Scarification on the central sepic
At the central sepic in Papua New Guinea , scarifications are a central component of a traditional initiation ritual lasting several weeks that is closely linked to the mythological creation story of the respective village communities. The aim is to simulate the skin of a crocodile that is revered as a spiritual creature. The scarifications are also called signs of the crocodile or bite of the crocodile and are cut in the back, chest, shoulders and thighs. With the scars and the tribal knowledge acquired in the course of the ceremony, the initiates receive the status of adult, marriageable warriors.
The scars are worn, for example, by the Kaningara , the Iatmul and the Chambri .
Implementation and importance
According to the beliefs of the peoples mentioned, when the crocodile-like scars are set, the young men also absorb the strength of the animal in order to be able to use them in the fight against their enemies. They become warriors and independent, marriageable men. In addition, scars refer to the wearer's clan in the form of special ancestral marks.
In the Iatmul belief, land, man and beast were created by a totem described as a crocodile with a man's head. The initiation ritual of the Iatmul shows symbolic parallels to this creation story, in which the totem animal with earth came up from the primordial sea and created an island from it. Its upper jaw rose and created the sky and the sun, the lower jaw followed, and grass, bush and mountains emerged. Then it created animals and humans. The clans sprang from an association between the totem and a woman. The initiates go through in three phases death (cutting of the later scars), development (regeneration time and teaching) and rebirth (ritual aftermath).
Initiation celebrations take place every four to five years as part of spiritual ceremonies lasting several weeks, which may differ slightly between the individual village communities. They are no longer tied to a certain age group as they were originally and are performed in boys and men between the ages of eleven and over 30 years. A ceremony is always held to initiate several people.
Preparations
The villages of the central Sepik , the region in which the Iatmul are also based, are organizationally made up of two halves of the village with different social structures. These in turn consist of several clans that are united in ritual communities. The individual clans of the two halves of the village support each other in the organization and implementation of the event. The initiates of one half of the settlement are accompanied through the process by men from the other.
The initiation takes place within a fence made of palm fronds for the celebrations; Women and children as well as unscarified men are usually not allowed in. Inside the fenced area are the men's house and a decorated dance floor.
With whirring devices , flutes and drums , the initiation time is accompanied by music and choral singing. The musicians play a so-called "crocodile rhythm" on slit drums ( garamut ). On the evening before the initiation, the men who have already been tattooed dance from the river bank into the fenced area and continue dancing there until the following morning. In the Kaningara, men dance with a ginger root in their mouth and then take a bath in the river. The dances symbolize the summoning of the crocodile and its appearance. The dancers call his name and describe the way for him. Musically, they also imitate the noises and sounds of the crocodile on its way to the men's house. The following line of text comes from a ritual chant of the Iatmul:
“In the skin of my father, in the skin of my ancestors, in the skin of the crocodile, in this man's skin cut the crocodile mark for you. Come here and cut it in. "
The snake is considered the mother of the crocodile who scarred her son in mythological tale. She is also approached by the singers so that she can send her son over to tattoo the novices:
“I (crocodile) are looking for you, (my) child, I am looking for you my novice, where are you my child? Oh child, my child, novice, my novice, […]. Mother Ndumangwanimbit (name of the mother and the snake) (I) your child (the crocodile) Wanimeli, in the (primeval) place Mävembit, (would like) a child, to tattoo a novice, just like you did, mother, (on me executed). "
Cutting the crocodile scars
The morning after the dance, the initiates are led into the fenced area by their maternal uncles. On the way there, they are beaten by other ceremony participants, with their uncles offering them protection from the blows. Then the scarification begins. With the Kaningara it takes place inside the Tambaran house. During the scar tattooing on the chest, which is described as the most painful, the young men to be initiated sit in front of their uncles and are hugely supported by them from behind. The scars can be cut by several people at the same time. When changing positions, the uncles are also available to assist. Uncle and initiates sit down on an upturned canoe to tattoo their back and shoulders. The initiates lie on their stomach and in their uncle's lap. Special plant leaves are chewed for pain relief.
