The Korowai Tribe, also called the Kolufo, are the people who live in southeastern West Papua in the Indonesian province of Papua, close to the border with Papua New Guinea. They number about 3,000.

 

According to The Daily Telegraph, “Until the late 1970s, when anthropologists embarked on a study of the tribe, the Korowai were unaware of the existence of any peoples other than themselves”.

It has been claimed that the majority of the Korowai clans live in tree houses on their isolated territory, but the BBC revealed in 2018 that the Korowai had constructed the tree houses “for the benefit of overseas programme makers” and did not actually live in them. Since 1980 some have moved into the recently opened villages of Yaniruma at the Becking River banks (Kombai–Korowai area), Mu, and Mbasman (Korowai–Citak area). In 1987, a village was opened in Manggél, in Yafufla (1988), Mabül at the banks of the Eilanden River (1989), and Khaiflambolüp (1998). The village absenteeism rate is still high, because of the relatively long distance between the settlements and the food (sago) resources. The Korowai appear to now smoke tobacco but not to drink alcohol.

They harvest sago from the sago palms in their gardens, catch fish from the river, and hunt wild pigs in the bush. The staple food in their diet is sago, and a single household will use one sago tree each week.

The patriclan is the central unit with respect to social, economic, and political organization. Kinship terminology follows the Omaha I pattern (Lounsbury), knowing a central opposition between cross and parallel relationships. In Korowai society the forms of institutional levirate and predominance of avuncular relationships are found, as well as a kind of affinal avoidance relationships. Marriage is exogamous and polygynous. Preference is given to a conjugal relationship with the (classificatory) mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter.

And when it comes to religion, the Korowai universe is filled with a variety of spirits, some more personal of character than others. Reverence is paid especially to the red headed creator god Gimigi. The Korowai ascribe an important role in their daily lives of honoring their “One God”, with one being used as the concept of a prime deity from whom all others either descend or to whom all others pay homage. Once in a lifetime, a Korowai clan must organize a sago grub festival in order to stimulate prosperity and fertility in a ritual fashion. In times of trouble they sacrifice domesticated pigs to the spirits of the ancestors. The Korowai have an extraordinary and rich oral tradition: myths, folktales, (magical) sayings and charms, and totem traditions.

With respect to death and afterlife the Korowai believe in the existence of a reciprocal type of reincarnation: those who died can be sent back at any time to the land of the living, by their kinsmen in the land of the dead, in order to reincarnate in a newly born infant of their own clan.