If I have seen it, and I have, it’s because of the influence of the missionaries. They are trying to get the men and women to have more contact than they have had in the past. In some villages you even find a man sitting next to a woman in church. It’s rare but in some villages you find it. So the missionaries have brought churches to most of the villages? Yes, if you call them churches . .. well, no matter what kind of roof or wall or lack of a wall ... it’s still a church. Now the people don’t really convert to what we think of as Catholicism? I don’t think so, but they do. The missionaries do. It’s one thing to be converted, it’s another for the people to practice in front of the missionary what he . preaches. No more Papisj, no more wife exchange ... well, practically all the villages continue that. Of course, no one is even aware of the homosexual element in Asmat; none of the missionaries are aware of that. So they put on a whole charade for the missionaries? I asked in several different places, I would say in 15 different villages. “How come this still exists? Don’t the missionaries say anything about the homosexual relations?” And everywhere they say the same thing; it is forbidden to mention it to a missionary or to any outsider. I think I am the only one who has ever gotten this information. Why do you think they respect the missionaries so much? Well, they bring in goods. It’s sort of bribery? It isn’t bribery in that sense. They see that the way of life of the missionary is better than their own lives, and he has his own gods. And to them the gods that the missionaries worship have brought them that stuff. So they respect the magic of the missionary? Yes, they want whatever it is that brings canned goods, canned sardines. They are crazy for canned fish, or steel knives or the tobacco. Anything that the missionary brings, they feel, is better then what they have. It's only his gods that make that possible and they feel if they worship his gods, they too will get the same thing. Whether the missionary gives it to them personally or not, it doesn’t matter. Their gods are mostly land spirits and water spirits? They are mostly involved in ancestors. They do have other spirits but it’s the ancestors who control their lives more than anything. Who they remember by name? Yes. The most recent ancestors, those who are recently dead. And the death of ancestors must be avenged. Nobody dies except through either murder in warfare, someone has outright killed him, or through magic. Someone has performed the magic to kill this person. If you get sick of malaria and die from it, someone has performed the magic to make you get sick of malaria. All deaths have to be avenged. By another death? By another death. That’s the only way you can avenge a death. The ancestors won’t let you alone until those deaths have been avenged. They come in dreams? Well, it’s possible for one to come in dreams, but they’ll come openly and stand around and watch you and force you while you are awake. Sort of a hallucination? If that’s what you want to call it. There are many people who claim to have seen them. There are all kinds of spirits. There's one kind of spirit of a living person; you might be talking to me in my house, then you would go into the jungle and would meet me there. You will think to yourself, but I just saw him in his house. If you are clever you will realize that this is my spirit — it is not really me — and if you come back to me in the house and tell me you saw my spirit in the forest, the real me will instantly die. That's a way of killing me. Then, of course, the spirits wander at night; my own goes out of my body and wanders around. You have to be very careful because if you try to wake someone up when his spirit is wandering, he will die. His spirit won’t have a chance / would be terrified to walk across Central Park at two o'clock in the morning, whereas I'm not afraid to walk across the jungle at night. The spirits might get me but I am not afraid of the people. to go back into his body. Do they put much emphasis on their dreams? They don’t talk about dreams and anyway it’s not dreams, it’s real life to them. There are very few dreams in our sense. I think either they forget them immediately or if something important happens they make a big thing out of it. I often wonder, I have not yet asked the right questions about it, what they think about when they are not doing anything. When they are sitting around carving paddles or canoes or whatever. Do they think about revenge? How they are going to avenge the death of a brother or a father or a mother... I don’t know. Doniphan Blair: There’s one sort of slight contradiction that has dawned on me. When a boy is initiated with a skull of somebody, you said he goes back as that person. Now wouldn’t they want to take revenge on the boy? Tobias Schneebaum: Not on the boy. On the other people of the village. The boy actually has not done the killing anyway. But that doesn’t matter. It doesn't really matter on whom you take revenge as long as it’s someone from that village but you cannot take revenge on the person who has taken the name of the dead man. That’s absolutely verboten .. . and that child, as he grows older, can go into that other village and become a spy. He just goes back and forth into that village as if it were his own. In the first place there’s no point in killing anyone unless you know his name, otherwise you can’t give it to the boy who’s being initiated. You have to know the name of the person you are killing. So really the killing is all based on magic. Getting names and transferring of energy and sort of balancing the heavens as it were. Yeah, the cosmos. Of course, they don’t use those terms. Do they philosophize at all in their own way? I have not been able to find out that they do. There is no way I have been able yet to talk about those things. The language itself? The language itself is very difficult and there are no verbs for that kind of thing. You said it’s a fairly egalitarian society but the important headhunters must have some sort of respect? Wine Testing Fridays 4:30-8:00 Champagne Sale throughout December • Introductory Wine Classes • 6^ SW 2nd Portland 97204 223-6060 VICTORIAN STYLE LAMPSHADES Silks & Satins with Fringes & Beads. Custom Designing to Suit Your Tastes & Needs. 10% off with this ad 3554 S.E. HAWTHORNE PORTLAND, OREGON 97214 238-5755 Clinton St. Quarterly 39
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