Daily Life

The Mountain Arapesh live in a precipitous, infertile country where it is exceedingly difficult to find any level spaces on which to build a hamlet or plant a garden. The whole arrangement of their villages, and the terminology they use, implies a village located on the very slightly leveled summit of a razor-backed ridge. Occasionally, a man will build a house or two in a valley, and small temporary shelters are built in the gardens and near sago patches, but the assumption always is that a hamlet is located on the top of a hill, so that its central place is surrounded by houses which back up on steep slopes on every side. Alitoa was the largest hamlet which we saw in the mountains, it contained twenty-eight houses in all, counting the most diminutive ones, and eighty-seven people had residence rights there. Most hamlets were much smaller, containing only five or six houses, and without ground space adequately to accommodate the crowd which would gather for a feast.