Stone Age Economics… John Husing

Nine days travel from my office, I recently made a new friend: In-are-ay. To an economist, he and his neighbors are unique. Any of them, down to age 12, can start from nature and within minutes begin producing food, clothing, shelter or tools … skills long forgotten by "civilized" people.

Stone Age. You see In-are-ay lives in the Stone Age. To visit him requires landing at a jungle clearing in a remote Indonesian area of New Guinea, followed by days of slogging through swamps, balancing on logs, fording rivers, and contending with torrential rains and malaria mosquitoes. Each step moves you deeper into jealously guarded clan turf, towards a time before agriculture, before permanent settlements, before written history.

In-are-ay is a Kombai. He and his tribe have only recently discovered that there is a clumsy people on this planet, who are mostly white, come from faraway villages, smile a good deal, have lots of stuff, and no apparent survival skills. They bind their feet and stumble, because they can't feel the jungle floor. They carry strange food for days, instead of eating the nutritious beetles, larva, spiders, grasshoppers and sago palm pulp that is all around them. Despite the jungle's heat and dampness, they wrap themselves in hot clothing. They can't hit a tree with a bow and arrow, and insist on viewing life through tiny clicking and flashing boxes.

In-are-ay and his clan were kind enough to let our group be the first to enter their territory for a sago-worm feast. Here, widely disbursed families leave their homes (tree houses built 15-50 feet off the ground to avoid insects) and gather at a long feast house to gossip, meet wives, trade, chant, dance, strut and gorge themselves on their one source of fat: inch long beetle larvae harvested from sago palms.

Who Are These People? In-are-ay is 5'2" and has the muscular definition of a gymnast. He appears to be 25 to 29 years old. He does not know as in his world, time is irrelevant. Little has changed since the last Ice Age. His main tool is a stone axe. His tool kit includes a hardwood crowbar, and bamboo knives. When he needs construction materials, he simply reaches for them: branches for traps or baskets or walls, bark for flooring or cloth, leaves for roofing tile or wrapping, vines for rope or thread.

His ever present weapons are a rattan strung bow and featherless bamboo arrows. The latter are notched for killing people, spatula-shaped for pigs, pronged for fish and blunt for stunning reptiles or birds. He stores water in a long bamboo pipe. His only clothing is a gourd or penis leaf. Like all nomads his art is portable: pig's tusks in his nose, carving on his smoking pipe, alligator like body scars, a pig's tooth necklace, a rat tail head band, feathers.

The Women. In-are-ay is a family man who dotes on his youngest daughter, Lela, who is often found perched on his shoulders. Altogether, he has two wives and four children. His senior wife, Don-day, has three girls and is pregnant. We often found her on the women's side of the feast house, breast feeding Lela, or hunched over a non-stop fire cooking sago mixed with the day's gathering of insects.

Don-day's long neck is accented by a coiled seed necklace. The only clothing worn by her or her girls are small skirts. These she made by picking young palm frond leaves, holding them in her teeth, and tearing them into thin strips. After powdering her thigh with ash, she uses her palm to tightly roll these strips on it, forming a growing length of thread. This was looped around her big toe, which anchored the macraméing of the skirts.

Nearby, another fire is maintained by In-are-ay's second wife, Berima. She is decked out in a family heirloom: a dog's tooth necklace. Despite a painfully swollen arm, Berima hauls loads of wood, gathers insects, dams and drains streams to collect crayfish, pounds sago pulp into powder, or beats bark into cloth. To carry these things, or the small piglet she keeps tied by her fire, she uses a macraméed carrying sack worn across her forehead and down her back. Like the men, she is quite adept with a stone axe. Berima was once married to In-are-ay's deceased brother. On his death, she and her son Ha-me-nah became In-are-ay's second family.

Its not easy to talk to In-are-ay. His language is probably spoken by fewer than 3,000 people. However, Ha-me-nah and the other inquisitive young boys are soon teaching us words like magu (dog), ai (pig), ringla (one) and dow (sago). Puru rambo is quickly understood to be the equivalent of "aloha" in Hawaiian: hello, good, good-bye, thank you. "Go vivi wa?" elicits people's names, though some are reluctant to answer as the killing of a named enemy means capturing his soul.

At A Feast. A Stone Age feast bombards the senses. As tribal distinctions melt away, In-are-ay sits with his leg resting on top of mine, his arm around me. His friend Po-man-are-ray uses my other thigh as a pillow. A "magu" curls up around my back. The smoky light from 20 smoldering fires barely reveals the women cooking; the children and dogs curled up together asleep; stone axes, bows and arrows standing at the ready.

I am occasionally startled as a harsh flickering torch suddenly lights up the shadowy scene as men strut along the feast house, or sight down arrows, or barter for dog's teeth, or light pipes. Sago worms and sago are offerred around. A singer starts a falsetto chant, and is answered by a low chorus of "Ahhh-oooh." Men dressed as birds begin a ritual dance. Others quietly sing or talk together. A dog yelps. An "ai" screeches. A child cries. A young bride furtively glances over her shoulder at a husband with whom she will be left in the morning. It is today. It is 15,000 years ago.

What Future? If Lela reaches adulthood, what life will she live? Certainly not the one described here. With her clan's isolation beginning to end, loggers will come for her exotic trees. Miners will come for her soil. Missionaries will come for her soul. Each has an agenda that will destroy the natural rhythm that has allowed her clan to exist, and lead what by jungle standards is a relatively happy and prosperous life. The shock from encountering us has inevitably begun to raise questions about steel axes, flash lights, clothing and medicine.

One young man, E-Callo, points to a possible optimistic future. He has worked with several eco-tourist groups entering the fringes of the Kombai area. He speaks a little Indonesian. He is beginning to understand money and occasionally makes the eight day roundtrip to where modern goods can be bought. He is gaining respect among the clans.

As the E-Callos of the tribe move into leadership, they still have a short time to set the direction in which the clan will evolve. If they elect to respect the best of today's clan values, and use carefully controlled eco-tourism as the means to finance their new found wants, then perhaps the clan itself will retain control over the pace at which they mesh with the modern world. Certainly, we who visit have the obligation to keep their values, not our own, at the forefront of any contact.

Afterthought: Writers make much about cannibalism when discussing this area. This has more to do with writing edgy stories than reality. While it still exists in remote areas, and was probably experienced by the parents of people like E-Callo or In-are-ay, it appears to be dying out.

[note: this article, along with a picture of Inare with Lela on his shoulders was on the front page of the Business Press Newspaper that is sold in this area. On the inside were two photos, one of me and Pow-man-are-ay and another Kombai holding a stone axe; another of one of the Kombai holding his bow and arrows while drinking from a root.]