Man with a Wound
Desoipitsj ('man with a wound', from deso 'wound' and ipitsj 'man') is the elder of the two brothers who, in the charter myth of Asmat headhunting recorded by the missionary-ethnographer Gerard Zegwaard in the early 1950s, were the first inhabitants of the Asmat land. When his younger brother Biwiripitsj returned from the hunt and pinned a pig's severed head to the floor of their hut, Desoipitsj insisted that the same be done to himself. Biwiripitsj at last obeyed: he speared him, cut into his throat with a bamboo knife, pressed the head forward until the neck vertebrae cracked, and removed it. The severed head remained alive and spoke, dictating the correct butchering of a human body, the preparation and decoration of the trophy skull, and its use in the initiation of boys, in which the novice sits for days with the head between his legs, absorbs the dead man's power, and assumes the victim's name so that the victim's kin thereafter treat him as the deceased. Because every subsequent headhunt and initiation repeats what his head first prescribed, Asmat tradition says the whole headhunting festivity 'came down from Desoipitsj'. He belongs to the same primordial mythic age as the culture hero Fumeripits, though the two figures act in separate myth cycles.
Domains
- headhunting
- male initiation
Powers
- to keep on speaking and giving instruction after his head was severed
- to ordain ceremonies that thereafter bind the living
Relations
- sibling: Parrot Man
Sources
- Gerard A. Zegwaard, 'Headhunting Practices of the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea', American Anthropologist 61, no. 6 (1959), pp. 1020-1041.
- 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'.
- Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art (New York: William Morrow, 2014).