually unsubstantiated beliefs; the primary existence of ‘sanguma’ was in the Lujere
imagination. While the murderous magic of the nakwolu was mostly imaginary, what was
highly visible and made them essential in everyday life was their status as a valued curer,
an imoulu.3 It was a peculiar dual status they uniquely held in Lujere society, a Janus-
faced, Jekyll-and-Hyde persona, lauded for one skill and damned for the other. Within
a village context he was respected as an imoulu and pursued for his curative skill. At the
same time, when out of sight he was believed to perform heinous murderous attacks as a
nakwolu on the unsuspecting. Thus, a ‘sanguma’ man in Lujere society was both a nakwolu
and an imoulu; there was no doubt in his patient’s mind that his power to cure was related
to his vicious clandestine murders.

3. The verb for his curing moves is imoure. Kelm (1990: 450), in her fieldwork with the Lujere’s
northern neighbors, the Kwieftim (Ak language) and Abelam (Awum language) villagers,
also found that ‘sanguma’ men doubled as curers. As Hau’ofa notes for Mekeo society, “The
attacker is the healer” (1981: 243) and Malinowski for the Trobriands, “The art of killing and
curing is always in the same hand” (1922: 75).

454
 The Afflicted and their Curers

Precolonial Lujere society had only one important male specialist status: the imoulu
as a healer. Other specialists, for example, the ‘luluai,’ ‘tultul,’ licensed gun owner and aid
post orderly, were all colonial statuses. Nakwolu, in spite of their bad reputations as mali-
cious secret killers, in their imoulu status were the desired diagnosticians and curers in
Lujereland and enjoyed the prestige that physicians have in Western society. Their curing
role, besides being greatly valued, was ethically transparent and as highly public as their
alleged magical murders were clandestine. Some curers were so renowned that they vis-
ited distant villages to treat the sick. Still, regardless of where the imoulu was welcomed
and esteemed for his curing skills, his healing performance remained shadowed by his
reputation as a murderous nakwolu.

Female Magical Curers

Although most curers were male, a few villages also initiated female curers. There were
no female curers in the western Lujere villages I knew best but I observed three who had
come to Wakau with three imoulu from the eastern Weari–area villages. Unlike the male
curers, who as ‘sanguma’ witches were both curers and killers with intrinsic powers to per-
form magical murders, to cure, and to fly, these female curers had only the power to cure.4
To receive that power, they underwent a special initiation: The initiate first entered a river
with her husband or close male relative while men upriver ran yelling through the forest,
frightening aokwae who fled into the river and were swept downstream. If the waiting
woman was entered by one of the aokwae she began to shake violently and was held by
her male attendant to keep from drowning. Leaving the river, they returned to the village
to celebrate. She now had the power to assist an imoulu to cure but remained subject to
mild, if infrequent, shaking fits caused by the aokwae within her. Like the male curers, the
women were paid with money but proportionally lower. While male curers performed
their therapeutic actions as they squatted, sat, or stood next to their patient, the female
curers I observed always worked while standing upright or bending over from the waist.

Magical Curing Practices

When a Wakau villager felt really sick and a home remedy, if tried, didn’t help, an imoulu,
not the aid post orderly, was usually approached for treatment.5 But, I was told, you
should be very sick. One evening I was at the upper iron and found Kwoien lying on a
blanket in a corner with a raging fever, barely talking, and he had been this way for two
nights. No imoulu had treated him. As Akami explained it, ‘sik i nupela yet,’ meaning he
hadn’t been sick very long, adding that if you get treatment too early, the curer just has to
do it over again.

4. I did not learn if there was a distinct term for women curers.
5. If a sick person lived in a village with an aid post, as in Yegarapi or Akwom, there was perhaps
a better chance that they first sought the free help of an orderly before accessing an imoulu,
whom they usually must pay.

455
 A Witch’s Hand

An ambulatory patient might seek out an imoulu, even if he lived in another village.
I had recorded numerous instances of patients coming to Wakau for treatment, as well
as Wakau villagers going to neighboring villages for healing. Whether the patient went
to the curer or the curer came to the patient, the treatment usually was in a house or an
iron. A sick person might see numerous different curers or even the same one repeatedly
before he or she recovered, died, or as in some cases, more or less settled for a chronic
condition, as the woman Mane did in chapter 15. Moreover, a curer might decide not to
treat a patient. Arakwake had a bad stomachache and asked K____ to treat him but he
declined. Earlier Arakwake had accosted K____ in Wakau’s bush, looking for his dog, and
told him he didn’t want him coming onto our bush to kill us with ‘sanguma.’ Arakwake
thought K____ was retaliating by refusing to treat him. There was also the possibility that
it was K____ who made him sick, as a nakwolu does not treat someone he has attacked.
Depending on the relationship to the patient, a small monetary payment, at most a few
shillings, was expected. Only K____, I was told, treated members of his own family. All
others sought out other curers for themselves and family members; as an example, one
morning Wami, an important nakwolu and imoulu from Mauwi, came down to Wakau
with his feverish son and had both Menetjua and Meyawali treat him.
In Lévi-Strauss’s (1949) classic paper on “The Sorcerer and his Magic,” he calls at-
tention to the three essential elements in the “shamanistic” curing complex that cannot
be separated: the shaman curer, the sick person, and the observing public. He also em-
phasizes that “in treating his patient the shaman also offers his audience a performance”
(1949: 180). That certainly was the histrionic situation among the Lujere. In my reporting
on the imoulu curing practices below, I follow his lead by including the same contextual
triumvirate.
First, unlike a visit to a doctor in America, there is nothing private about a Lujere
sick person’s treatment session; often the venue is filled with women, men, and children
talking, sleeping, cooking, eating, or just looking. Watching a patient’s treatment is often
a break in a wearisome day as the curer performs his different curing procedures in the
presence of oft random others. There is no undressing; the patient is examined in what
they were wearing: if a woman, a sarong or Native skirt; if a man, shorts, a sarong, or penis
sheath. The imoulu usually asks his patient a few questions about the problem before the
patient sits or lies down on the floor for him to begin examining his or her bare skin with
his exploring hands. Hence the title for this book, A Witch’s Hand; these are the same mag-
ical hands that are believed to kill or cure. No herbs or medicines are used or administered.
If the patient is seen in an iron, there are often a number of men sitting around
smoking, chewing betel nut, and visiting, as well as a few curious boys and a sleeping
dog or two. As the men talk, handfuls of sago-leaf fibers are pressed into loose balls and
passed among them as the men chewing betel nut spit repeatedly into them until they
are almost dripping with the bright red spittle. In this way part of the audience are active
participants in the curing performance. But there was no rationale behind the use of the
spittle-coated leaf bundle. Their explanation for this custom was the phrase, tiresome and
unhelpful to me, “It’s what our ancestors taught us.” 6

6. A betel-bespat sago frond bundle was not a requirement for treatment but always occurred if a
group of men were present. A treatment in a person’s home might forego it without comment
or concern; this was not a society that obsessed over procedures.

456
 The Afflicted and their Curers

Squatting next to his patient, the curer does much probing and kneading of the skin
as he attempts to find the cause of the sickness. Most curers are fairly careful, but if the
probing is done roughly or too deeply, it can be a painful process; children and young
women sometimes scream in pain and fright as the curer’s strong fingers probe deeply
into and under tender body areas. Relatives then restrain and try to comfort a protesting
patient as the treatment and cries continue. While the curer attempts to identify and
isolate a lethal object shot into the patient by an aokwae or nakwolu, he tightly pinches
the skin together with his fingers, pulling it inches aloft. When he locates an offending
entity under the skin, he grips it tightly within his fingers and, taking the betel-bespat
fibers in the other hand, grasps the affected skin and by pinching, pulling, and shaking
the skin he magically expresses the noxious substance, whatever it is, into the fibers to
be taken outside for disposal. This overall process may be repeated numerous times until
he is satisfied that he has removed the causes for the sickness, or at least done all he can
right then. Sometimes the curer will report that the object was, for instance, a piece of
razor blade or a bamboo sliver; more rarely he might momentarily display it, but he usu-
ally shows and says nothing.
Another frequent and sometime concurrent cause of sickness is “broken bones,” es-
pecially the bones in the upper body that may be cracked or broken by invisible arrows
shot into the body by an aokwae or nakwolu. These he repairs by pushing the fractures or
broken bones together with his fingers. A curer may perform other therapeutic actions
like simple massage for muscle soreness, or try to turn a baby in an improper position for
birth by massage and external manipulation. Klowi, however, was the only curer I knew
who actually assisted at a birth. For ordinary men, anything to do with childbirth was
taboo, as it negatively affected their health and ability to hunt.

Magical Curers and Their Patients

I observed twelve male curers and three female curers from a total of six different Lujere
villages performing treatments. From the many curing sessions by these fifteen curers
that I watched, I have selected a sampling to give the range of patients and curers, includ-
ing the differences in the latter’s temperament and treatment style.

Klowi Treats Iwanauwi of Mauwi Hamlet

The first imoulu I watched was Klowi treating the young girl Iwanauwi of Mauwi.
Just before lunch Nauwen mentioned that Weame was here with his sick daughter
for Klowi to ‘wokim skin,’ (curing with hands). I immediately went to the lower iron
where the two men and Ai’ire were visiting. Klowi seemed a bit surprised when I asked
if I could watch him treat Weame’s daughter, but Ai’ire smiled and said he would call
out for me when he did; right then she was with her mother at Klowi’s wife’s house.
I returned home for lunch but by one ten, not hearing from Ai’ire, I returned to the
iron with my notebook and Leica. Klowi was sitting on the floor kneading the skin of
a girl around twelve years old held in her mother Pokeni’s arms. Ai’ire lay on the floor
fast asleep.

457
 A Witch’s Hand

Her father Weame, who was sitting to the side smoking his beautiful two-piece tra-
ditional pipe, looked up and smiled. Klowi was rubbing the girl’s stomach and chest
and addressing me said, ‘banis i bruk,’ ‘het i pen,’ that is, her rib cage was injured and
her head ached. Klowi felt around Iwanauwi’s head and neck while she securely gripped
her mother’s arm. Her father continued to quietly smoke and watch. It reminded me of
Joyce and me visiting the pediatrician with one of our children; the caring affect of all
was the same, only the situation was startlingly alien. Iwanauwi began to whimper—she
was afraid as Klowi began pressing her head strongly with his fingers. I had been taking
photos but now moved my position so the four faced me and sat with my back against a
welcomed house post. Her mother abruptly had a brief coughing fit; the treatment was
interrupted, and we all smiled and laughed.
Klowi then carefully kneaded her back and her chest. He was not exploring for objects
shot into her by nakwolu or evil spirits; earlier he had told me, ‘Em i sik nating,’ implying
there was nothing to be removed from her body. Then he began feeling around under her
jaw. He pushed rather hard with his fingers and she did not like it; she began to squirm
away but her mother continued to hold her firmly. Klowi looked at me occasionally and
smilingly told me what he was doing. He then pushed very strongly on the frontal bone
above her left eye—he had chosen this area for special attention–now I began to mentally
squirm as he pressed extremely hard. Iwanauwi screamed; but he kept pressing even as he
tried to sooth her. I glanced at my watch; it was one-twenty.
Iwanauwi was still sobbing from the pain she had endured so I was relieved when
he began making a blowing motion, over and over, on the very top of her head; Klowi
seemed to be finished. My cynical thought was that the treatment was more painful than
her symptom. The young patient and her mother arose and left the iron—the terminal
phase of the treatment session I watched was just ten minutes long—then I stayed to visit
with the men. Enewan came in and reminded me that he was picking up my supplies
from Yellow River tomorrow when the MAF plane came in. Back home, I asked Nauwen
about Klowi’s blowing on Iwanauwi’s head. He said that it was to finish her sickness,
he didn’t know the details but that she would be all right and her headache would stop.
The community’s optimism regarding an imoulu’s treatment still impresses me, since I
privately saw it as, at best, only as an honest yet bogus remedy.

Menetjua Treats Tschorai

One morning early in February after Eine and his family had moved into Oria’s wife’s
house, Eine came over, all seriousness, to say that his son had become sick during the
night and that his skin was hot. Tschorai, about eleven, had little of the energy and lo-
quaciousness of his father. In fact, unlike other boys his age, he hadn’t picked up any Tok
Pisin and showed no curiosity about his foreign neighbor across the way. Early in the
afternoon I went over to see how he was; my less compassionate ethnographic self also
was curious to see how the two families had merged in their one-room accommodations
after Eine’s family moved in uninvited as noted in chapter 11.
There were two clay hearths in the middle of the floor of the house, one on each
side, and two elevated traditional beds, one each in the upper right and back left
corners of the room with no hearth beneath them as in the iron. The back bed was

458
 The Afflicted and their Curers

Oria’s, the front one Eine’s and his son’s. The women and other children slept on the
‘limbum’ floor. When I arrived, Oria was cooking a sago pancake on a piece of metal
taken from a kerosene drum. Sitting on the floor near him was his wife holding their
sleeping baby son, Nakwane. Eine was sitting on the side of his bed by Tschorai who
was lying naked on his belly with Oria’s old white tomcat curled up next to him. Eine’s
young daughter Imani was standing on the other side of the bed watching. I sat down
on the bed next to Eine and felt Tschorai’s head and back, both very hot. He was very
lethargic but Eine finally got him to sit up and said that his lower back ached and he
had a headache. When Tschorai turned towards me I saw that his lips were dry and a
bit puffy and that his right cheek was flushed and badly swollen. He looked miserable,
but was stoical.
Eine said he was going to take his son to the upper iron so Menetjua could treat
him, so I went home for my notebook and tagged along with them, slowly, as Tschorai
was unsteady walking and Eine held his arm. When we entered the iron, Samaun was
asleep—as usual—and Kaiera was sitting quietly on the floor near Menetjua’s bed eating
sago. Alomiaiya and Kworu were lazing around and Enewan, who was sick, was lying in
the sun on the narrow back veranda; seeking the sun when ill was an uncommon habit
here, but very common among the Wape. Eine and Tschorai followed me to the back of
the iron where I sat down near the door; it was two-thirteen.
Menetjua slowly got off his bed, appearing very sleepy. He neither looked at nor spoke
to me but sat down on the floor opposite me. Nor did he speak to his patient who lay
down with his head on his father’s legs while the latter swatted at flies annoying his son.
Tschorai moaned slightly when Eine tried to swish his body with nettle leaves, so he
stopped. Eine and Menetjua exchanged a few words then Menetjua scooted up closer
to the boy and at two-fifteen began to treat him. First he felt around the small of his
back and his upper buttocks, then pressed on his spine in various places with his thumbs
and the first few fingers of each hand. His motions were gentle but Tschorai had his
eyes tightly shut and at no time did he look at the imoulu. I visited a bit with Alomiaiya
and Enewan while Eine got his son to turn onto his back and Menetjua felt around his
frontal area, then his neck. Tschorai coughed and pulled away—this boy did not want to
be there—but Eine coaxed him to turn back towards his healer by holding both of his
son’s arms.
Menetjua pulled on Tschorai’s neck skin and when he began to press, the boy cried
out, but Menetjua continued, moving around to the side of the neck. Then Tschorai force-
fully turned onto his side away from Menetjua, who stopped. It was now two twenty-six.
With Eine still holding his son, Menetjua continued by putting his fingers on the swollen
neck area, but gently. Tschorai had a very sore boil that had yet to abscess. Eine told me
that Aiyuk and Leno previously both had children with boils on the head area. Menetjua
moved his hands momentarily to the boy’s stomach area, then at two twenty-seven, he
lifted them, scooted back, slowly stood, and got back up on his bed. The twelve-minute
treatment was over. I asked Alomiaiya, standing next to me, what Menetjua had done and
he replied that he had fixed the boy’s broken bones in his back but that the boil was just
an ordinary boil, and that is why he was sick. I glanced out the rear door and Enewan was
sleeping. I stood to leave but Eine and Tschorai remained, the latter with his eyes still
closed and maybe blessedly asleep.

459
 A Witch’s Hand

Eine’s and Tschorai’s Curer Treatments

Because I lived so near to Eine and his son, I was able to record their recourse to treat-
ment for a few days when both were in physical distress. Eine had been sick for about a
month when he took his son on a Friday to see Menetjua, as just reported. A few days
earlier, Eine had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Litabagi’s medical patrol to Wakau
and was ordered to visit the aid post for treatment. His son, who didn’t like any kind of
practitioner, did not attend. Eine was not satisfied with Menetjua’s treatment for his son
and later that same day had Klowi treat him. On Saturday Tschorai was still feverish so
Ulwau came down from Mauwi to treat him, then later in the day Mangko did too. As
he still had a fever the next morning, Eine decided to take his son to Mokadami where
his brother-in-law Anwani lived, so a few others and I went with them. Once there, both
Eine and his son were treated by different local imoulu. Oriak began by massaging Eine’s
stomach, searching for lethal objects to be removed, occasionally pulling up his pinched
loose belly skin by several inches then, having located something, was handed the usual
betel nut spittle-soaked bundle of shredded sago fronds wherein he put it over his clasp-
ing hand before carrying it outside to discard the object. He did this four times in the
ten minutes I watched. Before I left to make a quick visit to nearby Aiendami village,
Oriak, on our host Anwani’s instructions, showed me a slender ivory-colored object he
had removed that appeared to be a tooth, maybe filed down. Before we all returned to
Wakau, I watched Tschorai being unhappily treated by Mankani. Eine told me that since
a small child, his son had protested any and all curing treatments. Yet in the three days
of Tschorai’s acute sickness, his caring father had arranged for him to be treated by five
imoulu from three different villages.
The following morning Eine and his daughter Emani went to the aid post as advised
by Litabagi, but not Tschorai. In spite of his abscess, Eine said Tschorai did not want to
go, adding that Mankani had successfully cured his son’s fever.

A ‘Sangumaman’ Treats Ime

K____, as we know, was a convicted murderer, having ten years earlier strangled to death
the old woman, Prai, in a failed ‘sanguma’ magical ritual murder. As one of the most
feared nakwolu in Lujereland, he also was considered a powerful curer. Before Sakome
had moved to Mauwi with her children to live with her brother Kowali’s family to avoid
Samaun’s harassment, her oldest child Ime became sick and K____ was sent for to treat
her. Ime was physically mature but still very young. This became the most personally dis-
turbing treatment session I observed.
Ime’s treatment occurred in Klowi’s wife Wawenowaki’s house, just down the rise
from my house that, as usual, was active with people. Ime’s mother’s brother, Kowali,
who had a close relationship with his sister and her children, arrived in Wakau from
Mauwi just before noon with two other Mauwi men. He was convinced that Meyawali
(a nakwolu) and his brother Samaun had caused his niece’s sickness. At twelve-thirty
I went down to the treatment house with my notebook in hand and Leica around my
neck and sat on the floor towards the head of Ime’s prone body. To her immediate left
sat her mother Sakome with a small child and, to her left, her husband’s older brother’s
widow, Baruboi. To Ime’s right K____ squatted and down by her legs was her mother’s

460
 The Afflicted and their Curers

brother, Kowali. Others sat and stood around, still occupied with their own concerns,
except for the numerous children who, welcoming this diversion, crowded in around the
door behind me. Walwin, a Mauwi man I didn’t know well and the husband of Baruboi’s
daughter Elamwari, squatted a short distance down from Baruboi. At the far end of the
house Oria stood near the other door.
Ime lay on her left side and Walwin and K____ lightly stroked her legs, then her arms
with nettles. Walwin pulled her finger, placed his hand on her face, then helped her sit
up and felt her back. Sakome was nursing her baby but continued to watch her daughter.
When K____ put his hand on Ime’s head, she opened her eyes and appeared rational if
not steady. Earlier Warajak told me she had been delusional. K____ helped her stand up as
he spoke with Baruboi, but Ime was almost immediately helped back down, coughed, and
I noticed a line of new decorative burn scars on her upper right arm as K____ resumed
his squatting position. Looking around, I realized that most of the men and boys were to-
wards the other end of the house and I was at the end with the women, girls, and toddlers.
Hence, I was minus a young friend to keep me informed of what was happening and to
translate, a tradeoff for the bright light streaming behind me into the dark house and the
photos I was hoping for. I saw that Tsaime and Nauwen had entered the back door; eve-
ryone was visiting, smoking or chewing betel nut as Baruboi continued to soothingly rub
Ime’s back. Meyawali came in the front door and stood watching. Little was happening
and I wondered, is it all over? Then men gradually began to pass the sago frond bundles
around, each spitting his betel juice into them while K____ began his treatment (fig. 52).
It was now one o’clock. K____ felt around her stomach then appeared to grab some-
thing into his bundle before exiting the front door to return almost immediately to repeat
the process. K____ probed deep into her abdominal cavity as Ime moaned in anguish
and he made a grunt as if he had caught something in his bundle, pulled her skin up, and
again immediately exited to return quickly and continue his abdominal explorations. Her
moans of distress persisted as he pressed inward, then moved his attention to her bare left
breast. When Ime emitted a loud moan, he momentarily let go, then returned his tight
grip. As she began to resist the treatment, loving hands restrained her arms and legs.
I noticed Oria was now near me confining her right arm. They turned her over onto
her left side as K____ accelerated his intrusive moves poking his hand painfully deep
into her armpit; she moaned pitifully. I wrote in my notebook, “I’m upset!” They moved
her onto her back and when K____ continued his probing she now screamed out in pain.
Her family and friends continued to restrain her as K____ searched for something; she
screamed again and he left with the bundle. I scribbled, “Thank God”—but he immedi-
ately returned and began pulling her stomach skin apart. I could sit there no longer and
had to stand up but continued to take notes and photos.
At one twenty-two, he turned her over on her stomach, flipped her G-string and
pulled her skirt down exposing her upper buttocks and began pinching the skin at the
base of her spine. Kowali appeared to have come to his limit too and had pulled back
from the treatment area. Ime was now sobbing but K____ continued to work on her
exposed buttocks area. He pulled her skirt up half way and they turned her again on her
back, and K____ returned to his intrusive abdomen motions pressing up under her rib
cage. Amid her sobbing she occasionally moaned in pain. Her mother said something
funny—emotional relief ?—and they all laughed. Walwin held her left breast then pulled
her skirt back down as K____ returned to working over her left breast. He moved his

461
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 52. Ime with K____ and Kowali, her mother’s brother, holding a betel bespattered bundle.

462
 The Afflicted and their Curers

hands to her head, but just feeling, not pressing, then to her neck. But some of the action
had moved to me: I was standing and several little girls were stroking and playing with
the strange blond hair on my legs.
It was one twenty-eight when they helped her sit up and K____ straddled her side-
ways feeling around her back; this time I scribbled, “When will this torture stop?” For
another fifteen minutes he continued to explore her skin down to her legs doing pressing
repairs but there were no more painful intrusions into her body with a betel be-spat bun-
dle of frayed fronds. Pausing, K____ offered Ime some water to drink from a plastic bowl
then at one forty-four he pushed back. Ime, obviously sick and exhausted, sat quietly;
the curing session had ended, as everyone turned to new interests. I counted twenty-five
people still in the house and then, looking up for the first time, I saw the roof overhead
swarming with animated cockroaches. Fortunately for Ime, two days hence, Litabagi ar-
rived as already described on his medical patrol, diagnosed her sickness as pneumonia,
and prescribed the medicines that cured her.
Ime’s horrific hour-long curing session with K____ had been both physically painful
and emotionally wrenching. K____’s session might have seemed of heroic proportions to
some as he magically cornered and removed the deadly things causing her serious illness.
To me his actions seemed more sadistic abuse than curing and I, as a passive observer, felt
complicit in Ime’s nightmare ordeal. Yet these actions were publicly performed before a
local community that included her closest and most loving kin.
Late that evening Tsaime stopped by and I asked a few questions. K____ had removed
a part of an arrow and mended her many broken and fractured bones, one of the painful
parts of his work. Her family, he said, wanted another imoulu from Gwidami to treat her
tomorrow and also wanted to consult a woman who could dream back her soul.7

A Curing Clinic
I was just beginning to learn about the curing practices of the imoulu when on a Sunday
afternoon in mid-December, six Weari-area curers—three men and three women—ar-
rived at the lower iron for an extended curing session with Ai’ire. I was startled because I
thought only men were curers. That was true for the western part of Lujereland where I
lived but, as already noted, not for some of the eastern villages.
Shortly after 5:00 p.m., I went to the lower iron where the visiting male curers and
about twenty men and youths were sitting and lying around smoking or chewing betel
nut, plus two asleep stretched out along the wall. Some of the men were visiting while
others seemed to be in a private zone. It was hot. With evening approaching, I had left
my cameras at home. Ai’ire, who was there for treatment, sat near the entrance; his pri-
mary symptoms seemed to be gastrointestinal, with stomachaches and recurrent bouts
of diarrhea. Ai’ire stretched out on his back and one of the visiting male curers began
kneading and rubbing his stomach. Some of the men were preparing the sago strands by
splitting them apart and bundling them, then passing the bundled fibers to be spat into

7. This was the closest the Lujere got to creating what some witch-prone societies call a
“dewitcher”—a specialized person who is consulted by those who believe a witch has used his
or her powers to impair their health or luck in life, as Favret-Saada (2015) describes for the
Bocage region of northern France.

