Iatmul
The Iatmul are an ethnic group in Papua New Guinea . They settle along the central Sepik , in the East Sepik Province , divided into several autonomous villages. They build their houses on stilts, as the alluvial land is often under water for months. The most important means of transport is therefore the canoe. The Iatmul operate subsistence farming . They trade fish for sago with neighbors .
habitat
The Sepik flows eastward with many bends. In the constantly shifting bends in the river, lakes form with sometimes more and sometimes less water. The landscape is flat and swampy, the water is mostly standing. Matted layers of watergrass grow over time to a size and consistency that can support uprooted tree trunks. What protrudes above the water is mainly bush and grassland. Horticulture is tedious and coconut , sago and Borassus palm trees and bananas form the basis of life. Climbing bags, such as the couscous , ratites ( cassowaries ), feral domestic pigs and crocodiles assert themselves in the landscape and are hunted.
Research history
The name Iatmul goes back to the Anglo-American anthropologist Gregory Bateson , who first tracked down the people in 1929. Due to the lack of a self-designation, the name caught on. In 1936 the Iatmul became known to a larger audience through his work Naven . Together with the ethnologist Margaret Mead , Bateson carried out various research projects in 1938.
From 1972 to 1974, under the direction of the German-Swiss ethnologist Meinhard Schuster , members of the Ethnological Seminar / Bern (including Milan Stanek and Markus Schindlbeck ), took part in a New Guinea expedition to explore Iatmul villages. The ethnologist Jürg Wassmann researched the scarification rite among the tribe of the eight villages in Nyaura (West Iatmul) . Milan Stanek investigated the phenomenon of the "men's house gathering".
Religion and society
Mainly religious topics, ancestral rites and myths of origin were examined . Confirmed by the tribe to this day, legend has it that the original state of the world was an ancient sea. A saltwater crocodile lifted land from him. It then mated with the opened crevice and thus created living beings. The upper jaw of the animal transformed to heaven, the lower jaw took on the shape of the mountains and became the ground. In addition to this creation myth, there are stories of ancient crocodiles who colonized the land and founded settlements. In the initiation rites of the Iatmul men, the myth also plays a role, according to which "the boy" was swallowed by a crocodile and strangled again "as a man".
The crocodile myths "live" in their different varieties to be the initiators in Mannbarkeitsritual by sharp-edged shells, later there were razor blades, cuts on upper arms, chest, abdomen and shoulders taught (tattooing, mbangi Kalik ) whose scars later, the hard-hitting bite marks of Crocodile are supposed to illustrate. The crocodile kills the novice and swallows him (see above: scarification on the central sepic). In the ritual, the devouring of the killed is acoustically illustrated by hitting a stick. Since the man can only be born through initiation, the child must first die. The initiate loses a lot of blood during the procedure, which is understood as escaping menstrual blood and takes the motherly (female) part of the future man. Weeks of further initiation phases pass before the crocodile finally produces the "born man" or strangles it, in the context of indigenous magic / religion not to be understood as a rebirth but rather as a "new birth". Following the “killing”, clear rules determine the time of the “embryonic growth” and finally lead to the “new birth”, which means the end of initiation. The crocodile is ceremonially brought into a canoe, which is ceremonially sunk in the middle of a lagoon.
In totemic cults that people take the mythical kinship connection with natural phenomena and repeat it. The founders of today's clans divided the resulting environment and named it and were able to transform it and slip into it, thus appearing as a crocodile or the sun. These totems served them as “masks”. The competence acquired through the naming includes codifications of duties and rights and with regard to its own totem, the clan was allowed to use proper names, to know and tell the associated myths and to represent them in melodies, rhythms and optically.
The research group also examined the importance of women in Iatmul society and the relationship between the sexes. The descendant structures are patrilinear . It turned out that women are the food providers for the whole family. They are therefore also responsible for keeping ducks and pigs. Men, on the other hand, make the houses and the means of production such as canoes, paddles, and fishing spears, which is, however, considered to be far more prestigious. Nonetheless, it was noticeable that the women appear very self-confident and assertive despite their under-rated social status.
The men's past was marked by ritual headhunting , which excluded women from the mythical-sacred context. However, Bateson reports that the Iatmul, if at all possible, brought the body of the headhunted to the village. There the murdered man was ritually killed again by a mask wearer, this time the whole village taking part in the act.
