Mee Erotic

Mee means the people, which is what they call themselves. Almost everyone else has called them something else: Kapauku, borrowed from lowland Mimika neighbors, and Ekari or Ekagi, the spellings Dutch officials settled on in the 1930s. All three still turn up in older ethnography and in library catalogs, so they are worth knowing if you go looking. The Mee live in the central highlands of Papua, Indonesia, in the basin of the Paniai lakes and the valleys around them, Kamu, Mapia and Tigi among them, spread across the Paniai, Deiyai and Dogiyai regencies. It is cool, wet, steep country between roughly 1,500 and 2,000 meters, and the economy rests on two things: sweet potato gardens cut into the slopes, and the pigs those gardens feed. Their language, usually written Ekari, belongs to the Trans-New Guinea family and to a small Paniai Lakes cluster shared with Wolani and Moni. It is unrelated to the Austronesian languages of the coast, and with something on the order of a hundred thousand speakers it is one of the larger Papuan languages anywhere.

What made the Mee famous in anthropology was money. Leopold Pospisil, who lived in the Kamu Valley in the 1950s, described a society running on cowrie shell currency, priced transactions, credit, interest and enforceable contract, with remarkably little given away free between adults, kin included. Leadership follows from that. A tonowi, literally a rich man, holds influence by accumulating pigs and shells and then lending them out. Followers are debtors. Hoard instead of lend, and the influence evaporates. Nothing passes down by birth. Dutch aircraft sighted the lakes in 1936, Catholic and Protestant missions arrived close behind, and most Mee today are Christian, with Catholic parishes thick around Paniai. Older ideas have not gone anywhere either, including Ugatame, the creator understood to be behind everything that exists, the bad along with the good. Indonesian administration arrived in 1963 and has been contested ever since. The Mee are among the most politically vocal peoples in Papua and they carry the cost of it: the shooting of four teenagers at Enarotali in December 2014 is still the case the province argues over. Meanwhile the gardens are still cut into the same slopes, pigs still settle debts and marriages, and the noken, the looped string bag carried by a strap across the forehead, still does the work a backpack does elsewhere.