ASMAT LIFE: SOCIETY, MARRIAGE, FOOD, VILLAGES, WORK

ASMAT SOCIETY

Asmat in 1912

The indigenous people in the Asmat region are divided into two main groups; those living along the coasts, and those in the interior. They differ in dialect, way of life, social structure, and ceremonies. The coastal river areas are further divided into two groups, the Bisman, living between the Sinesty and the Nin River, and the Simai. [Source: Ministry of Tourism, Republic of Indonesia]

Asmat settlements and societies have traditionally been organized around “yews” (social-kin units centered around men’s houses) and been based on patrilineal descent although matrilineal descent is traced and recognized. The terms “cemen” (“penis”) and “cern” (“vagina”) are used to distinguish between male and female kin relations. [Source: Peter and Kathleen Van Arsdale, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Oceania “edited by Terence Hays, (G.K. Hall & Company, 1996)]

Clan loyalty is strong. Each yew is divided into named units called “aypium” and their rank is determined by the positioning of fireplaces within the men’s house. When young men enter the men’s house their association with the clan and other men is strengthened and their ties to their mothers and birth families are minimized. Since regular contact with outsiders in the 1950s, the role of the men’s house has been diminished somewhat. In some places they have been replaced by community houses which are open to all. ~

Asmat society is relatively egalitarian. There are no real hierarchies other than those within and between yew groups and their status is fluid and has traditionally been based on rituals and warfare. Leaders have traditionally been chosen on their basis of their skill, charisma and generosity. Social control is often exerted through gossip, public scolding and yew and peer sanctions. ~

Asmat Life and Customs

The Asmat are semi-nomads, their life depending on conditions on the river which is their sole means of transport and their source of food. The Asmat live on sago, their staple diet, as well as on mussels, snails, and fat insect larvae collected from decaying stumps of sago palms. These are eaten to the accompaniment of throbbing drums and ritual dances. Larvae feasts can last up to two weeks. The Asmat also gather forest products such as rattan, and catch fish and shrimp in large hoop nets. They like to smoke tobacco.

Describing an Asmat man, he met, Carl Hoffman wrote in “Savage Harvest”: He was small, 5 feet 7 and 140 pounds or so, with a prominent jaw, a big nose and deep-set eyes. Veins popped from his neck and his temples. He had a hole in his septum, in which he could wear a shell or pig-bone ornament if he chose. His T-shirt was stained, dotted with small holes. A woven bag adorned with cockatoo feathers and seeds from a Job’s tears plant hung from his neck across his chest. He had quick, darting eyes and spoke fast in a voice that sounded like gravel rolling across glass. [Source: Carl Hoffman, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2014]

Later Hoffman met with some village elders: “Amates, my Asmat guide and interpreter, brought out the tobacco and passed pouches of it and rolling papers to the elders, who passed mounds of the brown weed around the room. Soon we were enveloped in smoke. Amates talked, the men nodded. Some introduced themselves. I was uncertain why they were here. They didn’t ask me anything, but they seemed to want to see me, and they wanted the tobacco I’d brought.

Asmat initiation ceremony

Some Asmat men greet each other by grabbing each other with their left arms and squeezing each other’ testicles with their right hands. The Asmat have traditionally practiced in infanticide, ritual wife exchange, and adoption of children and widows. One Asmat man killed a missionary for trying to pressure him to send his children to school. Another Asmat said he threw one of his children into a fire because it cried too much.

Skulls of relatives have traditionally been kept in the house of their family. "The Asmat have a terrible fear of ghosts," one missionary told Kirk. "But if you keep a man's skull nearby it will protect you from his spirit!" The Asmat sometimes use skulls for pillows. The skulls of relatives can be immediately distinguished from those of enemies because the former are elaborately decorated with colored seeds and shells. [Source: Malcolm Kirk, National Geographic, March 1972]

Asmat Marriage

Asmat marriages are supposed to be yew-endogamous (marrying within the yew group) and aypim-exogamous (marrying outside the aypim group). An Asmat marriage usually involves the payment of a bride price in installments over time to the bride’s family and this was traditionally in the form of stones, axes, bird of paradise feathers and triton shells but now also includes tobacco and Western consumer goods. Polygamy is sometimes practiced among high-status men that can afford it although there has been pressure from the Christian church to end the practice. The only real marriage taboos involve incest within the nuclear family. After marriage a woman becomes more closely associated with her husband’s yew and yew unit. [Source: Peter and Kathleen Van Arsdale, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Oceania “edited by Terence Hays, (G.K. Hall & Company, 1996)]

