The Making of Papuaphobia: Colonial Genealogy, Racial Formation, and Psycho-Cosmocide

Contemporary Indonesian racism against Papuans is often treated as a spontaneous or purely local prejudice. This paper argues instead that it reproduces a symbolic vocabulary developed across European travel writing, racial taxonomy, missionary discourse, and physical anthropology, and subsequently adapted within Indonesian nationalist, developmental and security institutions. Using a genealogical and interpretive method, and drawing on the Psycho-Cosmocide framework, this paper traces this grammar — which I call Papuaphobia — through the colonial racialisation of "Papua," the colonial conflation of Negro Africa and the Pacific, the making of the Papuan "pygmy," the theological logic of the Curse of Ham, the scientific racism of craniometry and doomed-race theory, and the well-documented contemporary racism against Papuans in Indonesia. The essay closes by situating this genealogy within the Psycho-Cosmocide account of the Civilisational Psycho-Cosmocide Virus (CPCV), arguing that Papuaphobia is best understood not as an attitude but as an inherited cosmological infrastructure, repeatedly adapted and reauthorised rather than transmitted intact, that reproduces itself across empires.