T A B L E_T A L K Spending one night in Bangkok? Get tips on visiting Thailand in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk ___________________ Check out barnesannoble.com's fabulous selection of travel book bargains! ___________________ R E C E N T L Y Teaching the cannibals to dance By Craig Nelson An adventurer journeys farther than expected into a land of penis gourds and pig sacrifices (01/17/99) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe (01/15/99) Beijing's Backingham Palace By Mary Elizabeth Williams From back rubs to bowling to B-movies, this Chinese spa has it all (01/14/99) New York serenade By Pico Iyer An ex-Gothamite returns for five days -- and finds that attitude has its charms (01/13/99) Cold front By Mona R. Washington An ugly encounter on a Viennese metro colors a winter's day (01/12/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		-----Teaching the cannibals to dance ----------------------------------[ P A R T  T W O ] -----A mock battle culminates in a transcultural -----------------------------------------------two-step -- and an unexpected gift. ----------------------------------[ R E A D  P A R T  O N E ] BY CRAIG NELSON | The first European to write extensively about the Baliem valley was Robert Mitton, who fell in love: "Baliem is as close to paradise as one can get, the only place in the world where man has improved on nature." He wasn't being lyrical; it is knock-you-out beautiful here. The land is so verdant it fluoresces green; the mountains are topped with a permanent ring of cloud forest; and the basin is dotted with oak-brown thatch huts, the rising plumes of home fires, and purple-green fields of yam. Off in the corners are forests of auracaria, casuarina, oak and chestnut, home to the ostrichlike cassowary bird -- red-necked, blue-faced and notoriously moody. At the bottoms of the trees grow pitcher plants, which are fertilized by insects they've ensnared, drowned and digested, and in the branches, clamping tightly to the bark, are plenty of New Guinea's 3,000 different species of orchids. Through it all rushes the turbulent, milky-brown Baliem River, filled to bursting with those delicious crayfish. Yos and I walked to the village of Akima in order to meet Kain (great war king) Werapak Elosarek. The smell of fire, pig and tobacco struck the minute we entered the sili, a fenced-in compound of round grass huts built from oak and chestnut beams, with a second-story sleeping loft and a roof of saplings tied over in heavy thatch. For a crisp, perfect 100-rupiah bill (about 1 cent, but it has to be a crisp, perfect bill or the Dani will refuse it), the Akimans brought out Kain Elosarek, who was a smoked black mummy, his mouth opened in a scream, and his body seated, which is how all funerals are performed; the corpse is tied to a chair and cremated. We visited with the men in their pilai, where everything is burnished red from the smoke except for the fresh, purple yams. Any number of fetish objects, especially pig jaws, boar ribs, black magic stones and big fish (imported from the coast), hung in the rear of the hut, and everyone chain-smoked cigarettes. We then went to visit with the women in their long thatched shed used for cooking and as a home for the black, insouciant pigs. There had recently been a death in the village, and the deceased's female relatives had daubed their bodies in yellow mud as a sign of mourning. Dani do not live to be very old, and the tribes are in constant warfare over various small-town dramas involving pigs and women, so lurking constantly in the Baliem are these spectral mud people. Besides the yellow clay, it used to be a common practice to cut off a few of a young girl's fingers when someone died -- young meaning around the age of 3. The finger was first tied up to stop the blood's flow, the arm would be hit, hard, to numb the hand, and the finger would be chopped off with a stone blade. The removed fingers were then dried in smoke and buried in a holy place, while the hands were bandaged in grass and leaves and the little girl would show it to everyone, a mark of honor. Though this practice has stopped, there are still plenty of middle-aged Dani women today with an entire hand of missing fingers. The Dani women's lives may be harsh, but they are tough as tough can be. The only tool they use in the yam fields is a smoked and sharpened pig thigh, and if necessary it can become a lethal weapon. If a woman is unhappy with her husband, she will dress up every day and work in the fields closest to an enemy tribe, showing herself off and hoping to get stolen. If a man calls for war and the women don't think it's justified, they'll beat him up. It's a custom not to have sex from the first signs of pregnancy until the child reaches 4, but most wives don't think much of this idea. While the men think it's OK for unmarried girls to have abortions (an unmarried girl usually being under the age of 12), they think it's bad for their wives to do it. The wives, however, don't care to be sexually deprived for years and so feel free to get as many abortions as they want. As far as the men are concerned, the women think, what do they know? All of New Guinea was once a hotbed of cannibalism, and though the government claims that this practice has been stopped, I don't believe it for a second. Just a few years ago, the coastal Yali ate two missionaries and wrapped up their heads in fig leaves and rolled them through the fields for target practice. The Asmat, living in the swamps, believe that having a human head pillow will ward off the evil schemes of malevolent ghosts, and that if you kill an enemy, eat his brains, and wear his jaw bone as a necklace while carrying a dagger made from a crocodile's jaw, other people won't bother you so much. Who could argue? Though no one really knows the fate of Michael Rockefeller, a man who collected primitive art, it's thought he was eaten by the Asmat while on a sculpture-finding expedition. The story goes that two Dutchmen, searching the wilds of New Guinea for oil deposits, got into a dispute with the locals and killed two of them before running off. The Asmat believe that justice is done when you perform an eye-for-an-eye on anyone from the tribe that did you wrong, and they believe that all white people come from the same tribe. The next white person to enter their territory was Michael Rockefeller. N E X T+P A G E | The thought process of cannibals