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...lesser-known groups, Lower Arafundi. The Lower Arafundi people were ethnographically significant as foragers of the tropical rainforest, as progenitors of a rock art tradition, and as one of a small circle of human societies that claim not to recognize paternity. (Hunters and gatherers, tropical foragers, New Guinea, Sepik, Lower Arafundi)
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Although the Sepik Basin of New Guinea was home to a contact population of only 300,000 to 500,000 people, it was among the most linguistically diverse regions on Earth, its inhabitants speaking well over 200 languages and at least twice that number of dialects (Laycock 1973:54). Notwithstanding this diversity, however, the Sepik has received much less anthropological attention than other areas of New Guinea, and its ethnographic coverage has been highly uneven. Most attention has focused on the large, high-density, artistically and ritually prolific groups of the Middle Sepik River and Maprik regions. The Abelam around Maprik, for example, have received sustained attention from at least eleven fieldworkers and more fleeting attention from more than six others. A similar order of interest has been applied to the Iatmul of the Middle Sepik. By contrast, fewer than ten scholars have conducted sustained fieldwork among the more than 70 smaller-scale, low-density societies of the whole of lowland Sandaun (West Sepik) Province.
To avoid the biases imposed by anthropological field choices and achieve a more balanced understanding of Sepik contact-era ethnography, more attention has to be directed to these lesser-known groups. Unfortunately, with Western contact now more than a century along, such a task is increasingly difficult, and the likelihood of understanding much of the cultural context that motivated and informed contact-era behavior is slight. But for sketches of the broad contours of subsistence, settlement, social organization, and ritual life the situation is more hopeful. Anthropologists may have skirted most of the Sepik's less elaborate cultures, but they were not ignored by other Western agents. A surprisingly extensive, largely unpublished documentary record was left by various Sepik explorers, labor recruiters, missionaries, administrative officers, linguists, and occasional passing anthropologists. A major aim of this article is to demonstrate that considerably more usable ethnographic information exists in these sources than is commonly assumed.
Unfortunately, it is unrealistic simply to expect anthropologists to exploit this literature. For one thing, the costs in time and labor of gathering, translating, collating, and analyzing these scattered, often unpublished sources are enormous. For another, it is impractical to expect most scholars to have the level of familiarity with Sepik geography and history that is necessary to contextualize the material. Toward a modest remedy, therefore, we offer here a basic ethnography of one of the Sepik's lesser-known groups: the Lower Arafundi people of the East Sepik Province. In addition to their value in expanding and balancing the comparative knowledge of human society, the Lower Arafundi are anthropologically important for two reasons. The first is their ethnographic distinction. At contact, they comprised that supposed rarity among tropical forest peoples, a group living almost exclusively by hunting and gathering (cf. Bailey and Headland 1991; Bailey et al. 1989). They were progenitors of an important rock art tradition that used caves as cult structures functionally equivalent to men's houses, pointing to an important analogical transformation of ritual culture. And they were among that small circle of human societies that claim not to recognize paternity. Their second claim on anthropological interest is theoretical: they raise to especially sharp relief some of the difficulties associated with constructing the cultural units that underlie the comparative anthropological endeavor.
THE ARAFUNDI ENVIRONMENT
Scattered below and midway up the slopes of the Andogoro, Moirurtapa, and Kundiman mountains that separate East Sepik Province from the Enga and Western Highlands Provinces, the people of the Arafundi River region inhabit one of the more spectacular landscapes in New Guinea (Map). The limestone walls of their mountain homelands inspired awe in many early European visitors, "appearing perpendicular and completely white as though faced with cement, over which numerous small waterfalls cascade three or four thousand feet into the ARAFUNDI River" (ABN 1962:2). At the base of the mountains, the lowland environment is carpeted with tropical rainforest and sago swamp, and at contact was home to the Lower Arafundi communities. Midway up the mountains, located on massive, rainforested tablelands extending from both sides of the Arafundi River gorge, were the settlements of the Upland Arafundi (ABN 1966b:6, 1963:2; ANG 1950: Geo. note 1; Haberland 1966:36; KRW 1962:n.p.).
