Who I Am — And Why That Question Has No Simple Answer

People often ask who I am.

I am Papuan.

If you need more than that — I am a philosopher, anthropologist, writer, and independent researcher from the central highlands of Western New Guinea (West Papua), now living in Australia. Others have called my work decolonial scholarship, Indigenous philosophy, cultural criticism, anthropology. I am also the creator of the Psycho-Cosmocide Paradigm. These labels are useful maps. But maps are not the territory.

Before I became a researcher, I was a child born into a particular land, language, memory, ancestry, and cosmological world. Long before I encountered anthropology or political theory or philosophy, I had already inherited another way of understanding existence — one carried by my ancestors, embedded in landscape, alive in relationship. Everything I have studied since has been filtered through that earlier inheritance. My intellectual journey has never been separate from my personal one. The questions I explore did not begin in universities or libraries. They began in the encounter between an ancient Indigenous world and the expanding structures of modern civilisation.

This is why I have never understood philosophy as merely an academic discipline. For me, it is an investigation into the conditions that make reality possible. Anthropology is not simply the study of other cultures. It is the study of how people come to know themselves — and how they become separated from themselves. Writing is not simply communication. It is one of the ways memories survive across generations.

 

The Name — And the First Wound

The name most readers know me by is Yamin Kogoya.

Yamin was assigned to me in childhood by an Indonesian primary school teacher. For most people this might appear to be a minor biographical detail. For me it became one of the earliest philosophical problems I would spend years trying to understand. Who has the authority to name another human being? What happens when a people gradually inherit names, identities, categories, and realities created by others? Can the act of naming become one of the earliest instruments through which an entire civilisation reorganises another people's understanding of themselves?

Kogoya belongs to a completely different order of meaning. It is not a surname. It is an ancient network of relationships — connecting ancestry, genealogy, land, memory, and cosmological responsibility. It locates me within a living history extending far beyond my own lifetime. Less a surname, more what I call a cosmological passport.

Even the names used to describe my homeland reveal the same problem. Papua, West Papua, New Guinea, Western New Guinea, Netherlands New Guinea, Irian Barat and Irian Jaya. Each name carries a history and emerged from a particular colonial encounter, administrative project, or political agenda. None is neutral. Names rarely function as simple descriptions. They become architectures of perception. They establish the categories through which entire peoples are remembered, governed, represented — or erased.

This was my first intellectual wound.

The realisation that I had inherited not only a world, but also the vocabulary through which that world had already been interpreted by others. Once that recognition appeared, the other questions followed naturally. What is a people? What is civilisation? What is Indigenous? What is progress? Who first defined these ideas? Who benefits from their definitions? Who disappears within them?

Those questions eventually became the beginning of everything that would later develop into the Psycho-Cosmocide Paradigm.

 

Why West Papua

Papua is not simply my homeland. It is the place where my questions were born.

It was through Papua that I first encountered contradictions I could not explain. Two different worlds struggling to occupy the same landscape. Children inheriting names, languages, histories, religions, and futures that seemed increasingly disconnected from the worlds of their grandparents. Profound transformation celebrated as progress — while simultaneously producing profound forms of loss. Long before I possessed philosophical language, I had already encountered philosophical problems.

As my education expanded, I discovered that similar questions appeared across human history in many different forms. Philosophers asked about reality, consciousness, ethics. Anthropologists examined culture, kinship, cosmology. Political theorists mapped power and sovereignty. Ecologists explored the relationships between organisms and environments. Indigenous scholars investigated memory, land, language, and continuity. Each discipline illuminated part of the landscape. None illuminated all of it.

The more I learned, the more I realised: Papua was not an isolated exception to human history. It was one expression of much larger civilisational processes unfolding across the world for centuries.

This transformed everything. Papua ceased to be merely the subject of my research. It became the lens through which I learned to examine civilisation itself.

When I examine Papua, I am not looking only at Papua. I am asking what happens whenever one civilisation expands into another. How realities are reorganised. How memory survives — or does not. How languages disappear. How landscapes are transformed into resources. How cosmologies are replaced by new systems of meaning, and how human beings gradually come to accept realities that previous generations would scarcely have recognised. Papua continually opens outward. The questions born there eventually lead to Australia, the Americas, Africa, Asia, the Pacific — and ultimately to every society attempting to understand its relationship with memory, identity, ecology, and civilisation.

I write about Papua because it is the world I know most intimately. Not because Papuans are more important than other peoples. Not because Papua possesses a monopoly on suffering. Human history is full of violence, conquest, dispossession, and cultural destruction. But Papua is where the abstract questions discussed by philosophers become lived realities. It is where land and identity remain visibly connected. It is where ecological destruction is never merely environmental — but cultural, spiritual, historical, existential. It is where questions about civilisation, development, technology, and education become inseparable from questions about survival itself.

Papua is an intellectual starting point. A philosophical laboratory. A civilisational mirror.

 

Why I Write

There is no simple answer.

I do not write because writing is enjoyable. Much of it is exhausting. Writing demands long periods of solitude, uncertainty, revision, and continual confrontation with questions that refuse easy resolution. Many of the subjects I investigate are emotionally difficult — loss, disappearance, memory, extinction, ecological destruction, historical violence, the uncertain futures of Indigenous peoples.

