Monday, May 5, 2014

Extra Credit post: Huli Rituals

  • 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
 

Extra Credit Post: Huli Clothing

  • 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.

Extra Credit Post: Huli Food

  • 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
  
 
  • Bananas are another part of the Huli tribe diet.
  • Bananas are a great source of Potassium

    

References

World of the Huli

  • 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

Huli cultural survival

  • 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.

  • Heavy rain is very persistent in the Huli tribe part of Papua New Guinea.

  • 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

Huli Cosmos: What they think about the world

  • 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

Birds of the Huli Tribe in Papua New Guinea

  • From the research I did, I found that the wigs and headdresses that they wear in their traditional and ritual dances are made from different types of birds
  • One bird that I found that they use feathers from is called a killer cassowary. This bird is the third tallest and second heaviest bird behind the ostrich and the emu.
  • The cassowary has a black body, kind of like an ostrich has. The face of a cassowary however, is made up of different colors
 
  • Other birds that are native to the area are called "birds of paradise".
  • There are many different breeds of birds under this characterization.
  • What these birds are mainly known for, in particular are their highly elongated and elaborate feathers extending from the beak, wings, tail or head.
  • These species are becoming threatened by hunting and habitat loss in the rain forest.

Extra Credit: Movie Post: Slumdog Millionaire

  • When watching this movie, I realized that there was a lot of discrimination against Jamal and Salim
  • In the movie, Jamal and Salim's mother was killed by Hindus for being a Muslim so the boys were forced to be homeless and roam the streets.
  • The caste system is also shown in this movie. Jamal and Salim were considered "Untouchables" which means that they were of the lower caste.
  • Jamal was a server at a call center which meant that he was a low class kid. Then later when he signed up to be "Who wants to be a millionaire", when asked what his job was, everybody laughed at him. The host of the show then didn't believe that he was getting the answers right so he called the police to investigate which is also every ethnocentric.
  • When Jamal got a call from an English woman, she becomes mad because she doesn't like his accent

Extra Credit: Trip to New York

My first time I went to New York City, I had an amazing time! I went to Times Square with a bunch of my friends and just walked around to explore the city. At night we went to a place called Roosevelt Island. It's right between Queens and Manhattan. After some research I did on the island, I found it interesting that in 1828, The City of New York purchased Roosevelt Island for $32,000, which would be equivalent to $687,224 today.

Huli and their neighbors

  • Papua New Guinea is home to hundreds of distinct traditional social groups, or tribes, many of which have only recently been in contact with the outside world.
  • While some groups number in the thousands, many have just a few hundred members.
  • Over 800 languages are spoken in PNG, and tribal identities and traditions remain fundamental to the fabric of Papua life.
  • There are over 700 different Papuan and Melanesian tribes, all with their own language 

History of the Huli people of Papua New Guinea

  • The Huli have lived in their region for 1,000 years and recount lengthy oral histories relating to individuals and their clans.

  • They were extensive travellers (predominantly for trade) in both the highlands and lowlands surrounding their homeland, particularly to the south.

  • The Huli people first encountered the white-man in 1935 when Jack Hides and Peter O'Malley traversed one hundred and twenty miles of their territory. They looked at the two explorers and whispered excitedly among themselves about these men. They then presented the two explorers with sweet potatoes from their gardens and escorted them throughout their individual clan territories
  • However, the people would not let the white-men touch them nor did they accept their gifts of bead and cloth
  • The two explorers announced to the world the discovery of a Papuan Wonderland inhabited by a volatile, excitable people, divided into numerous small groups that frequently engaged in warfare.

  • It is believed that the first Papuans migrated to the island over 45,000 years ago.

  • The stocky, bearded highland people are closely related to the lowland Papuans and more distantly to the Melanesian populations of the Solomon islands.

  • Today, over three million people live in the highlands of New Guinea.

  • The harsh terrain and traditional inter-tribal warfare has lead to village isolation and the proliferation of distinct languages.


Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Papua New Guinea: Homeland of the Huli

map2.jpg
                       The green area is where the Huli tribe is located

     
  • The Huli live in the Tari Basin in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
  • The region had little outside influence before the 1940s when plane travel allowed Westerners to bypass the nearly impenetrable coastal swamps and rugged inland mountains.
  • PNG is a country located in the western half of the world's second largest island, New Guinea.
  • The island is situated just south of the equator and due north of Australia.
  • Its name comes from Spanish explorer Inigo Ortiz de Retes who believed that the people resembled the inhabitants of Guinea in western Africa.
  • The island is divided into two nations. The eastern half is known as Irian Jaya, which was annexed by Indonesia in 1963. The western half was granted full independence from Australia in 1975 under the name "Papua New Guinea".
  • The Huli people like many other indigenous peoples have learned to adapt and live off of the land for thousands of years. Because of the large variation in geography of the highlands the Huli benefit from all of their surroundings, from mountains to rain forests and even low wetlands
  • This is a video that shows the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKjxFgy_GAw

Index/Intro



  • The Huli people are indigenous people who live in the Southern Highlands districts of Tari, Koroba, Margaraima and Komo, of Papua New Guinea.
  • The latest estimates put their population at around 150,000; they have lived in their current area for about 1000 years.
  • They speak primarily Huli and Tok Pisin; many also speak some of the surrounding languages, and some also speak English.