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The Pairing of Musicians and Instruments in Iatmul Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Gordon D. Spearritt
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Extract

The Iatmul, numbering about eight to ten thousand people, dwell in some twenty or more villages along the middle reaches of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Although comparatively little is known about so many of the hundreds of different cultural groups in Papua New Guinea today, the Iatmul have caught the attention of many ethnographers over the past fifty years. Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, for example, worked in Iatmul villages and in those of adjacent cultures in the early 1930s, and Gregory Bateson's Naven (1958) was written as a result of his observations of the Iatmul, also in the early 1930s.1 Even before the visits of Bateson and Mead, some German explorers and ethnologists had pointed out special characteristics of Middle Sepik culture (e.g., Reche 1913 and Roesicke 1914), and since the Second World War several German and Swiss anthropologists have concerned themselves with aspects of Iatmul life (Aufenanger 1960, Schuster 1965 and 1967, Hauser-Schäublin 1977, Stanek 1978, Wassmann 1978 and Weiss 1978). The main characteristics of the Iatmul language have been outlined by Laycock (1965).

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 14 , 1982 , pp. 106 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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References

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Discography

Music of Oceania. Papua Niugini: The Middle Sepik. Musicaphon BM 30 SL 2700 Recording. Basel: Bärenreiter [1982].Google Scholar
Music of Oceania. The Iatmul of Papua Niugini. Musicaphon BM 30 SL 2701 Recording. Basel: Bärenreiter [1982].Google Scholar