Gender in the Diet and Health of the Wopkaimin

Abstract

The Wopkaimin are one of several Mountain Ok peoples (Fig. 24) located in the center of New Guinea. They live in a small-scale society of around 700 with common territory of around 1000 square kilometers divided into five parishes (Fig. 25). Their subsistence ecology is based on kinship and customary rights and obligations. Ancestral territory of the Mountain Ok peoples is of great antiquity and is maintained by strong cultural ties. Until the transnational Ok Tedi mining project started full-scale construction on Wopkaimin land in 1981 they exercised the only effective control over their ecosystem through their possession of a sophisticated and detailed understanding of local biota and environments and through their time proven, ecologically and culturally adapted management of resources. They lived with rain forest through knowledge and techniques accumulated over as much as 15,000 years (Swadling 1984) of practical in situ testing and experimentation. By encoding gender roles, ethnoscience not only socially adjusted each sex to food-getting but also ecologically adjusted the population to their environment over time.