463
 A Witch’s Hand

with betel juice. Another man rubbed a bundle vigorously between his hands as the red
juice colored it.8 The male curer working on Ai’ire’s stomach made a big mound of flesh
in the middle, pinched it together as one of the female curers grasped it with a bundle,
tugged upward, then took it outside. The other two female curers were now by the door.
Ai’ire’s primary curer had immediately resumed his ardent belly kneading, rubbing, and
pinching the flesh together. Ai’ire seemed stoical; no one had spoken to him, or he to
them, since I had arrived.
Bending down in her faded skirt, Ai’ire’s female curer had again placed her bundle on
his belly where her partner had gathered and held his flesh in a very high mound. Grasp-
ing, she tried and tried to extract something, then her partner spoke and, in another yank,
succeeded, but almost fell over backwards as Ai’ire smilingly grunted in relief. The male
curer had removed his hands and leaned back; Ai’ire first lifted one knee then gradually
sat up. I wrote in my notebook, “God, he looks sick!” The male curer started smoking as
did two of the female curers. Oria, who was sitting near me, now also was spitting betel
juice into a bundle. Pulling its dripping strands widely apart, he crushed them back to-
gether as he rubbed them briskly between his stained hands. Ai’ire, now sitting cross-leg-
ged, slowly scratched his back then stared down at his belly. Looking directly across at me
he silently raised his eyebrows in a quizzical gaze. Touched, I wrote, “He is in bad shape.
What a terrible way to deal with a man’s ‘bel’” [stomach]. Oria rubbed his hands on a
nearby post to get rid of the betel juice then, reaching into his ‘bilum,’ (a string bag) took
out a traditional white shell ring, saying he wanted to send it to Amanab where he could
get two ‘paun’ (Australian dollars) for it, then replaced it. Within my view the Wakau men
in the room were Kunai, Menetjua, Yaope, Oria, Nakwane, Mangko, and Mowal.
Just after 6:00 p.m., one of the other curing women standing by Ai’ire leaned over,
lifted high one of his arms and rubbed down on it over and over, then repeated the pro-
cess on his other arm. Ai’ire, now standing, extended an arm upwards to grip an overhead
rafter as she rubbed his sides and his rib cage. The male curer returned and simultaneously
began working on Ai’ire’s stomach, trying to locate something in his belly as his other
hand pushed strongly up on his shoulder. Ai’ire tightly gripped the rafter to maintain his
balance. The woman now addressed his stomach, pushing repeatedly inward with the heel
of her hand. The male curer had Ai’ire turn towards the door and also began rubbing his
belly. Then all three of the female curers began working on his stomach as the man put his
arms around Ai’ire for physical support. One of the women brought in a ‘limbum’ of water
and placed it on the floor near Ai’ire while another leaned over to rinse her be-spat bun-
dle. A third man—the first time he had touched Ai’ire—stood behind him with his arms
around his waist and began kneading his belly. All now were working away and I turned
my attention to the men around me, and learned how the women became curers and who
they were. Nawerie was from Naum and Nabtho and Inaru were both from Alai. The
women talked among themselves as they worked, occasionally going out with a bundle,
returning to rinse it, then back to work kneading, pulling and squeezing Ai’ire’s belly flesh.
At six thirty-two one of the men had returned to work on Ai’ire, still clinging to the
rafter with one hand and the other on his head to keep it out of their way. Oria asked

8. When I asked what utility the bespat bundles had in the treatment, I was told it was their
custom, always a lame explanation to the curious ethnologist. To my eyes, the primary func-
tion of the bundles was in grasping the noxious entity then removing it to the outside.

464
 The Afflicted and their Curers

me if I wanted to go and when I said, “No,” everyone laughed but I didn’t grasp why.
However, amid the Namia talk around me, several times I had heard the word ‘masta,’
obviously referring to me. Then when one of the male curers said to me that the treatment
was about over; I wrote wondering, “Trying to get rid of me?” When living submerged
in a language you don’t really know, paranoia is a recurrent risk. Conversation continued
and Oria said that Klowi had shot a cassowary today. Ai’ire now was lying on his back
and the interminable stomach kneading had resumed. Oria again, atypically, tried to get
me to leave with him but I declined. Around six forty-five, Oria left alone, Ai’ire sat up
and I noticed that Nimo was here too.
The three female curers ceased working on Ai’ire, then left together to stay overnight
with women relatives. I asked the male curers if they planned further curing that evening
but they said no; they would remain the night and go home tomorrow. One of them, for no
pertinent reason, added that Ai’ire would go to the aid post tomorrow, making me wonder
if they assumed that I disapproved of their traditional treatments like the missionaries did.
Mangko, probably in need of newspaper for his cigarettes, wanted to come that evening
to tell me stories but I suggested tomorrow. As much as I usually enjoyed his company,
he was a deadly dull storyteller. In the evening, if my energy lagged, he would put me to
sleep. Back home I reviewed the curing session with Oria and Nauwen, who avowed that
as onlookers, they didn’t know what the curers were removing except that it was not good
and that they can see it even if we can’t. Nakwolu, I already had heard, were clairvoyant.
It rained hard all night and next morning the village was soaked and dripping. The
skies remained cloudy and a four-foot python was killed behind my house before break-
fast. When I later visited the iron, the Weari nakwolu were just eating. As all the water-
ways were swollen from the heavy rains, they planned to return home tomorrow and treat
more patients today, including Ai’ire, who obviously wasn’t going to the aid post. I went
home and readied my equipment to film with my hand-held Bell and Howell movie cam-
era—the iron was too crowded with participants for the bigger tripod-mounted Bolex
camera—and to take photos with my Leica. When I returned shortly after noon with my
filming gear, the usual lower iron men and youths, about twenty, were visiting and smok-
ing or napping, like Klowi stretched out along a wall. Ai’ire was sitting near the entrance
and one of the men already was working on him, and I began filming his treatment. This
seemed to both please and slightly amuse the men and youths hanging out there.
Iwi came in with some sago fronds and gave them to Kunai, Engwe, and Tsaime to
shred and prepare for the customary curing bundles. Mangko had a champagne bottle
filled with kerosene, the bottle left over from when Joyce and I had celebrated with my
family, who came down to see my new camp. He tipped out a bit of the kerosene to rub
on a couple of small sores, then passed it around so men with lighters could fill them. The
imoulu Ari focused his kneading attention on Ai’ire’s stomach while two of the female
curers took turns in grasping into their bundle whatever Ari had obtained and carrying it
outside. In the meantime, I was both filming and photographing the process.
By one forty-five, Ai’ire’s curing had ended and the next patient was Yabowe, the lit-
tle daughter of Nakwone of Mauwi. Her symptoms were also abdominal; later Warajak
told me that an aokwae had shot something into her and from his description it sounded
like she had parasitic worms. Yabowe, wrapped in an old sarong too big for her, stood for
her treatment supported under both arms by her father (see fig. 53). Ari felt all around
her abdomen, then on locating something, his helper grasped it in her curing bundle and

465
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 53. Yabowe, supported by her father, is treated by Ari.

466
 The Afflicted and their Curers

Figure 54. As Klene clings to a rafter for support, Ari tugs on his belly skin.

467
 A Witch’s Hand

carried it outside. It was noticeable that Ari’s moves were not as intrusive in his thrusting
and pinching as with Ai’ire, and the patient did not struggle to get loose or cry. While Ari
continued to treat Yabowe, his helper began working on Klene, also from Mauwi, who
had symptoms in both his neck and his stomach.
Finally, Ari began treating Klene’s abdominal problems. Klene stood with his right
arm grasping a rafter and his other behind his head as Ari grappled with his belly skin
(fig. 54).
It was after two o’clock, and the next patient was one of my favorite little Wakau
boys. Manwe’s father was Wolwar but it was his mother, Nauware, who brought him for
treatment. Manwe was one of the few small children who, if I were in his vicinity, always
looked up at me and, one way or another, made it a point to emotionally connect with
me. Now he lay on his back and, like all little boys, was naked. Almost immediately his
mother had to hold down his two arms while Ari, squatting down by him, began feeling
over his belly with his long fingers (fig. 55).

Figure 55. Little Manwe is held down by his mother as Ari treats him.

Manwe started to scream and babble incessantly in Namia. It was a panic reaction
hard to watch from such a sweet child. As he struggled for freedom, I admired Ari’s
professionalism and compassion—but he had certain procedures to complete just as any
pediatrician must when examining a panicked child. However, it was Ari’s female helper
that terrified Manwe the most. Towering above him, she repeatedly thrust her soggy
curing bundle down on his quivering belly with the chilling complacency of a Nurse
Ratched (fig. 56).

468
 The Afflicted and their Curers

Figure 56. Ari explores Manwe’s belly as his helper leans down with a curing bundle.

I finished the roll of film on Manwe’s curing as he screamed “iiiiiiii!” when his skin was
pinched together. I loaded in another roll but was so distraught by my little friend’s an-
guished screaming I somehow, unwittingly, even crazily, put the cover on the lens, thereby
losing the next eleven photos. I didn’t notice the mistake until after my little friend had
been liberated; that set me musing regarding the mysterious power of the unconscious.
By then it was two-twenty and Iwani’s ‘luluai’ Bauwi came forward and sat down with his
legs outstretched as Ari, squatting by him, began to probe and pinch his stomach. He, too,
had problems with his gastrointestinal functioning, but this would be a short ten-minute
session. After his helper made just two trips outside with her curing bundle, Ari relaxed
his hands; for now he was finished.
Ari had been relieved by Enaru, the other imoulu from Alai, whose patient would be Li-
jeria, the mute bachelor and subject of Iwani’s na wowi curing festival a month earlier, de-
scribed in chapter 15. Lijeria rose slowly from the floor then stood listlessly, his skinny arm
gripping a rafter as Enaru probed and squeezed his wasted body (fig. 57). His floppy shorts
were sizes too big for him and made him look even more emaciated than he obviously was.
I used the end of the film in both the Leica and Bell and Howell cameras on Lijera’s
curing, then packed up and went home where Mangko was waiting to tell me some an-
cestor stories.

Mangko Treats Kaukobu of Gwidami

Towards the middle of January at the lower iron, I saw for the first time Mangko, who
was the village’s youngest imoulu, treat a sick person. His patient, Kaukobu, was from

469
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 57. Enaru squeezes Lijeria’s flesh as his helper waits with her curing bundle.

470
 The Afflicted and their Curers

Gwidami and had returned from plantation labor just a few weeks before. Like his fellow
villager Anwani, Kaukobu’s plantation boss sent him home because he was sick too often.
His major complaint was chronic chest pains. Mangko’s treatment lasted fifteen minutes.
His patient lay on his back wearing shorts and he primarily kneaded Kaukobu’s stomach.
He did not use a betel juice bespattered curing bundle but just his bare hands manipu-
lating the skin. His healing style was highly informal. He rarely looked at what he was
doing but was talking and joking with the patient and others including me. As Mangko
was working, Kaukobu also was talking to me telling me about his trip home. I did not
see Mangko remove anything from Kaukobu’s body or comment that he did. When he
finished, Kaukobu sat up and began smoking and Mangko went outside to eat some sago.
Iwi and some boys came inside with pieces of pork and put them on the hearth’s fire to
cook. The action over, I went outside in the bright sunlight and up the short rise to home.

Three Weari Curers Treat Klowi

In the last week of February five men, of whom at least three were imoulu, came to Wakau
from the eastern Weari villages. Previously Ai’ire had visited them for curing his little
girl and they had marked the date they would return the visit. The morning of the day
they arrived in Wakau, Ai’ire’s wife had taken their daughter to the aid post because of a
fever; Ai’ire told me he would go tomorrow and also take a pumpkin to trade for salt at
the mission. At my house Nauwen had been seriously sick but my regime of vitamins and
tetracycline had him finally up and looking more alive although Oria, who himself had
a headache, was still helping him out with household tasks. It was Monday and Nauwen
planned to go to Papei on Saturday to see an imoulu because neither Menetjua nor Man-
gko would treat him, apparently miffed at him about aspects of the younger Yaope’s mar-
riage I hadn’t sorted out. Mangko wasn’t even in the village, having gone on an overnight
hunt with Klowi’s gun accompanied by Warajak and Newai.
I had spent most of the day laboriously working on genealogies with Mari, Mowal,
and Oria when the Weari men arrived midafternoon at the lower iron. By the time I
joined them, some cooked ‘aupa’ leaves had been brought to them from Klowi’s wife’s
house and men from both irons were scattered around the four sides of the room includ-
ing Ai’ire, Aiyuk, Ukai, Klowi, Alomiaiya, Iwi, Kaiera, Enewan, Menetjua, plus Oria
and Nauwen who arrived with me. Shortly after four o’clock, the little boys who were
clustered in the center of the room were told to clear out so the visitors could start curing
there. At four-twenty, Klowi stood up and walked quietly to the center and lay down with
his head on his folded blanket, loosened the belt on his shorts and the three visiting im-
oulu joined him on the floor. I was informed earlier that two Aiendami imoulu told Klowi
that he had a piece of a metal sickle in him and these men had come to remove it. As I
already had exhausted Oria with the genealogy work, I looked around for Tsaime—al-
ways a helpful and tactful informant— to join me, but he was at his wife’s house. So, with
no names for the visiting curers, they would only be numbers—Two, Three, and Four—in
my notes. I watched as a couple of clusters of betel juice-soaked sago fronds were passed
among the men when Four first put his hands on Klowi’s stomach, then felt under his
back as Three stroked his legs and Two felt of his head. This, I thought, was going to be
interesting; it was the first time I had seen an imoulu treated by his professional peers. It
was obvious that Klowi believed in an imoulu’s power to cure or he wouldn’t be stretched

471
 A Witch’s Hand

out before me. I was fascinated: how did Klowi and his curers rationalize their moves,
like the bodily removal of an object, albeit usually unseen by the ordinary observer like
me? More to the point, what was their personal understanding about those objects that
they actually removed?
Three held both of Klowi’s hips while Two held his arms. I wanted to take a photo
but it was far too dark. Amid much talking amongst themselves, all three began working
on his frontal area, including under his belt. They were a rather grubby-looking bunch
but they also had made a grubby two hour or so hike to get here. Four was now sitting
on Klowi’s left, Two on his right, and Three near his feet. Four did the most exuberant
work, pursing his lips tightly together as he pulled up tautly on Klowi’s belly skin. At
four forty-five, he finally found something, pulled strongly with his betel-red bundle
to quickly take it outside and, in less than a minute, resumed his exploration of Klowi’s
belly. A clutch of young girls watched from the front door. Again, Four appeared to yank
something from Klowi’s belly and headed outside the door as the girls jumped out of
his way. (I wondered out loud what happened to the noxious invisible substance when
it was released, where did it go? But no one else cared; apparently it was just another
of my irrelevant or inane questions.) Two had stopped to eat some ‘opa’ on a leaf while
Four and Three continued to feel and probe. By five o’clock, Three had both hands in
Klowi’s shorts on either side of his genitals as Four pulled up his belly skin, yanked hard,
and went out the door with the curing bundle. As he came back inside, a young woman,
Wabe, threw in some nettles to old Menetjua. Another curing appeared to be happening:
I watched our curer Menetjua stand behind one of the other two visiting Weari men,
lean over to stroke his stomach with the nettles, blow gently into his right and his left
ear, then stepped over him astride his head before enigmatically returning to where he
was sitting.
When I returned my puzzled attention to Klowi’s curing session, all three men busily
focused on his abdomen. One of them was rubbing it up and down while emitting a soft
continuous sibilant sound. At eight minutes after five, Three turned Klowi onto his left
side amid mild laughter, and Two began exploring and pulling at the skin on his back.
The sun was now streaming in the door and I took some photos of the three curers with
their prone patient. Two was now having success and he went outside two more times as
I took two more photos.
Finally they put Klowi onto his belly and Two worked on his back and lower spine as
the other two curers watched; then it ended. At five-fourteen, Ukai was the first to leave,
then I left momentarily for some tasks at home, but returned to watch Two treat Ai’ire
for thirty minutes. The Weari men began to work on both Nauwen—whom Klowi and
Mangko had declined to treat—and Oria, but I went home; I had had a surfeit of magical
curing and wanted to clear my head with a warm bucket-shower and a shot of my favorite
dark rum over a few tiny ice cubes, whose appearance from my small kero fridge in the
middle of a steamy tropical jungle was the only magic I could truly believe in.
Oria later said the imoulu told him that the reason his head ached was that he had
been shot in the back of his head with a wire that extended to the front. He had paid
them thirty cents, twenty for himself and ten for Nauwen. He added that they did not
say what they removed from Ai’ire’s or Nauwen’s stomachs and I forgot to ask if they
removed the piece of a sickle from Klowi. Later that night Nauwen, after a few miserable
days of real sickness when no imoulu he trusted would treat him, was almost jubilant he

472
 The Afflicted and their Curers

felt so good, enthusing to me how the Weari imoulu had removed bad things from his
stomach. Although I was just as delighted to see his energy and spirits returning, I totally
lacked his faith in the magical cures of a visiting curer and wished I were able to distin-
guish the difference between the placebo effect of a local hands-on cure and the proven
efficacy of the powerful drug tetracycline I was giving him. I envied my colleague and
friend, Gilbert Lewis, who had lived in a remote village like Wakau with doctorates in
both anthropology and medicine. Though Nauwen protested that he already was cured, I
insisted that he still complete the tetracycline regimen he had agreed to. Not surprisingly,
it was the Weari imoulu magic that was credited for his cure.
Early the next morning Oria awakened me across the way loudly yelling in pain from
an intense headache. Later I went across to see him and his head was wreathed in a long
rope. All I could think of was the wire the nakwolu said had been shot into his head.
Meyawali was with him gently rubbing his head. While he was a nakwolu, he only knew
the hands-on techniques of curing, not how to remove lethal objects. I had brought with
me some aspirin so by midafternoon Oria felt better and had come over to my office.
Earlier Ai’ire and his wife had gone to the aid post as their daughter’s fever had returned,
and Tsaime had gone because he wanted a bandage for his lanced boil. Oria and I went
to work and he taught me everything I should know about why the lower iron men were
so susceptible to the boils that I earlier described.

Sickness, Curing, Placebos, and the Male Curers

When a Lujere villager was sick, their fervent hope was that an imoulu treatment would
return them to health. I had seen the worried anxiety of a sick person who could not get
the treatment of a curer, then the calming—on Nauwen it was exuberance—of the body
when finally being treated by imoulu hands. Because there are so many imoulu, if a patient
did not get better after a curer’s treatment, he or she had only to seek out another one,
thus maintaining a sense of hopefulness. However, regardless of the dramatically con-
vincing physical details of a curer’s treatment, from the perspective of scientific medicine,
any healing effect was only psychological. An imoulu had none of the remedial imple-
ments, skills, or pharmacopeia to cure disease. As Gilbert Lewis writes,

For nearly all man’s time on earth, he has had almost no power to combat disease in
the way we do now. Largely lacking effective somatic treatments, lacking microscopes
and chemistry and knowledge of the intimate, intrinsic characteristics of disease, most
people’s decisions about treatment have made probably little, or random, difference to
the natural outcome of their ailments. In terms of evolution, disease was mostly left to
work on human populations like the wolf among the caribou, taking the infirm, leaving
the rest—the healthy—to run free. (Lewis 1977: 233)

Yet these healers, the imoulu, were not charlatans or quacks: what we call magic, they
perceived as real. Via the confidence villagers placed in a curer’s healing hands, the hope
of regained health was kept alive by the patient and their family. However, to a scientifi-
cally trained observer, an imoulu curing treatment was at best a placebo, a treatment with
no active therapeutic agency. In this sense, to me their treatments, like the curing festivals,

473
 A Witch’s Hand

were just theater, but to the local believer they were genuine. In fact, from the outside,
the entire imoulu-curing syndrome could be conceived as a culturally embraced placebo.9
In recent years the placebo effect has had extensive study as researchers have discov-
ered that patients who erroneously think they are receiving a curative agent often show
signs of improvement. While that obviously was not a part of my thinking when I lived
with the Lujere, I was impressed that their Indigenous forms of curing like the imoulu
and curing festivals were significant in maintaining a community sense of viable opti-
mism—up to a point—when faced with sickness. While these Indigenous interventions
couldn’t realistically save lives, they could provide a thrust of hopefulness until death be-
came inevitable. Then villagers were as skilled as an elderly GP in recognizing the clinical
signs of dying; with unsentimental pragmatism they abandoned their cherished curing
traditions and sought only to provide emotional support and physical comfort.

The Curer Paradox and Self-Referential Magic

At various points in this book, I have paused to consider the nature of the phenomenon
I was writing about, especially if I identified it as magical or fantastical. By now it is clear
that I perceive Lujere magical beliefs as specious; however, my modus operandi generally
has been to write about occult phenomena with the field-oriented ethnographer’s sus-
pension of disbelief, just as I behaved when I lived with them.10 My primary responsibil-
ity is to present the Indigenous view, not to contest it.
I also have occasionally focused on the disjunction between the consciousness of the
Wakau villagers and my consciousness. While we more or less inhabited the same eve-
ryday physical world for month after month, our perceptions, how we experienced and
interpreted the enveloping events, were often light years apart. My professional task—not
theirs—was to lessen this disjunctive gap by looking, listening, questioning, and learning;
theirs (if they wished), was to teach and explain.
What my Wakau friends taught me about ‘sanguma’ was that they—unlike what Bur-
bandt (2014) reported for the Indonesian village of Buli—had no doubts regarding their
witchcraft beliefs. Never did I hear a villager question the authenticity of ‘sanguma’ or

9. It was Michael Specter’s (2011) article that stimulated my thinking regarding the Lujere’s
Indigenous forms of curing therapy as placebos and introduced me to the pioneering placebo
research of Ted Kaptchuk (Kaptchuk and Miller 2015) and his colleagues.
10. Bubandt has a very thoughtful discussion regarding the “anthropological exhortation to sus-
pend disbelief as a general rule” as it relates to modern and pre-modern or traditional societies,
finding it problematic as it “upholds the illusion that disbelief is the monopoly of modernity”
(2014: 15–17). Also see Bruno Latour’s (2010) book, that even more radically explores “belief ”
in modernity and his critical and creative takes on “fetishes” and “facts.” For another searching
view of the significant difference between “literate and oral cultures” see Jack Goody’s his-
torical essay on agnosticism in relation to the ethnographer’s holistic approach that “tends to
exaggerate. . . . and to neglect absences or failures of belief, and the existence of doubt” (1996:
677). Holding these caveats in mind, I still aver that the Wakau villager, even with a succession
of failed treatments by imoulu, rarely lost faith in their eventual efficacy. Ai’ire was the only
villager I knew who explicitly did.

474
 The Afflicted and their Curers

what a nakwolu-cum-imoulu did, or was alleged to have done, regardless of how logically
impossible to me. Never! Not even Litabagi who, while a practitioner of Western medi-
cine, totally believed in their killing and curing magic. At the political meeting I attended
at the base camp before I moved to Wakau, it was Litabagi who scathingly proclaimed to
the group that all of the ‘sanguma’ men should be captured and thrown into jail for life.
That was the only way—for him, and many other Lujere—to end the secret murdering
scourge of the nakwolu.11
I had no problem appreciating—if not accepting—the villagers’ fantastic beliefs about
the nakwolu; I had been raised in the Kansas Bible belt with a plethora of wildly inexplica-
ble supernatural beliefs I believed in when young, so personally knew the inherent power
of socialization. Still, there were some Lujere occult actions I initially could not find a way
to easily fathom. My main problem was with the nakwolu-cum-imoulu themselves: it was
one thing for villagers to attribute to them magical powers, but quite another for them
to claim the capability to personally perform such logically impossible acts. How could
they believe in (1) the magical, even bizarre murderous actions individually attributed to
them, and (2) the magical curing treatments they performed on their patients? This was
the paradox that for a long time was constantly gnawing at me. It wasn’t until writing this
book that I came to more deeply grasp the impact that magical thinking had not only on
the imoulu’s patients but, even more extensively, on the imoulu themselves.
While still in the field I was convinced nakwolu-imoulu were not frauds but believed
in their own magical powers. Why else would they go, or bring family members, to each
other for treatment when sick? As skepticism or doubt regarding a nakwolu’s magical
powers was almost unknown within the culture, it makes it easier for a nakwolu to be
convinced of them himself.12 Magical thinking, as I have documented repeatedly, was
endemic among the Lujere. It shouldn’t take much imagining for an imoulu to believe
that what he had corralled within a curing bundle was real and lethal and, as he had the
power to see what others couldn’t, know from his thoughts, his imagination, what it was.
Likewise, he could fantasize, like Warner’s murderous Murngin informant Lainndjura
(chap. 16), a gruesome magical ‘sanguma’ murder if he wished. If you live in a society
where magical thought is universally credible, who is to challenge your fantasies as not re-
ally real? Even in our secular modern society, many Christians believe that the Eucharist’s
wafer and wine are Christ’s body and blood. Belief in itself makes it genuine.13
From the point of view of an empirically oriented rationalist like myself, the Lujere
mentally inhabited a perceptual world steeped in magical thoughts not verifiable in a
space/time continuum, as did the Christian Brethren missionaries who felt the Lord

11. This, of course, also would have exterminated access to their prioritized form of curing, but
that was ignored.
12. I recorded only a single instance of doubt, when Oria told me that K____’s wife, in anger,
called him a fraud as a cure
13. Fortune provides another example among the Dobu where a sorcerer removes crystals from a
person’s body:
This removal is like a trick in appearance, but actually the sorcerer does not think of it
as a trick. The presence of the crystal in his hand after he has projected it magically at
a victim, or before he has ejected it from a patient is immaterial. The immaterial on the
contrary is material effecting his purpose. That is all there is to it. (Fortune 1963: 298)

475
 A Witch’s Hand

was divining and guiding their and others’ decisions (Thorp 2004). When imoulu or their
family members were sick they, as indicated, sought out each other for treatments just
as Western physicians do when ill. I assumed they believed their curing happened on
an unseen level they could see, and was therefore real. No one questioned the integrity
of their curing or its effectiveness and neither did they. If your metaphysics includes the
imagined as real, then it is.14
In the history of ethnographic research, shamans (Balzer 1996) are famed as media-
tors between the worlds of spirits and of humans, with trance being a strategic aspect of
their performances that, for our interests, includes curing with the use of miraculous acts
or tricks. Michael Taussig (2003) has written a searching article about shamans, stimu-
lated by Boas’s research among the Kwakiutl and his informant–shaman collaborator,
George Hunt (Boas and Hunt 1966). A Kwakiutl shaman’s curing is much more given to
tricks or chicanery, often elaborate, than is the Lujere imoulu, who never goes into trance
and who can at most can produce, for example, a bit of razor allegedly removed from his
patient’s abdomen.15 Taussig cites Stanley Walens as to how the Kwakiutl understand
their curing tricks as a form of mimesis, thus the shaman performs his curing trick, but
the spirits imitate it exactly: “The tricks turn out to be models or scenes for the spirits to
follow, and it is the spirits who ultimately supply the cure” (Taussig 2003: 288), therefore
preventing the shaman from being accused of deception. That is fine for the Kwakiutl,
but the Lujere do not have a similar belief of curers and spirits in a magical, symbiotic
relationship.
It is significant that I never saw an imoulu show an actual object he extracted in the
many curing sessions I observed. Nor was there any onlooker curiosity to view the unseen
objects removed and quickly disposed of outside. I was the exception. I once casually fol-
lowed a woman curer out and saw her lean over and slightly shake the bundle near the
edge of the cleared area absent of people, and immediately return inside. In my cursory
assessment, I saw nothing unusual. Once, I did see a single object that allegedly was
removed from a patient when in Mokadami at Anwani’s house and described earlier in
this chapter. This was when Anwani wanted the imoulu Oriak, who was treating Eine, to
show me the thing he had removed: a slender ivory colored object that appeared to be a
filed tooth of some kind.
When a cultural practice is trusted without question by the populace, there is no need
for the curer to validate his prowess with actions such as Oriak’s. As Boas and Hunt

14. This line of argument may shed light on the self-acceptance of a nakwolu’s curing prowess,
but it does not provide a convincing explanation of how a novice understands his training to
magically kill victims with a nakwolu and then revive them to go home and die. If it were a
solo fantasy activity, I could perhaps grasp it, but how do two men, a novice and his teacher,
work together to create a fantasy about an alleged actual event involving killing, cutting, clos-
ing cuts, and returning a victim to life (unless, perhaps, it is a form of folie à deux in which they
somehow share the same homicidal fantasy)? Athough ethnographers strive to understand
the consciousness of those they live with, I confess that the consciousness of the nakwolu and
imoulu I knew remains a troubling conundrum to me.
15. Also see Graham M. Jones’s (2017: 115) unique book that considers European “entertainment
magicians” or “illusionists in relation to the “magical thinking by ritual experts at conjuring
tricks” in less developed societies.