LANGUAGES
Originally, it was thought that the peoples of the Lower and Upper Arafundi spoke different languages, Alfendio and Meakambut, respectively (ABN 1962:6; Laycock 1973:40). By the late 1960s, however, administrative patrols were reporting mutual comprehension between the two peoples, and linguistic opinion now views them as sharing a common language, Arafundi. If this is so, however, it is a language with significant dialect differentiation, perhaps down to the level of individual communities (ABN 1966a:7, 1969, App. 2:1; Foley 1991:7-8; Grimes 1992:819, 2000; Williams 1993). Arafundi, once thought to be a linguistic isolate, appears to be unrelated to the Middle Sepik languages to its north. Foley (1991:7-8) suggests that it may be related to the Harwai, Hagahai, and Pinai languages spoken in the mountains to the east, in the head waters of the Yuat.
Whether or not they spoke the same language, the lowland- and upland-dwellers exhibited marked cultural differences. As might be expected of people living in a swamp and floodplain ecosystem, the Lower Arafundi had canoes and could swim; in the mountains 200 to 400 meters above, the Upland Arafundi did not (ABN 1963:8). The two people had also adopted very different subsistence regimes. The lowland carbohydrate staple was sago, a palm that grows abundantly in low-altitude wetlands, while meat protein came primarily from hunting and fishing. In the uplands, sago also featured in the diet, but only as "an important subsidiary" to the shifting cultivation of sweet potato, yams, taro, and banana (ABN 1962:7, 1963:10, 1964a:3,5, 1965:7, 10, 1966a:map, 1969:map; Taylor 1938/39:323). In contrast to the lowlands, moreover, food-gathering was "comparatively unimportant," and meat protein was obtained primarily from domesticated pigs (ABN 1962:7).
In the uplands, Arafundi settlements seem to have been dispersed and the people quite mobile. The population lived in "scattered homesteads" that made up loose village groups; and they were "always moving," as one garden was worked out and the family group relocated to establish another (ABN 1962:7, 1963:10). Their houses resembled those of the highlanders to their south rather than the Sepik house type favored by the lowland people to the north (ABN 1967a:4). Beyond this, unfortunately, nothing is known of the Upper Arafundi people. By default, therefore, the rest of this ethnographic survey focuses on the Lower Arafundi and the contact-era communities of Awim, Imanmeri, Meakambut, and Wamblamas (or Wambramas) (Map). (2)
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC RECORD AND THE PEOPLE OF THE LOWER ARAFUNDI
The most important documentary source on the Lower Arafundi people is Haberland's (1966) brief ethnography based on a total of five days spent in the settlements of Awim, Warlamas (or Kapokmeri), Imanmeri, Yamandim, and Imboin in 1961 and 1963. Other sources include early patrol reports and census registers from the Angoram and Amboin Patrol Posts and information from several other observers who passed briefly through the region. These sources are supplemented by data that Telban (1997, 1998) gathered in three brief visits to the region: a nine-day trip in November 1990 to Kansimei, Imboin, and Meakambut; a seven-day visit to Imboin and Meakambut in January 1991; and a five-day trip in January 2001 to Warlamas, Yamandim, Awim, Imboin, and Kurinjang (Meakambut was by then deserted). In addition, he made many visits to Imanmeri during fieldwork in the Karawari village of Ambonwari.
Combining unpublished field data with documentary material raises some citation difficulties. In what follows, ethnographic information taken solely from documentary sources is cited in the usual form; information unaccompanied by any citation derives solely from Telban's field research; and statements derived from both Telban's work and documentary sources (say, Haberland) are signaled as: "also Haberland 1966:40."
CONTACT HISTORY
Germany was the first colonial master of the Sepik, and Imanmeri people told Telban that their first encounter with Europeans was a visit from "German police," who took five men captive for fighting: they were said to have "hooked" their prisoners by the chin and to have taken them off to Ambunti, where they later died. The most likely German presence to which this incident refers is the Kaiserin Augusta Fluss Expedition, which in 1912 established a base camp at what later became Ambunti Station. In December of that year or in January of the next, expedition members ventured some 65 kilometers up the Karawari River to a point no more than a dozen kilometers from Imanmeri (Anonymous 1913; Stolle 1912). There is no mention in the expedition's published reports of any excursion even close to the Imanmeri environs, let alone of captives being taken from the area. Since expedition members had little interest in pacifying the region, moreover, it is difficult to understand why their indigenous police would have been sent on such a mission. Possibly, indigenous police, carriers, or "shoot boys" from the expedition up the Karawari forayed off on their own and tangled with local people,...
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