Marriages are usually arranged by the parents, with wealth, yew contexts and prestige having precedence over love. If a girl refuses to marry the boy selected for her, her parents sometimes beat her until she changes her mind. Only on rare occasions do couples elope. During the wedding ceremony itself the bride's mother wails over losing her daughter and the bridegroom makes a symbolic dash for freedom only to be captured and brought back. When the teen-age couple is joined they feign dejection and whisper each other's name to an uncle, whose wish for mutual happiness sanctifies the marriage, completing the marriage ritual. [Source: Malcolm Kirk, National Geographic, March 1972]

Not only are couples married sometimes entire Asmat communities go through a ceremony similar to a wedding. Anthropologists say these rituals propagate multiple births as a response to the high death rate which inflicts some communities. It is not an orgy but a solemn affair in which adultery is punished with banishment from the clan.

There is no ritual for divorce: a woman simply returns to her yew. Some women site abuse by their husband as the reason for divorce. Some men site their wife’s cooking skills. Wife exchanging is common and implicitly condoned.

Asmat Family, Children and Education

The extended family is the basic household unit. At marriage a woman becomes more closely affiliated with her husband's aypim, and takes up residence there. Households were typically set up near the men’s house. The informal adoption of children, even from nearby families, is relatively common and perceived as way of maintaining yew balance.

The Asmat believe every birth is the result of impregnation by a same-sex ancestor. Asmat babies are light skinned at birth. Asmat girls are traditionally raised by women and boys after the age of six are raised by men. Boys go through a formal initiation and go to live at th men’s house after that. Children rearing has traditionally been done by the mother and female members of the extended family. Some children attend government-sponsored and missionary-run schools. Outside these school social life is done informally through the extended family and the yew.

Only in the last few decades, thanks primarily to the work of missionaries and the Indonesian government, have the Asmat learned how to read. In pre-contact times, children learned the tasks specific to their sex from their elders. Outside influences on the Asmat include formal education. Missionaries and colonial administrations set up various schools in the region. Agats, the regional administrative center in the coastal Asmat area, has schools for mass education. [Source: A. J. Abalahin, “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life,” Cengage Learning, 2009]

Asmat Men and Women

Asmat women raise the children, do the cooking, fish with nets, transport firewood and gather most of the food. Sometimes children help them. Men have traditionally hunted, felled trees and fished with weirs, Women have traditionally done most of the horticulture chores while men guarded the women while they performed these chores. Both sexes assist on sago production. [Source: Peter and Kathleen Van Arsdale, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Oceania “edited by Terence Hays, (G.K. Hall & Company, 1996)]

What did men do when headhunting and revenge wars stopped and guarding was no longer necessary: mostly nothing. And what happened if a woman complained. One missionary told Kirk a man who was being scolded by one of his wives picked up an oar with a pointed handle and speared her dead. During certain feasts women traditionally attack their husbands with bone daggers, fish harpoons and sticks, often drawing blood as they chase them about it. The men do not retaliate in any way because they believe women can perform evil magic on them. [Source: Malcolm Kirk, National Geographic, March 1972]

Asmat women

Asmat women traditionally faced harsh conditions. Wife beating was socially sanctioned, though now reduced by missionary influence and law enforcement. Unmarried women could be beaten by male relatives for perceived promiscuity, and a woman’s property became her husband’s at marriage, leaving her with little control over resources. Wife-swapping and wife-exchange (papisj) were practiced to reinforce alliances or address crises; in papisj, women temporarily exchanged households and sexual partners as part of a formalized agreement between men or families. Women also played roles in fertility rites, and in some central Asmat areas, sorcery was attributed solely to women. [Source: A. J. Abalahin, “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life,” Cengage Learning, 2009 *]

Central Asmat men did not practice ritualized homosexuality, unlike neighboring groups, but they did participate in ritualized heterosexual acts meant to restore social or natural balance. On the Casuarina Coast, however, a ritual male–male relationship known as mbai existed, resembling the Central Asmat papisj exchange in its structure and purpose.

Asmat Villages and Homes

The Asmat live in villages with populations that vary in size from 35 to 2,000 inhabitants. Houses in coastal areas still are generally built on pilings two or more meters high, to protect residents from daily flooding by the surging tides of the brackish rivers. In the foothills of the Jayawijaya Mountains, Asmat live in tree houses that are five to 25 meters off the ground. In some areas, they also build arboreal watchtowers as much as 30 meters above the ground. [Source: Library of Congress]

Asmat villages usually have about 300 to 2,000 people living in them. The villages consist of large huts grouped together side by side. Villages in a proper sense were only created after the contact era. Before that settlements were organized around “yew” (social-kin units centered around men’s houses) and often built on the perimeters of sweeping river bends or off tributaries near where they merged with larger rivers because they offered strategic and resource advantages.