476
 The Afflicted and their Curers

observed for the Kwakiutl, where shamanistic practice was oft challenged and the shaman
himself could be doubtful of his powers, he “is always ready to bolster them up by fraud”
(Boas and Hunt 1930: 121). But the Lujere belief in magic is so thoroughgoing that the
idea of “fraud” is an inoperable one. Nevertheless, my unremitting abjuration of all forms
of magic makes me wonder if Oriak, by documenting his cure with the “removed” tooth,
may have raised personal skepticism in his own powers while Anwani, who also was a
curer, on seeing the tooth may have questioned his own abilities. Likewise, Eine, as well
as the observers to the treatment, may have questioned the efficacy of the powers of curers
in subsequent treatments if the nature or the object were either ignored or just verbal-
ized, rather than being expressly shown. Concrete facts can have a way of destabilizing
the status quo. However, the above scenario is of my skeptical imaginative devising in
opposition to the Lujere imagination rife with magic. Consequently, “concrete facts” are
open to interpretation, thus raising slippery questions about what’s real. These, however,
are ontological questions that can’t be answered definitely here, if indeed anywhere.

Psychosis or Devil Possession?

We can, however, examine what happens when one’s sense of what is real gets tangled or
goes off the track. I only saw one psychotic person while living with the Lujere.16 I first
saw him at the mission when I was removing my boots and he walked by alone, talking
loudly and incessantly in Tok Pisin, never Namia. I glanced quizzically at a nearby local
man and he said he was ‘long long,’ psychotic. He had been ‘long long’ before and only
recently had returned from indentured labor. Later I was down on the airstrip waiting for
a mission plane to Lumi and saw him again with two men who were trying to escort him
back to his hamlet in Yegerape. Another man was shouting at him for insulting his wife,
having said he wanted to have sex with her. He reeled around awkwardly like a drunk
and headed out onto the airstrip, but was neatly dressed in fresh clothes. Eventually his
handlers got him headed homeward, still walking unsteadily.
While I was in Lumi, he flew up on a government-chartered plane I met with Betty
Gillam in the hospital’s pickup. He was standing on the airstrip with two policemen and
a small crowd around him. His wrists were tied together in front of him with bark, as were
his knees and ankles. He was again in a manic state, laughing and talking continuously
in Tok Pisin about praying, declaring there was a Satan inside of him, ranting on and on,
while raising his hands together up and down as if praying. Addressing the police, he kept
saying, ‘O tenkyu, O tenkyu,’ “Oh thank you,” over and over, mixed with more Christian-
inspired religious talk, again all in Tok Pisin. Betty said that he had religious books that
Ces Parish had given him and that at one time he was a Bible teacher. Along with five
other men including the police and me, he was driven in the back of the pickup to the
hospital where his legs were freed but not his hands. Betty gave him an injection and he
gradually quieted down. I mention this man because he was the only psychotic person I
knew about and, as an intimate associate of the mission at one time, a completely atypi-
cal Lujere person. Whether it was personal instability, his involvement with charismatic

16. I heard only about two other people who were ‘long long’ and in other villages.

477
 A Witch’s Hand

Christianity, a combination of these, or other factors that provoked his psychosis, I had
no way of knowing. What I did know, however, was that the closed stability of his parents’
magical Lujere world he knew as a child had been shattered.
Philip Ace visited his disturbed friend at the Lumi Hospital but when he tried to
kneel in front of Philip he said no, they would kneel together, then his friend began
preaching nonsense and speaking vulgarities, so the CMML nurse Shirley Stephens with
them had to leave. Later Philip prayed with the man’s brother, a Christian, regarding his
brother’s madness, as Philip was convinced, and the patient himself believed, that the
devil was inside of him. When Philip and his wife Rosemary returned to Yellow River, as
a testament to their faith they flew back with the disturbed man and his medication so
they could look after him and pray with six others for the devil to release him. The man
wanted to return home and they felt this was God’s will because when the Lumi Hospital
tried to transfer him to the larger Vanimo Hospital, the doctor in charge would not give
his permission as they did not have the necessary funds. While both the missionaries and
the Lujere believed in the supernatural, the Lujere were not also divine fatalists.
Exorcism, the casting out of evil spirits residing in a person, is a common action in
those societies with strong beliefs in supernatural powers. In chapter 15, we learned about
the Lujere beliefs and curing rituals related to exorcism.17 Both CMML charismatic
Christianity and conservative Catholicism have ardent beliefs regarding the evil powers
of the devil that can corrupt a person’s morality. But the Lujere belief system is very dif-
ferent. The traditional Lujere belief is that an evil spirit can make you sick, not make you
bad; theirs is a mechanistic connection and unrelated to ideas of morality or a person’s
ethical character.18

17. On April 20, 2018, The New York Times International carried an article on a Catholic exorcism
conference in Rome with the headline, “Amid Fears That Evil is Winning, Learning to Cast
Out il Diavolo.” Goodman (1988) also explores the nature of exorcism in “the modern world.”
18. A sometime point of linguistic confusion is that the Tok Pisin term for “spirit” is ‘tewil,’ which
a Westerner may misconstrue as “devil.”

478
chapter nineteen

Death in Wakau

Pneumonia is not among the sicknesses they recognize,

and they blame the death on Sanguma.
PO R. K. Treutlein (1962: 14)

The last weeks of my village fieldwork included dismantling my camp to return home—
a wearying task I conducted with mixed emotions—and a glimpse of Ray Lanaghan’s
‘sing-sing’ to celebrate the official opening of the Edwaki Base Camp; in importance
and meaning however, both events paled in comparison to the deadly attacks of pneu-
monia occurring in Wakau. This final chapter examines the disease’s tragic consequences
within the cultural context of the Lujere’s comparative use of Indigenous (magical) and
introduced (medical) curing techniques that are then contrasted to indicate some of the
factors inherent in each that kept them inviolate. Finally, I summarize my findings on the
veracity of ‘sanguma’ killings and curings, acknowledging the extraordinary power of the
human imagination to shape our beliefs and, consequently, our lives.

Rampant Pneumonia
With Ces Parish and a visiting missionary, I flew up to Lumi on the mission plane the
day before Joyce and the children were to return from Australia. In spite of the fact that
all three arrived in Lumi with bad colds, we had a joyous reunion. It was a busy few days:
Joyce and I hiked out to Taute village to say our farewells, my Wape artifacts got partially
packed, hours were spent hand copying records in the office of the Lumi ‘kiap,’ and more
hours spent organizing cargo to be sent home and given away. My days in PNG were now
literally numbered. On April thirtieth we would fly from Port Moresby to Hong Kong on
the first leg of our roundabout trip home. But my work in Wakau was not yet finished.

479
 A Witch’s Hand

I flew back to the Edwaki Base Camp with Tony Wright, the new ADC who replaced
Peter Broadhurst. We had lunch with Ray, then I saw Mary Parish at the mission who
told me that Mowal’s infant daughter had died at the aid post of cerebral malaria, the
third infant they had lost to that fateful disease. Oria told me it was an aokwae of Arak-
wake’s that killed Mowal’s baby, as they had stolen a papaya from him. Oria also told me
that Kairapowe, Ukai’s wife and Oria and Nauwen’s paternal aunt, was seriously sick so
we stopped in Yegerape at the aid post to get some sulpha and quinine medicine from
Litabagi who, with his Tok Pisin–savvy wife, were busily treating people. It was still the
rainy season; on our way home, we pushed through one swift brook that was waist deep.
In Wakau, the village was almost empty, as many families had departed for their hunting
camps with no intention of a hurried return.
Oria and I found Kairapowe sitting by a burning clay hearth, moaning occasionally
but surprisingly talkative, apparently pleased to see her nephew. She had become sick
while I was gone and had been delirious off and on the past two nights. She had a high
fever and, from her pain in breathing, probably pneumonia. I had a long-standing affec-
tion for Kairapowe, as early on she had shown me how to wash sago; it was an amusing
encounter, she with no Tok Pisin and me with no Namia. Following Betty’s regime, I gave
her three quinine and four sulpha tablets. Oria said that both Mangko and Klowi had
treated her earlier that day; an aokwae had broken some of her chest bones causing the
pain and they had fastened them back together.
Later that evening, I told Oria and Nauwen that in two weeks I would be moving out
of the village to Lumi in preparation for returning home with my family. What I didn’t
know then was that they would be the two most stressful weeks of the fieldtrip. As I
predicted, they both took my announcement with matter-of-fact calmness. New Guinea
men have a wonderful way of taking events—excepting death—in stride. Nauwen and
Oria did express regrets that I was leaving and I thought and hoped it had to do with me
as a person, not just what I gave to people. With the Wape, I sometimes felt that I was
just a commodity dispensing commodities and was judged by the amount I was dispens-
ing. But in Wakau I had felt real warmth from the people, even from the women with
whom I couldn’t communicate verbally, and that I was appreciated as a fellow human—
different to be sure, but not just as a rich white man.
The following day Kairapowe took more sulpha tablets and, when I stopped by that
evening, she was lying down with Ukai sitting near her; visiting her were Oria’s family,
Yaope and his wife, and Nakwane’s wife Auwe. Also present was a young daughter of
Mowal’s dead older brother who had come from Bapei to live with Ukai and Kairapowe.
It was a happy setting with casual visiting and laughter. Regarding Kairapowe, Oria said
that she was much better now, that her heartbeat was slower and, if I had been gone two
weeks, she would have died; but I still found her feverish. Ukai, in his limited Tok Pisin,
spoke to me twice. He told me how he had built the house by himself and that there was
a bit left of the canned fish I’d given Kairapowe. She had requested the fish because of a
pork taboo; it was thought to be lethal for the sick.1 Yaope said he was sorry I was leaving

1. While the Lujere denied pork to the sick, Li Puma observed that for the Maring in the
mountains behind Madang, “feeding ritual pork to the sick may add quality protein to their
diet at a critical time, helping to replace nutrients and to assist the body’s natural defenses”
(2001: 324).

480
 Death in Wakau

so soon, adding jokingly that some of the men alleged that they would then return to the
bush and go wild. The day before Oria had told me that when I left he would ‘go long bus’
[go into the bush for a long time] for seven months, then that day he said that when I left
he and Nauwen would go to Wewak.
The following Wednesday was a pivotal day as the pneumonia cases increased; in my
field notes it became “The Day of the Big Sick.” The day’s only good news was that just
before seven a.m. a thumping sound from someone striking the keel of a forest tree sig-
naled that a pig had been killed. Later Ino’s wife arrived to see Kairapowe, bringing the
news that Nimo had killed a pig from a blind by a felled sago palm. He also put an arrow
into another pig, but being alone and at night, did not follow it. Three Tsila villagers
stopped briefly en route home after being sent by the ‘kiap’ to Litebagi’s aid post to cure
their tropical ulcers.
Late morning, I went up to Ukai’s house to see Kairapowe but found her in Ukai’s
half-finished new house sitting in a dark corner and Ukai on the narrow veranda. She was
still feverish with labored breathing and a haunting wild look in her eyes that distressed
me. The sulpha that usually changes the progress of pneumonia was not being effective,
so I returned home for some tetracycline from my dwindling supply. While I was helping
Kairapowe, Ukai said he had become sick the previous night and it was obvious that he
too had pneumonia so I began him with sulpha tablets and aspirin.
I was still at Ukai’s house when three Gwidami men transported Eine, too sick to
walk, to Wakau on a trapeze-type bar strapped to their back that they carried in turn. He
had gone to them three days previously where two imoulu had treated him. His carriers
had literally dumped him on the upper iron’s veranda and then gone inside. His family
followed a short time later. I stopped to see him and his eyes were haunted as if he were
dying. His breathing was the most labored I had ever seen and he could not really talk, al-
though he was rational. It was the first time I had seen him since he left the village weeks
earlier, angry with Oria and bitter towards me because I did not give him everything he
asked for. Oria and Nauwen finally went up to see him midafternoon, but it was no great
reunion. Oria still was aggravated by the advantage Eine had taken of their kinship tie
and said he couldn’t feel that sorry for him. Once home for lunch, I sent up some tetra-
cycline for him to take, but when I went to the iron around 4:00 p.m., I learned he could
not swallow them. One of the men who had carried him in said something was wrong
with his throat; they had stopped once to give him some water but he couldn’t swallow it.
And they wouldn’t carry him to the aid post. Earlier that day Oria said they never carry
anyone to the aid post; if they don’t get well in the village, they die. I recalled when his
wife Pourame was so sick and he had no intentions of carrying her to the aid post; and his
father, who was related to the aid post orderly Litabagi whose penicillin might have saved
him, died of dysentery in Wakau only months before my arrival in the village.
Just before four o’clock, Klene of Mauwi trudged into the village with his family from
their camp across the Sand River. Too sick to climb the hill home, they settled at Akami’s
house where Eine’s family also was staying. Klene lay on his back, a small belt strapped
around his chest, with the same vacant stare as Eine. He too had pneumonia and I offered
him medicine but he said through Nakwane—he spoke only Namia—he would wait for
an imoulu to treat him. I heard that Mangko also was sick and had been in bed all day
with back pains but when I looked in the lower iron, he was asleep. Nakwane, seeing my
red tetracycline capsules for Eine, told his wife that they were to replace blood. What a

481
 A Witch’s Hand

good example of how we humans tend to process the unknown; it was a hypothesis but
stated as a fact. Nakwane also had some physical complaints but nothing serious so I gave
him two aspirin, joking that I had become Wakau’s personal medical assistant. Nauwen
stated he had diarrhea so I gave him some Lomotil. Kaiera and Samaun were also sick but
not with pneumonia. The sun was fast sinking out of sight when Alomiaiya approached
me; Mangko was now very sick and had sent him to me for some medicine. It seemed
that everyone was falling apart and I, fatefully, had become a central player in the thera-
peutic systems I had come to study.
I went down to the lower iron and Mangko came out from under his mosquito net,
one of the few in Wakau. His body was burning and his eyes glazed; he was seriously sick.
I gave him Betty’s treatment regime. He said it was only this morning that he became ill;
however, I thought he had looked sick the day before when he went to the base camp to
pick up my kerosene, but I said nothing and neither did he.
It was a beautiful, bright, moon-lit night when around eight o’clock I began my medi-
cal rounds. Mangko was sweating profusely and had strong chest pains. If not better by
the next day, I would start him on tetracycline. I found Ukai and Kairapowe now sleeping
at Akami’s house and they were about the same. Akami greeted me outside; he had not
been inside all day because he didn’t want to get their sickness. Although the diagnosis
of a serious sickness is usually explicitly related to the occult, the Lujere also have an
amorphous sense of sickness as contagious even to the extent that, occasionally, a village
must be abandoned. Litabagi’s sulpha was almost gone and with so many sick—there
were five with pneumonia—I started publicizing that someone needed to go to the aid
post for more.
In the upper iron, Eine seemed a bit better in spite of still being unable to swallow
any medicine; his face was expressionless when he tried to talk. He said he had been
‘long long’ three successive nights in Mokodami and again last night was unable to sleep
and wandered around. He believed it was a ‘sanguma’ man who had made him sick and
named him but his speech, never clear to my ear, was now even more garbled. He also was
upset because an imoulu who had treated his daughter Emani in Mokadami performed
the treatment too hurriedly as dark was settling in. When he looked for him the next day
to finish the treatment, he had left the village. Now he wanted Klowi to return from his
bush camp to treat her. I saw Emani earlier and, although she might not have felt well,
she wasn’t seriously sick. Eine was a solicitous father, but it was observable that he wasn’t
well liked; no one was attending him or visiting him, not even his wife.
Thursday morning at seven forty-five I was at Akami’s house and saw Kairapowe
chucking my precious tetracycline through the limbum floor. I was both irritated and
surprised as she had taken her meds eagerly before. But I already knew that as soon as a
villager feels better, they stop taking medicine. Their thinking is the same when seeing a
curer; if you felt a lot better after seeing one imoulu, why would you pay to visit another
one? It wouldn’t make sense. They have the additional judgment that too much medicine
makes you sick. Exasperated by Kairapowe’s behavior, I lectured her briefly that medicine
was money and you don’t throw it away, but I knew right then that my days of giving
medical assistance were probably over. Rather than get caught up with negative emotions
towards the villagers’ slack attitude to Western medicine, I abandoned my nursing role, a
role I had reluctantly assumed only when I saw people deathly sick with pneumonia. If
villagers no longer wanted my medicine that was their right, just as villagers didn’t have

482
 Death in Wakau

to visit the aid post when sick. It was also clear by now that no one was going to fetch
more sulpha from Litabagi.
Ukai seemed about the same, coughing but no big fever. He was my last pneumonia
patient; I offered him his sulpha and he took it but Nauwen later asked me not to give
him medicine because his aunt and uncle would just throw it away. Samaun and Kaiera
looked fine and I gave them their last medications, then looked in on Eine. Although he
still had trouble swallowing, his skin was cooler and he seemed over the worst, apparently
cured by his own strong immune system. Mangko must have felt better as he had gone
with Alomiaiya across the Sand River to be treated by Klowi at his camp. What with
my retirement from giving medical assistance and Mangko gone, Wakau still had one
active curer in the village: Poke, who was such an unlikely nakwolu I often forgot he was
one, had done a lot of curing the past few days including of Eine, Ukai, Kairapowe, and
Mangko.
Having done what I could with what I had for Wakau’s five pneumonia cases, I tried
to turn my attention elsewhere. Although I had a lot to do, it wasn’t easy. It haunted me
that the aid post had plenty of penicillin and sulpha if a person were motivated to go
there for treatment, thus making it ridiculous for any adult but the truly weak and aged
to die in Wakau. However, the villagers I knew, and that you have come to know, lived in
another logical world with different ideas about sickness in terms of etiology, diagnosis,
and treatment. Although I knew this better than anyone, it was still a stretch to accept
that my medical help to Wakau’s pneumonia victims was useful only up to a firm cul-
tural line, really more of a cultural wall, they could not venture over. Even then, it was
wrenching to accept the cold reality that they were unwittingly trading cultural fealty for
a potential early death.
With my time in Wakau limited now to days and not weeks, I had a lot to accomplish.
I still had several professional obligations to complete; most important was a collection of
Lujere artifacts I had promised to Margaret Mead for the American Museum of Natural
History in New York where she was a curator. I purposely had left this to my last days
in the field as, once the word goes out that you are now a buyer of traditional items, your
days can be obsessed with locals coming from everywhere to sell things. This had been a
huge task when leaving the Wape but I knew the Lujere culture was not as rich in tra-
ditional material culture so the task would be, as I predicted, not as onerous. I also had a
commitment to Alan Lomax’s Cantometric Project for tapes of the Namia language and
I had yet to adequately measure and map the village, not to mention the gradual breaking
down of my camp and packing of supplies and equipment for transshipment by sea back
to the States. My two treasured mosquito-proof tents, however, would be left in Wewak
for colleagues Rhoda Metraux and Nancy McDowell to collect for planned Sepik River
anthropological fieldtrips. Last, but not least, carriers had to be enlisted for transporting
my cargo to the base camp but, with so many men happily away in their hunting camps,
Oria was concerned, as was I.
Thursday morning after making my decision to retire from active doctoring, I re-
turned home, took some village footage with the Bolex, and then when Kori of Mauwi
brought me a few interesting old artifacts to buy, the day mushroomed to one of buying
and cataloguing. It was also a day of learning, as I was seeing and asking questions about
some traditional articles for the first time. Fortunately, there weren’t the masses of things
thrust at me as in Taute. It was busy but manageable—they had none of the pottery and

483
 A Witch’s Hand

wooden pieces the Wape make—and my prices seemed fair, as there was no haggling. The
villagers were intrigued with my new role as artifact collector and enjoyed the excitement
that a market atmosphere always generated. I did hear that Kairapowe was not doing well
and Eine sent someone saying he wanted me to give him a blanket and some canned fish.
He obviously had recovered; it was his same old annoying demanding behavior. While
asking for something from a rich white man was a common occurrence in New Guinea,
among the Lujere it was done with a sense of humor. If the answer were no, the response
was a smile or a laugh and, ‘Em i orit, mi traim tasol!’ (“That’s ok, I just thought I’d ask!”).
There is no term in Namia, Tok Pisin, or even English for Eine’s personality type, but the
Yiddish term “shnorrer” nicely nails it.2

A Hunting Camp Visit

The visit to Klowi’s hunting camp described in chapter 10 occurred just two days after
Wakau’s “Day of the Big Sick.” As indicated, Mangko and Ai’ire were there, both ill.
There was talk that there might be a curing festival for Ai’ire, Eine, and Kairapowe, and
Ai’ire told me he still wanted to go to the Wewak hospital as neither the aid post orderly
nor the imoulu had cured him. I told him I had learned that the mission had almost com-
pleted plans for that to happen. He also said that the imoulu were removing little snakes
from his stomach, but the problem was that they kept coming back! There was a lot of
talking and commotion in the house and Mangko, obviously not well, moved out onto
the quieter veranda. Sago and cooked green leaves were served to us guests and, after
more visiting, some of us including Oria, Nauwen, and Samaun got up to leave. Outside
we met Klowi just arriving with a big Victoria crowned pigeon that, as described earlier,
he generously gave to me.
On our way home, I was sloshing through a swamp with precarious footing and con-
centrating on not falling when a sharp twig suddenly jammed into my ear and I cried,
“Ouch!” Then I heard Samaun who was following me giggle. I realized it was the first
time I had used that term with the Lujere, as I had learned and always used their term
for sudden pain or being startled, “Aii!” Nauwen ahead of me was also giggling and, on
my questioning, they said what made my term funny was that it was the nasalized cry of
a baby crocodile and that, of course, made me laugh too.
We had crossed the Sand River when Oria heard the cry of a bird they called a ‘mok
mok’ and announced that it meant a big sickness was coming. My jaundiced thought was
that it already was here. Superstition or not, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear just then. My
other concern, fast becoming an obsession, was that in spite of the rare chance for local
men to earn money, I did not have the carriers to transport my cargo to the base camp.
Akami said it was because they were sorry that I was leaving and that they wanted me to
stay until my house fell down indicating, I guess, if my cargo stayed, I would have to stay
too. As I discussed the cargo carrying dilemma with Oria that evening his suggestion was
to apply economic sanctions: “If you don’t carry cargo, Bill won’t buy any of your artifacts!”
Creative, yes, but I needed both carriers and artifacts.

