Huli Erotic

The Huli live in the high valleys around Tari in Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands, at elevations where the air is cool and the soil, worked into long parallel ditches, has supported sweet potato cultivation for centuries. They are one of the largest highland populations in the country — several hundred thousand people — and their visibility outside PNG owes a great deal to the men's tradition of growing human-hair wigs shaped over a cane frame and decorated with everlasting daisies, parrot feathers, and the iridescent breast plumage of the Superb Bird-of-Paradise. The wigs are not costume. They are made during a period of seclusion in a wig school, under the guidance of a specialist, and the hair must be grown by the wearer himself under strict ritual rules about diet, contact with women, and exposure to certain plants. A man may produce several wigs in a lifetime; some are ceremonial, some everyday.

Huli belongs to the Engan branch of the Trans–New Guinea family, and sits in a dense neighborhood of related but mutually unintelligible highland tongues — Enga, Ipili, Mendi — the legacy of populations that have lived in adjacent valleys long enough for languages to drift apart while staying recognizably kin. Traditional Huli social organization rests on patrilineal clans tied to specific land, and on a sharp separation between the worlds of men and women: until quite recently, married couples did not share a house, and boys left their mothers around age seven or eight to live in men's quarters. Christianity, mostly through Lutheran, Catholic, and various evangelical missions that arrived after first contact in the late 1930s, is now the dominant religious affiliation, but it overlays rather than replaces older ideas about ancestral spirits, sacred ground, and the ritual responsibilities of clan leaders.

The arrival of the Porgera and Hides resource projects, and the wider footprint of the PNG LNG pipeline, has reshaped Huli life in a single generation: cash, rifles, court cases over land royalties, and renewed clan warfare have all followed. So has a complicated visibility — the wigman in feathers has become one of the standard images used to represent Papua New Guinea abroad, often without much sense of the ritual discipline behind the costume, or of the fact that the people wearing it are negotiating mining contracts and provincial elections in the same week.