Looking In, Looking Out

Papua New Guinea

- Not very developed
- Colonised by Dutch, Germans and Portuguese
- Full of mountains, tropical weather
- Not great for farming
- Communities are very rural
- Location influences a lot
- Apparently, cannibal culture

Interesting:
1. Agricultural
2. Poverty
3. Not a lot of infrastructure
4. Physical labour
5. Collective society
6. Tribes
7. Small villages
8. No more cannibalism, was in early times
9. Tribal dress/attire
10. Multigenerational family homes/separate for men and women
11. Culture and tradition kept alive
12. Environmental people, live with nature
13. Cultural diversity, significant number of tribes
14. Isolated from rest of the world
15. No electricity
16. Not much social issues, criminal activity, everyone knows everyone in the village
17. Eat coconuts and fish

Culture
- Remained largely intact from outside cultures
- Estimated 750 tribes
- Social composition very complex, most classified Melanesian and minorities of Micronesian and
Polynesian
- 800 different languages
- Religion – magic, spells, sorcery widely practiced.
- Culture is local and is expressed through wood carving, storytelling, song, dance, body decoration
- Kundu, wooden drums are essential for song and dance. Self-decoration like paint

Daily life
- Different responsibilities, extended families, children
- Accompanied by rituals. E.g., planting.
- Strict separation of men and women, different housing for genders.

Chimbu Skeleton Tribe

1. Provide some facts about the culture and their location

2. Describe the rituals of the tribe
3. Describe the transitions through the life course for men and women
The Chimbu, an ethnic and linguistic group, live in the Chimbu, Koro and Wahgi valleys in the mountainous
central highlands of Papua New Guinea. They live in rugged mountain valleys between 1,400 and 2,400
meters above sea level, where the climate is temperate, with precipitation averaging between 250 and 320
centimetres per year.

The Chimbu live traditional lives, looking after their pigs and crops, and most of their
houses are oval or rectangular, with dirt floors, low thatched roofs, and walls woven from
flattened reeds. With pigs being “by far the most important domesticated animal” to the
Chimbu, there is the pig ceremony (bugla ingu), the largest exchange ceremony at which
hundreds or even thousands of pigs are slaughtered, cooked, and distributed to friends
and affines.