2. For more on “shnorrer” with some amusing usage, see Rosten (1970: 364-7).

484
 Death in Wakau

A Graveyard Ritual

Saturday morning Oria and I, with the help of some boys, began measuring the village
and houses with my long tape for an eventual proper village map more to scale; in two
hours we were finished and I began buying artifacts from waiting villagers. My house
was adjacent to the cemetery and in the afternoon Oria reported that Ukai’s ‘sot win’ (or
pneumonia) was worse and that he needed to dig up some of the dirt atop his father’s
nearby grave, which he proceeded to do (see fig. 58). His father was the village’s last
adult death, and his hunting bow and arrows set atop his grassy grave—the only indi-
cation this area was a grave yard—I easily viewed from my dining tent. He explained
that Ukai held his brother Limeritjo in his arms as he died and the sweat and dirt of
his dying brother got on Ukai’s skin and, as Limeritjo’s body was still hot in its grave,
this heat was going to Ukai’s heart, giving him ‘sot win’ and making his heart beat too
fast. Opening the earth atop the grave would allow the heat to escape and Ukai would
be able to breath easily. Also, the rain could now go down through the opened ground
to cool his father.
When I saw Ukai on Akamai’s veranda later in the morning as Oria and I measured
the village, I hesitated to offer him medicine but when I did, he tacitly agreed. I didn’t
get back to him immediately but got sidetracked buying artifacts villagers were bring-
ing to Wakau for me to buy. Sometime after lunch I gave Nauwen four sulpha and two
aspirin for Ukai as Nauwen was leaving to carry Kairapowe to Mari’s house. There were
aokwae in Akamai’s house who were making the couple sick, although now it was Ukai,
not Kairapowe, who was sickest. Nauwen then went to bathe, but at 5:15 p.m., I saw
Kwoien and learned that Ukai did not want the medicine. On further questioning he
said ‘nek i pas,’ that Ukai had trouble swallowing. A little after six o’clock Kworu walked
fast past my ‘ofis’ looking serious and said he was going to Klowi’s camp across the Sand
River to get him to treat Ukai. Then Poke went by with his bow and arrows, obviously
accompanying him. Later Nauwen also told me that Ukai declined the medicine. This
was disheartening but not surprising. Once I had shown my concern and tried to help
but was declined, I was still learning to let it go, regardless of how dangerously misguided
I felt they were.
Yet a bit after 6:00 p.m., when Oria and I started for the upper iron where Ukai was,
I carried some tetracycline, just in case. While there I learned that Ukai oddly had been
left alone at Akami’s house, had gone out to defecate and then, wanting company, had
walked naked across to the iron where, too sick to climb the ladder, they pulled him up
onto the veranda where he now lay. On our way we met Aria whose dire remark was, “He
won’t get up again.”

The Death of Ukai

We found him naked on the iron’s veranda, lying in Kwoien’s lap, conscious but with
his eyes partially closed. Soukene and her baby were next to him and she occasionally,
gently nudged him, trying to keep him from slipping into a coma. Ukai’s testicles were
very painful and he asked Kwoien to bind them, which he did with thin tree bark as
he explained his actions to me. Then Ukai took the thin bark and bound his penis to
his testicles. Oria and K____ were also outside, as were two women who began to wail

485
 A Witch’s Hand

but faintly. However, it stimulated Kwoien and Oria to carry Ukai inside and for me
to dash home for the notebook I had stupidly forgotten. I momentarily thought about
also getting my Uher tape recorder but somehow, just then, it seemed too crass. When I
returned, I saw Kairapowe, observably sick, sitting stoically inside. Kaiera and Samaun,
whose home it was, were also inside, Kaiera sitting on his bed and Samaun soundly
asleep, maybe dreaming about a new young and appealing wife preparing his evening
meal. Ukai asked for water to be poured on his testicles, which Kwoien did, but the pain
was not abated. A bit later K____ brought a glowing firebrand to heat his testicles but
that also did not ease the pain. It was now dark both inside and outside of the iron but
my two lanterns, one I brought and the other I had asked K____ to fetch from Nauwen,
gave a soft glow of light with big looming shadows. Ukai asked for Kairapowe’s hand
and gently held it, but he was restless. Aria, who had moved to the old iron because he
was afraid of ‘sanguma’ in this one, had come in and was sitting nearby. Ukai sat up sud-
denly, then lay back down and shouted, “Oh, Oh!” Aria leaned towards me, saying it was
the pain from his testicles. Then he told me a story I didn’t really follow about sleeping
alone in the bush for two nights. He also said that in the afternoon Mowal had put
mud on Kairapowe’s chest and also a circle of mud around Ukai’s nipples, both healing
rituals.3
Our little group was just inside the front entrance of the nearly empty iron and outside,
the village itself was almost as empty of life. Kwoien and Ukai were in the middle of the
‘limbum’ floor between two vacant beds and their hearths on opposite sides of the room.
Aria and I sat against the wall just left of the entrance and Kairapowe was up nearer her
husband. She remained silent and finally lay down. Once Ukai exclaimed, “aokwae!” but it
was the mosquitoes, legions of them—not aokwae—that were unmercifully attacking us,
in spite of the smoldering fires Kaiera had made in several of the hearths. At 7:10 p.m.,
Kwoien got up and Oria took his place supporting Ukai and, at my suggestion by point-
ing to the tetracycline in my hand, Oria asked him if he wanted medicine, then K____
also asked him, but he softly replied, ‘Maski,’ “Never mind,” a polite Tok Pisin “No,” ap-
parently aware I was there too.
I went home for a shower and some food as it looked like a long night’s vigil. Re-
freshed by my bucket-shower, I had some rum and then the delectable bird that Klowi
had given me. Nauwen had cooked it in boiling water and made some brown rice grown
in the Nuku area east of Lumi. Occasionally we could hear Ukai call out in pain. Pourame
and her children were at home across the way joined by a young woman friend, as Oria
would sleep at the iron. Oria had asked for his flashlight so Pourame, who wanted to see
Ukai, took it to him and then returned.
Shortly after nine, Nauwen and I went up to the iron where he joined Oria, Kwoien,
and the youth Kairapowe in attending to Ukai. Samaun and Kaiera were still there and so
was K____. Kwoien and Nauwen sat down together, both supporting Ukai; Kairapowe,
seeking intimacy with her husband, lay her thin legs astride his. I joined Kaiera and
K____ who said Ukai had drunk water twice while I was gone. (Either Ukai or Kwoien
earlier had dissembled regarding his inability to swallow.) A bit later he drank again.
K____ told me a rather rambling story about when he was sick at Boram; he had been

3. These were similar, but only grossly, to the curing rituals done at the Mokadami aewal wowi
curing festival, reported in in the “Concluding Rituals” of chapter 15.

486
 Death in Wakau

given some tablets by someone he worked for, took four of them, and was cured. He saved
the rest and gave them to his children when sick and they recovered every time! I was
impressed how this infamous traditional curer gave modern medicine to his children and
had encouraged Ukai to take some too.
Kairapowe had changed her position to sitting next to Ukai, whose breathing now
was very heavy. The rain had started soon after Nauwen and I came to the iron but by
now it was a raging storm with flashing lighting and roaring thunder. Ukai, eyes closed,
remained in Kwoien’s and Nauwen’s enfolding arms while K____’s flashlight was focused
on his heavily breathing torso. It was beautiful, and deeply human, the way this dying
person was so intimately held within a comforting clasp. There were two deep breaths,
then nothing, just the claps of thunder and flashes of lightening.
Kwoien was the first to wail, crying out as he rubbed Ukai’s body then Kairapowe,
grasping his left leg, also began but she was so sick, there was scarcely a sound. It was
ten o’clock, Ukai lay dead, and the storm continued to rage. The men’s wailing grew in
intensity and the iron shook with sorrow, even as the storm quieted and began to move
on. Their wailing was very private and self-absorbed, each seemed lost in a raptur-
ous world of grief. Oria’s cry was a profound tenor and K____’s a high rich baritone,
but Nauwen’s a meager murmur, and Kaiera did not cry at all; it was indicative of the
two older men’s commitment to their culture and, despite different personalities, bold
self-confidence.
When the rain slackened, I started home to get the Uher to record the wailing. The
black village seemed lifeless but as I passed Mari’s house, I heard gentle wailing that was
hauntingly beautiful. Pourame, her house shut tight, had heard Oria’s wailing announcing
Ukai’s death and the two women were quietly lamenting his demise. When I started back
the strap to the Uher came unhooked and it fell heavily to the ground. As I fixed it the
rain began again so I gave my lantern to Aria, who had tagged along and didn’t wail, to
take to the iron and I returned home and recorded from there; I could hear Oria’s voice,
loud and clear. But the rain got heavier and louder making recording impossible, so at a
bit before midnight I went to bed. It was still April Fool’s Day; just two years ago we had
left our Vermont home for New Guinea.
I slept fitfully, something unusual for me, and the wailing was so compelling that I
got up twice in the night to record it. I was surprised to see on my calendar that it was
Easter Sunday. At six-thirty Nauwen arrived, undoubtedly relieved to be away from the
mourning and I, after some hot tea, walked over the rain-soaked earth up to the iron.
Eine was sitting under the house, his eyes listless and his body emaciated, but without
fever. He almost demanded that I give him a blanket. In the iron, Ukai’s body lay on the
floor with Kairapowe’s legs astride his; exhausted and skirt less as tradition demanded,
she stared trance-like. Sakome sat with her baby across from Kairapowe, wailing quietly,
and sometimes touched Ukai’s arm as she cried. Lujere women wail unobtrusively, it is
the men who are the belters. I noticed Klene in a ‘lap lap’ and Oria wore only his under
pants, having removed his shorts, but no men were naked. There were two other women
by Ukai’s feet, also mourning. I was surprised not to see either Samaun or Kaiera—they
were probably in retreat to the quieter old iron—but I spoke to K____ who was hoarse
from wailing; he had a wonderful voice and, for all his faults, was an impressive man.
K____ told me that a ‘sanguma’ man had killed Ukai and cut his testicles. The bark that
had bound his testicles now lay across his genitals.

487
 A Witch’s Hand

Ukai’s wake

At 7:00 p.m., Kwoien and Oria put ‘limbum’ flower sheaths under Ukai’s body, then
carried him to his own house to continue the mourning. I helped them down the iron’s
ladder then went home for some breakfast. Around nine o’clock, Oria was with me in
my ‘ofis’ and we discussed the events around Ukai’s death. The forty cents I saw on Ukai’s
chest was something about appeasing relatives that had brought him food in the past; a
widow must destroy all her sago tools; only men without small children can do the burial;
the two women mourning by Ukai’s legs were Ino and Klene’s wives; they wanted Klowi
to treat Kairapowe when he arrives; the nakwolu had attacked and killed Ukai when he
went alone to get sugar cane for Kairapowe last Saturday. Most surprising, Oria said
that K____ had stopped curing. His wife was angry with him because he accused her of
infidelity and she now proclaimed that he was a fraud as a curer. Oria also had brought
with him from Ukai’s house a strong old spear that I bought for the New York museum.
Late morning Tsaime arrived from the bush camp and said they had found Warajak
and he was fine. Then Kori, naked, charged out of the upper iron and ran around the
plaza yelling. Tsaime said he had marked Tsetsuwani of Mauwi as Ukai’s killer and was
exclaiming that we should go get him. He explained that Mauwi believed Wakau had
killed Tsetsuwani’s younger brother Poiani before I arrived, and now he and the ‘tultul’
had reciprocated by killing Ukai. It made me aware of how few mysteries, if any, there
were in the Lujere consciousness; sickness and death, for example, was always explain-
able if sometimes contestable. What wasn’t contestable was Homo sapiens’s obsession with
intellectual closure. Kaiera told me that the burial for Ukai would be tomorrow and
the village would grieve again tonight but that mourning a death used to be for several
nights. Nauwen added that they were waiting for Arakwaki and Engwe to arrive before
the burial. Arakwaki told Tsaime he wanted to see me before I left Wakau and all were
expected later that day. I still desperately needed carriers to transport my cargo to the
base camp so told Nauwen privately that when Klowi and Arakwaki arrived, we needed
to have a meeting about the carrier crisis.
The day before, Mowal had gone to Edwaki to get an imoulu to come and treat Ukai.
Midafternoon Mowal and four Edwaki men were reported on the ‘kunai’ approaching
Wakau. Klowi and his wife as well as Meyawali already were back but Klowi and his wife
left almost immediately for a garden to get some bananas. A short while later Engwe,
Nimo and Nakwane arrived and another group were seen on the ‘kunai’ coming to mourn.
Visiting male mourners usually circled Ukai’s house counterclockwise, carrying weapons.
At about 5:00 p.m., Mowal came to me with a short note from Litabagi and a few pills I
didn’t recognize for Kairapowe but no directions regarding their use. The villagers coming
to mourn were, as required, in their shabbiest clothes and one woman was naked. I was
told that sometimes mourners rolled in the dirt or mud to express their grief. During the
day, other than the death, I had been preoccupied with taking my camp apart and organ-
izing trunks and buying artifacts. I had only four days remaining in Wakau. Throughout
the day villagers continued to return, usually wailing as they entered, and at almost 6:00,
Akami and Yaope appeared. Many of the village men had returned but several, including
Aiyuk, Enewan, and Luritsao, were still away. Everyone, however, was expected to return
to mourn Ukai’s death.

488
 Death in Wakau

Early evening, I went up to the iron where a visiting nakwolu named Narape from
Mantopai, the Lujere village far up the Sand River, had stopped. His father’s father had
come from Wakau. Ai’ire hadn’t given up entirely on the nakwolu curing techniques and
had Narape treat him, but I was still buying artifacts and taking my camp apart so did not
stay. After dinner, Nauwen and I went to Ukai’s house where he would spend the night in
mourning. Except for the lanterns Nauwen and I brought, the house, filled with mourn-
ers, was dark. Men and women were wailing and Kori strode around naked as he wailed;
Poke was also naked sitting with his legs astride Ukai’s legs. I sat down towards the back
with Mowal and Wolwar, both genial men, and the wailing gradually died down, but I
heard snippets of conversations all around me and knew I was being discussed. Then Kori,
knowing Nauwen would be mourning, spoke in Tok Pisin about who would stay with me
tonight, that I can’t be left alone, that Samaun and Kworu should sleep in my ‘haus kuk’
tonight, and on and on. Lujere villagers don’t like to be alone at night, but especially not
on a night when a fresh corpse’s horrifying aokwae naki was amok in the village, not to
mention the dozens or hundreds of threatening, long departed aokwae bidami who had
flocked into the village to greet it. I appreciated Kori’s concerns about my safety but I
presumed that the the others were less concerned for my safety from a ravaging ghoul
and more about their own.
From the semi darkness it was impossible to know, other than Kori and Poke, who
might be naked among the seated throng as women were always topless. But there were
many visitors, especially women, in the crowded room to whom I was at best, if known
at all, still an alien white man. Out of the darkness behind me I heard Nauwen’s voice,
unusually brisk, say, ‘Bill, yumi tupela i go nau,’ “Bill, we must go.” I was being dismissed,
expelled, ousted, booted out of Ukai’s wake. My initial response was a weird mixture of
embarrassment and anger, a classic response to a status insult. I gradually stood, said only,
‘Lam em i ken stap’ “The lantern can stay,” and walked to the entrance to join Nauwen
outside.
Nauwen, who disliked confrontational situations, would have been irritated that he
was assigned the task of ousting me from the wake, and just as aware of my irritation
at being sent home. When I asked him why, he initially tried to avoid answering—that
really did irritate me—but I kept my cool. Pressed, he said that the visitors were embar-
rassed to wail in front of me, then added that it was just the women, not the men, as they
had worked away on coastal stations, implying they were more familiar and comfortable
with white men. Then after seeking my assurance that I was not afraid to sleep alone, I
gave him my lantern and he returned inside as I slowly wandered home through the dark
village without benefit of a flashlight, moon, or single star. As I walked along, my anger
intensified at being thrown out; then I became even angrier with myself for not making
a scene. However, by the time I climbed the ladder to my house, reason had gradually
returned. But, had I not been leaving for good in a handful of days, I think my impulse
to express self-righteous umbrage might have prevailed. Back in my own cultural cocoon
with lanterns lit, I had a shot of rum on several precious tiny ice cubes and returned to
organizing and packing for my departure. Throughout the night as I worked, I would now
and then hear the wailing drift towards me from Ukai’s house at the far end of the village.
But by midnight, all was quiet.

489
 A Witch’s Hand

Ukai’s burial

Nauwen arrived early the next morning. Yesterday Oria had been focused on his uncle’s
death, but I was unaware he also had been recruiting carriers as men returned to the
village to mourn Ukai. Then at eight, the last two carriers volunteered. I wrote in my
notebook “WHEW!” The long indecisive nerve-wracking hassle of looking for carriers
was over. My joyful relief was tempered, however, by knowing that only a death made it
happen. It was a cruel irony that the mortality of kindly Ukai was making it possible to
wrap up my work with the Lujere and head for home.
Arakwaki and Nimo had returned in the night and Aiyuk and Enewan entered the
village wailing Ukai’s death even as Engwe, Kworu and Nimo were digging his grave.
Six Mauwi women filed past my house in tattered skirts, wailing but not sobbing as they
headed home. Eating breakfast, I watched the men prepare the gravesite and saw the
brothers Samaun and Meyawali down on the ‘kunai’ going to their garden. By custom
a grave was not usually dug by men of the dead person’s patriclan, but by members of
other village patriclans. For Ukai, it was primarily the men of the lower village Elamoli
patriclan, including Engwe, Nimo, and Klowi. I spent the next hour or so in and around
the gravesite, taking photos and making notes.
The grave was about five feet deep by five feet long and three feet wide. In a sense
it was an earthen tomb, a small underground room where the body was placed off the
ground, an adaptation of their traditional burial scaffold where the body was left to de-
compose in the elements. The difference in the underground tomb was that it eventually
would collapse in on itself and become an ordinary grave. The platform for the body was
laid five or six inches from the bottom, where four poles were inserted in small holes a few
feet apart along the width of the grave. On these were placed ten ‘limbum’ strips running
the length of the grave, on top of which the body would be placed about a foot above the
grave’s floor.
At 11:35 a.m., six men, including the three gravediggers Engwe, Kworu and Nimo,
two men from Mokadami, and Klowi carried Ukai’s body on ‘limbum’ flower sheaths past
my ‘ofis’ to the neighboring cemetery. His body was swollen, his face and genitals were
covered with cloth, and the stench was tangible. Several small boys followed at a short
distance and, once the entourage was at the grave, two young women arrived with ‘lim-
bum’ baskets full of water (fig. 59) for the men to wash the body.
Klowi removed the two cloths and the body, held sitting up, was brushed with gar-
lands of ginger unavoidably removing some skin then washed with the ginger infused
water. Watching from a fair distance were Meyawali, Arakwaki, several children, the wa-
ter carriers who stayed the farthest away, and little Womkau who had joined me as I
moved around taking photos. Children watched as ginger was thrashed in a ‘limbum’ of
water, and Klowi, facing Ukai’s body, stroked it with ginger. Five mourners stood in the
distance on the ‘kunai’path to the village. Just before the remaining ginger infused water
was poured over the body, Oria arrived to observe; then the men together lowered the
body into the grave as the children gathered up close to watch.
Klowi, who had done much of the cleansing, rinsed his hands and Akami arrived with
more ‘limbum’ sheaves to cover the grave. The body, now lowered in place, was covered
with sheaves; then a series of small but strong poles was laid horizontally and lengthways
atop the grave. Finally, several large palm branches were placed lengthwise on the poles

490
 Death in Wakau

Figure 58. Men plan and prepare Ukai’s gravesite.

491
 A Witch’s Hand

Figure 59. Two young women bring water to the gravesite for the men to wash the body.

to be covered with more sheaves that, in turn, were covered with some light dirt, closing
the underground tomb.
By eleven-thirty in the morning, the burial was complete and the participants grad-
ually dispersed. I returned to my house where I continued packing, but was interrupted
by two Mauwi couples wailing and approaching the new grave. I stopped work to
record the restrained blending of their male and female voices. At 1:45 p.m., I was in-
terrupted again when I heard that Mangko had just been carried in from Klowi’s camp
and went to the lower iron to see him. His skin was red hot. He was obviously now
seriously sick and I offered him medicine but he, like Ukai, said, ‘maski.’ I told him if
he changed his mind to send for me, as I would be home packing all afternoon. Feel-
ing both dejected and aggravated by Mangko’s obliviousness to his fatal plight and the
lifesaving medicine I offered, I eagerly returned to packing up my belongings, a won-
derful distraction for frustration. Then something poignant happened that changed my
miserable mood. Wolwar’s wife, just in her G-string, came to Ukai’s grave alone; she
quietly sat down in the grass under the palms in the afternoon heat and began softly
wailing her soothing lament. Later Kunai brought Ukai’s bow and arrows and placed
them atop his grave.
Just at dark, Oria went to the grave with a lighted torch so Ukai’s aokwae could take
the light to the village of the nakwolu who killed him. Litabagi had agreed he would be
up at the base camp where he could see Wakau and follow the path of the aokwae’s fire to
the killer. That night I visited with Oria who, the mourning finished, had moved back to
his wife’s house. He said that Ukai’s body began to swell up last night and that was why

492
 Death in Wakau

Nimo began digging the grave early this morning for the burial. Regarding why I was
banished last night, he said, as Nauwen had earlier, that the visiting women were em-
barrassed by my presence, adding that if I hadn’t been in Wakau, they would have come
wailing naked into the village and put on their G-strings later. Regarding the washing of
the body with water and ginger, there were two reasons. One was to remove the smell of
those who had touched him, to prevent their children from getting sick; the other was so
his dead relatives would welcome him and not be angry at the living for sending him off
unwashed. All of these were old traditions.
The following morning, Tuesday, six carriers arrived as scheduled and I was elated to
send them off with the first three trunks ready to go. I was now in countdown mode to
leave the village. Mourners were still arriving; at eight-thirty, three strange women were
wailing near the grave, and a man with just a sash around his waist carrying his bow and
arrows circled the grave to the left. One of the women came forward, sat lightly on the
grave, patted the surface, then got off. She must have had some tender memories of Ukai,
but I didn’t know their relationship. The man, I learned, was related to Ukai by marriage.
Those were probably my last thoughts about Wakau for the day: the darkness of death
was behind me as I threw myself into the task of dismantling my ‘ofis,’ packing supplies
and gear except for my cameras and the back-up typewriter I never had to use, a light-
weight portable Olivetti.
That night at around eight-thirty I stopped for a break and, over a cup of instant
coffee, enthusiastically scribbled in my notebook with a number of atypical capital
letters,

What a day! Finally got my office tent cleared out and the tent DOWN and packed—
Hallelujah! I’M GOING HOME! Letter from JM [ Joyce] tonight and she is just as
desirous as I to take off. Problems with our reservations but who gives a shit! As long
as we’ve got those air tickets we’ll find a place to sleep.
My fabulous adventure is coming to an end. But I’m not sad—there is an odd sad-
ness about leaving these people who never really knew a white man before—but I’m
ready to go. I need a switch; just like I needed one when I came to NG. But it’s been
two of the greatest years of my life. TOTAL INVOLVEMENT!
That’s thrilling. To be a sensitive instrument recording a culture—what more could
a man like me want to do? Nothing—How lucky I found anthropology.
But—let’s get back to packing—You’re not home yet baby!

