Once we arrived in the village, we were taken to the Long House where the villagers gathered outside, males at one end of the house and women at the other. The women were beating drums and dancing and chanting in unison. I don’t mean to be titillating, but some were bare-breasted, just like in the National Geographic magazines from your high school days! From the video we have seen onboard in our guest speaker’s presentations, the men used to dance in the nude, but now they wear these knee length shorts under their grass skirts so my pictures aren’t quite as revealing as they might have been. The dress was a weird combination of the traditional and modern.
The dancing went on for a while, and then the men disappeared into the long house where they chewed beetle nut (when you see red teeth in the photos, it is from beetle nut juice) and worked themselves into a small frenzy and then came out and carried their freshly carved and painted bisj poles to erect on a specially built platform. These poles are traditionally used to honor the dead killed in inter-tribal battle. To avenge the dead warriors, an enemy would be captured and sacrificed in retribution, and their brains, hands, and testicles would be eaten. The blood of the enemy would release the spirits of their fallen warriors from the poles so they could go to their afterlife. The common wisdom is that Michael Rockefeller was just such a sacrifice when he went missing in the Asmat in the seventies. Ironically, he was there to trade for some of the bisj poles.
Once the poles were raised and tied in place, the men danced beneath them and started to hit each other with branches of the mangrove trees and reeds. The women all raced from their end of the compound to get in their blows, so the ceremony basically ends in a melee! We were then invited to come into the long house where the villagers had laid out their wood carvings for sale. The Asmat call themselves “the tree people” and are renowned for their woodcarving. We bought a couple of pieces for very little money. As usual it was a hot and humid day, so by the time we left the long house, which had two fires burning inside, you could have carried me back to the ship in a bucket!
