Atome Pii

To help guide your journey, we’ve organized the website into regional chapters. Each one introduces you to the people of that area and points you toward the origin traditions of its major tribes.

Forty years ago, in 1985 when Prof. Polly Wiessner first arrived in Enga Province, and met Akii Tumu, the director of the Enga Cultural Centre, we tried to envision the research that needed to be carried out to preserve knowledge of Enga history and tradition for future generations in these times of rapid change. Dr. Paul Brennan had made an extensive collection of Enga material culture displayed in the museum at the Enga Cultural Centre in the 1970s. However, unlike in many other parts of Papua New Guinea where spectacular wood carvings, weavings, ceramics, and barkcloth paintings were produced, Enga material culture is sparse.

The cultural wealth of Enga lies elsewhere—in the wide variety of oral traditions that were passed down in men’s houses for ten or more generations: sung tales, myths, songs, poetry, and atome pii, the more factual historical traditions of tribes and clans. The work of Roderic Lacey had shown that these historical narratives were key to opening the door to Enga history, as well as providing narratives to unify clans and tribes. However, they had not been systematically collected.

At the end of 1985, we set out to record the “origin traditions,” or charter narratives, for Enga tribes and their genealogies, which lay out tribal structure and identity. We began by visiting all tribes in the province to collect their origin traditions, genealogies, and legends of tribal dispersals. We felt we could accomplish this within a year or two. However, as we crossed ridge after ridge, we found far more than expected—historical traditions on wars and migrations, religious cults, bachelors’ cults, ceremonial wars, and agricultural innovations. Our goals expanded, and some 40 years later after many ups and downs, we are still learning. There is always more.

After ten years of research, we compiled much of the information we had collected into the volume Historical Vines, published in 1998, that documented the extraordinary developments in Enga society over the past 350 years prior to contact with Europeans. In 2009, we opened the Enga Take Anda Museum and research centre to replace the former Enga Cultural Centre, returning the results of our research—and that of others—to the people. In 2016, we launched the Enga Cultural Education Program to transmit knowledge of Enga cultural heritage to K6–12 students in primary and secondary schools.

However, we never published the origin traditions and genealogies collected for most tribes of Enga. We had felt it was questionable to put this information into print because we knew it was far from complete — we had very rich material for some tribes and very sparse material for others. Was this because some tribes had not maintained their origin traditions, or because we had not encountered the most knowledgeable elders?

We have now decided to publish this material on a website so that the information we do have on individual tribal histories is available to the people of Enga. This information, though incomplete, is particularly valuable because we were privileged to speak with elders who grew up in men’s houses before or during the time that the Australian Administration and missions were established in Enga. Formerly, historical narratives were told in men’s houses, so if somebody altered them or related them incorrectly, others present could correct them. Such cultural transmission is no longer practiced today. Obtaining reliable information on the pre-colonial histories is ever more difficult.

Over the years, we spoke with as many elders from each tribe as possible who were identified as men of knowledge. However, it should be clear that the historical traditions presented here cannot be taken as fact nor used for matters such as land claims. Polly Wiessner compiled all the information that we collected from different elders for each tribe into the tribal histories presented here. It was a challenging undertaking; she is responsible for any errors. There will be omissions and errors—however, because the material is on a website that can be edited, Engans who are knowledgeable about their own tribal histories can offer corrections via the Enga Take Anda. Moreover, additional information can be added as an appendix. In other words, this website is an ongoing project.