Worlds in Mind: the Experience of an Outside World in a Community of the Finisterre Range of Papua New Guinea

This paper deals with how the Yupno's mental image of proper settlement patterns has been changed through the experience of an ‘outside world’. The Yupno inhabit a rugged, extremely remote, mountainous region of the Eastern Finisterre Range in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea. Teptep is the administrative centre. The region is one of the last unexplored areas of Papua New Guinea. The old Yupno grew up in an isolated world, which was bounded both externally (they knew only their own valley) and internally (the fenced‐in dwelling house was the centre of the settlement structure). After the Second World War, however, the valley was ‘opened’: schools were established and some younger Yupno left their valley to visit the cities of Madang and Lae. This experience of the ‘outside world’ changed the mental image of their own settlement territory. When asked to draw their own area, i.e. to externalise their mental image in the sense of Piaget, the Yupno without ‘outside’‐experience (the old men and the children without school education) drew a closed, usually oval world with the Yupno river at its centre (the valley as the ‘world’), whereas those who had ‘outside’‐experience drew an open, rectangular map laden with details.