A razor blade is used to cut herringbone-like patterns into the skin, consisting of points and arched lines. The blood flowing out is always rinsed off with water. According to the belief of the communities in the middle sepic, a person's bones arise from the father's semen and the perfused tissue from the mother's menstrual blood. The bleeding wounds are seen as the draining of maternal blood, which according to various sources is symbolically understood as separating the umbilical cord or cleaning the man from his mother's menstrual blood .
With the cuts, understood as crocodile bites, the men die in a spiritual sense and are devoured by the crocodile and then reborn. They symbolize the descent of humans from the primeval crocodile. The marks imitate the scale-like skin of that being. With their structure, the stripes on the back indicate its trunk, the scars on the upper arms and hips represent the limbs of the crocodile. The faces of the Iatmul men remain free of the crocodile-skin-like scars, as the creation crocodile itself has a human head. With the Kaningara, on the other hand, the pattern on the upper body is described as the face of the crocodile: A navel surrounded by circular scars represents the nose, and circular nipples represent the creature's eyes.
After the scar tattooing, a tincture of coconut oil and charcoal ash and then clay or clay are applied to the body in order to provoke inflammation and thus intensify the scarring. The incrustations of the cuts are later scraped off with a bamboo strip. According to the assumption of some anthropologists, the clay could symbolically correspond to feces as residue of a birth through the anus, which is based on the symbolic act of rebirth and at the same time masculinizes the process of birth.
According to further reports, the uncles first carry their symbolically dead nephews from the fenced-in area to their mothers after the procedure. In doing so, they break ties with the maternal branch of their clan.
Regeneration and teaching
The second phase of the initiation ritual is the regeneration of the scarified and their training and teaching. For this purpose, the face and upper body of the initiates are painted with white paint, the color of death. They are brought to the Tambaran house , the symbolic place of the original creation, where they live in seclusion for the following weeks. There they are thoroughly cared for and fed by the men and are given the secret knowledge of their paternal clan, which in the mythological sense corresponds to growing up in the belly or in the egg of the crocodile. You will be taught manual skills such as making and playing musical instruments, and explaining spiritual and mythological beliefs. For the Kaningara, however, the withdrawal phase takes place before the scarification process and lasts two months.
During this time, the boys are forbidden from any contact with women or touching food with their hands. According to further rules of conduct that were described at the initiation of the Kaningara, the initiates are completely forbidden from visual contact with women, which is why they cover themselves when they leave the Tambaran house to relieve themselves. Furthermore, they are not allowed to sit down on seating furniture and only stay in the west side of the house, as the east side is reserved for men whose initiation has already been completed. Clothing is limited to underwear. Touching one's own body with bare fingers, including scratching or the like, is also not permitted. The meals consist exclusively of fish , leafy vegetables , sago and occasionally bananas and are eaten facing the wall and without communication between the initiates. The usual consumption of tobacco and betel is avoided. Violations of the rules will be punished with blows of the rod. There is even the belief that a rule violation could lead to the early death of the initiate.
Completion of the ritual
Finally, the third phase of the initiation time symbolizes the completion of creation. First of all, the fence around the fairground is dismantled. The novices celebrate their rebirth with a washing in the river. Their hair is shaved off and stuffed into a crocodile doll made from leaves, which is then sunk in the Sepik, with which the crocodile being of creation symbolically withdraws to its place of origin. Finally, the “newborn” men present themselves to the entire village community.
The adult men who have been initiated into the knowledge and belief of the village community are now allowed to take part in the meetings in the men's house . A few months after the ritual, they are given a secret name by their maternal uncle. They have this in addition to their actual name, which they received from their father after their birth. This is the name that the man's soul will bear after his death.
development
The scars were originally cut with bamboo shavings, stones or shells that were used several times . Later, more hygienic disposable razor blades were used, which made the cuts and patterns more accurate and the scars less bulging.
With the changed habits of life that went hand in hand with colonization, the framework conditions for the scarification rituals also changed in the 1920s and 1930s. Increasingly, the men responsible for carrying out the celebrations left their villages for several years to pursue gainful agricultural work on the coast. This meant that the events could be held less often. In addition, the boys between the ages of 12 and 14 went to boarding schools after compulsory schooling was introduced. The ceremonies therefore only took place when several young people had returned to the village, which raised the average age of the initiates into later adulthood. In addition, they no longer lasted for several weeks, but only according to the non-teaching time during the school holidays.
