The Korowai of Irian Jaya

This book is a particularly useful reference for those of working in New Guinea. It is a descriptive presentation of a massive amount of data collected over a lengthy period of fieldwork among the Korowai, who live scattered throughout the swampy, mixed-tropical rainforest between two rivers (the Eilanden and Becking) in southern Irian Jaya. The Korowai speak a Papuan language belonging to the Awyu-Ndumut family.

Gerrit J. van Enk lived among the Korowai as a missionary for the zgk (Mission of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands) from 1987 to 1990. Lourens de Vries worked as a linguist with zgk in the Wambon, Kombai, and Korowai areas from 1982 to 1991. Their presentation of the Korowai has been enhanced by the linguistic and ethnographic work of several other zgk missionaries. The book contains an outline of the Korowai community’s physical, cultural, historical, and linguistic background; Korowai phonology, morphophonemics, morphology, some major morphosyntactic patterns of coherence in discourse, kinship terminology; and Korowai texts (e.g., narratives on the origin of foods, the creation of a new world and humankind, first contacts with outsiders, and cannibalistic witchcraft); useful appendixes (e.g., a comparative word list with Kowowai and Kombai basic lexical items, Korowai-English and English-Korowai vocabularies, and a list of Korowai loanwords from Indonesian).

The Korowai are a Papua treehouse dwelling people who came into contact with outsiders only in the 1980s. They are horticulturalists, with sago and bananas as their basic food items. Women raise domesticated pigs and men hunt for wild pigs (with bows and arrows or pitfalls) and cassowaries (with bows and arrows or by setting rattan ropes at the height likely to break the bird’s neck as it traverses along game trails). Both women and men fish to supplement their diet.

Dramatic change came for the Korowai when the Indonesian administration imposed the kampong (Indonesian-style) village system in which the Korowai live together with people from different clans. This was radically different from the traditional Korowai form of living in houses located on their own clan ground that were 8 to 12 meters off the ground to living in kampong houses on stilts of no more than 2 meters high in a mixed-clan community. Along with the transition to kampong villages came an increase in khakhua (male cannibalistic witchcraft) accusations and initially fears that the universe would cease: both a result of rapid change and social stresses that came in its train.

The Korowai do not practice head-hunting but raids by head-hunting groups did occur on them until the late 1960s, and they have a long-established set of fears about khakhua. When someone is convinced that they are a victim of khakhua, it is believed that they will die within a few days. These attacks involve the cannibalistic consumption of the victim’s inner organs, after the khakhua has pierced the victim’s heart with his “invisible” arrows. Those found guilty of khakhua are in turn executed and eaten, after a trial that often involves torture.

One of the strengths of this book is that the materials are presented in such a way that they can be directly used by other anthropologists or linguists to make comparisons with their own field areas. For example, the materials on witchcraft accusations are valuable for our work among the Duna people, who live across the border in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In the Aluni Valley of the Duna area most of the witches are female rather than male, but we find a parallel situation with increased accusations of witchcraft when particularly stressful situations are being mediated by the community at large. The gendered differences between the Korowai and the Duna in terms of witchcraft accusations are particularly intriguing. It would be interesting to know about Korowai gender relations in this context. In the Duna case the attribution of witchcraft to females implies a strong recognition of female agencies and powers as well as a concern about excessive forms of consumption. Exempting females from this category in Korowai may have the effect of protecting them against accusation of this form of wrongdoing, but it also perhaps alters their involvement in other spheres such as political life. The Korowai of Irian Jaya provides data that demonstrate cultural and sociological continuities existing across the artificially imposed border that separates Irian Jaya on the west side of New Guinea from Papua New Guinea on the east side. We hope to see more books of this sort coming out in future; they provide a valuable resource.

The authors also state in their preface, “This book is meant not only as a first step in the study of the Korowai but also as an urgent appeal for anthropologists, linguists, and others to continue with the study of the Korowai and to start with the study of the Ulakhin, the Kopka, the Tsawlwambo, and other isolated and totally unknown groups living just south to the central ranges in southeastern Irian Jaya” (vi). A clarion call of a kind often made in anthropology today, we wonder if it will be answered.