A Ritual Response to Climatic Perturbations in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

The impression gained by visitors to the New Guinea Highlands is of an equable climate year round with its usual, though not invariable, daily Pattern of warm sunshine in the mornings regularly followed by rainfalls in the afternoons. Yet according to the Wola people of the Southern Highlands Province, their region sometimes experiences weather so inclement that food shortages occur, even famine in extreme conditions. The threat of climatic perturbations has recently attracted popular Western interest (Houghton et al. 1990). The possible environmental consequences of our industrial pollution of the atmosphere are causing concern: the so-called greenhouse effect (Slade 1990; Heymsfield and Miloshevich 1991; Vellinga and Swart 1991), global warming (Maddox 1991; Hecht 1990; Schneider 1990), and acid rain (Pearce 1990; Mason 1990), to mention but three topical issues. While these global concerns may well affect highland New Guinea weather patterns, they do not currently concern people living there, unlike the inhabitants of some of the low-lying islands of the Pacific who fear catastrophic loss of land if sea levels rise as some forecast. Major perturbations in the usual weather pattern however, which they say have occurred for generations, have always been a worry. THE WOLA AND THEIR CLIMATE The Wola speakers occupy five valleys in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, from the Mendi River in the east to the Ak in the west. They live in small houses scattered along the sides of their valleys in areas of extensive cane grassland, the watersheds between which are heavily forested. Dotted across the landscape are their neat gardens. They practice shifting cultivation and subsist on a predominantly vegetable diet in which sweet potato is the staple. They keep pig herds of considerable size. They hand these creatures, together with other items of wealth such as seashells and cosmetic off, around to one another in interminable series of ceremonial exchanges, which mark all important social events. These transactions are a significant force for the maintenance of order in their fiercely egalitarian, acephalous society. Their supernatural conceptions center on beliefs in the ability of their ancestors' spirits to cause sickness and death, in various other forest spirit forces, and in others' powers of sorcery and poison. High annual rainfall and seasonally uniform tropical temperatures characterize the climate of the southwestern Pacific region, dictating the weather over the Southern Highlands, though modified by local controls. The seasonal shift north and south of the thermal equator, together with the associated positional changes in the southerly subtropical anticyclone centers and northerly monsoonal wind system, are the principal seasonal controls on the region (Curry and Armstrong 1959). The seasonal variation in rainfall is small nearly everywhere. High humidity and cloudiness are predictably associated with the combination of high rainfall and temperature. There is a seasonal alternation in the direction of prevailing winds from northwest monsoons to southeast trades; wind patterns being consistent, sometimes strong but rarely violent (see Hounam 1951; Howlett 1967:36-41; Brookfield and Hart 1971:4-21 for more detailed overviews). The climate of the Wola region is of the Lower Montane Humid type (according to the classification scheme of McAlpine et al. 1983:160). It is characterized by high rainfall, the absence of soil moisture, droughts, cool temperatures due to the moderating effect of altitude, and the relative absence of any seasonality (Fitzpatrick 1965). Occasionally serious climatic perturbations occur with potentially serious consequences for food supply. FROST Frost is a dramatic instance of such a disturbance. It is not a hazard commonly associated with equatorial regions, but it is a possibility at higher altitudes (Brown and Powell 1973, 1974; Waddell 1975). …