October 1997
Leiden, The Netherlands
The Bird's Head area of Irian Jaya, which has always fascinated scientists, is being studied
more intensively than ever at the moment by researchers from various disciplines and
backgrounds. For example, the Dutch Irian Jaya Studies programme (ISIR), working in
cooperation with the Indonesian LIPI, focuses exclusively on this area.
There is still so much that we do not know about this area that some scholars will deem it
premature to discuss the issue of interdisciplinary perspectives. Archaeological research, for
example, is clearly at a stage in which sorting out the basic data of the first diggings is the
job to be tackled. It seems useless to try to integrate facts into a wider perspective if there
are hardly any facts to integrate. However, other disciplines have collected more significant
amounts of data and discussion of perspectives helps to formulate research questions and
broadens the view of researchers beyond the borders of their own field.
Inevitably, the various disciplines have different perspectives on the Bird's Head. For
example, for the earth sciences the area is the promontory of the Australian continental plate,
and the area with the first and longest contact with terrain of Eurasian affinity. From a
linguistic point of view, the area is, roughly speaking, a middle ground between
predominantly Papuan areas towards the East and Austronesian areas towards the West. For
historians, the Bird's Head is a part of New Guinea with many old links to other parts of
Eastern Indonesia (e.g. the North Moluccan sultanates) and old trade links reaching into
China. For anthropologists, the Bird's Head is in some respects an area in between two
traditional fields of study: Eastern Indonesia and Melanesia. The presence of specific culture
areas within the Bird's Head (e.g. the Biak-Numforese area in the north and north-east
coastal zones), each to be placed in its own regional and historical contexts, indicate the
impossibility of developing a unified anthropological perspective on the Bird's Head. From
the point of view of development administration scholars, the central theme is the local
administration at the interface of national and local identities.
Of course, these aspects of the various disciplines are the subject of constant internal debate,
they are changing perspectives. For example, in the past the languages of the Bird's Head
tended to be viewed from the perspective of central New Guinea languages, and thus
appeared as a kind of peripheral Papuan languages, but now the perspective seems to shift
towards the middle-ground perspective mentioned above.
Conference Aims
The aim of the IIAS conference Changing Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya is
twofold. First, to inform Bird's Head researchers about the current perspectives in other
disciplines in order to facilitate integration of the findings of the various disciplines in wider
frameworks. Secondly, to stimulate internal debate within the various disciplines on the
changing perspectives on the area.
To reach these goals, the IIAS conference is set up in such a way as to facilitate both
discipline-internal discussion of perspectives (in oral sessions and poster sessions) and
interdisciplinary discussion (in plenary sessions).
Deadline abstracts: 1 January 1997. All articles submitted in the correct
version according to the conference style sheet will be published in the Proceedings.
For more information:
ISIR Secretariat
Nonnensteeg 1-3
P.O. Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
Tel: +31-71-5272419
Fax: +31-71-5272632
E-mail: projdiv@let.leidenuniv.nl