Replace mindless change with cultural balance
19 September 2013
KELA KAPKORA SIL BOLKIN
FOR THE MAJORITY OF OUR Papua New Guinean people the change we have accepted has not served us well but made us dull and sick.
The aesthetic traditional regalia and body paintings have made way for faded western rags. One can smell the stench of mobile buai sellers when they stroll across to the bus stop.
The hausman system was a by-product of both good and evil experiences encountered and evolved over some 45,000 years.
Christianity and western ideologies were shaped and influenced in a different environment in a faraway land and have come to us only relatively recently.
Why do we absorb every liquid foreign concept like a sponge without sieving it first?
Our forefathers had brains that enabled them to look for medicine in the forest, study the sun movements and make weather forecasts and countless other useful things.
They were professors in medicine, astronomy, navigation and seafaring; landscaping and fertility too.
Do we have a good reason for discarding all of our traditional knowledge banks and falling for the disillusionment of formal education so we are now running around like people without heads?
Hence, cyncretism or inculturation is the way forward; we have to quickly put up a quasi-hausman system and teach the good of both cultures (western and traditional) and likewise discard the bad of both.
This is what I think should be advocated at all times.
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