Different worlds

An encounter with the Asmats of Southern Papua exposes a cultural divide thousands of years in the making.

- MATT VANCE

Writer Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Had she ever visited the Asmat people of Southern Papua, Indonesia, she might have added to that profound statement “… and to confirm the greatest of our fears”.

There is a reason that the Asmat is remote. It is an immense 18,000 sq km mangrove-covered delta that extends its shallow, muddy waters well out to sea, preventing any shipping from coming close; there is little dry land, hence few roads or landing strips. Labyrinthine river systems stretch to the rising peaks of inland Papua, which are high enough to have snow on them despite being near the equator.

Contact with the outside world was developed in the 1950s. What the Dutch discovered as they attempted to bring the Asmat under colonial rule was an intricate cultural network that had been refined over several thousand decades.

They also discovered, to their horror, that the Asmat engaged in a ritualised form of cannibalism. To the Western mind, this is murder of the worst kind. To the Asmat, it is an ancient cultural practice of avenging any wrongs brought on their ancestors and restoring a cosmic balance to the universe.

In 1961, the Asmat swamps became even more infamous when Michael Rockefeller disappeared there. Rockefeller, a member of one of the world’s richest families and son of the New York governor, was on an art-collecting expedition for his father’s Museum of Primitive Art. He was reported to have drowned after swimming from his upturned catamaran at the mouth of the Betsj River with two empty petrol tanks tied to his waist.

There was an extensive search for him funded by his father, but after two weeks with no body found, the Rockefellers retreated into their own private grief.