1 - The problem

Summary

The great proliferation of ritual forms, cult organizations, and social structures found among the Mountain Ok provides a challenge to anthropological description, explanation, and theory. This extended essay is an attempt to analyse variations in ritual between cognate and contiguous Mountain Ok communities in a way that will provide insights into the forms of religion and society in an area, and raise theoretical questions as to how these can best be perceived and analysed.

Thus, the object of study in this analysis is not demarcated and conceptualized as ‘a culture’ but as a variety of culture – specifically, the varieties of cosmological ideas and expressions in a population of ‘neolithic’ cultivators and hunters in a recently contacted area of Inner New Guinea. To promote clarity of expression I shall sometimes use the term ‘sub-tradition’ to refer to the ideas which members of a local community or a single language group regard as true, and ‘tradition’ for the conglomerate stream of ideas and symbols of a plurality of genetically related and intercommunicating communities. These are not analytical but descriptive terms in my effort to account for how Ok ideas vary and are distributed between individuals, congregations, and local areas.