Papua New Guinea

The Huli take part in over thirty-four rituals which are supposed to serve many purposes.
Rituals are carried out in a number of ways each requiring their own particular encounters.
The requirements of each ritual are different; some require dance and song, others call for an animal sacrifice
Most members in the Huli tribe will take part in a ritual at some point in their life, but there are those who perform more regularly: these people are called ritual specialists.
The main idea behind the rituals is to connect the Huli with nature so they can use it's power in a beneficial manner.
The Huli believe in a supernatural energy or force called gamu which is manipulated by rituals
There are seven types of Huli gamu rituals that are performed on a regular basis. These are: sorcery (gamu bia), healing(agali gamu), divination(tadu bia), fertility(dindi gamu) and initiation(gurumaigiti and haroligamu), protection and production.
These rituals involve combinations of ritual gestures, verbal expressions, and sacrifice although not all rituals contain all three.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV8q06PU5Wk
- Above is a link to a Huli wigmen ritual dance

Westerners are often surprised by the traditional highland apparel.
While women wear grass skirts, men wear nothing but a koteka, or "penis gourd."
The gourd is tied under the man's genitals and around his waist with two pieces of string.
While very few villagers in PNG still wear traditional clothing, many inhabitants of the Balem Valley in Irian Jaya proudly maintain this custom.
They wear lots of face makeup and feathers in their headdresses.

The Huli tribe are hunter-gatherers.
The men do the hunting while the women in the tribe grow and gather the crops.
They practice cyclical agriculture, moving to a new location after the soil is exhausted
The women are exceptional farmers, and have adopted many introduced crops
The men help clear the land, but the rest of cultivation is done by women.

The men also use domesticated dogs to help them hunt.
One of the biggest parts of their diet is the sweet potato, grown by the women in the tribe.
They also rely on several types of garden greens in their diet.
Meat is rarely eaten in this culture; only on special occasions is meat eaten.

Taro is also another specialty in the Huli tribe.
The leaves of the taro plant are also used as a vegetable.
Taro root is easily digestible and the leaves are a good source of Vitamin A and C

The Huli tribe is an indigenous tribe from Papua New Guinea
The continue with their cultural ways by doing things such as hunting animals such as opossums and wild cassowaries.
Their beliefs and how they use the environment are still alive today
These days, they allow tourists to visit their village and to meet them
They just live to survive by holding different ceremonies to have fun.
Some of the Huli tribe have decided to leave their own tribe to work for the logging industry and helping to build roads, airports, facilities and electrification

From my research on the Huli tribe, I found that there are a great number of threats to the Huli tribe.

The most common threats to the tribe are flooding, crop damage and their part of the rain forest being cut down for wood.

The amount of rainfall that they have in this area works in relation to the economy.

Because the amount of rainfall is plentiful, sometimes the crops get damaged, which means that the Huli tribe can't make themselves money.

The Southern Highlands Provincial Government has been pretty much stealing land from the Huli tribe without them knowing because the Huli people are highly illiterate

Not much information is given for what the Huli's believe about the world.
What I did find though is that they believe that the world is lived by not only humans and animals, but also lived by spirits.
It is believed that the spirits that they believe in can either be Good, Evil or ancestros.
They think that the biggest and most powerful good spirits look like the Huli men, just in different clothing
They have a get together where they dress up and paint their face.
This get together is to make sure that the bad spirits leave the area and that the good spirits stay

Monday, May 5, 2014