Crocodile Festival in Papua New Guinea

Held annually, the Sepik River Crocodile Festival will be held this year on August 5 - 7, 2019 in Ambunti, East Sepik Province. This celebration honors crocodiles which hold a special significance in Sepik culture where traditions, beliefs, and legends are based around this animal.

There is also a special bond between man and crocodile where crocodiles symbolize strength, power, and manhood.  To emphasis this bond, skin cutting ceremonies are held in this area as a right of passage to manhood. The skin is cut and the scars resemble the back of a crocodile from the shoulders to the hip.

Image from PapuaNewGuinea.Travel

Below is a list of selected resources to help share information on Papua New Guinea and the region:

Aikhenval'd, A. (2008). The Manambu language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea. [electronic resource] New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

This book is the first comprehensive description of the Manambu language of Papua New Guinea. Spoken by 2,500 people in 5 villages, Manambu is considered to be endangered and have many unusual properties where every noun is gendered and relates to shape of the object. 

Moyle, Richard. (2007). Songs from the second float: a musical ethnography of Taku Atoll, Papua New Guinea. Honolulu, HI: Center for Pacific Island Studies, University of Hawaii Press.

Includes the history and geography of the region, religious context for their music, the process of creating their songs, and nature of Taku dance. 

Stella, Regis. (2007). Imagining the other : the representation of the Papua New Guinean subject. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Much has been written about Papua New Guinea over the last century and too often in ways that legitimated or served colonial interests through highly pejorative and racist descriptions of Papua New Guineans. Paying special attention to early travel literature, works of fiction, and colonial reports, laws, and legislation, Regis Tove Stella reveals the complex and persistent network of discursive strategies deployed to subjugate the land and its people. - from book description

Quanchi, Max. (2007). Photographic Papua : representation, colonial encounters, and imaging in the public domain. [electronic resource] Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishers. 

Photographing Papua switches attention from a few well known prints in museums and archives. It deals instead with thousands of photographs, often used in ways not intended when the photograph was taken, but which editors and publishers (and subsequent photographers) gradually made conform to an iconographic imperative, a sort of abbreviated visual gallery of "natives" and a quick-access pathway to the actual and imagined lives of Papuans in the "last Unknown" as New Guinea was titled.  - from book description