Arapesh Erotic

Arapesh is a label anthropologists built from a local word for human beings. It covers a cluster of related communities in the north of Papua New Guinea's East Sepik Province, not a single unified people with one center. Their country climbs from the coast west of Wewak, over the steep, forested Prince Alexander Mountains, and down into the grass and forest plains that run toward the Sepik River. Outsiders have long split them into Beach, Mountain and Plains Arapesh, and the split tracks real differences in soil, food and trade. In the mountains, hamlets sit on narrow ridgetops above thin soil, and households make a hard living from gardens of yams and taro, sago, pigs and hunting.

Language holds the cluster together. The Arapesh languages, among them Bukiyip, Mufian, Bumbita and Abu', belong to the Torricelli family. That sets them apart from the Sepik family languages of large neighbors such as the Boiken and the Abelam. Linguists value them for a dense system of noun classes, in which the words that agree with a noun often echo the sound the noun ends with. Tok Pisin is the everyday bridge to everyone else.

The mountain villages were never sealed off. Men kept long-standing trading partners along paths the ethnographers called roads, running from the beach to the plains. Along those roads moved shell valuables, pigs and even whole dances and song cycles, bought from coastal people and passed inland. Colonial labor recruitment and the Second World War, when Japanese and Australian forces fought along the coast around Wewak, pulled the region further into the wider world. Most Arapesh today are Christian, mostly Catholic. Before the missions, ritual life leaned heavily on the men's tambaran cult, whose sacred flutes were hidden from women and uninitiated boys.

Abroad, the Arapesh are known mainly through Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, who lived with the Mountain Arapesh in the early 1930s. In Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead described a society that expected both men and women to be gentle, cooperative and nurturing, and the book became a landmark of twentieth-century anthropology. Fortune published an account of Arapesh warfare that sits awkwardly beside her picture, and later scholars have read it as a quiet rebuttal. Neither book is the last word on people who have kept living, arguing and changing since.