Iatmul people

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.

Kundu drum, from Papua-New Guinea, Iatmul people, 20th century. Kundu is Papuan general name used for drum. It is an hourglass shaped drum made of wood, and normally covered with a snake or lizard's skin as membrane. [ 1 ] The crocodile is symbolic to the Iatmul, who believe they are descended from a giant crocodile, and that the world is the back of that first crocodile. [ 1 ] There are three crocodiles on this instrument: the handle and each of the drum openings (seen in the engravings). [ 1 ]