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Geography
The Marind live south of the lower parts of river Digul, east of Yos Sudarso Island, mainly west of Maro River (a small area goes beyond Maro at its lower part, including Merauke). Today the area inhabited by Marind-anim is contained by Papua province of Indonesia.
Culture
In the past, the Marind were famed because of headhunting. This was rooted in their belief system and linked to the name-giving of the newborn. The skull was believed to contain a mana-like force. Headhunting was not motivated primarily by cannibalism, but the already killed person's flesh was consumed.
The people lived spread in several extended families. Such an extended family derives its origin up to a mythological ancestor. Ancestor veneration has a characteristic form here: these mythological ancestors are demon-like figures, they feature in myths, and act as culture heroes, arranging the ancient world to its recent state, introducing plants, animals, cultural goods. They have often the form of plants or animals; there is a kind of totemism, but it is not accompanied by a regular food taboo of the respective animal or plant. Totems can appear both in artefacts and myths.
The word for such an ancestral spirit being is dema in the Marind languages. The material similarity of this word to “demon” is incidental. Each extended family keeps and transfers the tradition, it is especially the chore of the big men of the respective family. The influence of these big men does not go beyond their extended family.
The Marind-anim are also notable for their sexual culture, which features ritualistic male homosexuality. In the century or so before European contact, young Marind-anim men were led through initiatory rituals in which they would perform fellatio on older men in order to receive their semen, which it was believed the boys did not have until they received it from their older counterparts. Ritual intercourse with women would take place on the day of a girls wedding, when after the ceremony she would have sex with her new partners male kin before having sex with her husband. This ritualistic intercourse would take place during other times as well, such as after the women has given birth.
Their culture was researched by several ethnologists, for example the Swiss Paul Wirz, the German Hans Nevermann, and the Dutch cultural anthropologist Jan van Baal, who was the Governor of Netherlands New Guinea from 1953 until 1958.
The Marind languages form a small family of the Trans–New Guinea language phylum.