The men's house assembly, which, according to Milan Stanek, served to bring about social order, was of importance. Functionally, the living space was secured and the community organized, whereby the production of material goods and the reproduction of human life could be guaranteed. The “ceremonial debate” was of particular importance. To do this, the speaker moved towards the middle of the men's house, where there was a ceremonial chair with a human-shaped back. On top of it lay two dozen thin strips of coconut palm leaves half a meter long. This had to be recorded and the debate began. For each argument put forward, the speaker could put off the leaflets until he had none in his hands. In the ceremonial chair, the ancestor embodied himself, who made sure that everything that was put forward received the effectiveness of a magic word.
language
The Iatmul language is derived from the Sepik language area of the Ndu classification and is a dialect of the same name. The Iatmul themselves refer to themselves as Gepma Kwudi (derived from: Gepma = village; Kwudi = language ; pronounced: Ngepma Kwundi ).
See also
literature
- Gregory Bateson : 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 University Press, Stanford 1958, ISBN 0-8047-0520-8 .
- Fritz Morgenthaler , Florence Weiss, Marco Morgenthaler: Conversations on the dying river: Ethnopsychoanalysis at d. Iatmul in Papua New Guinea , Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-42267-1 .
- Jürg Schmid, Christin Kocher Schmid: Sons of the crocodile: men's house rituals and initiation in Yensan, Central Iatmul, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea , Wepf, Basel 1992, ISBN 3-85977-190-6 .
- Susanne Schröter : Witches, warriors, cannibals. Imagination, Domination, and Gender in New Guinea. (= Women's cultures - men's cultures. 3). Lit, Münster / Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-8258-2092-0 .
- Milan Stanek: Social order and myth in Palimbei: Building blocks for a holistic description of a village community in the Iatmul East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea , Ethnological Seminar of the University and Museum of Ethnology, 1983, University of Basel, Dissertation 1979, Series of publications: Basler Contributions to Ethnology; 23.
Web links
Remarks
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To the settlement area of the Iatmul: see map p. 12.
Margaret Mead : The Mountain Arapesh . In: The Mountain Arapesh (with a new introduction by Paul B. Roscoe) (= Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History ). 1938 (en). - ↑ a b c d e Susanne Schröter : Witches, Warriors, Cannibals. Fantasy, domination and gender in New Guinea (= women's cultures - men's cultures . Volume 3 , no. 1 ). LIT Verlag, Münster / Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-8258-2092-0 ( IT book version (accessed on March 5, 2016)).
- ↑ a b Milan Stanek: Social order and myth in Palimbei, building blocks for a holistic description of a village community in Iatmul, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea . Dissertation (= Basel contributions to anthropology . Volume 23 ). 1983.
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↑ a b c d e f g h i j
In volume 2: 1.) Contribution by Waldemar Stöhr: The religions of New Guinea. P. 434 and 2.) Contribution by Jürg Wassmann: The bite of the crocodile: The function of names in the relationship between man and the environment, using the example of initiation, Nyaura, Mittel-Sepik. Pp. 511–557 and 3.) Milan Stanek: The men's house assembly in the culture of the Iatmul. P. 621–643:
Mark Münzel : New Guinea use and interpretation of the environment . tape 1 + 2 . Museum of Ethnology, Frankfurt 1987, DNB 551344652 . - ↑ Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the Sepic 1938: A timely polemic from a lost anthropological efflorescence ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
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The participants in the expedition of the Ethnological Institute Basel in the years 1972-74 were: Meinhard Schuster, Jürg Wassmann, Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, Milan Stanek, Florence Weiss, Markus Schindlbeck and Jürg Schmidt (source: Susanne Schröter):
Meinhard Schuster : Ethnological field research in Papua New Guinea New Guinea . In: Birthday script (Alfred Bühler, 80th birthday) (= Geographica Helvetica ). No. 4, 1979. - ↑ Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin : Women in Kararau: on the role of women among the Iatmul at the Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea. (= Basel contributions to ethnology. Volume 18). Ethnological seminar at the university, Basel 1977, OCLC 3605636 .
- ↑ Meinhard Schuster: On the village history of Soatmeli. In: Kurt Tauchmann et al. (Hrsg.): Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Helmut Petri. Böhlau, Cologne 1973, OCLC 16326939 , pp. 475-491.
- ↑ Ndu / Iatmul ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Iatmul / Gepma Kwudi
