Huli Wigmen Engage Tourists
By Jaap Timmer
Soon after they were first encountered by white explorers, the Huli of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea became renowned worldwide for their magnificent wigs decorated with colourful plumes, feathers, and flowers. In 1934, while prospecting for gold with his twin brother in the area between Mount Hagen and the border with the Dutch territory, Jack Fox wrote of encounters with men wearing 'half moon' shaped hats made of human hair and decorated with flowers. Capitalizing on the fascination for these 'Stone Age' people, a series of popular books, magazines, and travelogues boosted the image of Huli as wigmen. Subsequently, photographs of Huli faces enhanced by headdresses and decorative face painting began to adorn advertisements, tourist brochures, and guide books. Now, about six decades after the first whites visited Huli land, Western tourists regularly set off with guides and carriers to make contact with Huli wigmen in the Tari basin of the 'last unknown'.While the first white explorers were recognized as non-human spirits filling Huli with fear and amazement, Western tourists are now seen as human beings, albeit wealthy and powerful ones. The sightseeing tours are far less dramatic than the Fox brothers' patrol, yet tourist brochures suggest the opposite. These brochures foster a variety of tourism that promises an adventure in 'savage unknown lands', where 'wigmen' play the 'Stone Age warriors' with an 'authentic tribal culture'. The labelling of Huli as wigmen, however, is not only the outcome of Western representations that privilege exotic styles of bodily adornment as an index of authenticity. The Huli actively engage in showing themselves to present-day visitors as they would like to be seen: sporting magnificent wigs, their apperance embellished by painted faces and shiny skins, all expressing vitality and distinctiveness. At present there are several groups of Huli men who continue a tradition of bodily adornment and dance self-confidently to display cultural strength and pride to Western tourists in order to forge a path into the future.
The Huli consider the dance performances, called mali, to be a highly competitive and prestigious occasions. Individual dancers attend these events to acquire prestige and to celebrate their traditions at local, regional, national, and international levels. They see self-adornment as part of a core of skills and knowledge (mana) inherited from their ancestors. Mana distinguishes the Huli from their pre-contact and current cultural neighbours. The shapes of their haircuts and the wigs symbolize this mana, and also express masculinity. The bright red-and-yellow face paint motifs are associated with death, danger, and destruction, and they are required for raids, hunting, and dispute meetings. Mali celebrated the death of an enemy or ritual cycles which involved competitive reciprocal exchange of pigs. The mali dances were occasions on which to enhance a man's own performance, and to diminish that of an opposing team. This was most clearly pronounced in the taunting of a defeated enemy by flaunting their virility, strength, and vigour. Nowadays, dancing for tourists, the Huli feel a sense of superiority and empowerment in the face of foreign strength and beauty.
For the tourists, Huli decorative styles are the 'authentic culture' of a timeless ethnographic present. The wearing of Western clothing instead of traditional costume is for many tourists a sign of cultural degradation. Thus, for both the Huli and their white visitors, bodily adornment has been and still is the most distinctive and characteristic feature of Huli culture, in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. The revival of Huli dance performances, which have acquired worldwide fame, allows this indigenous population to pursue self-determination and affect its own destiny. The encounter with tourists and the creative tradition of self-adornment and display in performances for tourists expresses Huli desire and agency within the modern world system. Apart from economic motivations, the Huli embrace tourism to express and protect their own traditions and identity. The new role of dances in a tourist context give the Huli wigmen a new perspective on their past which many find important to continue.
Jaap Timmer is PhD Research Scholar in the Irian Jaya Studies Programma (ISIR) at Leiden University, Nonnensteeg 1-3, 2311 VJ Leiden, The Netherlands.