ORIGEN, DEFINICION Y NIVELES

Through the course of a long afternoon at my hosts’ house at Samoa village, a steady stream of people came to look at the pictures I had brought with me in the hope of eliciting stories. I quickly lost sight of the two folders of images, as two groups formed around the individuals who were leafing through the pictures taken several decades earlier, prompting memories of stories heard from previous generations, along with plain guesswork. Over the last few days the same scene had been repeated, and my fieldnotes were full of scribbles recording all the comments that I could understand (with or without the help of an interpreter). That day I decided to pick just one set of photocopies to look at with my host Pepo in a quieter corner. I took out the copies of the maps I had found during my archival research and started to ask Pepo whether or not he recognised any of the place-names, to help me understand the social geography of the region. The map reproduced in figure 2 captured my attention, as it featured the toponym “Neuri”, which by now I knew as the local name for Aird Hill, but here appears attached to a landmass far to the south of Aird Hill’s location.

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Figure 2: Particular of the map contained in BNG Annual Report 1892.

I expressed my puzzlement to Pepo, and he explained that during the kidia oubi tau, or time of creators, Neuri was a sentient being, who had ordered the mountain to its south to move away as it was blocking its view of the sea. The southern mountain, on hearing the command, moved to what is now Oro Province in northeastern Papua, where it can still be found today. I was advised never to speak Kerewo language near that mountain lest it seek revenge.

Familiar with the local cartography associated with exploration by figures such as Francis Blackwood (1845), Theodor Bevan (1886, 1887), and William McGregor (1892, 1896), I considered the changing shape of rivers and landmasses simply as the result of a cumulative and increasingly accurate knowledge of this area. What I was alerted to by Pepo and others with whom I discussed the matter was the ever-changing quality of the Kikori landscape.

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Except for Aird Hill, elevated 200 metres above the surrounding plain, the landscape of the Kikori delta appears entirely flat, with few areas higher than 30 metres above sea level. Mangroves and nipa palms, with their dark colours, cover the littoral areas of the intricate labyrinth of streams that unravel as the river proceeds toward the sea. The tide, with its 12-hour cycle, temporally structures everyday activities as large areas of muddy land get flooded or channels dry up, preventing the passage of canoes. The tide is also connected to the currents, a great aid or obstacle to navigation depending on whether or not the canoe’s occupants are paddling with or against the flow. It is no coincidence that, in Kerewo language, verbs of movement usually index directionality in terms of upstream or downstream movement.200

As explained in technical detail by Australian botanist Alexander Floyd, the horizontal roots of the local vegetation, which have to adapt to the salinity of water and the regular tides that inundate large portions of land, capture the mud carried downstream by the Kikori River, forming over time new masses of soft mud.201 Contrary

to what Simon Harrison describes for the Avatip of the Sepik River, very few of the changes in Kikori topography are due to human interaction with the environment except the clearing of small gardens and the much more significant effects of the underwater oil and gas pipelines, which have had a substantial impact on the form of riverbanks along their course.

During my fieldwork I frequently travelled on canoes with my hosts, either to see and map old sites, or for more mundane activities such as fishing and processing sago at the kombati (bush camps). It was during these trips that I slowly learned how much of daily life is structured by the river’s pulse, and how to recognise whether the tide was rising or falling. Travelling along the Kikori River and its streams I also learned that the configuration of waterways and mud-banks changed significantly over time. Certain places were irretrievably under water, while others would occasionally emerge from the water.

The changing shape of the Kikori River is echoed in many myths, some of which are shared with Kerewo neighbours, while others, such as the mythic cycle of Hido, go well beyond places ever visited by Kerewo. In this chapter I focus in particular on the character of Hido, a figure who corresponds well with the characteristics of what is known in the scholarship of religions as a ‘culture hero’, a demiurge whose actions shape the environment and who teaches certain groups the fundaments of their cultural

200 _{Very much like the Avatip of the Sepik River, which is ecologically quite similar to the} Kikori River, described by Simon Harrison, ‘Forgetful and Memorious Landscapes’, Social Anthropology 12, no. 2 (2004): 138.

201 _{Alexander Geoffrey Floyd, ‘Ecology of the Tidal Forests in the Kikori-Romilly Sound Area,} Gulf of Papua’ (Lae: Division of Botany, Office of Forests, Department of Primary Industry, 1977), 9–22. Floyd conducted his survey in 1955.

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practices. I begin my ethnography of Kerewo historical consciousness with an analysis of Hido’s cycle as it provides some tools with which to glimpse fundamental ideas about change that have played out since the colonial period.

I agree with Klaus Neumann’s acute critique of the political implications of starting any history of colonised people with the first encounters with Europeans, and I share with him the problem of ‘finding an appropriate beginning’ for Kerewo past, hence the title of this chapter.202 As pointed out in the opening vignette, early European exploration

of the Kikori area is an inadequate point of departure. It is not just that Kerewo oral literature and archaeological evidence extend back far behind that period, but also that the first fifty or more years of European exploration of the Kikori delta lie beyond contemporary Kerewo historical consciousness. Almost without exception, the arrival of James Chalmers is considered the first occasion in which a white person arrived in the area. Although the death of Chalmers plays a central role in contemporary Kerewo historical consciousness and the dramatic transformations it brought about are hard to overstate, change in even earlier periods is also a feature of Kerewo lore.