The Korowai of Irian Jaya
The Korowai of Irian Jaya

Author: Gerrit J. van Enk

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1997-07-03

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0195355636

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Irian Jaya is the official name of the western half of New Guinea, a province of Indonesia since the 1960s. Its inhabitants are generally untouched by civilization, and most of their hundreds of native languages and cultures remain unstudied. Van Enk and de Vries gained access to one of the most isolated parts of Irian Jaya in order to study the Korowai, a tribe in southern Irian Jaya. The Korowai still use stone tools, live in tree-houses, and have no knowledge of the outside world. Van Enk and de Vries provide the first study of the Korowai language and culture. They reproduce oral texts that show patterns of grammar, discourse, and culture, and discuss the phonological, morphological, and syntactical aspects of the language. In the process, van Enk and de Vries reveal a number of key semantic fields and conceptual patterns such as kinship, counting, the role of lunar phases, and Korowai cosmology.

Ecology of a Tool
Ecology of a Tool

Author: Pierre Perequin

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2020-04-30

Total Pages: 933

ISBN-13: 178925387X

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New Guinea, and especially Papua New Guinea, is the last country in the world where ethnologists were able to closely observe, film and photograph the whole manufacturing chaînes opératoires of polished stone felling tools, from quarry extraction to finished tool use. Research on the polished blades of PNG has evolved over the years, following changing philosophies and research agendas. While it is clear that an exceptional sum of information has been gathered, it remains centered on that small part of the Highlands where conditions for field research were more pleasant than elsewhere. This presentation of Irian Jaya axes therefore tackles a topic that remains mostly unexplored. Until now, stone tool research in New Guinea has followed an anthropocentric approach, in which tools are seen more as vectors for social exchanges than as means of acting on the environment. This monograph takes a different approach. Here, polished stone blades are placed at the center of the world, between, on one side, the transformed natural environment, and, on the other, the social and economic environment. This approach allows for a suggestion of new avenues of inference in archaeology, as well as to test and abandon existing ones. In this volume, the stone blade is considered as a living being, existing in balance within its biotope. This idea is not far removed from the beliefs of Irian Jaya farmers, for whom life animates certain objects of their material culture. Following a brief presentation of Irian Jaya, the function of polished stone blades in Irian Jaya societies and the distribution of hafting styles is described, defined and studied along with the quarrying zones and the areas of diffusion and use of their production. The different trends in each area of polished blade production and exchanges are also noted. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the ethnoarchaeological potential of these contemporary observations.