Asmat ceremonial house

Traditional Asmat houses have no running water or electricity, though mission and government posts in the region typically do, giving Asmat who work there limited access to these amenities. Most homes include an outdoor porch where people gather to talk, gossip, smoke, and observe the activity of the village. Formerly, entire tribal families lived together in houses of up to 28 meters long called yeus. Yeus are still in use today, but are only occupied by men for rituals where unmarried men sleep. Upriver, the Asmat still live in longhouses. [Source: A. J. Abalahin, “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life,” Cengage Learning, 2009]

The 10- to 20-meter foot long houses used in the 1970s had as many as 16 family units, each with its own fireplace. The houses were built in this fashion for protection and because it was an efficient way to utilize manpower resources. The Asmat have traditionally spent such a large part of their day collecting food they have had little time left over to build houses. [Source: Malcolm Kirk, National Geographic, March 1972]

Asmat Food

The Asmat are primarily hunters and foragers who subsist by gathering and processing the starchy pulp of the sago palm, finding grubs, and hunting down the occasional wild pig, cassowary, or crocodile. The Asmat also eat the fish they catch. In recent decades, canned meat and fish, along with flour, tea, and sugar, have become important additions to their diet. These goods are typically purchased from Indonesian-run trade stores or mission stores. Although the Asmat population has steadily increased since coming into contact with missionaries and government health workers, the forest continues to yield an adequate supply and variety of food. According to anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum, “Some Asmat have learned to grow small patches of vegetables, such as string beans, and a few raise the descendants of recently imported chickens. The introduction of a limited cash economy through the sale of logs to timber companies and carvings to outsiders has led many Asmat to consider as necessities such foods as rice and tinned fish; most have also become accustomed to wearing Western-style clothing and using metal tools.” [Source: Library of Congress]

The sago palm is the staple of the Asmat diet. Described as the "staff of life," it is a "chalky” starch extracted from a palm tree, and is neither nutritional nor tasty. The palm tree is felled by men with a ax who then cut the trunk into sections. The pith is pounded to a dry pulp and mixed with water and drained to separate the fiber from the starch. The lumpy flour-like residue is roasted and the crust on the outside. The lump is roasted and eaten again and again until it is gone. [Source: Malcolm Kirk, National Geographic, March 1972 =]

The Asmat's favorite food is the sago grub, the soft white larva of the immense Capricorn beetle. The thumb size larva are raised like domestic animals in a sago palm log honeycombed with holes and seeded with pregnant Capricorn beetles. To do this, a sago palm tree is cut down and holes are cut into it. The beetles enter the holes and lay their eggs. After about six weeks the grubs are harvested and roasted over an open fire on a bamboo sliver. Lawrence Blair described eating roasted grubs as "an explosion of hot rich fatty protein [that] was followed by the sensation of a jolt of energy rushing through my system, as if I had swallowed a potion of some sort. Then my teeth crunches on its little black head, and I was instantly converted into a sago-grub addict." One Asmat man used sign language to tell Blair that sago-grubs were the next best thing to human brains.[Source: = "Ring of Fire" by Lawrence and Lorne Blair, Bantam Books, New York]

The Asmat also eat monitor lizards, small lizards, wild boar, tree kangaroos, leaf-steamed plankton and shellfish which are gathered from the mud during low tide. Traditionally no cooking utensil were used; food was roasted, toasted or steamed directly over embers in leaves. Unlike many other groups in New Guinea, the Asmat did not maintain trading networks with neighboring communities that might have supported food specialization before colonial times. In other regions, one group might produce sago and trade it for fish caught by another. The Asmat, however, sought to control the food resources within their own territory. They invested considerable effort in ensuring the productivity of their sago palm stands. In the past, the heads of headhunting victims were hung in the sago groves to enhance the trees’ fertility, and ancestor poles (bis) were erected for the same purpose. While the Asmat still value the fertility of their sago stands, they are no longer allowed to engage in headhunting.[Source: A. J. Abalahin, “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life,” Cengage Learning, 2009]

Asmat Transportation and Health

Asmat traditionally got around on long dugout canoes filled with 15 or so standing and furiously paddling men. The boats seem so unstable to Westerners they fear the boat will capsize just by standing in it. Carved-out long boats sometimes have stylized humans effigies on their bows, symbols of vanquished enemies and made with fire hardened sticks and blades made from sea shells. Today the Asmat hold dugout canoe races.=

