Catalogue Drumming to forget

Ordinary Life and Ceremonies Among a Papua New Guinea Group of Forest-Dwellers

Drumming to Forget relates the daily life of a small population of highland forest-dwellers in the interior of Papua New Guinea. Although they were « discovered » in 1938 by a team exploring for oil and were « pacified » in the late 1960s, the Ankave still are without roads, an airstrip, an health post or a school. Yet they are neither living in the « Stone Age » nor caught up in the web of « globalization ».

The photographs in this book show the many faces of Ankave everyday life (semi-nomadism, gardening, forms of sociability, marriage, gender relations) as well as less ordinary events (mourning rites, male initiations, first contacts with the church).

Like us, the Ankave see these images, published with their permission, as capturing the memory of a time that will soon be no more.