Papua New Guinea is home to the Asara tribe, also known as the Holos. And for about 70 years or more, they have had a strange tradition.
The men of the tribe paint their bodies with white clay, put on frightening clay white masks over their heads, and put on a long pointed bamboo stalk on each finger.
Nowadays, every performance and dance in such a dress is an important part of the show for tourists and brings excellent income for the tribe. But once everything was different and this masquerade was for the Papuans a much more important part of their culture.
Asara calls these costumes "Dirty People".
No one knows where this tradition came from, there are a lot of hypotheses on this score. The fact is that everything is very difficult for the Asar when it comes to counting the time; they can even hardly say how old they are. Therefore, when asked why and when they began to wear such costumes, the answer may simply be "when was asara born."
There is a theory that once the Asar warriors hid from their enemies and climbed into a stream with clay banks, and when they then came to an enemy village, smeared with white clay from head to toe, they very frightened its inhabitants. Because only spirits can be white in the Asara tradition.
True, why this case has become so important for them and where the tradition of creating long "claws" on the fingers came from, this theory is silent.
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According to another version, asaras only depict white people, a kind of "cargo cult". However, this version is also not very clear, the Papuans encountered white people long before they had this tradition.
At the same time, the masks of "dirty people" have deliberately distorted features and bear little resemblance to an attempt to simply portray a person's face. These masks often have large boar bared fangs, pointed ears like animals and narrow slit eyes.
Historians and ethnographers are convinced that the tradition of "dirty people" arose not earlier than the 1950s, while even they do not know what caused it to emerge.
Ufologists see in this tradition the clash of the Papuans with something much more frightening than the visits of white people to them. In the long sharp claws on their hands and the grinning mouths of the masks, they see the display of humanoids with large heads and long fingers (as they are often described by abduction victims), and the evil faces of the masks show that the humanoids were unfriendly towards people.
Also, the ends of the bamboo "claws" are always colored red, showing the bloodthirstiness of the "Dirty People".
Jim, who looks about 50 years old, says that he first wore a clay mask when he was a child, and at first this mask was very frightening for him. However, his father told him that it is an important part of their culture and therefore should not be feared.
Now Asara and other tribes, who quickly adopted this tradition from them, make good money on tourists by showing them the Dirty People dances.