There was a final note regarding Ai’ire. This was the day he would fly to Wewak in
the mission plane for a checkup at the government’s regional hospital. The Mission had
made all the arrangements; hopefully the physicians there could successfully diagnose his
abdominal malady and provide a cure. After I left Lumi for home with my family, we had
to stop in Wewak to complete numerous tasks and there I was able to talk with my friend
Dr. Gobius. He told me that the clinicians who examined Ai’ire had found nothing. This
seemed to me inexplicable, but such was the disappointing medical finding after Ai’ire’s
inpatient tests and examination.4

4. See Appendix for a case study of Ai’re’s magical and medical interventions.

493
 A Witch’s Hand

The Death of Kairapowe

The next morning the carriers, smiling and fresh, arrived to carry the second group of
trunks to the base camp. For me it was just another day of endless packing, and I was
still buying artifacts, mostly from visiting mourners. Neither of my two precious Alad-
din lamps was packed, but today one would have to go. Late afternoon I took a break
and went to the lower iron to see Mangko, as I’d had no feedback from him regarding
medicine. He was draped in a towel and sat cross-legged facing the wall. He looked
ghastly. With him were his younger sister Wabe, Klowi with his wife and son Pipia, and
Weyuro. Without asking, I successively handed Mangko four tetracycline and two aspirin
that he swallowed with difficulty. He seemed thankful that I was there. Then Klowi told
me that Kairapowe had just died at Kwoien’s house, that ‘sanguma’ men had killed both
her and Ukai. He added that K____ and Meyawali had treated her but, to my surprise,
called them ‘rabisman’ [a worthless person]. Later I was told that K____ did not treat her
because she was too sick and would die.
Back home I could hear the wailing from Kairapowe’s house and felt both thwarted
and despondent about two such futile deaths. Neither Nauwen nor Oria were with her
when she died; if they were aware she was dying, as they must have been, neither men-
tioned it to me. When I spoke to Nauwen about her death, he seemed oddly cold and
unaffected. I asked him if the mourning would deter my cargo going out and he said it
wouldn’t. I went up to the house briefly but Oria did not go until much later.
In the early evening I gave Mangko more tetracycline and aspirin; already his fever
had receded some. In the interim both Klowi and Meyawali had treated him and Wara-
jak told me they removed a one-inch “spear,” which he saw. Mangko was still in pain,
so gladly took the medicine. K____, Kwoien, and Kori were there and the conversation
was about death and ‘sanguma.’ Arakwaki told me later that he never had heard of a
couple—a husband and wife—being killed like that, almost at once. He added that they,
the nakwolu, would probably keep killing until the entire village was dead. Kwoien said
that Kairapowe’s aokwae had spoken to Sakome and that she was ‘long long’ or disturbed.
When I went up later that night to Kairapowe’s house to record the wailing I saw Sa-
kome and, while some agreed she had been affected, she was not crazed. The dark house
contained mostly women wailing, but I also saw Yaope, Kwoien, K____, and Poke, naked
except for his mourning sash. Nauwen came to mourn, then Oria and his family. Of the
carriers for the morning, only Yaope was committed to mourning and he had found a
replacement. Outside were Klowi with his shotgun, Nimo, and Iwi, all guarding against
Kairapowe’s new reality as a terrifying aokwae naki. I earlier had been told that outside
mourners would come as for Ukai’s wake, but by the time I had finished my recording,
my last in Wakau, and gone home, no mourners had arrived from the neighboring villages
or Iwani hamlets, not even Mauwi except for K____. It made me wonder if it was be-
cause she was a woman or, having mourned two successive nights for her husband Ukai,
with her death only three days later; if it was excessive to mourn all night once again. Or
maybe it was a bit of both. Still, I couldn’t help but feel it must be a kind of status insult
to both Kairapowe and Wakau.
This time I left the wake voluntarily to address the myriad tasks awaiting me at home,
including organizing the trunks to be taken in the morning. Then I wrote a long letter
to Rhoda Metraux citing in detail the supplies and gear I was packing for her return to

494
 Death in Wakau

Tambunum Village on the Sepik, with special details on how to carefully maintain the
kerosene refrigerator that not only had given me a few miniature ice cubes for my nightly
rum on the rocks—sheer luxury—but kept cool the meat and eggs ordered from Wewak.
At seven a.m. I heard Klowi in front of the lower iron giving a yelling lecture con-
demning Mokadami and Aiendami for not coming to mourn Kairapowe’s death and felt
justified for my last night’s feelings of pique. Not a single outside mourner had entered
the village crying since she had died. It was another instance where the action belied
the talk, a familiar occurrence for any fieldworker. Around nine o’clock, Meyawali and a
couple of helpers began digging the grave for her burial and I went into high gear as this
was my last full day in Wakau; tomorrow the final cargo would go to the base camp, then
I, too, would say goodbye.
At one o’clock I watched Meyawali, Mowal, and Poke carrying Kairapowe’s frail body
towards my house and the cemetery. I followed them, and this time a larger group of chil-
dren, nine or ten including a few girls, had come to watch. The only other adult present
was Klowi’s wife, Wawinowaki, who was helping the men prepare Kairapowe’s body for
burial. Once the body, so slight, was washed, it was placed in the grave and covered with
a cloth, then the burial was completed as for her husband.
My last black and white Wakau fieldwork photograph was Mowal placing ‘limbums’
over the palm branches he and Meyawali placed atop Kairapowe’s grave (see fig. 60). I
had yet to make the promised Cantometric recordings for Allen Lomax’s project, so I
turned to that task with Oria and Nauwen’s linguistic help. Afterwards, Oria and I talked
about the funeral customs. The reason they put articles of the dead on the grave is to pla-
cate the deceased and prevent them from becoming angry at the survivors and attacking

Figure 60. Meyawali and Mowal closing Kairapowe’s grave with palm branches.

495
 A Witch’s Hand

them or their children. The women wailed while their husbands circled the grave. The
‘limbum’ palm that I saw cut by Ukai’s house was used in the wood for his grave. For
Kairapowe’s grave a betelnut tree was cut, but any small tree could be used. Wawenowaki
had cut Kairapowe’s waist string so that when her body swelled, it wouldn’t cut into her.
Even after death, the Lujere knew compassion.

Saying Goodbye

Late afternoon, feeling more pensive than sad, I took my final walk through the quiet
and almost empty village. One little boy I knew but not by name looked up at me and
wistfully said, “Oh, Beal!” Once home, I returned to completing and checking off my
diminishing to-do list. At nine o’clock I grabbed a flashlight and went down to the lower
iron to give Mangko his last tetracycline tablets. His fever and chest pains were gone. He
didn’t want them, ‘sik i pinis!,’ “Sickness is cured!” he exclaimed. But Klowi and Arakwaki
were both there and prevailed on him to take them. Back home, I gave gifts to those men
who had made this adventure in Wakau possible, and lastly cleaned the refrigerator and
secured it for transport in the morning. Small but heavy, it would be lashed to two poles
and carried, sedan-chair style.
The next morning, I awakened at eight o’clock, annoyed that I’d overslept an hour with
so much yet to be done. After we dismantled and folded the big Abercrombie and Fitch
“house” tent I’d occupied on the Sepik in 1967, it was a wild morning of final packing. A
light rain was falling. There was an abundance of stuff, stacked, ready, and waiting to be
carried to the base camp but I couldn’t seem to get the cargo moving out. I mused: Why
is it relatively easy to move into a village and always such a royal pain to get the hell out?
By early afternoon everything was ready to go, but we were still waiting for the carriers to
get organized. I was frustrated by just standing around then, so after a promise that they
would bring the cargo today, I suppressed my disgust and anger and took off with Oria
for the base camp. It was a crummy way to leave a village I had come to deeply appreciate
as a welcoming home. Nauwen remained at the empty house to stand guard over the gifts
I had given him for his friendship, hard work, and loyalty.
Once on the trail, striding through the familiar marshes and brooks, I began to calm
down. After experiencing the acute tensions inherent in dismantling and packing up my
camp, finding carriers, the rampant pneumonia, and the tragic and absolutely senseless
deaths of Ukai and Kairapowe, I didn’t realize what a mess I was until the steady tempo
of the trail began to straighten me out. I had learned to love hiking in New Guinea; even
today it takes only a good hike to restore my equanimity when personal events or the
world kicks me off balance. Ray was waiting for me in his big airy house where I began
my Lujere adventure with that alarming wind and rain storm—now seeming years ago—
and we enjoyed a few welcoming beers. I relaxed. What a fantastic relief to be successfully
out of the village! Then, at about five-thirty, the men began arriving, laden down with
every last bit of the cargo. I was thrilled and finally could rejoice with both an emotional
and physical sense of closure on my Wakau fieldwork. As I paid each man, I added a
twist of coveted tobacco as a bonus, then thanked him as we shook hands and smilingly
said goodbye. But it was harder to say goodbye to Oria. Without his help as a resource-
ful teacher, his generous friendship, and fine intelligence, this would have been a very

496
 Death in Wakau

different book—if indeed there could have been a book at all. By six o’clock my Wakau
friends Yaope, Akami, Alomiaiya, Engwe, and Oria wearily started down the mountain
towards home, probably arriving just after dark.
My chartered flights to Lumi were three days hence so I had two days to unwind and
write up data from the patrol reports and other administration records in Ray’s office, and
to learn more from Makau about Magaleri village’s culture and the killing of his father.
Extremely aware of the unpredictable exigencies of life in New Guinea, I had prudently
scheduled the two buffer days as rescheduling a missed charter could take weeks.
On Monday morning, rested by two carefree days, I was on the airstrip with all of
my cargo and eager to go (fig. 61). The MAF Cessna first took two loads to Wewak that
would continue by sea, and then returned to take a final small load, including the Lujere
artifacts and me, to Lumi where I met Joyce, Ned, and Elizabeth to celebrate the end
of my Lujere fieldwork. Joyce already was busy collecting things to be given away while
packing other things to be shipped to America, and our bags for the trip home; whereas I
got busy readying the Wape and Lujere objects for shipment to the museum in New York.

Figure 61. The author with his cargo and two local boys on the Yellow River airstrip awaiting his
MAF chartered plane to Lumi. Photo by Ray Lanaghan.

I actually had one more bit of Lujere fieldwork to complete: to attend Ray’s big ‘sing-
sing’ celebrating the official opening of the Edwaki Base Camp the following Saturday.
He had requested that as many local people of the South Wapei Census Division who
could attend come in traditional dress. When I arrived shortly after lunch in the Fran-
ciscan’s plane with the Lumi patrol officer Bill Swan, his wife Margaret, and baby son
Jim, the airstrip was lined with colorfully decorated local people (the splendid yellow and

497
 A Witch’s Hand

white plume of the lesser bird of paradise was the favored adornment) who thronged the
field. There seemed to be two groups, one with bows and arrows, obviously Lujere men
and women, and the other with spears that someone said were from Magaleri and Yawa
villages, the latter a village far to the east of Magaleri. In the evening the action moved
atop the hill by the base camp buildings and it went all night, making sleep a spotty
difficult option. A very large palm leaf–screened area was the backstage for the Lujere’s
nawowi men who performed in the morning with their flamboyant dancing phalluses. I
had brought color film for both my Leica and small cine camera and took colorful photos
and film of the celebration.
Ray, as he should have been, was delighted with the locals’ turnout and the genuine
success of his planned festivities. After lunch, although the ‘sing-sing’ was still going
strong, my Franciscan plane ride returned to take me to Lumi. Not too surprisingly,
none of my Wakau friends had come to the party thrown by the ‘kiap,’ nor had I seen
anyone from Mauwi among the crowds. After Kairapowe’s burial they had started re-
turning, family by family, to their bush camps to hunt, fish, and make sago. The Iwani
villagers remained, as when I arrived, more aloof than intimate with the base camp’s life.
It seemed improbable that just days before, for month after month, they had been my
only regular companions, but had now, suddenly, physically vanished. Already they lived
only in my memory and in the generous amount of rich and varied research materials
I had collected. Writing this book, however, was mostly an excursion into the Lujere’s
past as I knew them. Reconnecting with my Wakau friends via vivid memories, scrib-
bled notebooks, color and black-and-white photos, tape recordings, films, and most im-
portantly, detailed notes banged out on a mechanical typewriter, night after night, in a
village asleep, was like returning to the Lujere for a long rewarding visit—but without
the jet lag.

Magical versus Medical Curing

In the previous pages you have come to know the Lujere as I came to know them via
their colonial history and my fieldwork among them in 1971–72. One important focus
of my research and this book was curing; in this concluding section, I pull together
some things we know about the different techniques of curing intervention we’ve en-
countered among the five therapeutic modes to which the Lujere had access.5 Discrete
examples of these interventionist techniques appear throughout the text, but are pre-
sented in tabular form in table 10. The Lujere’s three Indigenous therapeutic modes
were home remedies, curing festivals, and treatment by their Indigenous practitioners,
the imoulu. The immediately available, introduced, or Western therapies were aid post
clinics, maternal and child health (MCH) clinics, and Rosemary Ace’s nursing care at
the mission. The following analysis and discussion include the perspective of the Lujere
people, in particular the residents of Wakau, and concludes with my observations on
the relationship between the Lujere’s Indigenous (magical) and introduced (medical)
therapeutic systems.

5. This section is based in part on an earlier paper, Mitchell (1975).

498
 Death in Wakau

Curing Modes and Techniques

The major types of healing or curing interventionist techniques that were available to the
Lujere are briefly identified as follows:6

1. Medicinal: introduction of materia medica into or on the patient’s body, such as pills,
injections, inhalations, ear and nose drops, ointments, poultices, nettles, and ginger.
2. Surgical: cutting into the patient’s body, for example, lancing, bloodletting, amputa-
tion, and suturing.
3. Physical: manipulation of the patient’s body, through massage and/or grappling to
remove objects, mending bones, and applying tourniquets.
4. Ritual: appeal to a supernatural agent, for example, aokwae, wowi, and God, via pat-
terned acts of exorcism and prayer.
5. Avoidance: abstaining or avoiding certain foods, substances, organisms, or places.

Table 10. Variability in Lujere curing modes and techniques, 1971–72

Lujere curing mode Western curing mode

Curing Home Curing MCH
techniques remedies Imoulu festivals Aid posts clinics
Medicinal X X X
Surgical X X X
Physical X X X X
Ritual X X
Avoidance X X X

Table 10 shows the different patterns of curing techniques according to the thera-
peutic modes available to Lujere villagers. The therapies with the most similar profiles
are Lujere home remedies, aid posts, and MCH clinics. All three employ a wide variety
of healing techniques, except that the Western therapies, grounded as they are in ex-
perimentation and clinical empiricism, exclude ritual techniques, whereas certain Lujere
home remedies consist of private ritual treatments in which a spirit (an aokwae or wowi),
is invoked and asked to depart the afflicted person’s body. And, just as the Lujere’s curing
festivals use only ritual techniques to heal, imoulu use only physical techniques. Imoulu,
via physical techniques on the patient’s body, are believed able to remove lethal objects
intruded into a patient by other witches or spirits.
Also of interest is the fact that Lujere home remedies and curing festivals were per-
formed by ordinary villagers; there was no apprenticeship to learn the techniques as re-
quired for imoulu, aid post orderlies, and MCH nurses, each a trained professional. Of
the three kinds of professionals, it was the imoulu, as explained earlier in this chapter,
who enjoyed the greatest prestige in terms of villagers’ faith in their diagnostic skill and
treatment. As in many societies, it is not technical versatility but diagnostic skill that is

6. I am indebted to Rena Gropper’s classification (1967) for inspiring mine.

499
 A Witch’s Hand

ultimately valued. Finally, though lacking reliable counts, my observations on the usage of
the five therapeutic modes suggested that home remedies, imoulu treatments, and the aid
post were used most frequently and in that order. Just as we do not feel a pressing need
for a definitive diagnosis for every sore muscle, diarrhea attack, or headache, neither did
the Lujere. They treated themselves much as we do, perhaps with rest or a remedy learned
from their parents; or they went to the aid post because they knew the orderly had medi-
cine that could, for example, heal an ulcerating sore or eradicate a feverish headache. As
already emphasized, however, it was usually only ambulatory patients who visited the
aid post, possibly a girl with a badly abscessed hand, a man with recurrent diarrhea, or a
mother who could easily carry her sick baby. As we saw in the pneumonia cases of Ukai
and Kairapowe, the reason that the severely sick, at least from Wakau, were not carried
to the aid post was because the orderly was not considered an appropriate therapist for a
critically ill person.
Remembering that the MCH clinics made occasional village patrols focusing on
mothers and their babies, the aid post stood alone among the available therapies with
ready access to powerful antibiotic and malaria drugs to treat illnesses in patients of all
ages. But the germ theory of disease (i.e., microorganisms) that the orderly Litabagi
had learned and on which his treatments were based was alien to Lujere culture and ir-
relevant to Lujere beliefs about the violent nakwolu, aokwae, and wowi who were ready
and eager to cause lethal sicknesses. Although Litabagi was valued as a dispenser of free
Western medicines that were often considered very helpful in curing or at least relieving
the symptoms of minor illnesses, if not the cause of a major one, when a loved one’s life
was endangered by sickness, the family turned to a proven expert, an imoulu—not an aid
post orderly—to provide a sensible and definitive diagnosis in Lujere cultural terms to
eradicate the noxious agent.
Western and Lujere therapies also differed in the frequency of treatment for serious
illnesses. According to Lujere belief, if one received the correct diagnosis and treatment,
then one treatment was all that was needed. The exception I’ve observed is that when two
curers were readily available, they both might be utilized. But the more general principle
was, if the patient didn’t improve after an initial treatment by an imoulu, the latter might
modify his treatment, or the patient might seek out another imoulu. Thus, K____, having
failed to cure Ai’ire in the daytime, told him he would try to treat him at night, which he
did, but still unsuccessfully. Or, again focusing on Ai’ire, he was treated successfully when
“little snakes” were removed from his stomach, only to have others reappear, necessitating
further treatments. But treatment with Western medicines like antibiotics may involve
taking pills several times a day and over a successive number of days. Obviously, such an
attenuated approach to treatment does not inspire local confidence in the prowess of the
practitioners of Western medicine.
Linked to the Lujere belief that any truly effective treatment for eradicating the cause
of a serious sickness should be a single one was the belief that, although Western medi-
cines may at times be dramatically helpful, they are potentially lethal as well; swallow-
ing too many pills or capsules could destroy the inner body. As we saw in my doctoring
efforts towards the end of my fieldwork, as soon as patients began to feel better, further
medicine was tragically refused. Mangko was the exception when two important senior
men, Klowi and Arakwaki, insisted that he continue the tetracycline after he felt he was
cured.

500
 Death in Wakau

This study of the Lujere was made in the twilight of the colonial era, when the so-
ciety was still in vassalage to Australia. Thus, it is instructive to review the relationship
of the Lujere Indigenous and Western-introduced curing systems at this point in time
to provide a baseline for future studies on how a society’s therapeutic systems change.
In 1971–72, the Lujere’s cultural contact situation was one of mutual autonomy of
the Indigenous and introduced curing systems; each had remained inviolate. Neither
had been altered noticeably by contact with the other, as each continued to follow its
own rationale and treatment schema as conceived by the originating culture. Only in
the person of Litabagi, the aid post orderly, were both therapeutic systems—the Lu-
jere magical one and the Western medical one—enacted. Nor had the Wakau villagers
innovated any alternative therapies based on cultural syncretism as described for the
Manus of Papua New Guinea (T. Schwartz, 1962; L. R. Schwartz 1969). There, Chris-
tian cosmology and moral concepts about the good and the bad had extensively influ-
enced therapeutic beliefs and practices in a succession of cults and the Paliau political
movement.

The Lujere Separation of Local and Introduced Curing Systems

Some of the factors contributing to the persisting cognitive and structural separateness
of the Lujere Indigenous and Western-introduced curing systems have been alluded to,
but let me summarize them here. Marked change in any group’s Indigenous curing sys-
tem through cultural contact is often slow to transpire. Concepts and beliefs about sick-
ness and its treatment are learned at an early age through intense experiences of sickness
and suffering, and these fears and hopes of childhood imprint the personality, inhibiting
change. More directly relevant, although the Lujere had been under the direct politi-
cal influence of Westerners since the 1930s, actual intercultural contact had been very
sporadic and slight. The Lujere were a small and scattered population, geographically
isolated mostly off the Sepik River in inhospitable and economically destitute swamps, a
society of zero interest to Western entrepreneurs once exotically feathered hats went out
of vogue. Before the establishment of the Christian Brethren mission and the more re-
cent Public Health Service’s aid posts, the only contact with Western medicine occurred
every year or so, when a government patrol including a health officer or medical orderly
set off from Lumi to visit the distant Yellow River villages. Then sores were dressed, in-
jections given, and an occasional order given to take a child to Lumi for treatment. But
the patrols made little impact on local healing techniques and health practices, beyond
the obligatory burial of the dead. The mandated latrines were still rarely used during my
stay.
Similarly, the influence of Christian teaching had been culturally insignificant in the
western Lujere villages I knew best, so that basic ideas about life, sickness, death, and
a person’s relationships to others remained basically unaltered. One or two missionary
couples, however ardent their faith and energetic their effort, can have only limited influ-
ence on a widely dispersed population of thousands who, for much of the year, abandon
their villages for scattered family hunting camps. Another argument, not pursued here, is
that the relative simplicity of Lujere culture itself has a structural and cognitive resiliency
that tends to ignore or minimize the threatening dissonances that occur when radically
divergent cultures meet.

501
 A Witch’s Hand

‘Sanguma’: Some Final Thoughts

When I had finished my fieldwork with the Wape in 1971, it was my curiosity about
the terrors of ‘sanguma’ and its fearsome male practitioners that had lured me down
to the Yellow River swampland. I wasn’t disappointed. The nakwolu and their infamous
magical ‘sanguma’ murders were a challenging and fascinating topic to study. However,
these secret ‘sanguma’ murders—according to villagers they accounted for almost all adult
deaths—eventually mostly evaporated into air as magical scenarios unsubstantiated by
facts grounded in reality. Examining the entire Sepik area, I could only locate a few actu-
ally documented killings by ‘sanguma’ men, and those that I did, like K____ and his two
accomplices, could not magically revive their physically slain victims. There was no magic;
they were simply murderers, a fact recognized by the territory’s Supreme Court when it
initially sentenced them to death for their crimes.
As for the ritual scenario of a ‘sanguma’ man’s magical murder—killing the victim,
cutting the flesh to remove tissue or organs and magically sealing the wounds without
scarring, then returning the dead victim to life and sending him or her home without
memory of the attack for an eventual, final death—these procedures were all illusory,
little more than fantasized heinous acts. In studying the Lujere, my private approach to
their occult practices and beliefs was as a scientist; thus I couldn’t accept their unseen and
unsubstantiated supernatural phenomena as tangible or real, but instead as demonstrable
features of the Lujere imagination. If you are similarly negatively disposed towards un-
documented problems of evidence, good luck in discounting ‘sanguma’ as a reality with-
out also calling your own supernatural beliefs into question.
What I did discover about the Lujere’s nakwolu that was both culturally and ontologi-
cally grounded was the role of the imoulu as the society’s principal curer. As dedicated
therapists wielding white magic to pull mostly unseen deadly objects from their patients’
bodies, I found them compelling to study and a unique part of their society. Probably
for centuries, the imoulu had been the principal source for the relief of suffering caused
by sickness. But as their curing was anchored in magic, it was as unreal as their alleged
nakwolu killings, thus medically incapable of curing physical sickness. With the coming
of the aid post and the modern availability of powerful antibiotics and drugs that could
eradicate death-dealing sicknesses, the imoulu had become a part of the past no longer
crucial. But cultural icons as affectively formidable as the Lujere’s nakwolu cum imoulu
don’t disappear overnight. In the meantime, when serious sickness threatens life, many
Lujere will continue to find explanatory comfort in their ancient beliefs—beliefs that
promise surcease from suffering by the extraordinary powers of a witch’s hand.

502
appendix

Ai’ire’s Chronic Abdominal Illness

A Case-Study Log of Magical and Medical Interventions

Ai’ire battled abdominal distress during my stay in Wakau and I followed as best I could
his use of therapies that were readily available to him: the aid post clinic in Yegerape;
Indigenous curers, that is, the imoulu; and curing festivals. Of these, he availed himself
only of the first two. I have no record of self-applied “home” remedies because I heard of
none. While there were rumors of a curing festival for Ai’ire, it never materialized. The
following is a chronological log account of Ai’ire’s recourse to diagnosis and/or treatment
based on the incomplete and intermittent evidence I collected during 1971–72.
According to Ai’ire, he first became sick while away as an indentured laborer and was
temporarily in his employer’s ‘haus sik.’ Back in Wakau, he was occasionally ill with diar-
rhea and stomach pains from early October 1971. His closest kin and friends were con-
cerned about his illness, but Ai’ire appeared to take the initiative seeking treatment. Be-
low are his treatments that I happened to know about and my brief comments; in no way
is it a definitive account of his symptoms and treatments. Nevertheless, it is an interesting
record of a chronically sick man’s recourse to local treatments by imoulu, whose magical
rationale he clearly grasped, and to the foreign treatments by the aid post orderly, whose
biomedical rationale he understood little. He was often discouraged that his symptoms
persisted but at other times he voiced confidence that he was cured—even when he
seemed sick to me—and throughout, he never physically retreated from the community
into depression. How his illness progressed after I left the village, I do not know.

November 11–13, aid post: Ai’ire went to the aid post the day before I moved to Wakau
because of diarrhea and stayed two nights. He had a single shot of penicillin on two suc-
cessive days; white round pills, probably sulpha; and some cough syrup.

503
 A Witch’s Hand

November 29, the villagers’ diagnosis and etiology: I visited the lower iron in the morn-
ing; the night before Ai’ire again had diarrhea. Sitting around a hearth were Klowi, Ai-
yuk, Oria, Tsaime, and some boys including Warajak, seeming to be in deliberation; Ai’ire
sat apart from them, his legs crossed, eyes sunken and looking sick. They believed that
Ai’ire’s sickness was caused by old Leno, his father-in-law and a nakwolu, who disap-
proved of his daughter’s marriage and was openly angry with Ai’ire. To them it appeared
obvious that Ai’ire had been ensorcelled by Leno. (Some believe that only the sorcerer
himself can nullify his sorcery.)
Oria was convinced that the aid post did not have strong enough medicine to cure
Ai’ire’s sickness and that eventually he would have to go to a regional hospital in An-
guganak or Wewak. The local consensus was that Ai’ire had the same sickness that had
killed a Mauwi man and recently Oria’s father, that is, dysentery, except Ai’ire’s sickness
hadn’t moved to the bloody stage.

November 30, Wami, imoulu from Mauwi: Ai’ire’s treatment is mentioned in chapters
16 and 17; Wami treated him at the lower iron and described it to me after the fact.

December 9, aid post: Ai’ire sought treatment for diarrhea and cramps and went with
Eine and his daughter and Wauripe’s wife; all except Eine had diarrhea.

December 10, Oriak, imoulu from Gwidami: The same group that had visited the aid
post the day before went to Gwidami for a local curer’s treatment. Oriak told Ai’ire that
he should have come to him sooner as he has cured others with the same complaint. He
removed some fibrous slivers from his stomach by kneading, slivers that were smaller and
different from those Wami had removed. Ai’ire had paid each curer five shillings.

December 11, My medical lecture: On December 9, Litabagi had given Ai’ire some pills
that appeared to be sulpha to take home and directed him to take one in the morning
and another in the afternoon. But on December 10, he had taken only one and, as of my
visit to him the next day, he hadn’t taken any. I found him after lunch stretched out on
his stomach and obviously sick, still with diarrhea. He said that since the nakwolu had
removed the things from his stomach he was cured; his only remaining problem was diar-
rhea. In other words, he felt that the cause of his illness had been removed, but discounted
the fact that his symptom of diarrhea remained. I prevailed on him to take one of the pills
and gave him a little lecture on the importance of taking Western medicine consistently
to make it strong enough to work. My note ends with, “I can see that hospitalization is
really the only form of treatment that can succeed with such illnesses. They don’t take
medicine at home.” (WN437).

December 12, imoulu from Weari: Chapter 18 includes a brief description of his treat-
ment by one of the six visiting Weari curers (three men and three women) in the lower
iron. [See WN598–600 for verbatim description.]

