The Iatmul are a large ethnic group of about 10,000 people inhabiting some two-dozen politically autonomous villages along the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea.
The Iatmul are best known for their art, men's houses, male initiation, elaborate totemic systems, and a famous ritual called naven, first studied by Gregory Bateson in the 1930s.
More recently, Iatmul are known as a location for tourists and adventure travellers, and a prominent role in the 1988 documentary film Cannibal Tours.
[2] When tsagi are chanted during rituals, the names evoke ancestral migrations and different places and features of the landscape created by the group's mythic ancestors during their long-ago travels.
The word "Iatmul" was coined by Gregory Bateson during his initial period of anthropological research among the language group in the late 1920s.
"[3] In Mindimbit village, he reported, local people referred to the entire linguistic group with the compound phrase Iatmul-Iambonai.
The use of the word Iatmul to signify the entire group was Bateson's convention, and it thereafter gained anthropological and wider currency.