Bringing Past to Present: Unraveling Papua’s Culture of Shame with Forms of Cultural Resilience

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-348-1_4How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Cultural resilience; Culture of shame; Sentani tribe; Customary fines

Abstract

Papua is blessed with rich customs that are used to regulate vertical relations between humans and the Creator and horizontal relations among humans. In the past, every members of the Papuan society maintained and respected these rules. Violators of norms felt ashamed and tried to erase their shame by paying customary fines. Some even commited suicide because they could not bear the shame. This cultural practice underscores the Papuan’s resilience and how they adhere to their values. Ironically, today, the culture of shame has begun to fade. Stealing, corruption, and adultery are done without feeling burdened. This cultural shift, therefore, highlights the need of exploring the cultural resilience, which takes in the form of Papuan’s culture of shame. In the past, the culture of shame is needed to provide social awareness to today's society about the importance of these ancestral noble values. This article, thus, reflects the reviving and re-implementing of the culture of shame to show the role of cultural resilience in maintaining social norms. This article has the aim to (1) explore various cultures of shame in Papuan society, and (2) discuss how society deals with shame. The method used to analyze the data is descriptive-qualitative. Data for the study were collected during March-July 2024 through (1) observation and interviews with informants, who are traditional elders and community elders and (2) written documentation regarding the culture of shame in Papuan society. Because Papua is large, this study limits itself only on the Sentani tribe, in Jayapura. This article concludes that the culture of shame in Sentani tribe is (1) stealing and (2) committing adultery. The way to deal with shame is to pay a customary fine in the form of beads (hayae, hawa, nokho), stone axes, and sometimes accompanied by money depending on the case and the customary area.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wigati Yektiningtyas
AU  - Ekawati Marhaenny Dukut
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/12/31
TI  - Bringing Past to Present: Unraveling Papua’s Culture of Shame with Forms of Cultural Resilience
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th Celt International Conference (CIC 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 36
EP  - 46
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-348-1_4
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-348-1_4
ID  - Yektiningtyas2024
ER  -