December 13, imoulu from Weari: Ai’ire was again one of the patients the visiting curers
treat.

504
 A Case-Study Log of Magical and Medical Interventions

December 15, aid post: Ai’ire left with the Weari men and women but also stopped at
the aid post for treatment.

December 15, imoulu in Alai: Finally arriving in Alai village, he was further treated by
the six Weari curers.

December 16, aid post: On his way back to Wakau, he stopped again for Litabagi’s
medical help at the aid post. I talked with him the following day and he said his diarrhea
was gone, that it cleared up after the December 13 treatment in Wakau.

December 21–January 4: I was away in Lumi and Wewak during this time period. I
only knew that Ai’ire had stayed at the aid post’s ‘haus sik’ for several days. While there,
K____ talked to him about treating him at night instead of during the day on his return
to Wakau to trick the elusive substance that was making him sick.

January 20: Ai’ire sent Unei and Tsaime to find K____ to request that he come treat him.

January 22, K____, imoulu from Mauwi: K____ had the idea that the reason his treat-
ments for Ai’ire had not been successful was that the noxious “whatever” ran away in the
daytime but maybe they could trick it at night. I wasn’t there but Ai’ire explained what
had happened. Ai’ire was in the lower iron and, after it was dark but before everyone had
gone to sleep, K____ grabbed the upper part of Ai’ire’s stomach as Mangko grabbed the
lower part to trap the noxious agent. Using sago fronds K____ kneaded Ai’ire’s stomach
and extracted a couple of razor blade fragments and a bit of ginger. He said they had
been shot into him with a tiny bow by an aokwae. K____ also told him that if they had
remained in his stomach, they would have cut it to bits.

January 25, aid post: Ai’ire had gone to Norambalip the day before, then to the aid post
to “drink medicine” on his way back home. He told me he was all right then but he did
not look good; he had lost weight and his face was very drawn.

January 31, imoulu at K____’s camp: Ai’ire had gone to K____’s camp across the Sand
River for treatment on a Monday but stayed until Saturday, February 5, when Mangko,
Oria, and I went to Klowi’s camp to see why he was staying there so long and he returned
home with us. Klowi had only treated Ai’ire on his arrival. On February 7, his diarrhea
returned. I spoke with him the following day and he said that if K____ had just treated
him one more time, he would probably be all right. My note says, “He looks like hell.”

February 13, I give Ai’ire medicine: I gave him a course of sulpha treatment. I visited
the lower iron in the morning and gave Ai’ire three sulpha tablets; he only wanted to take
one but finally took all three. No diarrhea that morning.

February 29, aid post: Litabagi treated Ai’ire when he was accompanied by his wife and
daughter who also were treated because their legs felt weak. He told me this on March
2; my note says, “Ai’ire’s famous stomach is at it again! It was gurgling away tonight and

505
 A Witch’s Hand

he has slight diarrhea again. He said he might go to the ‘haus sik’ with me when I go to
YR this Saturday.”

March 13, Ai’ire sick again: While I was visiting the lower iron, Ai’ire said he was having
stomach pain,

this time mid and left lateral: no diarrhea. Just a constant pain. . . . I talked with him
about going to the Wewak ‘haus sik’ [hospital] and he said he would; if he doesn’t do
something like that he thinks he won’t make it. I talked with Betty [Gillam] about him
Sunday [when she visited] and she thought it might be cancer; there are a few cases
she said. I will check with Ces [Parish] Thursday and with the ‘haus sik’ in Lumi for
procedures to get him shipped out to Wewak. If something isn’t done while I am here,
I am afraid he is going to keep losing weight and then get pneumonia that would finish
him off. (WN555)

March 31, I visit with Ai’ire at Klowi’s camp: Ai’ire told me that there was talk of a cur-
ing festival for him, Eine, and Kairapowe. I told him that Ces Parish was working on get-
ting him admitted to the Wewak hospital. He added that since neither the aid post nor
imoulu had cured him, he wanted to go to the big hospital. My skeptical note is, “We will
see, when it gets down to it, if he really will go or not.” Ai’ire said that the imoulu treating
him from Alai and Bapei told him they were removing little snakes from his stomach but
the problem was that they kept returning.

April 4, Ai’ire flown in the CMML plane to Wewak hospital: The Yellow River CMML
mission had arranged for Ai’ire’s transfer to the Admin’s regional hospital for diagnosis
and treatment.

April 22, I meet with Dr. Risto Gobius in Wewak: Dr. Gobius told me that the hospital
staff ’s clinical results found nothing physically amiss with Ai’ire. This was a very discour-
aging and befuddling finding; to me he had appeared clinically ill and I had monitored
the deteriorating process of his illness over many months and hoped for a definitive diag-
nosis. It was not the terminus of the case study I had expected. When I returned briefly
to the Lujere in 1982, I sadly learned that Ai’ire had died.

506
References

Allen, Bryant J. 1982. “The Pacific War 1941–1945.” Papua New Guinea Atlas: A Nation in
Transition, edited by David King and Stephen Ranck. 14–15. Bathurst, Australia, and
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea: Robert Brown & Associates in association with the
University of Papua New Guinea.
———. 1983. “A Bomb or a Bullet or the Bloody Flux? Population Change in the Aitape
Inland, Papua New Guinea, 1941–1945.” The Journal of Pacific History 18 (4): 218–35.
———. 1990. “The Importance of Being Equal: The Colonial and Postcolonial Experience
in the Torricelli Foothills.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea,
edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William E. Mitchell, Douglas New-
ton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster.185–96. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic
Press.
———. 1992. “The Geography of Papua New Guinea.” In Human Biology in Papua New
Guinea: The Small Cosmos, edited by Robert D. Attenborough and Michael P. Alpers, 36–
66. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2005. “The Place of Agricultural Intensity in Sepik Foothills Prehistory’. In Papuan
Pasts: Cultural, Linguistic, and Biological Histories of Papuan-speaking Peoples, edited by An-
drew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Jack Golson, and Robin Hide, 585–623. Canberra:
Australian National University Press.
———. 2006. “Remembering the War in the Sepik.” In The Pacific War in Papua New Guinea:
Memories and Realities, edited by Yukio Toyoda and Hank Nelson, 11–34. Tokyo: Rikkyo
University Centre for Asian Area Studies.
Anonymous. 1945. “Operations–Moss Troops.” National Archives of Australia: A3269, C4/C.
Arens, W. 1979. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Armstrong, W. E. 1928. Roussel Island: An Ethnographic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Asad, Talal. 1991. “Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthro-
pology of Western Hegemony.” In Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of

507
 A Witch’s Hand

Ethnographic Knowledge, edited by George W. Stocking, Jr., 314–24. Madison: University

of Wisconsin Press.
Ashforth, Adam. 2005. Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Atkinson, Jane Monnig. 1989. The Art and Politics of Wana Shamanship. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. 1996. “Shamanism.” In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology,
vol. 4, edited by David Levinson and Melvin Ember, 1182–85. New York: Henry Holt.
Barnes, J. A. 1962. “African Models in the New Guinea Highlands.” Man 62: 5–9.
Barnett, T. E. 1972. “Law and Legal System.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 2,
edited by Peter Ryan, 617–29. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Barry, J. V. 1945. “Report of Commission of Inquiry into the Suspension of the Civil Admin-
istration of the Territory of Papua in February, 1942.” Produced for the Australian Com-
monwealth Government. Unpublished manuscript.
Barstow, Anne L. 1994. Witchcraze: A New History of European Witch Hunts. London: Harper
Collins.
Bateson, Gregory. 1932. “Social Structure of the Iatmül People of the Sepik River.” Oceania
2 (3–4): 1–101.
———. (1936) 1958. Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the
Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
———. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: A Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of
Himself. New York: Ballantine Books.
———. 1978. “Towards a Theory of Cultural Coherence: Comment.” Anthropological
Quarterly. 51 (1): 77–78.
Baxstrom, Richard, and Todd Meyers. 2016. Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the
Mystery of the Invisible. New York: Fordham University Press.
Beaglehole, Ernest. 1968. “R. H. Codrington.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
Edited by David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton. New York: Free Press.
Bean, Ian. 1971. “Agricultural Patrol Report: Lumi Sub District.” Lumi Patrol Report #1 of
1971/72. University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections Library.
Behrmann, Walter. 1917. Der Sepik (Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss) und sein Stromgebiet: Geogra-
phischer Bericht der Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss-Expedition 1912–13 auf der Insel Neuguinea.
Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn.
———. 1922. Im Stromgebiet des Sepik: Eine deutsche Forschungsreise in Neuguinea. Berlin:
August Scherl.
———. 1924. Das Westliche Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land in Neu-Guinea (with three folded maps).
Berlin: Gesellschaft für Erdkunde.
Beidelman, T. O. 1986. Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.

508
 References

———. 2012. The Culture of Colonialism: The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. (1955) 2007. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah
Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
Beran, Harry, and Barry Craig. 2005. Shields of Melanesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Berndt, Catherine H. 1972. “Myths and Tales.” In Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea,
vol. 2, edited by Peter Ryan, 822–29. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Berndt, Ronald M. 1962. Excess and Restraint: Social Control among a New Guinea Mountain
People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Biersack, Aletta. 2017. “Afterword: From Witchcraft to the Pentecostal-Witchcraft Nexus.”
In Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia, edited by Knut
Rio, Michelle MacCarthy, and Ruy Blanes, 293–305. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Biskup, Peter. 1969. “Hahl at Herbertshoehe, 1896–1898: The Genesis of German Native
Administration in New Guinea.” In The History of Melanesia, 77–99. Papers from the Sec-
ond Waigani Seminar, May 30–June 5, 1968, Port Moresby, University of Papua and New
Guinea. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Blackwood, Beatrice. 1935. Both Sides of Buka Passage: An Ethnographic Study of Social, Sexual,
and Economic Questions in the North-Western Solomon Islands. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Boas, Frantz. 1914. “Mythology and Folk-Tales of the North American Indians. Journal of
American Folk-Lore 27: 374–410.
———. 1925. “Stylistic Aspects of Primitive Literature.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 38:
329–39.
Boas, Franz, and George Hunt. 1966. “Religion.” In Franz Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, edited
and abridged by Helen Codere, 120–70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bowden, Ross. 1983. Yena: Art and Ceremony in a Sepik Society. Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum.
Bracken, Christopher. 2007. Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Bridges, John G., ed. 1945. Displaying Australia and New Guinea. Sydney: Australia Story
Trust.
Brightwell, M. 1957a. “Report of Investigation of Massacre of Yellow River Natives.” Archives
#CRS A518, Item EU 840/1/4. Canberra: National Archives of Australia.
———. 1957b. “Patrol Report–Ambunti No. 3 of 1956/57.” Port Moresby: National Archives
of Papua New Guinea.
Broadhurst, P. T. K. 1970. “Patrol Report–Lumi No. 8 of 1970/71.” University of California
San Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
———. 1971. “Lumi Patrol Report #4 of 1971/72.” University of California San Diego
Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
Brookfield, H. C. 1972. Colonial, Development and Independence: The Case of the Melanesian
Islands in the South Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

509
 A Witch’s Hand

Brown, C. A., ed. 2011. “SRD Operations in New Guinea: Mosstroops, Sepik District, Aug–
Dec 43.” The Official History of Special Operations–Australia, vol. 2 Operations, 124–28.
Canberra, Australia: SOA Books.
Brown, W. T. 2012. “Reminiscences of Rough Times: May River and the Mianmin.” http://
asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/2012/09/remininscensces-of-rough-times-may-river-
mianmin.html. Accessed March 2, 2016.
Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Burbank, Victoria Katherine. 2000. “‘The Lust to Kill’ and the Arnhem Land Sorcerer: An
Exercise in Integrative Anthropology.” Ethos 28 (3): 410–44.
Burridge. K. O. L. 1960. Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium. London: Methuen.
———. 1965. “Tangu, Northern Madang District,” in Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesian,
edited by P. Lawrence and M. J. Meggitt, 223–49. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Burton-Bradley, B. G., and Charles Julius. 1965. “Folk Psychiatry of Certain Villages in the
Central District of Papua.” South Pacific Commission Technical Paper no. 146. Nouméa,
New Caledonia.
Buschmann, Rainer F. 2000. “Exploring Tensions in Material Culture: Commercialising Eth-
nography in German New Guinea, 1870–1904.” In Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic
Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s, edited by Michael O’Hanlon and
Robert L. Welsch, 55–102. New York: Berghahn.
———. 2009. Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New
Guinea, 1870–1935. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Calaby, J. H. 1972. “Finsch.” In Encyclopedia of Papua Ned Guinea, vol. 1, edited by Peter Ryan,
404–5. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Campbell, I. C. 1989. A History of the Pacific Islands. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2000. “The ASOPA Controversy: A Pivot of Australian Policy for Papua New
Guinea, 1945–49.” Journal of Pacific History 35 (11): 83–99.
Campbell, James. 2007. The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for
New Guinea–The Forgotten War of the South Pacific. New York: Crown.
Cantwell, Anne-Marie and Diana diZerega Wall. 2001. Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology
of New York City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Carey, Matthew. 2017. Mistrust, An Ethnographic Theory. Chicago: Hau Books, Chicago Dis-
tribution Center.
Carroll, Michael P. 1996. “Myth.” In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, vol. 3, edited by
David Levinson and Melvin Ember, 827–31. New York: Henry Holt.
Charlton, Peter. 1983. The Unnecessary War: Island Campaigns of the South-West Pacific 1944–
45. South Melbourne, Australia: Macmillan.
Cheesman, L. E. 1941. “The Mountainous Country at the Boundary, North New Guinea.”
The Geographical Journal 98 (4): 169–88.
———. 1949. Six-legged Snakes in New Guinea: A Collecting Expedition to Two Unexplored
Islands. London: George G. Harrap.

510
 References

Codrington, R. H. (1891) 1969. The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, Alex. 1996. “Folklore.” In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, vol. 2, edited by David
Levinson and Melvin Ember, 501–2. New York: Henry Holt.
Coiffier, Christian, 2020. “Chauves-souris et roussettes en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée. Leune
représentations dans la région du Sepik.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 150: 43–56.
Colby, Benjamin N., and James L. Peacock. 1973. “Narrative.” In Handbook of Social and Cul-
tural Anthropology, edited by John Honigmann, 613–35. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff,. eds. Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in
Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Conrad, Sebastian. 2011. German Colonialism: A Short History. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Cotlow, Lewis. 1966. In Search of the Primitive. Boston: Little, Brown.
Counts, Dorothy Ayers, Judith K. Brown, and Jacquelyn C. Campbell, eds. 1999. To Have and
to Hit: Cultural Perspectives on Wife Beating, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Craig, Barry. 1969. “Houseboards and Warshields of the Mountain-Ok of Central New
Guinea.” MA thesis, University of Sydney.
———. 1972. “Report of Upper Sepik Ethnographic Expedition, 1969.” Unpublished manu-
script.
———. 1975. “The Art Style of Yellow River, West Sepik District, New Guinea.” Bessler-
Archiv n.s. 23: 417–45.
———. 1988. Art and Decoration of Central New Guinea. Aylesbury, UK: Shire.
———. 1990. “Is the Mountain Ok Culture a Sepik Culture?” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition
and Change in Papua New Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann,
William E. Mitchell, Douglas Newton, Lita Osmundsen and Meinhard Schuster, 129–49.
Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
———. 1997. “The Fate of Thurnwald’s Sepik Ethnographic Collections.” Special issue:
Gestern und Heute-Traditionen in der Südsee. Festschrift zum 75 Geburstag von Gerd Koch,
edited by M. Schindlbeck. Bessler-Archiv n.s. 45: 387–408.
———. 2008. “Sorcery Divination Among the Abau of the Idam Valley, Upper Sepik, Papua
New Guinea.” Journal of Ritual Studies. 22:(20), 37–50.
Craig, Barry, Ron Vanderwal and Christine Winter. 2015. War Trophies or Curios? The War
Museum Collection in Museum Victoria 1915–1920. Melbourne, Australia: Museum
Victoria Publishing.
Craig, Barry and Christine Winter. 2016. “Richard Thurnwald and Thomas James Rodo-
ni in the Upper Sepik Region of New Guinea 1914.” http://www.usncngp.com/papers.
Accessed November 28, 2016.
Dalton, Doug. 2000. “Melanesian Can(n)ons: Paradoxes and Prospects in Melanesian
Ethnography.” In Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays Toward a More Inclu-
sive History of Anthropology, edited by Richard Handler, 284–305. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preserva-
tion of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street.

511
 A Witch’s Hand

Dawes, Allan W. 1936 reprinted 1943. Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea.
Canberra, Australia: L. F. Johnston, Commonwealth Government Printer.
De Groot, Nick. 2008. “Foreword.” In Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin–English Dictionary, edited
by C. A. Volker. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.
de Martino, Ernesto. 2015. Magic: A Theory from the South. Translated and annotated by
Dorothy Louise Zinn. Chicago: Hau Books.
Denoon, Donald, with Kathleen Dugan and Leslie Marshall. 1989. Public Health in Papua
New Guinea: Medical Possibility and Social Constraint, 1884–1984. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
de Waal Malefijt, Annemarie. 1968. Religions and Culture: An Introduction to Anthropology of
Religion. New York: Macmillan.
Dexter, David. 1961. The New Guinea Offensives. Canberra: Australian War Memorial.
Dobrin, Lise M. and Ira Bashkow. 2010. “‘The Truth in Anthropology Does Not Travel First
Class’: Reo Fortune’s Fateful Encounter with Margaret Mead.” In Histories of Anthropol-
ogy Annual, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Glesch, 66–128, Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press..
Dobson, Denis, n. d., “Aitape Mission.” Unpublished typescript manuscript.
Dornstreich, Mark D. and George E. B. Morren. 1974. “Does New Guinea Cannibalism have
Nutritional Value?” Human Ecology 2 (1): 1–12.
Dozier, Edward P. 1956. “The Concepts of ‘Primitive’ and ‘Native’ in Anthropology.” In Cur-
rent Anthropology: A Supplement to Anthropology Today, edited by William L. Thomas, Jr.,
187–202. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Drea, Edward J. 1984. Defending the Driniumor: Covering Force Operation in New Guinea.
1944. Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, U. S. Army Command and General
Staff College.
Duggan, Stephen J. 1979. “The Passing of the ‘Good Time:’ A History of the People of
North-Central Papua New Guinea During the Second World War, 1942 – 1947.” Thesis
submitted as part of the Final Honors Examination in the Department of History, La
Trobe University.
———. 1983. “In the Shadow of Somoro: The Franciscan Experience in the Sepik Region,
1945–75.” MA thesis, La Trobe University.
———. 1989. “Franciscans in the Sepik: A Spiritual Conquest or a Quest for Acceptance?”
The Journal of Pacific History 24: 70–88.
Eliade, Mircea. 1972. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Errington, Frederick K., and Deborah Gewertz. 1995. Articulating Change in the “Last
Unknown.” Boulder, CO: Westview.
Evans-Pritchard. E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Farlow, Raleigh Monash. 1944a. “Report on Operations: Moss Troops.” Copy one, National
Archives of Australia, digitized item, Series no. A3269, Control symbol C4/B, barcode
235119.

512
 References

———. 1944b. “Mosstroops: “Report on Food Packs, Equipment, Weapons, Etc.” National
Archives of Australia, digitized item, Series no. A3269.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1980. [1977] Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Translated by
Catherine Cullen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2015. The Anti-Witch. Translated by Matthew Carey. Chicago: HAU Books.
Feinberg, P. E. 1951. “Lumi Patrol Report No. 2 of 1950/51.” University of California San
Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
Feldpausch, Becky, compiler. (2001) 2006. Namia, Tok Pisin and English Dictionary. Ukarumpa,
PNG: Summer Institute of Linguistics Papua New Guinea.
———. 2011. “Introduction to the Namia Dictionary.” Unpublished manuscript. Ukarumpa,
PNG: Summer Institute of Linguistics Papua New Guinea.
Feldpausch, Thomas, and Becky Feldpausch. 1988. “Background Study: Working with the
Namia People of the West Sepik Province PNG.” Unpublished manuscript. Ukarumpa,
PNG: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
———. 1992. “Namia Grammar Essentials.” Ukarumpa, PNG: Summer Institute of Lin-
guistics. http://www.sil.org/pacific/png/abstract.asp?id=34683
———. 1993. Updated 2009. “Phonology Essentials of the Namia Language.” Ukarumpa,
Summer Institute of Linguistics. Accessed August 22, 2016. http://www.sil.org/pacific/
png/abstract.asp?id=51230
———. 1999. “Dialect Survey of the Namia Language.” Manuscript. Ukarumpa, Summer
Institute of Linguistics. http://www.sil.org/pacific/abstract.asp?ic=51809 Accessed March
7, 2015.
———. 2000. “Namia Orthography Paper,” Manuscript. Ukarumpa, Summer Institute of
Linguists. Accessed March 7, 2015. http://www.sil.org/pacific/png/abstract.asp?id=51229.
———. 2003. updated 2007. “TAM [tense, aspect, mood] Marking in Namia (nnm).” Manu-
script. Ukarumpa, Summer Institute of Linguists. Accessed August 24, 2016. http://www.
Namia_Tense_Aspect_Mood(1).pdf
Feldt, Eric. (1946) 1967. The Coast Watchers. Sydney: Angus and Robertson Pacific Books.
Citations refer to the Pacific Books edition.
Firth, Stewart. 1983. New Guinea under the Germans. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Fowke, J. E. 1968. “Lumi Patrol Report No. 21 of 1967/68.” University of California San
Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
Foley, William A. 1986. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Forge, Anthony. 1970. “Prestige, Influence, and Sorcery: A New Guinea Example” in Witch-
craft, Confessions, and Accusations, edited by Mary Douglas. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Forsyth, Miranda. 2015. “A Pluralist Response to the Regulation of Sorcery and Witch-
craft in Melanesia.” In Talking it Through: Responses to Sorcery and Witchcraft Beliefs and
Practices in Melanesia, edited by Miranda Forsyth and Richard Eves, 213–240. Canberra:
Australian National University Press.
Forsyth, Miranda and Richard Eves. eds. 2015. Talking it Through: Responses to Sorcery and
Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia. Canberra: Australian National University
Press.

513
 A Witch’s Hand

Fortes, Myer. 1953. “The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups.” American Anthropologist,
55: 17–41.
———. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Chicago:
Aldine.
Fortune, R. F. 1927. The Mind in Sleep. London: Kegan Paul, Trendh, Trubner.
———. 1942. Arapesh. Publications of the American Ethnological Society, Franz Boas editor,
vol. 19. New York. J. J. Augustin.
———. (1932) 1963. Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the
Western Pacific, 2nd ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fountain, Jenny. 1999. ...To Teach Others Also: The Bible Schools of the Christian Brethren Church-
es of Papua New Guinea. Palmerston North: Osjen Ministries Trust.
Fowke, J. E. 1967. “Lumi Patrol Report No. 21 of 1967/68.” University of California San
Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
Fowler, F. R. 1960. Aid Post Medical and Hygiene Training Book. Port Moresby: Department of
Public Health, Territory of Papua and New Guinea.
Fox, Robin, 1964. “Witchcraft and Clanship among the Cochiti.” In Magic, Faith and Heal-
ing: Studies in Primitive Psychiatry Today, edited by Ari Kiev, 174–200. Glencoe, IL: Free
Press.
———. 1983. Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Frankel, Stephen, and Gilbert Lewis, eds. 1989. A Continuing Trial of Treatment: Medical
Pluralism in Papua New Guinea. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Franklin, Karl J. 2010. “Comments on Sorcery in Papua New Guinea.” Graduate Institute of
Applied Linguistics electronic notes. http://www.gialens/vol4num3/. Accessed October
30, 2017.
Fried, Morton H. 1967. The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology.
New York: Random House.
Fulton, E. T. W. 2005. No Turning Back: A Memoir, edited by Elizabeth Fulton Thurston.
Canberra, Australia: Pandanus Books.
Fyfe, Andrew. 2006. “Progress Report, June 2006.” Upper Sepik–Central New Guinea Pro-
ject. http://uscngp.com/reports. Accessed September 9, 2017.
Gailey, Harry A. 2004. MacArthur’s Victory: The War in New Guinea, 1943–1944. New York:
Presidio Press.
Gamble, Bruce. 2006. Darkest Hour: The True Story of Lark Force at Rabaul—Australia’s Worst
Military Disaster of World War II. Minneapolis: Zenith Press.
———, 2010. Fortress Rabaul: The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942–April 1942.
Minneapolis: Zenith Press.
———. 2014 Target: Rabaul, the Allied Siege of Japan’s Most Infamous Stronghold, March 1943–
August 1945. Minneapolis: Zenith Press.
Gardner, Don. 1999. “Anthropology, Myth, and the Subtle Ways of Ethnocentrism.” In The
Anthropology of Cannibalism, edited by Laurence R. Goldman, 27–49. Westport, CN:
Bergin & Garvey.

