Male Yipwon Figure

This figure's strong and masculine head is balanced on top of a tall body form that was constructed around a broad spine, with large curving hooks forming the chest. The men of the Alamblak region kept a number of yipwon figures in their sacred men's houses in order to contact their ancestors for help in hunting, warfare, or to solve other problems such as food shortages or disease. To entice an ancestral spirit to enter a yipwon figure, the men would smear it with animal feces, pieces of human meat, and blood taken from a man's penis. This magnificent sculpture was created in one of the fifteen villages found in the early 1950s near the hilltops on either side of the upper Korewori River of the Sepik River region in Papua New Guinea. Although it was carved using modern steel tools, this yipwon figure is still a product of the original ideas that the people of the Alamblak region had cultivated as part of their cultural heritage.