The Garra figures of the Bahinemo T. Wayne Dye PhD
Garra (gē ‘rä) (no plural) is the word used by the Bahinemo (bä ‘hē nǝm o) people for a traditional set of religious artifacts. These include the famous hook carvings, but also bamboo flutes and pipes kept and played to please them, and the “tamberan house” or “men’s cult house” where the men practice this religion. The most important artifact they have is the garra homu, the artistic hooked figures, of which we are concerned here. Bahinemos are the people who own and inhabit all of the Hunstein mountain range in the East Sepik Province, an area bordered by the April, Sitifa (Blackwater), and Salumei rivers, and, to the north, the line where the hills give way to the Sepik River floodplain. The Bahinemo people were hunters and gatherers who moved frequently through the 500 square miles of this tropical forest. Their lives were not easy; deaths from ABOVE: Boys Initiation ceremony tropical diseases, which they normally blamed on witchcraft, often led to mutual suspicion and war. Many babies died, and those who survived to adulthood seldom lived beyond their fifties. By the time we arrived, their population had dwindled to 308 people. My wife I lived and worked among the Bahinemo as anthropologist/missionaries, for much of each year from 1964 until 1985. We learned the language, provided much-needed medical help, showed them new ways to improve their daily lives, developed a way they could write their language, and translated portions of the New Testament. Particularly in the 1960s, the Bahinemo people were totally dependent on their garra carvings. On several occasions, we observed how much they trusted those carvings to protect them from the evil spirits that they believed were ready to kill them at the first opportunity. For example, in 1968 I saw an anthropologist (who should have known better) keep raising the price he was willing to pay for the main garra in the remote village of Moli until it reached the astronomical sum of money. (As an anthropologist, he should have known better.) The village headman, who had the social right to sell it was literally shaking in the end, wanting that money so badly. However, he refused to sell it, saying, “If it goes, our village is completely unprotected.” The garra carvings were kept inside the men’s cult house except when the village was going to be empty and vulnerable to strangers coming. Then they were hidden in deep pools to protect them from both human visitors and the ravages of insects and rot. They were also brought out for a short time at the culmination of a boys’ initiation ceremony. “Seeing the garra” was the central supernatural focus
124 Michael Hamson Oceanic Art
