On this episode of Big Blend Radio’s Before They Vanish Podcast, explorer and author James Michael Dorsey returns to talk with producer Lisa D. Smith about Papua New Guinea, the most linguistically diverse country on earth, and about the Asaro people, the famous Mudmen, whose fearsome reputation hides a very different story. James describes the Sing Sing festival, where tribes gather in full regalia, and how the Mudmen are stepping into the modern economy while keeping their traditions alive.

Watch the episode below or download/listen to the audio version on Podbean:

The conversation starts with the numbers: Papua New Guinea is home to more than 800 indigenous languages and thousands of dialects, and it sits on the second largest island on earth. James tells the story of attending the Sing Sing, a gathering he says began in 1957, when tribal leaders decided to share their cultures through music and dance rather than keep raiding one another’s villages. He describes a field the size of four football fields filled with as many as 150,000 people in magnificent headgear and indigenous dress, with cash prizes for the most original costumes, including a group the visitors nicknamed the “volcano heads,” who wore terracotta pots with flames coming out of them. He also went in several days early to visit villages at times when tourists are not allowed.

The star attraction, James explains, is the Asaro people, known as the Mudmen. Many people think of them as brutal savages in huge clay masks and white-painted bodies, but James calls them one of the most peaceful tribes in Papua. Their fierce look, he says, goes back about 200 years, to a spearing raid in which villagers fled into the Asaro River and came out coated in gray mud. The attackers took them for spirits come back to avenge them and ran. James is quick to say he can’t vouch for how factual the story is. The clay masks that grew out of it now weigh 25 to 40 pounds and sit right on the collarbones, and the Mudmen appear as slowly as fog creeping in.

The conversation also looks at the island’s history, including the Papuan men who served the Australian military as litter bearers and guides during World War II, and the bronze statue in Brisbane that thanks them for it.

Then comes the modern turn. James lists the ways the Mudmen have commercialized themselves: an orange drink commercial on Australian television, perfume ads on European TV, an ad for a four-by-four vehicle company, two music albums, and their own website for booking private performances at weddings and ceremonies. He also mentions that Pink Floyd wrote a song called Mudmen. James says the tribes aren’t dressing up just for tourists. He walked into villages that weren’t expecting him and found people in full costume simply because that’s how they live every day. He also notes that the average Papuan is not sharing in the wealth, and that many remote communities see putting their culture on display as the only way to survive in the modern world.

James also shares candid travel notes. Port Moresby has a bad reputation for violence, and visitors are told not to go out at night, while Goroka offered a comfortable hotel with a pool and room service. In the Asaro villages, he stayed in a cardboard shack and ate roast pig cooked in the ground for a week. He tells the story of the cassowary, a five-to-six-foot bird that can disembowel a man and is kept in villages as both a delicacy and a formal currency in some remote places, and of a run-in with a wild pig he says weighed a thousand pounds.

Along the way, James talks about ancient and modern worlds colliding, from Mongolian yurts with solar panels and satellite dishes to cell phone coverage in the middle of the great deserts. He says traditional peoples have their own lives and cultures and don’t need us to hold them to our standards, notes that only about one in six Americans holds a passport, and calls looking down on other cultures as primitive ridiculous. The episode closes with a preview of next month’s conversation, when James reports back from Mongolia.

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