Tag Archives: animist If you are like me – or, indeed, like the majority of people in the modern world – you spent most of your childhood in a standardised classroom. Schools are so “alike” all around the world that it is hard to remember that it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of thousands of years, children […]  “Development” in Papua New Guinea is a double-edge sword. It is hard to imagine how the country could be more diverse! This rugged land of rivers teeming with crocodiles and jungle-clad, mosquito-infested mountains, is home to about 8.5 million people. Predominantly Papuans and Austronesians, the population also includes Negritos, Micronesians, and Polynesians. Papua New Guinea only gained […]  It takes a lot of time to prepare for a Papua New Guinean sing-sing. Ancient masks and costumes – some pieces carved from wood and others woven from leaves and grasses: all decorated with paint, shells or feathers – have to be checked and repaired. New costume details need to be fashioned from leaves and grasses. And […]  Papua New Guinea is intensely colourful. Papua New Guinea is also – thanks to rugged terrain and relative isolation from the outside world – exceptionally regional. This is certainly the case for the speakers of between 50 and 250 distinct languages (depending on how you categorise things) who live in tightly knit clans in small […]  What is “culture”? That was the question for our first assigned essay in “Culture Myth and Symbolism”, an upper-level anthropology course I took at university, many, many years ago. Deceptively simple, the “answer” – if there is one – became increasingly layered and complex the more I delved into tomes written by the notable ‘modern’ […] |
|
