Parrot Man

Biwiripitsj ('parrot man', from biwir or bewor, a many-coloured parrot, and ipitsj 'man') is the younger of the two brothers of the Asmat headhunting charter myth recorded by Gerard Zegwaard in the early 1950s. Returning from a hunting trip with a pig, he cut off its head, thrust a dagger of sharpened cassowary thigh-bone through the throat so that the point came out at the neck, and pinned the head to the floor of the hut. His elder brother Desoipitsj then demanded that the same be done to himself, and Biwiripitsj, after resisting, speared him, severed his head with a bamboo knife, and thereafter obediently executed every order the still-speaking head gave: the butchering of the body, the preparation of the decorated trophy skull, and the first initiation of a boy, in which the head is submerged in water and carried at a run to the bachelors' house, and the novice assumes the name of the slain man. He is thus the first headhunter, and the Asmat warrior who takes his victim's name repeats what Biwiripitsj first did. Under the spelling Beworpitsj the figure remained, into the twenty-first century, a model of behaviour celebrated in myths, songs, rituals and objects connected with the former headhunting complex, and the name is preserved in modern Asmat cultural festivals at Agats.

Domains

• headhunting
• warriorhood
• hunting

Powers

• to take heads in the manner he first performed upon his brother
• to hunt game and bring home pigs from the forest
• to demonstrate the initiation procedures for those who came after

Relations

• sibling: Man with a Wound
• slayer of: Man with a Wound

Sources

• Gerard A. Zegwaard, 'Headhunting Practices of the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea', American Anthropologist 61, no. 6 (1959), pp. 1020-1041.
• Astrid de Hontheim, 'Imagination behind Shape: The Invisible Content of Asmat Artefacts', Anthropological Forum 20, no. 3 (2010).
• Jan Pouwer, Gender, Ritual and Social Formation in West Papua: A Configurational Analysis Comparing Kamoro and Asmat, Verhandelingen KITLV 258 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010), ch. XI 'Asmat headhunting and the initiation of male adolescents'.