Abun Erotic

The Abun live on the northern shore of the Bird's Head, the big western arm of New Guinea, where the Tambrauw mountains come down close to the Pacific. Two things make them a group. They speak a language found nowhere else, and their clans have long named, divided and held a stretch of coast and forest as their own. Outsiders used to lump them in with their inland neighbors under the label Karon, and older records still call the coastal Abun Karon Pantai. There are only a few thousand of them.

Linguists notice the language first. Abun has no proven relatives. Most classifications treat it as an isolate, though some place it in a loose West Papuan grouping that has never been firmly shown to exist. It also works differently from most languages of New Guinea. The verb sits between subject and object, and words change very little, so meaning comes from word order and chains of verbs. The Mpur, who speak another isolate, live to the east, and Moi speakers live to the southwest. Biak speakers from the islands to the northeast settled villages along the same coast long ago. Most Abun also speak Indonesian, and younger people use it more and more.

Land still organizes daily life. Families garden in forest clearings, work sago, hunt wild pig and fish the reefs and river mouths. Rights to land and beaches belong to clans, and those rights now carry real weight. Two Abun beaches, Jamursba Medi and Wermon, hold the largest remaining leatherback turtle nesting population in the Pacific. Turtle eggs used to be a seasonal food. Now villagers patrol the sand with conservation groups and argue over who should benefit from protecting it. Tambrauw calls itself a conservation regency, so Abun customary law and national environmental policy have to deal with each other directly.

Christianity came with missions in the Dutch colonial period and is now the norm. Protestant congregations are at the center of village life, and Sunday services set the rhythm of the week. Older beliefs about ancestors and spirits tied to the land have not fully gone away. At least once, world history came straight through here: in July 1944 American forces landed at Sausapor and Mar and built airstrips on this coast during the push toward the Philippines. More recently, Tambrauw Regency was split off from Sorong in 2008 and Southwest Papua province was created in 2022. Both brought roads, government offices and new politics to a coast that was long reached mostly by sea.