Afek's Last Son: Integrating Change in a Papua New Guinean Cosmology

This article explains millenarism as a cultural response to a range of social, economic, and ecological changes that occurred during the past few centuries in Oksapmin society. The assumption is that Oksapmin cosmology has always been dynamic and self-innovating toward both endogenous and exogenous factors of change, tending to integrate emergent elements by modifying its inner structure and outer practice. The following analysis focuses on four main examples of radical transformations due to exogenous causes. All the changes discussed herein were originated, directly or indirectly, from contact with the European world (here defined as white-skinned individuals who came from the "Western" world in a broader sense) under the form of physical persons or material and ideological items. This does not mean that Oksapmin society has found vectors of change only in its confrontation with the Western world. The choice to analyze the interaction between this indigenous culture and different manifestations of European culture has been made according to the anthropologist's ethnographic focus.