Asmat is a tribe living on small islands in mangrove vegetation nearby the sea, on the south side of the western part of the New Guinea Island. They are the most famous cannibalistic tribe in Papua, a province of Indonesia.
These coastal people occupy a low-lying swampy region that covers approximately 9,652 square miles (25,000 square kilometers) in southwestern Irian Jaya. The Asmat population is estimated at about 65,000 people, living in villages with populations of up to 2,000.
The Asmat’s first encounter with European people was with the Dutch in 1623. However, until the 1950s, their remote and harsh location almost entirely isolated the
Asmat from other peoples. It was not until the mid-20th century that they came into regular contact with outsiders.
The Asmat were documented as headhunters and cannibals, and as a consequence was left largely undisturbed until the mid-20th century. The first apparent sighting of the Asmat people by explorers was from the deck of a ship led by a Dutch trader, Jan Carstensz in the year 1623.
Captain James Cook and his crew were the first to actually land in Asmat on September 3, 1770 (near what is now the village of Pirimapun).
According to the journals of Captain Cook, a small party from the HM Bark Endeavour encountered a group of Asmat warriors; sensing a threat, the explorers quickly retreate
d. In 1826, another Dutch explorer, Kolff, anchored in approximately the same area as that visited by Cook.
When the Asmat warriors again frightened the visitors with loud noises and bursts of white powder, Kolff’s crew also rapidly withdrew. The Dutch, who gained sovereignty over the western half of the island in 1793, did not begin exploring the region until the early 1900s when they established a government post in Merauke in the southeast corner of the territory.
From there, several exploratory excursions with the goal of reaching the central mountain range passed through the Asmat area and gathered small numbers of zoological specimens and artifacts.
They took these artifacts to Europe, where they generated much interest, and probably influenced mod
ernist and surrealist Western artists such as Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, and Pablo Picasso.
Besides the fact that the Asmat were head-hunters, they also “hunted for names”. They believed that when they killed a man and ate him, they take his power and become him.
They named every person after someone deceased, or after a killed enemy. A child was sometimes given a name only ten years after it was born, and after its village set out to kill a man from an enemy village nearby.
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