The Gebusi Culture Analysis

You can learn a lot about someone by the way they tell a story. In Bruce Knauft’s The Gebusi, you can learn a lot about another culture through his eyes. In his book Bruce, presents to the reader stories of a people that will never be the same as they were when he wrote about them. The Gebusi are a cultural group within the Nomad River area of the East Strickland River Plain, Western Province of Papua New Guinea. They live near the northern edge of New Guinea's large south central lowland rain forest. They are bordered on the north by the Hamam River, on the northwest by the Nomad River and the Nomad government station, and on the south by the Rentoul River.
The intense speed at which the Gebusi culture changed between 1982 and 1998 is unique. Incredible culture changes occurred especially in Gebusi customs of religion, marriage, sexual maturation, perception of time and traditional rituals. It is important that the reader understands the idea of kogwayay. It is a Gebusi concept that is the culture of the Gebusi but also impossible to simply define as culture. In the ethnographic work, Knauft explains the idea of kogwayay as the idea of laughing and telling jokes loudly and happily together. Knauft describes it as the backbone of understanding the Gebusi culture, and it can be found in all aspects of the Gebusi …show more content…
With the Gebusi now attending activities on a weekly basis, they developed a sense of time. They now had scheduled dates for activities. In 1980, the idea of time had almost no similarities to what it had developed into later. Back in 1980 the Gebusi followed a more relaxed schedule that revolved around how much work had been done that day and if major events were coming up soon. The modernization of the culture in 1998 created a more detailed perception of time completely new to the Gebusi. Knauft noted this when he was asked by some of the locals to attend church with