Furthermore, the ritual, which was costly for families, increasingly lost its spiritual significance; In the 21st century, depending on the financial situation of those affected, among other things, it is no longer mandatory for every man in the villages of the Sepik area. Scarification and the symbolism associated with it experienced a further loss of significance when the people of Papua New Guinea moved into the urban lifestyle.
Anthropological research
Before the 20th century, the initiation ritual was still largely unknown in Western culture. The scarifications were researched in the 1910s by the anthropologist Otto Reche and in the 1920s by the geographer Walter Behrmann . Behrmann took part in the Empress Augusta River Expedition in 1912/13 . Due to a lack of language skills and the associated communication problems, the scars were initially described by European researchers based on purely visual impressions and regardless of their symbolic meaning. There are also reports from the 1930s by the Anglo-American anthropologist Gregory Bateson .
The ritual was first extensively researched and analyzed by the ethnologist Jürg Wassmann from the Nyaura tribe in 1972 to 1974 using film and photo documentation . The most recent ethnological documentaries of the 20th century include that of the curator Christian Coiffier in the Yensan settlement in 1988. In 2009, the anthropologist Lars Krutak made a film about the scarifications of the Kaningara .
See also
literature
- Lars Krutak: Spiritual Skin: Magical Tattoos and Scarification , Edition Reuss, Glattbach 2010, ISBN 978-3-943105-11-7
- Walter Behrmann: In the river area of the Sepik. A German research trip to New Guinea , Berlin, 1922
- Christian Coiffier: Initiation of the crocodile men , 1995 in Anthony JP Meyer: Oceanic Art , Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne, pages 232–233
- Peter Probst: The Decorated Body , Museum Education Visitor Service, Berlin: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1992
- Otto Reche: The Empress Augusta River. Results of the South Sea expedition 1908–1910 , II. Ethnography: A Melanesien Bd. 1., Hamburg, 1913
- Adolf Roesicke: Communications on the ethnographic results of the Empress Augusta River Expedition , Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 46, page 507-522, 1914
- 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 , Basler Contributions to Ethnology 36. Basel, 1992
- 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 , Basler Contributions to Ethnology 23. Basel, 1983
- Jürg Wassmann: The bite of the crocodile: The function of names to create order in the relationship between man and the environment using the example of initiation, Nyaura, Mittel-Sepik in: New Guinea, Use and Interpretation of the Environment, Vol. 2 (Red Thread for Exhibition 13), Edited by Mark Münzel , Frankfurt: Museum für Völkerkunde, page 511–557, 1987
Movies
- Lars Krutak: Tattoo Hunter - Papua New Guinea , 2009
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c In the Empire of the Crocodile Men , Die Zeit, September 5, 2007
- ↑ a b c d e f g h The power of the ancestors - cultural evidence from New Guinea , Guide to the special exhibition in the Ethnological Collection of the University of Göttingen, edited by students of the Institute for Ethnology at the University of Göttingen under the direction of Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin and Gundolf Kruger
- ^ Lars Krutak: Making Boys into Men: The Skin-cutting Ritual of the Kaningara Tribe of Papua New Guinea.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Eva Ch. Raabe: The relationship with the crocodile , initiation and scars tattooing among the Iatmul in Papua New Guinea at journal-ethnologie.de
- ↑ Doneisha L. Snider: Crocodile Scarification as a Male Initiation Ritual in Papua New Guinea (PDF; 426 kB) (English)
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Lars Krutak: Making Boys into Men: The Skin-cutting Ritual of the Kaningara Tribe of Papua New Guinea.
- ↑ Australia and Oceania: Crocodile Scars ( Memento of the original from March 11, 2013 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. , Video from National Geographic
- ↑ Patrick F. Gesch: On Conversion from the Global to the Local: Going Beyond One's Best Understanding in Sepik Initiation , page 6
- ↑ a b c d e f Peter Probst: The decorated body , Museum Pedagogy Visitor Service, Berlin: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1992
- ^ A b Lars Krutak: Tattoo Hunter - Papua New Guinea , 2009
- ↑ a b Papua New Guinea: At the End of the World , Badische Zeitung of October 12, 2012
- ↑ a b c Bernd Keiner: Papua New Guinea, the crocodile cult on the Sepik River