Transportation for the Asmat is primarily by dugout canoe and also by foot on trails through the rain forest. Numerous streams and tributaries that overflow their banks in the rainy season provide the primary means of transportation for the Asmat. There are different kinds of canoes constructed for different activities. War canoes of the Asmat are about 21 meters (70 feet) long and can hold around 30 people. Paddling is done from a standing position, and the narrowness of the hull demands that each person maintain their balance; otherwise, the canoe could easily capsize. This is extremely dangerous in the crocodile-infested rivers, lakes, and streams. [Source: A. J. Abalahin, “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life,” Cengage Learning, 2009 *]

Only in the last few decades, thanks primarily to the work of missionaries and the Indonesian government, have the Asmat received proper medical attention. Traditional cures by shaman and sorcerers includes herbal remedies (including tobacco), sorcery, magic and spirit possession and communication. Western medicine has been introduced more aggressively by missionaries than by the Indonesian government. During the contact era there were problems with diseases such as cholera, influenza and yaws. Malaria is endemic on the southern coast of Papua. The debilitating effects of the disease take a toll on the Asmat population. Death by crocodile attack is also common in parts of the territory. In one region, these deaths occur frequently enough to warrant the carving of special commemorative poles called 'crocodile poles.'"

Asmat Economic Activity

Valued items have traditionally included triton shells, bird of paradise feathers, cassowary quills, stone axes and shell nosepieces. Wealth is often defined by possession of these things, which are are passed down through inheritance. Songs and song cycles can also be inherited. [Source: Peter and Kathleen Van Arsdale, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Oceania” edited by Terence Hays, (G.K. Hall & Company, 1996); [Source: “Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of World Cultures,” The Gale Group, Inc., 1999]

Many Asmat continue to subsist on hunting, gathering and fishing. Raising and processing sago is their main food processing activity. Horticulture activity was introduced in the 1950s but conventional agriculture is problematic in the Asmat’s marshy world. Women have traditionally been responsible for net fishing, gathering, and other domestic tasks while men have been responsible for line and weir fishing, hunting, gardening, and felling trees. Selling woodcarvings to outsiders is an additional source of income. Some wage-based activities have been introduced, primarily the production of timber or crocodile hides, some of which are exported to Singapore and Japan. ~

Land has traditionally been owned by a clan or settlement not individuals and the demarcation lines, often marked by atural barriers such as rivers, fluctuated with claims made by different clans. Groves of sago palms and hardwood trees have traditionally been the most desired resources. Sometimes different clan groups fought over them. In recent years there have been conflicts over land between the Asmats and the Indonesian government, which has a different view about landholdings.

In the old days most trade was done to obtain stone for axes or items that had ritual value such as triton shells. These were obtained through trade networks with other tribes that extended through the foot hills and highlands. Later the Asmat obtained goods from Indonesian traders of Javanese and Chinese descent.

Asmat, Environmental Issues and Indonesia

Agats is the main village in the Asmat region. Here, raised walkways form a network above the muddy ground. The walkways link the village landmarks – churches, mosque, schools, Catholic mission offices, post office, police station and several government offices and a few shops selling basic goods. At high tide, small canoes and outboard motor dugouts weave through a small network of canals. [Source: Ministry of Tourism, Republic of Indonesia]

Attempting to rebuild the Asmat culture, which was nearly destroyed by the Indonesian government in the 1960s by tearing down men's house, outlawing feasts and destroying sacred objects, the Crosiers incorporated Asmat rituals into their Catholic services. They also acted as mediators in clan conflicts and as intermediary between the Asmat and the Indonesian government.

The Asmat they still have a long way to go to become part of the modern world. The government got the Asmat hooked on tobacco and then offered them free tobacco if they gave up cannibalism and headhunting. The Indonesian government authorized logging of Asmat land in the 1960s.

As large timber, oil, and mining companies expanded their operations into the Asmat region, the fragile, low- lying mangrove forests that were home to many Asmat has came under threat from industrial waste and soil erosion. The Asmat appear to be gaining some national and international recognition for their artwork; however, this fame has not resulted in their acquiring any significant political input into decisions of the Indonesian government affecting the use of land in traditional Asmat territory. Although there is currently little evidence of Free Papua Organization (OPM) activity among the Asmat, there has been a history of resistance to logging companies and other outside intruders, often in the form of cargo cults and other ritual activity. [Source: Library of Congress]

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Global Viewpoint (Christian Science Monitor), Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and various books, websites and other publications.

Last updated November 2025