514
 References

Gardner, Robert and Karl G. Heider. 1968. Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea
Stone Age. New York: Random House.
Geertz, Clifford. 1966. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In Anthropological Approaches to the
Study of Religion, edited by Michael Banton, 1–46. London: Tavistock.
Gell, Alfred. 1971. “Penis Sheathing and Ritual Status in a West Sepik Village.” Man 6 (2):
165–81.
———. 1975. Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries: Umeda Society, Language and Ritual. London:
Athlone Press.
Gesch, Patrick F. 1985. Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo Cult-Type Movement in the Sepik
Against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion. St. Augustin, West Germany:
Anthropos-Institut.
———. 2015. “Talking Sanguma: The Social Process of Discernment of Evil in Two Sepik
Societies.” In Talking it Through: Responses to Sorcery and Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in
Melanesia, edited by Miranda Forsyth and Richard Eves, 111–29. Canberra: Australian
National University.
Geschiere, Peter. 2013. Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Gewertz, Deborah. 1983. Sepik River Societies: A Historical Ethnography of the Chambri and
their Neighbors. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press.
Gibbs, Phillip, and Josepha Junnie Wailoni. 2008. “Sorcery among the Plains Arapesh.”
Anthropos 103: 149–58.
Gill, C. H. 1996. “Feldt, Eric Augustas (1899–1968).” Australian Dictionary of Biography,
National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. http://adb.anu.edu.au/bi-
ography/feldt-eric-augustas-01063/text17953. Accessed March 26, 2016.
Gillam, Elizabeth A. 1983. “Cultural Aspects of Infant Undernutrition Among the Lujere
People of Papua New Guinea: A Nursing Perspective.” MA thesis, Massey University,
Palmerston North, New Zealand.
———. 1996. “The Nutritional Practices of the Edwaki Sub District, Sandaun Province,
PNG: An Investigation into What is Eaten, What is not Eaten and the Reason Why.”
Postgraduate thesis, Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago, Otago, New
Zealand.
Glasse, R. M. 1969. “Marriage in South Fore,” In Pigs, Pearlshells, and Women: Marriage in
the New Guinea Highlands, edited by R. M. Glasse and M. J. Meggitt, 16–37. Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Glick, Leonard B. 1972. “Sangguma.” In Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea, vol. 2, edited
by Peter Ryan, 1029–30. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University.
Godelier, Maurice, Thomas R. Trautman, and Franklin E. Tjon Sie Fat, eds. 1998. Transfor-
mations of Kinship. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Goldman, Laurence R. 1999. “From Pot to Polemic: Uses and Abuses of Cannibalism.” In
The Anthropology of Cannibalism, edited by Laurence R. Goldman, 1–26. Westport: Bergin
& Garvey.
Goodare, Julian. 2016. The European Witch-Hunt. London: Routledge.
Goode, William J. 1951. Religion Among the Primitives. Glencoe. IL: The Free Press.

515
 A Witch’s Hand

Goodman, Felicitas D. 1988. How about Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Goody, J. 1996. “A Kernel of Doubt.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (4) 667–81.
Gordon, Robert. 1981. “The Myth of the Noble Anthropologist in Melanesia.” Bikmaus 2
(1): 10–20.
Gray, Geoffrey, 1999. “‘Being Honest to my Science’: Reo Fortune and J. H. P. Murray, 1927–
30.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 10 (1): 56–76.
Greenop, F. 1944. Who Travels Alone. Sydney: K. G. Murray.
Grey, Jeffrey. 2008. A Military History of Australia, 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Griffin, James, Hank Nelson, and Stewart Firth. 1979. Papua New Guinea: A Political History.
Richmond, Australia: Heinemann Educational Australia.
Grimshaw, Peter J. 1972. “Police.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 2, edited by Peter
Ryan, 916–21. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Gropper, Rena. 1967. “Toward a Universal Comparative Medicine.” Unpublished manuscript.
Grosart, Ian. 1972a. “Australian School of Pacific Administration.” In Encyclopedia of Papua
New Guinea, vol. 1, edited by Peter Ryan, 50–52. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
———1972b. “House of Assembly.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 1, edited by
Peter Ryan, 531–40. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
———1972c. “District Administration.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 1, edited
by Peter Ryan, 266–69. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Guddemi, Phillip Vickroy. 1992. “We Came from This: Knowledge, Memory, Painting and
‘Play’ in the Initiation Rituals of the Sawiyanô of Papua New Guinea.” PhD diss., Univer-
sity of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Haberland, Eike. 1965. “Tasks of Research in the Sepik Region, New Guinea.” Bulletin of
the International Committee on Urgent Anthropological and Ethnological Research 7: 33–44.
Healy, A. M. 1972. “Goldfields.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 1, edited by Peter
Ryan, 499–501. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Hefner, Robert W. 2007. Review of Naming the Witch by James Siegel in American Anthro-
pologist 109 (2): 420–21.
Heider, Karl G. 1970. The Dugam Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West New Guinea.
Chicago: Aldine.
———. 1976. Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful Warriors. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Held, Gerrit Jan. (1947) 1957. The Papuas of Waropen. Hallstrom Pacific Collection, Transla-
tion Series 2. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. (Originally published in Dutch
as Papoea’s van Waropen. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.)
Herskovits, Melville J. 1948. Man and his Works. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Hides, J .G. 1936. Savage Patrol. New York: Robert M. McBride.
Hinkle, L. E., N. Plummer, R. Metraux, P. Richter, J. W. Gittinger, W. N. Thetford, W. E.
Mitchell, H. Leichter, R. Pinsky, D. Goebel, I. D. J. Bross, and H. G. Wolff. 1957. “Factors
Relevant to the Occurrence of Bodily Illness and Disturbances in Mood, Thought and

516
 References

Behavior in Three Homogeneous Population Groups.” American Journal of Psychiatry 114:

212–20.
Hogbin, H. Ian. 1935a. “Native Culture of Wogeo.” Oceania 5: 326–28.
———. 1935b. “Sorcery and Administration.” Oceania 6: 1–32.
———. 1937. “The Hill People of North-Eastern Guadalcanal.’” Oceania 8 (1): 62–92.
———. 1943. “Developing New Guinea and the Future of the Natives.” Australian Journal of
Science 5 (5): 133–35.
———. 1952. “Sorcery and Succession in Wogeo.” Oceania 23: 133–36.
———. 1970. The Island of Menstruating Men: Religion in Wogeo, New Guinea. Scranton, PA:
Chandler.
Hogbin, H. Ian, and Camilla H. Wedgwood. 1943. “Development and Welfare in the Western
Pacific.” Sydney: Australian Institute of International Affairs.
Höltker, Georg. 1963. “Neue Materialien über den Tedeszauber in Neuguinea.” Anthropos 58
(3–4): 333–71.
Horton, Robin. 1967. “African Traditional Thought and Western Science.” Africa: Journal of
the International African Institute. 37 (2): 155–87.
Horowitz, Jason. 2018. “‘Shut Up, Satan’: Rome Course Teaches Exorcism, Even by
Cellphone.” New York Times, April 19: A6.
Huber, Peter B. 1975. “Defending the Cosmos: Violence and Social Order Among the
Anggor of New Guinea.” In War: Its Causes and Correlates, edited by Martin A. Nettle-
ship, Dale Givins, and Anderson Nettleship, 619–61. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton;
Chicago: Aldine.
———. 1980. “The Anggor Bowman: Ritual and Society in Melanesia.” American Ethnologist
7: 43–57.
———. 1990. “Masquerade as Artifact in Wamu.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change
in Papua New Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William E.
Mitchell, Douglas Newton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster. 150–59, Durham,
NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Huber, Mary Taylor. 1990. “The Bishops’ Progress: Representations of Missionary Experi-
ence on the Sepik Frontier.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea,
edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William E. Mitchell, Douglas Newton,
Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster, 197–211, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic
Press.
Hudson, W. J. 1971. “Introduction.” In Australia and Papua New Guinea, edited by W. J. Hud-
son, 1–7. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Hutchings, R. 1968. “Patrol Report No. 22, 1967/68, Lumi Sub-District, West Sepik Dis-
trict.” National Archives of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby.
———. 1970. “Patrol Report No. 3, 1970/71, Lumi Sub-District, West Sepik District.” Na-
tional Archives of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby.
Jack-Hinton, C. 1972. “Discovery.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 1, edited by
Peter Ryan, 246–57. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.

517
 A Witch’s Hand

Jacobs, Marjorie, 1972. “German New Guinea.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 1,
edited by Peter Ryan, 485–98. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Johnson, L. W. 1983. Colonial Sunset: Australia and Papua New Guinea 1970–74. St. Lucia,
Australia: University of Queensland Press.
Jones, Graham M. 2017. Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Jorgensen, Dan. 1996. “Regional History and Ethnic Identity in the Hub of New Guinea:
The Emergence of the Min.” Oceania 66 (3): 189–210.
Joyce, R, B. 1972. “Exploration.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 1, edited by Peter
Ryan, 385–89. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Juillerat, Bernard. (1986) 1996. Children of the Blood: Society, Reproduction, and Cosmology in
New Guinea. Translated by Nora Scott. New York: Berg.
———. 1990. “Male Ideology and Cultural Fantasy in Yafar Society.” In Sepik Heritage:
Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian
Kaufmann, William E. Mitchell, Douglas Newton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard
Schuster, 380–84, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
———. 1992, ed. Shooting the Sun: Ritual and Meaning in West Sepik. Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
———. 2000. “Do the Bánaro Really Exist? Going Back After Richard Thurnwald.” Oceania
71: 46–66.
Kaberry, Phyllis M. 1941–42. “Law and Political Organization in the Abelam Tribe, New
Guinea.” Oceania 12 (1, 3, 4): 79–95, 209–25, 331–63.
———. 1967. “The Plasticity of New Guinea Kinship.” In Social Organization: Essays Pre-
sented to Raymond Firth, edited by Maurice Freedman, 105–23. Chicago: Aldine.
Kapferer, Bruce. 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
———. 2002. “Introduction: Outside all Reason—Magic, Sorcery, and Epistemology in An-
thropology.” In Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft, and Sorcery, edited by
Bruce Kapferer, 1–30. New York: Berghahn.
Kaptchuk, Ted. J., and Franklin G. Miller. 2015. “Placebo Effects in Medicine.” New England
Journal of Medicine 373: 8–9.
Kaufmann, Christian. 1990. “Swiss and German Ethnographic Collections as Source Materi-
als: A Report on Work in Progress.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New
Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William E. Mitchell, Douglas
Newton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster, 587–95. Durham, NC: Carolina Aca-
demic Press.
Kaufmann, Christian, Philippe Peltier, and Markus Schindlbeck. 2018. “Le Sepik: Société et
production matérielle.” Journal de la Société de Océanistes 146: 5–14.
Keenan, Mel. 2015. “The Western Legal Response to Sorcery in Colonial Papua New
Guinea.” In Talking it Through: Responses to Sorcery and Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in
Melanesia, edited by Miranda Forsyth and Richard Eves, 197–211. Melbourne: Australian
National University Press.

518
 References

Kelm, Antje. 1990. “Sanguma in Abrau and Kwieftim.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change
in Papua New Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William E.
Mitchell, Douglas Newton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster, 447–51. Durham,
NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Kelm, Antje and Heinz Kelm. 1975. Ein Pfeilschuss für die Braut: Mythen und Erzählungen
aus Kwieftim und Abrau, Nordostneuguinea. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
———. 1980. Sago und Schwein: Ethnologie von Kwieftim und Abrau in Nordost-Neuguinea.
Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Kelm, Heinz. 1966. Kunst vom Sepik II. Berlin: Des Museums für Völkerkunde.
King, Charles. 2019. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented
Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. Doubleday: New York.
Kirk, G. S. 1970. Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and other Cultures. Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press.
Knauft, Bruce M. 1985. Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland
New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1999. From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology. Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press.
Koster, G. J., and Georg Höltker. 1942–45. “‘Sangguma’ of de Sluipmoord op de noordoost-
kust van Nieuw-Guinea.” Anthropos 37–40: 213–24.
Kroeber, A. L. 1909. “Classificatory Systems of Relationship.” Journal of the Royal Anthropo-
logical Institute 39: 77–84.
Kulick, Don. 1992. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncre-
tism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2019. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in
Papua New Guinea. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
La Fontaine, Jean. Editor. 1972. The Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A. I. Richards.
London: Tavistock.
———. 1973. “Descent in New Guinea: an Africanist View.” In The Character of Kinship,
edited by Jack Goody, 35–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Langdon, Robert. 1971. “A Short History.” In Papua/New Guinea: Prospero’s Other Island,
edited by Peter Hastings, 42–59. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Lanaghan, R. F. 1971. “Patrol Report LUMI No. 9 of 1970/71, South Wapei Census Division,
Establishment of Base Camp.” University of California San Diego Libraries, Mandeville
Special Collections.
———. 1972. “Patrol Report LUMI No. 9 of 1971/72, South Wapei Census Division.” Uni-
versity of California San Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Laycock, Donald C. 1973. Sepik Languages: Checklist and Preliminary Classification. Canberra:
Australian National University.
———. 1996. “Sanguma.” In Papers in Papuan Linguistics, vol. 2, 271–81. Pacific Linguistics
Series. Canberra: Australian National University.

519
 A Witch’s Hand

Lawrence, P. and M. J. Meggitt. 1965. Gods, Ghosts, and Men in Melanesia: Some Religions of
Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Lea, D. A. M. 1972. “Sepik Districts, East and West.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea,
vol. 2, edited by Peter Ryan, 1030–36. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
———. 1972. “Agriculture, Indigenous.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 1, edited
by Peter Ryan, 10–18. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Leach, Edmund R. 1968. “Ritual.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 13,
edited by David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton, 520–26. New York: Free Press.
———. 1969. Genesis as Myth and Other Essays. London: Jonathan Cape.
Legge, J. D. 1971. “The Murray Period: Papua 1906–40.” Australia and Papua New Guinea,
edited by W. J. Hudson, 32–56. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Lessa, William A., and Evon Z. Vogt. 1972. Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological
Approach. New York: Harper and Row.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1949. “The Sorcerer and His Magic.” In Structural Anthropology, trans-
lated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 167–15. New York: Basic Books.
———. 1976. “Anthropology, History and Ideology.” Critique of Anthropology 2 (6): 44–55.
Lewis, Gilbert. 1975. Knowledge of Illness in a Sepik Society: A Study of the Gnau, New Guinea.
London: Athlone.
———. 1977. “Belief and Behavior in Disease.” In Health and Disease in Tribal Societies,
227–41. Ciba Foundation Symposium 49. Amsterdam, Netherlands, New York: Elsevier/
Excerpta Medica/North-Holland.
———. 1980. Day of Shining Red: An Essay on Understanding Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 1986. “The Look of Magic.” Man, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21
(3): 414–435.
———. 1987. “Fear of Sorcery and the Problem of Death by Suggestion.” Social Science and
Medicine 24 (12): 997–1010.
———. 1995. “Revealed by Illness: Aspects of the Gnau People’s World and their Perception
of It.” In Cosmos and Society in Oceania. Eds. Daniel de Coppet and André Iteanu. Oxford:
Berg.
———. 2000. A Failure in Treatment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2021. Pandora’s Box: Ethnography and the Comparison of Medical Beliefs. Chicago:
Hau Books.
Lewis, M. Paul, ed. 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 16th ed. Dallas, TX: SIL Inter-
national.
Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2015. Ethnologue: Languages of
the Americas and the Pacific, 18th ed. Dallas: SIL International.
Lindenbaum, Shirley. 2013. Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands,
rev. ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
———. 2004. “Thinking about Cannibalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 475–98.
Lindstrom, Lamont. 1990. Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society. Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press.

520
 References

Lipscomb, Adrian, Rowan McKinnon, and Jon Murray. Papua New Guinea. Hawthorn,
Australia: Lonely Planet.
LiPuma, Edward. 2001. Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lloyd, Richard. 1974. “Baruya Kith and Kin.” In Kinship Studies in Papua New Guinea, edited
by R. Daniel Shaw, 97–124. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: Summer Institute of Lin-
guistics.
Lohmann, Roger Ivar. 2009. “Dreams of Fortune: Reo Fortune’s Psychological Theory of
Cultural Ambivalence.” Pacific Studies 32: 273–298.
Lomnitz, Claudio. 2014. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón. New York: Zone Books.
Long, Gavin. 1963. The Final Campaigns. Canberra: Australian War Memorial.
Losche, Diane. 2011. “The Anthropologist’s Voice: Margaret Mead and Donald Tuzin.” In
Echoes of the Tambaran: Masculinity, History and the Subject in the Work of Donald F. Tu-
zin, edited by David Lipset and Paul Roscoe, 297–311. Canberra: Australian National
University.
Loving, Richard and Jack Bass. 1964. Languages of the Amanab Sub-District. Port Moresby,
Papua New Guinea: Department of Information and Extension Services.
Lowie, Robert. 1954. “Richard Thurnwald, 1869–1954.” American Anthropologist 56 (5): 863–
67.
Ludvigson, Tomas. 1985. “Healing in Central Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu.” In Healing Practices
in the South Pacific, edited by Claire D. F. Parsons, 51–64. Honolulu: Institute for Polyne-
sian Studies.
Lutkehaus, Nancy C. 2008. Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
———. 1995. Zaria’s Fire: Engendered Moments in Manam Ethnography. Durham, NC:
Carolina Academic Press.
Lutkehaus, Nancy, Christian Kaufmann, William E. Mitchell, Douglas Newton, Lita
Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster, eds. 1990. Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in
Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Mair, L. P. 1970. Australia in New Guinea. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Mair, L. P., and Ian Grosart. 1972. “Local Government.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea,
vol. 2, edited by Peter Ryan, 657–73. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1915. “The Natives of Mailu: Preliminary Results of the Robert
Mond Research in British New Guinea.” Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society
of South Australia 39: 494–706.
———. 1922. The Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adven-
ture in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. 1988. Malinowski among the Magi: The Natives of Mailu, edited with an introduction
by Michael W. Young. London: Routledge.
Mar, Tracy B. 2016. “Performing Cannibalism in the South Seas.” In Touring Pacific Cultures,
edited by Kalissa Alexeyeff and John Taylor, 323–31. Canberra: Australian National Uni-
versity Press.

521
 A Witch’s Hand

Marshall, Alan John. 1938. The Men and Birds of Paradise: Journeys through Equatorial New
Guinea. London: William Heinemann.
Matthiessen, Peter. 1969. Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age.
New York: Ballantine Books.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1981. Mekeo Inequality and Ambibivalence in a Village Society. Canberra:
Australian National University Press.
Mauss, Marcel. (1902–03) 1975. A General Theory of Magic. Translated by Robert Brain. New
York: Norton.
McArthur, Margaret. 1971. “Men and Spirits in the Kunimaipa Valley.” In Anthropology in
Oceania: Essays Presented to Ian Hogbin, edited by L. R. Hiatt and C. Jayawardena, 155–
189. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
———. 1972. “Food.” In Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea, vol. 1, edited by Peter Ryan,
433–47. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
McCallum. P. Maurice. 2006. “‘Sanguma’—Tracking Down a Word.” Catalyst 36 (2): 183–
207.
McCarthy, John Keith. 1936. “Report of Patrol to the Yellow River Base Camp. Sepik Divi-
sion – J. K. McCarthy.” Department of Territories, Patrol Report from Territory of New
Guinea. Commonwealth Archives Office: Accession AS13/26 item No. 20.
———. 1963. Patrol Into Yesterday: My New Guinea Years. Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire.
———. 1964 “Establishment of Government Stations, New Guinea.” Circular memo file No
2–1–0, 9 September, Department of Native Affairs.
McDowell, Nancy. 1991. The Mundugumor: From the Field Notes of Margaret and Reo Fortune.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
McKnight, D. 1982. “Conflict, Healing, and Singing in an Australian Aboriginal Commu-
nity.” Anthropos 77: 491–508.
Mead, Margaret. 1938. The Mountain Arapesh, part 1: An Importing Culture. Anthropologi-
cal Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 36 (3): 139–349.
———. (1935) 1963. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: William
Morrow.
———. 1947. “The Mountain Arapesh, part 3: The Socio-Economic Life.” Anthropological
Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 40 (3): 163–232.
———. (1938, 1940) 1970. The Mountain Arapesh: Arts and Supernaturalism. Garden City,
NY: Natural History Press.
———. 1972. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: William Morrow.
———. 1973. “A Re-examination of Major Themes of the Sepik Area, Papua, New Guinea.”
Paper presented at the Ninth Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences,
Chicago.
———. 1978. “The Sepik as a Culture Area: Comment.” Anthropological Quarterly 51 (1):
69–75.
———. 1977. Letters from the Field, 1925–1975. New York: Harper and Row.
Mead, Margaret, and Rhoda Metraux. 1978. An Interview with Santa Claus. New York:
Walker.

522
 References

Melk-Koch, Marion. 1989. Auf der Suche nach der menschlichen Gesellschaft: Richard Thurnwald.
Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.
———. 2000. “Melanesian Art or just Stones and Junk? Richard Thurnwald and the Ques-
tion of Art in Melanesia.” Pacific Arts 21–22: 53–68.
———. 2010. “Remembering Bernard Juillerat. Visiting the Bánaro after Richard Thurn-
wald.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes. 130–31: 29–40.
Merlan, Francesca. 2016. “Women, Warfare and the Life of Agency: Papua New Guinea and
Beyond.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 22: 393–411.
Métraux, Rhoda. (1954) 2001. “Themes in French Culture.” In Themes in French Culture: A
Preface to a Study of French Community, edited by Margaret Mead with Rhoda Métraux,
3–73. New York: Berghahn.
Middleton, John, and E. H. Winter. 1963. Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa. London:
Routledge Kegan and Paul.
Mihalic, F. 1971. The Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin. Milton,
Australia: Jacaranda Press.
Mikloucho-Maclay, Nikolai. 1975. Mikloucho-Maclay: New Guinea Diaries 1871–1883.
Translated and edited by C. L. Sentinella. Madang, Papua New Guinea: Kristen Press.
Mitchell, William E. 1968. “The Doktaboi: A Medial Medical Role in New Guinea.” Paper
presented at the Eighth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sci-
ences, Tokyo.
———. 1971. “Use and Abuse of Pidgin.” Man in New Guinea 3 (3): 17–19.
———. 1973. “A New Weapon Stirs up Old Ghosts.” Natural History 82: 74–84.
———. 1975. “Culturally Contrasting Therapeutic Systems of the West Sepik: The Lujere.”
In Psychological Anthropology, edited by Thomas R. Williams, 409–39. The Hague,
Netherlands: Mouton.
———. 1977 “Sorcellerie chamanique: ‘Sanguma’ chez les Lujere du cours supérieur de
Sépik.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 3 (56–57): 179–89.
———. 1978a. Mishpokhe: A Study of New York City Jewish Family Clubs.” The Hague,
Netherlands: Mouton.
———. 1978b. “On Keeping Equal: Polity and Reciprocity among the New Guinea Wape.”
Anthropological Quarterly 51 (1): 5–16.
———. 1988. Magical Curing. VHS Film and Film Guide. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
———. 1989. Review of Sorcerer and Witch in Melanesia by Michele Stephen, ed. American
Ethnologist 16 (3): 591–92.
———. 1991. “Bus, Baret and Tais: A Lujere View of Ecological Resources in Terms of
Kinship and Subsistence.” Paper presented at the 90th Annual Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association, Chicago.
———. 1992. ed. Clowning as Critical Practice: Performance Humor in the South Pacific.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
———. 1999. “Why Wape Men Don’t Beat Their Wives: Constraints Towards Domestic
Tranquility in a New Guinea Society.” In To Have and to Hit: Cultural Perspectives on Wife

523
 A Witch’s Hand

Beating, 2nd ed., edited by Dorothy Ayers Counts, Judith K. Brown, and Jacquelyn C.
Campbell, 100–36. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
———. (1987) 2012. The Bamboo Fire: Field Work with the New Guinea Wape, 2nd ed. London:
Routledge.
Molnar-Bagley, Emese. 1980. “West Sepik Handbook – 1980.” Produced for the Sandaun
Provincial Council, Papua New Guinea. Unpublished manuscript.
Monckton, C. A. W. 1921. Taming New Guinea: Some Experiences of a New Guinea Resident
Magistrate. New York: John Lane.
Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1851. League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. Rochester, NY:
Sande & Bros.
———. (1868) 1970. The American Beaver and his Works, reprint ed. New York: Burt Franklin.
———. 1871. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Smithsonian Con-
tributions to Knowledge 17. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Morrell, W. P. 1960. Britain in the Pacific Islands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morren, Jr., George E. B. 1986. The Miyanmin: Human Ecology of a Papua New Guinea Society.
Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press
Moses, J. A. 1969. “The German Empire in Melanesia 1884–1914: A German Self-Analysis.”
In The History of Melanesia, Canberra: Australian National University Press, University of
Papua New Guinea.
Murdock, George Peter, 1949. Social Structure. New York. Macmillan.
Murray. J. H. P. 1912. Papua or British New Guinea. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Mwakyembe, H. G. 1986. “The Parliament and the Electoral Process.” In The State and the
Working People of Tanzania, edited by Issa G. Shivji, 16–57. Dakar, Senegal: Council for
the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.
Napier, A. David. 1986. Masks, Transformation, and Paradox. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
———. 2003. The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Needham, Rodney. 1967. “Blood, Thunder, and Mockery of Animals.” In Myth ad Cosmos:
Readings in Mythology and Cosmos, edited by John Middleton, 271–85. Garden City, NY:
Natural History Press.
Nelson, H. N. 2000. “McCarthy, John Keith (1905–1976).” Australian Dictionary of Biogra-
phy, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.
———. 1985. “European Contact and Administrative Control.” Papua New Guinea Atlas: A
Nation in Transition, edited by David King and Stephen Ranck, 2–3. Bathurst, Australia,
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea: Robert Brown & Associates in association with the
University of Papua New Guinea.
Nevermann, Hans. 1941. Ein Besuch bei Steinzeitmenschen. Stuttgart: Kosmos.
Oakes, George D. 1956a. “Patrol Report Sepik District, Lumi No. 1, 1956/57.” University of
California San Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
———. 1956b. “Patrol Report Sepik District, Lumi No. 2, 1956/57, University of California
San Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.

