ust like I wrote about the bonobos last week, I decided to write about the video that we

watched this week, about the people in New Guinea. I think they were called the Numera
people, but when I went to look them up, I could not find anything. After some more searching,
the only cannibals in New Guinea are the Korowai people. I find these people interesting
because of how primitive they are. They have had the same culture until the British came. It is
amazing to see what tribes were like before technology and before the agricultural revolution.
What I think are unique about these people is that they are open cannibals, meaning they want to
be eaten, and work was fun to them until the Dutch and British came and started monetizing
everything. So, after talking with a friend, I found out that these people are actually the Asmat.
So, yea.
have heard of cannibalism before so I was not that shocked but I have never heard of people
wanting to be eaten by other people. Most cultures will bury or cremate their people after
they die, but the Asmat people want to be eaten so their soul lives on. I guess that makes sense.
It also amazes me how many cultures there are and how many different indigenous people there
are on the planet. It seems that every week I am hearing of some other people that I have never
heard of before. I chose to do the article on these people for two reasons: One, I had to watch a
twenty minute video on them and two, their name sounds funny. Another thing that I found
interesting in the video was the fact that they put things in their noses. And not little things,
those bone-looking things were big. My reaction to this was to throw up and then to look it up.
The film also talked about the tradition of when a boy want to become a man. A person in the
tribe lies the boy down and starts cutting his forheard. I believed the fild called it gar but I am
not sure of that either because I found nothing online about it.
J
I
henever I would look up the Asmat online, I found a lot of articles about Michael
Rockefeller. I had no idea who he was so I decided to look him up. He was exploring
the Asmat region when his boat capsized and he swam to shore. He was never seen again and it
is believed that he was eaten by the Asmat tribe in revenge for what the Dutch did to them. In
1958, leaders of the Otsjanep village were killed by a Dutch patrol so when they found a white
man, they wanted revenge. Soon after his death, the tribe was swept with cholera, which they
believed was revenge for killing Rockefeller. I also wanted to talk about their ritual of becoming
a man. In a process called gar, a person will cut lines in their forehead. This shows that the boy
can withstand the pain and become a man. There are many traditions of becoming a man all over
the world that are not this painful. For example, I was bar mitzvahed, which means I became a
man in the Jewish religion. I only had to read from the torah, not have my head cut up. After the
Dutch came in to the Asmat region, they changed their culture a lot. Cannibalism and gar
decreased because it was too inhumane. While I do not agree with either of these processes, I do
not believe that the Dutch had the right to invade their land and change their culture.

W