The Papuans: A Stranded Cosmobian Society on the Highway of Civilisation

This paper argues that the Papuans of Western New Guinea — now administered by Indonesia as its easternmost provinces — represent one of the world's last surviving cosmobian societies: peoples whose historical continuity depended not upon extractive imperial expansion but upon long-term reciprocal relationships with ecology, cosmology, ancestry, and land. Drawing upon deep archaeology, decolonial theory, archival colonial history, Indigenous studies, and political anthropology, this paper develops and extends the concept of Psycho-Cosmocide to describe how it destroys Indigenous bodies, territories, and languages together with cosmological systems, metaphysical foundations, ecological consciousness, and civilisational continuity. The paper situates Papuan societies within a chronological arc spanning more than fifty thousand years of continuous human habitation, positioning the Papuan peoples as among the first agricultural innovators on the planet, among the earliest subjected to Austronesian and later European colonial intrusion, among the first in the Pacific to articulate modern anti-colonial nationalism, and ultimately among the first to be formally betrayed by the international community's decolonisation apparatus. West Papua today occupies what this paper terms the waiting room of civilisation: a condition of suspended decolonisation in which the formal language of self-determination exists within international law, yet the material structures of sovereignty, demography, ecology, and historical narration remain externally imposed and actively manipulated. The analysis extends the Psycho-Cosmocide framework by mapping its operation across the Eight Atlases of Human Existence, naming its operative mechanism as the Civilisational Psycho-Cosmocide Virus, and situating the Papuan case within the broader Cosmobian/Synthobian civilisational distinction developed elsewhere in this research programme. The conclusion argues that the fate of West Papua is not merely a regional territorial dispute but a far-reaching civilisational crisis, and that Psycho-Cosmocide represents a conceptual advance necessary to name and theorise what is occurring there. The paper closes not only in diagnosis but in Wonesis, the reconstructive counter-framework through which this civilisational destruction is met with a disciplined orientation toward return.