524
 References

Oakley, E. W. and S. Eve. 1932. “Patrol Report No. A3/32–33., South Wapi Extending to
the Sepik River.” Accession AS13/26 item No. 21. Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth
Archives Office.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 2005. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in
the South Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Odgers, L. 1942. “The J. A. Thurston Expedition Across New Guinea via Sepik and Fly Riv-
ers—April to September, 1942.” Australian Archives: Accession No. AS13/26, Box 34–79,
item 59.
Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea. 1936. Canberra, Australia: L. F. Johnston,
Commonwealth Government Printer.
O’Hanlon, Michael and Robert L. Welsch. 2000. Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collec-
tors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s. New York: Berghahn.
O’Keefe, Daniel Lawrence. 1982. Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic. New York:
Vintage.
Orwin, R. 1951. “Sepik (Wewak) Patrol Report No. 2 of 1950/51.” University of California
San Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections. Assen: Van Gorcum.
“Pacific Islands – Sepik River Expedition, 1919.” Department of Home and Territories, Cor-
respondence File, NG Series (Old File). Commonwealth Archives Office: CRS A4 item
NG 40. Canberra, Australia.
Pappenhagen, Ronald W., and Doris J. 1981. “A Sociolinguistic Survey of Namie.” In Socio-
linguistic Surveys of Sepik Languages, edited by Richard Loving, 163–76. Work Papers in
Papua New Guinea Languages 29. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: Summer Institute of
Linguistics.
Parkin, David. 1985. “Introduction.” In The Anthropology of Evil, edited by David Parkin,
1–25. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Patterson, Mary. 1974–1975. “Sorcery and Witchcraft in Melanesia: An Ethnographic
Survey.” Oceania 45 (2): 132–60; Oceania 45 (3): 212–34.
Paulsen, Rune. 2003. “Fighting Hierarchy: Relations of Egality and Hierarchy among the
May River Iwam of Papua New Guinea.” In Oceanic Socialities and Cultural Forms: Eth-
nographies of Experience, edited by Ingjerd Hoëm and Sidsel Roalkvam. 29–49. New York:
Berghahn.
Pavlac, Brian A. 2010. Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the
Inquisition through the Salem Trials. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Pawley, Andrew, Robert Attenborough, Jack Golson, and Robin Hide, eds. 2005. Papuan
Pasts: Cultural, Linguistic and Biological Histories of Papuan-Speaking Peoples. Canberra,
Australia: Pacific Linguistics.
Payne, G. F. 1972. “Ambunti Patrol Report No. 2 of 1972/73, Rocky Peaks Census Division.”
University of California San Diego Library, Mandeville Special Collections Library.
Peck, Susan L. 1973. “Ethics and the Public.” Hastings Center Report 3: 16.
Pels, Peter. 2003. “Introduction.” In Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Con-
cealment, edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels. 1–37. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.

525
 A Witch’s Hand

Peltason, Ruth A. 2005. New Guinea Art Masterpieces from the Jolika Collection of Marcia and
John Friede. Vol. 2. San Francisco: Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.
Pendergrast, Mark. 2017. Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses
to Die. Hinesburg, VT: Upper Access Books.
Philsooph, Hushang. 1971. “Primitive Magic and Mana.” Man 6 (2): 182–203.
———. 1990. “Open Structures: Aspects of Cross-Cultural Influence in the Sepik in Re-
lation to Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and
Change in Papua New Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William
E. Mitchell, Douglas Newton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster, 87–115. Dur-
ham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Powell, Alan. 1996. War by Stealth: Australians and the Allied Intelligence Bureau, 1942–1945.
Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
———. 2003. The Third Force: ANGAU’s New Guinea War, 1942–46. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Prinz, Jesse J. 2007. The Emotional Construction of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pulsford, R. L. and J. Cawte. 1972. Health in a Developing Country: Principles of Medical An-
thropology in Melanesia. Milton, Australia: Jacaranda Press.
Radford, Anthony J. 1971. “The Future of Rural Health Services in Melanesia, With Par-
ticular Reference to Niugini.” Presented at the Fifth Waigani Seminar on Change and
Development in Rural Melanesia, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
Radin, Paul. (1937) 1957. Primitive Religion: Its Nature and Origin. New York: Dover.
Reed, Stephen Winsor. 1943. The Making of Modern New Guinea. Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society.
Ray, Herbert. 1892. “The Languages of British New Guinea.” Sidney Transactions of the Ninth
International Congress of the Orientalists 2: 754–70.
Rehburg, Judith. 1974. “Social Structure of the Sepik Iwam.” In Kinship Studies in Papua
New Guinea, edited by R. Daniel Shaw, 211–22. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: Summer
Institute of Linguistics.
Reid, J. 1983. Sorcerers and Healing Spirits: Continuity and Change in an Aboriginal Medical
System. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Resek, Carl. 1960. Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Richmond, Keith. 2004a. “‘Locust,’ Whiting’ and New Britain: Guy Black’s Covert War with
M and Z Units.” The Free Library. Military Historical Society of Australia. https://www.
thefreelibrary.com/%22Locust%22%2c+%22Whiting%22+and+New+Britain%3a+Guy+
Black%27s+covert+war+with+M...-a0126849912. Accessed July 17, 2014.
———. 2004b. “Nakano Agents and the Japanese Forces in New Guinea, 1942–1945.” The
Free Library. Military Historical Society of Australia. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nak
ano+agents+and+the+Japanese+forces+in+New+Guinea%2c+1942-1945.-a0123162110.
Accessed July 17, 2014.
Riley, Ian D., Deborah Lehmann, and Michael P. Alpers. 1992. “Acute Respiratory Infec-
tions.” In Human Biology in Papua New Guinea: The Small Cosmos, edited by Robert D.
Attenborough and Michael Alpers, 281–88. Oxford: Clarendon.

526
 References

Rio, Knut. 2002. “The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person: Formations of Fear and Anger
in Vanuatu.” In Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft, and Sorcery, edited by
Bruce Kapferer, 129–54. New York: Berghahn.
Rio, Knut M. and Bjern Enge Bertelsen. 2018. “Anthropology and 1968: Openings and
Closures.” Anthropology Today 34 (2): 9–13.
Rio, Knut, Michelle MacCarthy, and Ruy Blanes, eds. 2017. Pentecostalism and Witchcraft.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Rivers, W. H. R. (1924) 2001. Medicine, Magic, and Religion. Reprint ed, New York: Routledge.
Robinson, Eric D. 1931. “Annual Report of Sepik District 1930–31.” Territory of Papua and
New Guinea Archives. Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth Archives Office.
———. 1932. “Patrol Report: Ambunti to the Sepik–Dutch Border, and approximately 10
Miles of the Yellow R. No. A4 of 1932–33. Sepik District. E. D. Robinson.” Accession
AS13/26 item no. 14. Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth Archives Office.
———. 1934. “Special Patrol Report No. S.D. 1/1934–35.” Territory of Papua and New
Guinea Archives. Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth Archives Office.
Roscoe, Paul B. 1986. “The Emergence and Development of a Sepik Culture-Bound Syn-
drome.” Ethnology 25 (3): 181–93.
———. 1989. “Medical Pluralism among the Yangoru Boiken.” In A Continuing Trial of
Treatment, edited by S. Frankel and G. Lewis. 199–215. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer.
———. 1996. “War and Society in Sepik New Guinea.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 2 (4): 645–66.
———. 2005. “Foraging, Ethnographic Analogy, and Papuan Pasts: Contemporary Models
for the Sepik-Ramu Past.” In Papuan Pasts: Cultural, Linguistic, and Biological Histories of
Papuan-Speaking Peoples, edited by Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Jack Golson,
and Robin Hide. 555–84. Canberra, Australia: Pacific Linguistics.
Rosi, Pamela C. 1991. “The Role of the National Arts School in the Creation of National
Culture and Identity in Papua New Guinea.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of
the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, Victoria, Canada.
Ross, Malcolm D. 2005. “Pronouns as a Preliminary Diagnostic for Grouping Papuan Lan-
guages.” In Papuan Pasts: Cultural, Linguistic, and Biological Histories of Papuan-Speaking
Peoples, edited by Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Jack Golson, and Robin Hide,
15–66. Canberra, Australia: Pacific Linguistics.
Rosten, Leo. 1970. The Joys of Yiddish. New York: Pocket Books.
Rowley, C. D. 1954a. “Native Officials and Magistrates of German New Guinea 1897–1921.”
South Pacific 7: 772–82.
———. 1954b. “The Area Taken Over from the Germans and Controlled by the A.N.M.E.F.”
South Pacific 7: 824–39.
———. 1958. The Australians in German New Guinea 1914–1921. Melbourne, Australia:
Melbourne University Press.
———. 1966. The New Guinea Village: The Impact of Colonial Rule on Primitive Society and
Economy. London: Pall Mall Press.
Royal Anthropological Institute. 1954. Notes and Queries on Anthropology. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.

527
 A Witch’s Hand

Rüegg, Francois, ed. 2018. Ethnographie und Mission: Georg Hölker und Neuguinea. Sieburg,
Germany: Franz Schmitt Verlag.
Ruhen, Olaf. 1963. Mountains in the Clouds. London: Horwitz.
Rutherford, Danilyn. 2012. Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2018. Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Ryan, Peter. 1969. The Hot Land: Focus on New Guinea. Melbourne, Australia: Macmillan.
———. 1972a. “World War II.” In Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea, vol. 2, edited by
Peter Ryan., 1211–24. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
———. 1972b. “ANGAU (Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit).” In Encyclopedia of
Papua and New Guinea, vol. 1, edited by Peter Ryan, 21–23. Melbourne, Australia: Mel-
bourne University Press.
Sack, Peter, and Dymphna Clark, eds. 1979. German New Guinea: The Annual Reports.
Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Sagan, Eli. 1983. Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form. New York: Psychohis-
tory Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1965. “On the Ideology and Composition of Descent Groups.” Man 65:
104–7.
———. 1978. “Culture as Protein and Profit.” New York Review of Books 25: 45–53.
———. 2013. What Kinship Is—And Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Salisbury. R. F. 1964. “New Guinea Highland Models and Descent Theory. Man 64: 168–71.
Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 1986. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Scaglion, Richard. 1990. “Reconstructing First Contact: Some Local Effects of Labor Re-
cruitment in the Sepik.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea,
edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William E. Mitchell, Douglas New-
ton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster, 50–57. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic
Press.
Schindlbeck, Marcus. 1997. “The Art of the Head-hunters: Collecting Activity and Recruit-
ment in New Guinea at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” In European Impact and
Pacific Influence, edited by Herman J. Hiery and John M. Mackenzie. London: German
Historical Society, I. B. Tauris.
Schmitz, Carl A. 1959. “Todeszauber in Nordost-Neuguinea. Paideuma 7: 36–67.
Schneider, David M. 1972. “What is Kinship All About?” In Kinship Studies in the Morgan
Centennial Year, edited by Priscilla Reining, 32–63. Anthropological Society of Washing-
ton. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Schoorl. J. W. 1993. Culture and Change among the MuYu. Leiden, Netherlands: KITLV Press.
Schultz, Kathryn. 2017. “Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them.” The New Yorker (November
6): 24–28.

528
 References

Schuster, Meinhard. 1967. “Vorläufiger Bericht über die Sepik–Expedition 1965–1967 des
Museums für Völkerkunde zu Basel.” Verhandlunger der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft Basel
78: 268–82.
———. 1969. “Die Maler vom May Rivers.” Palette 33: 2–19.
Schutt, Bill. 2017. Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin
Books.
Schwartz, Lola Romanucci. 1969. “The Hierarchy of Resort in Curative Practices: The Admi-
ralty Islands, Melanesia.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 10: 201–9.
Schwartz, Theodore. 1962. “The Paliau Movement in the Admirality Islands, 1946–1954.”
Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 49: 211–421.
Scott, Michael W. 2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian
Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
———. 2016. “To be Makiran Is To See Like Mr. Parrot: The Anthropology of Wonder in
Solomon Islands.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22 (3) 474–95.
Seligman, Brenda Z., ed. 1954. Notes and Queries on Anthropology. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Seligman, C. G. (1910) 1976. The Melanisians of British New Guinea. New York: AMS Press.
Serjeantson, Susan W., Philip G. Board, and Kuldeep K. Bhatia. 1992. “Population Genetics
in Papua New Guinea: A Perspective on Human Evolution.” In Human Biology in Papua
New Guinea: The Small Cosmos, edited by Robert D. Attenborough and Michael P. Alpers,
198–233. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Shand, R. T. 1972. “Cocoanut Industry.” In Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea, vol. 1,
edited by Peter Ryan, 187–90. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.
Shaw, R. Daniel. 1974. “Introduction.” Kinship Studies in Papua New Guinea, edited by R.
Daniel Shaw, 11–21. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Silverman, Eric K. 2018. “The Sepik River, Papua new Guinea: Nourishing Tradition and
Modern Catastrophe.” In Island Rivers: Fresh Water and Place in Oceania, edited by John R.
Wagner and Jerry Jacka, 187–221. Acton, Australia: Australian National University Press.
Smith, Benjamin R. “Sorcery and the Dividual in Australia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropologi-
cal Institute 22 (3): 670–87.
Souter, Gavin. 1963. New Guinea: The Last Unknown. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Specter, Michael. 2011. “The Power of Nothing.” The New Yorker (December 12): 30–36.
Stanhope, 1968. “Competing Systems of Medicine among the Rao-Brerik, Lower Ramu
River, New Guinea.” Oceania 39: 137–45.
Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J Gillen. (1899) 1968. The Native Tribes of Central Australia, reprint
ed. New York: Dover.
Stanley, G A.V., S. W. Carey, J. N. Montgomery, and H. D. Eve. 1935. “Preliminary Notes on
the Recent Earthquake in New Guinea,” Australian Geographer 2: 8–15.
Steadman, Lyle. 1975. “Cannibal Witches among the Hewa.” Oceania 46: 114–21.
Steer, Martin. (2005) 2011. “Languages of the Upper Sepik and Central New Guinea.” Upper
Sepik–Central New Guinea Project (website). Paper no. 33. Unpublished manuscript. http://
uscngp.com/papers. Accessed October 26, 2015.

529
 A Witch’s Hand

Steinbauer, Friedrich. 1969. Concise Dictionary of New Guinea Pidgin (Neo-Melanesian) with
translations in English and German. Madang, Papua New Guinea: Kristen Pres.
Stephen, Michele. Ed. 1987. Sorcerers and Witch in Melanesia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Stevens, David L. 1972. “Patrol Report Ama No. 33, 1972–1973.” National Archives of Papua
New Guinea, Accession 496.
Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew Strathern. 2020. “Gossip—A Thing Humans Do.”
Anthropology News 61 (1) 18–21.
———. 2004. Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Stocking, George W. 1996. After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951. Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press.
———. 1992. The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Strathern, Andrew. 1972. One Father, One Blood: Descent and Group Structure among the Melpa
People. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela J. Stewart. 2010. Curing and Healing: Medical Anthropology in
Global Perspective. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2017. Book Review of A Practice of Anthropology: The Thought and Influence
of Marshall Sahlins, edited by Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, and John D. Kelly. Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (1): 226–27.
Swadling, Pamela. 1981. Papua New Guinea’s Prehistory: An Introduction. Boroko, Papua New
Guinea: National Museum and Art Gallery; Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea: Gordon
and Gotch.
———. 1990. “Sepik Prehistory.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New
Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William E. Mitchell, Douglas
Newton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster, 71–86. Durham, NC: Carolina Aca-
demic Press.
———1996. Plumes from Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and Their Impact on
New Guinea and Nearby Islands until 1920. Boroko, Papua New Guinea, Coorparoo,
Australia: Papua New Guinea National Museum in association with Robert Brown &
Associates.
Taaffe, Stephen R. 1998. MacArthur’s Jungle War: The 1944 New Guinea Campaign. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas.
Taussig, Michael. 2003. “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic.” In
Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, edited by Brigit Meyer and
Peter Pel, 272–306. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Taylor, J. C. 1984. “Of Acts and Axes: An Ethnography of Socio-cultural Change in an Abo-
riginal Community, Cape York Peninsula.” Doctoral diss., Cook University.
Terrill, Angela. 2007. Review of Papuan Pasts: Cultural, Linguistic and Biological Histories of
Papuan–speaking Peoples., edited by Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Jack Golson,
and Robin Hide. Oceania Linguistics 46 (1): 313–21.

530
 References

Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religions and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth
and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Thompson, D. F. 1961. “Marrngitmirri and Kalka—Medicine Man and Sorcerer—in
Arnheim Land. Man 61: 97–102.
Thorp, Dennis, and Barbara Thorp. 2004. Christian Brethren Churches in Papua New Guinea
1951–2004: How Did It All Happen? Auckland, Australia: Castle.
Tonkinson, Robert. 1974. Aboriginal Victors of the Desert Crusade. Menlo Park, CA: Cum-
mings.
Thurnwald, Richard. 1914. “Entdeckungen im Becken des oberen Sepik.” Mitteilungern aus
den deutschen Schutzgebieten 27: 338–48. English translation: “Discoveries in the Basin of
the Upper Sepik.” Annotations and footnotes by Barry Craig, 2010. Upper Sepik–Central
New Guinea Project (website). Paper no. 26. http://uscngp.com/papers. Accessed October
26, 2015.
———. 1916a. “Vorstösse nach dem Quellgebiet des Kaiserin-Augusta-Flusses, dem Sand-
Fluss und dem Nord-Fluss bis an das Küstengebirge.” Mitteilungen aus den deutschen
Schultzgebieten 29: 82–93. English translation: “Dash to the Source of the Sepik River and
to the Sources of the Sand and North Rivers as far as the Coastal Range.” Annotations
and footnotes by Barry Craig, 2010. Upper Sepik–Central New Guinea Project (website).
Paper no. 27. http://uscngp.com/papers. Accessed October 26, 2015.
———. (1916b) 1974. “Bánaro Society: Social Organization and Kinship System of a Tribe
in the Interior of New Guinea.” Reprint ed. Memoirs of the American Anthropological
Association. Millwood, New York: Kraus.
———. 1921. Die Gemeinde der Bánaro. Ehe, Verwandtschaft und Gesellschaftsbau eines
Stammes im Innern von New-Guinea. Aus den Ergebnissen einer Forschungsreise 1913–15.
Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Familie und Staat. Stuttgart, Sonderausgabe aus
der Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, vol. 38 and vol. 49.
———. 1936a. “Review of Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.” American
Anthropologist 38 (4): 663–67.
———. 1936b. “Studying Savages in Melanesia.” The Yale Review 36, 313–32.
Tomaselli, Keyan G. 1989. “Visual Anthropology in South Africa: A Survey of the Turbulent
‘80s.” Commission on Visual Anthropology Newsletter (May).
Tomlinson, M. E. 1969. “May River Patrol Report No. 5 of 1968/69.” University of California,
San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections Library.
Tonkinson, Robert. 1974. The Jigalong Mob: Aboriginal Victors of the Desert Crusade. Menlo
Park, CA: Cummings.
Townsend, George Wilfred Lambert. 1968. District Officer: From Untamed New Guinea to
Lake Success, 1921–46. Sydney: Pacific Publications.
Townsend, Patricia K. 1974. “Sago Production in a New Guinea Economy,” Human Ecology
2 (3): 217–36.
———. 1971. “New Guinea Sago Gatherers: A Study of Demography in Relation to Sub-
sistence.” Ecology of Food and Nutrition 1: 19–24.
Trautmann, Thomas R. 1987. Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship. Berkeley:
University of California Press

531
 A Witch’s Hand

Treutlein, R. K. 1962 “Lumi Patrol Report No. 1 of 1962/63.” University of California, San
Diego, Mandeville Special Collections Library.
Trollope, C. A. 1962. “Lumi Patrol Report No. 8 of 1962/63.” University of California, San
Diego, Mandeville Special Collections Library.
Tudor, Judy. 1968. “Introduction.” In District Officer: From Untamed New Guinea to Lake
Success 1921–46, by G. W. L. Townsend, 1–14. Sydney: Pacific Publications.
Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine.
Tuzin, Donald F. 1976. The Ilahita Arapesh: Dimensions of Unity. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
———. 1980. The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Religion. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
———. 1983. “Cannibalism and Arapesh Cosmology: A Wartime Incident with the
Japanese.” In The Ethnography of Cannibalism, edited by Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin.
Washington, DC: Society for Psychological Anthropology.
Tylor, Edward B. 1881. Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization.
New York: D. Appleton.
Ucko, Peter J. 1970. “Penis Sheaths: A Comparative Study.” Proceedings of the Royal Anthropo-
logical Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1969, 24–67. London: Royal Anthropologi-
cal Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
Vargyas, Gábor. Data on the Pictorial History of North-East Papua New Guinea. Budapest:
Ethnographic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Van Baal, J. 1966. Dema: Description and Analysis of Marind-Anim Culture (South New Guinea).
The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Van Gennep, Arnold. (1908) 1960. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom
and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Vargyas. G. 1986. Data on the Pictorial History of North-East Papua New Guinea. Occasional
Papers in Anthropology 1. Budapest: Ethnographical Institute of the Hungarian Acad-
emy of Sciences.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics for a Post-Structural Anthropology.
Translated and edited by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal.
Vizedom, Monika. 1976. Rites and Relationships: Rites of Passage and Contemporary Anthropol-
ogy. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Volker, Craig Alan. 2008. Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin English Dictionary. South Melbourne,
Australia: Oxford University Press.
Wafingian, F. J. 1972a. “Lumi Patrol Report No. 13, 1971/72.” University of California San
Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
———. 1972b. “Lumi Patrol Report No. 15, of 1971/72.” University of California San Diego
Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1966. Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House.
Wark, Lynette, and L. A. Malcolm. 1969. “Growth and Development of the Lumi Child in
the Sepik District of New Guinea.” Medical Journal of Australia 2: 129–36.

532
 References

Warner, W. L. (1937) 1958. A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe. New
York: Harper & Brothers.
Webster, E. M. 1984. The Moon Man: A Biography of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Webster, Richard. 2005. The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt. Oxford:
Orwell.
Weiner, Annette B. 1984. “From Word to Objects to Magic: ‘Hard Words’ and the Bounda-
ries of Social Interaction.” In Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific, edited
by Donald Lawrence Brenneis and Fred R. Myers, 161–91. New York: New York Univer-
sity Press.
———. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Wells, Roberta. 1999. “Sidney Herbert Ray: Linguist and Educationist.” The Cambridge Jour-
nal of Anthropology 21 (1): 79–99.
Welsch, Robert L. 2000. “One Time, One Place, Three Collections: Colonial Processes and
the Shaping of Some Museum Collections from German New Guinea.” In Hunting the
Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s, edited by
Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch, 159–79. Oxford: Berghahn.
Wenke, P. B. 1953. “Report on Patrol to Yellow River passing through the Lower Mai-Mai
and the Lower Wapi Area.” Ambunti Patrol Report No. I of 53/54.
West, Francis. 1972. “Townsend, George Wilfred Lambert.” In Encyclopedia of Papua and
New Guinea. vol. 2, edited by Peter Ryan, 1141. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne Uni-
versity Press.
West, Harry G, 2005. Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
White, Geoffrey M., and Lamont Lindstrom, eds. 1989. The Pacific Theater: Island Representa-
tions of World War II. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
White, John. “Patrol Report May River No 3 of 1970/71.” University of California San Diego
Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
White, Osmar. 1965. Parliament of a Thousand Tribes: A Study of New Guinea. New York:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Whitehead, Neil L. 2002. Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Whitehead, Neil L., and Robin Wright. 2004. In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of
Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Whitehouse, Harvey. 1996. Rites of Terror: Emotion, Metaphor and Memory in Melanesian
Initiation Cults.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (4) 703–15.
Whiting, John W. M. 1941. Becoming a Kwoma: Teaching and Learning in a New Guinea Tribe.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Wiessner, Polly and Akii Tumu. 1998. Historical Vines: Enga Networks of Exchange, Ritual, and
Warfare in Papua New Guinea. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

533
 A Witch’s Hand

Wigley, S. C. 1990. “Tuberculosis and New Guinea: Historical Perspectives with Special Ref-
erence to the Years 1871–1973.” In A History of Medicine in Papua New Guinea, edited by
B. G. Burton-Bradley. Kingsgrove: Australian Medical Publishing.
Williams, Francis Edgar. 1928. Orokaiva Magic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1930. Orokaiva Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1936. Papuans of the Trans-Fly. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1944. “Mission Influence Amongst the Keveri of South-East Papua.” Oceania 15 (2):
88–141.
Wilson, Monika. 1951. “Witch Beliefs and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology.
56 (4) 308–13.
Winkelman, Michael James. 1992. Shamans, Priests, and Witches: A Cross-Cultural Study of
Magico-Religious Practitioners. Anthropological Research Papers 44. Tempe: Arizona
State University.
Wolfers, E. P. 1971. “Political Development.” In Papua New Guinea: Prospero’s Other Island.
edited by Peter Hasting, 142–68. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Wright, E. J. 1959. “Taboo.” Papua and New Guinea Medical Journal 3 (3): 108–9.
Wronska-Friend, Maria. 2015. “From Shells to Ceramic: Colonial Replicas of Indigenous
Valuables.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 28: 50–69.
Yoshida, Shuji. 1987. “Migration Routes of the Iwam, East Sepik Province, Papua New
Guinea.” Man and Culture in Oceania 3: 177–89.
Young-Whitford, D. 1946. “Aitape District Patrol Report No. 6 of 46/47.” University of
California San Diego Libraries, Mandeville Special Collections.
Zocca, Franco. 2009. Sanguma in Paradise: Sorcery, Witchcraft and Christianity in Papua New
Guinea. Goroko, Papua New Guinea: Melanesian Institute.
Zocca, Franco and Jack Urame. 2008. Sorcery, Witchcraft and Christianity in Melanesia. Goroko,
Papua New Guinea: Melanesia Institute.

534