Yet I continue.

I continue because I have never been able to separate writing from understanding. Writing is how I think. Writing is how I investigate. Writing is how I test ideas, discover contradictions, recognise my own mistakes, and slowly approach something resembling clarity. Many people imagine that writers first think and then write. My experience has usually been the opposite. I begin with confusion rather than certainty. The act of writing itself is the process through which understanding gradually emerges. The page became both my laboratory and my companion.

Many ideas failed. Many notebooks led nowhere. Many concepts were abandoned, only to return years later transformed by experiences I could not have anticipated. Looking back, almost every publication grew from the same persistent desire: to understand why human beings create worlds, how those worlds are maintained, and what happens when those worlds begin to disappear.

I write because language still matters. Names matter. Stories matter. Memory matters. Ideas matter. Human beings rarely transform the world before first transforming the ways they imagine it. Every civilisation has first existed as an idea before becoming institutions, laws, economies, technologies, cities, empires. If that is true, then new futures also require new ways of thinking, describing, questioning, and imagining.

These writings are not an attempt to preserve the past unchanged. They are not a rejection of modernity. They are a contribution to a conversation about whether humanity might continue living without destroying the conditions that make diverse human worlds possible.

 

The Psycho-Cosmocide Paradigm — What It Is and Is Not

Everything published here belongs to a single long-term research project: the Psycho-Cosmocide Paradigm.

It did not begin with a desire to invent a new theory. It began with dissatisfaction.

For many years I read across philosophy, anthropology, Indigenous studies, psychology, ecology, political theory, religious studies, history, and archaeology. Each discipline provided valuable insights. Each illuminated an important dimension of human existence. Yet I repeatedly encountered experiences that fell between disciplinary boundaries. Questions concerning land belonged partly to anthropology, partly to ecology, partly to politics, partly to philosophy. Questions concerning memory belonged simultaneously to psychology, history, language, religion, and culture. The deeper I investigated, the more artificial these disciplinary divisions appeared. Human beings do not live only politically, only psychologically, only spiritually, or only biologically. Human existence unfolds simultaneously across many interconnected dimensions. Any serious attempt to understand civilisation, colonisation, or Indigenous survival must account for this complexity.

The Psycho-Cosmocide Paradigm gradually emerged from this recognition. At its most fundamental level, the paradigm asks a deceptively simple question: What happens when the conditions that make an entire world possible begin to disappear?

This question extends beyond governments, borders, constitutions, and institutions. It reaches into language, memory, relationships, imagination, ecology, cosmology, symbolism, consciousness — and ultimately into the conditions through which human beings recognise reality itself.

Psycho refers not merely to individual psychology but to consciousness, perception, memory, imagination, and the ways human beings experience reality. Cosmo refers to the worlds people inhabit — not only the physical environment but also the relationships, meanings, symbols, ancestors, spiritual traditions, ecological systems, histories, languages, and cosmologies that together constitute a living universe. Cide refers to destruction.

Taken together, Psycho-Cosmocide does not describe the destruction of one isolated aspect of life. It seeks to understand the simultaneous transformation of multiple dimensions of existence that together sustain a people's world.

Everything else that has gradually emerged — the Eight Atlases of Human Existence, the Seven Existential Cages, the Civilisational Psycho-Cosmocide Virus, Wonesis, Cosmobian philosophy, the Four Civilisational Gospels — belongs to this broader intellectual project. None of these frameworks are complete. They remain works in progress. Some may eventually be abandoned. Others refined. Still others may prove entirely mistaken. That possibility does not concern me. The purpose of research is not to defend ideas simply because they are ours. It is to follow questions wherever they lead, even when they require us to revise our own assumptions.

These writings are not intended to become another doctrine. They are not sacred texts. Not political manifestos. Not ideological blueprints. Not self-help manuals. Not instructions for becoming successful, wealthy, influential, or morally superior.

If readers arrive expecting certainty, they may leave disappointed. Certainty is not what I am offering. Questions are.

 

The Turning Point

Looking back over three decades, people sometimes ask when Psycho-Cosmocide first appeared.

It did not appear. It emerged — slowly, through thousands of hours of reading, writing, listening, questioning, teaching, travelling, working with communities, making mistakes, abandoning ideas, and beginning again. For many years I believed I was investigating colonialism. Then Indigenous survival. Then civilisation itself. Each time I believed I had reached the centre of the problem, another layer revealed itself beneath the one I had just uncovered.

Eventually I realised I had been asking the wrong question. I had been asking what colonialism was doing to Indigenous peoples. The deeper question became: What happens when an entire way of recognising reality begins to change?

That transformation forced me to stop thinking of land, language, religion, education, politics, economics, technology, ecology, psychology, and memory as separate fields. They increasingly appeared as interconnected dimensions of a single living world. Change one — consequences ripple through all.

Many discussions of colonialism concentrate on external structures: governments, laws, institutions, military power, economics. These are undoubtedly important. Yet they did not fully explain the transformations I was witnessing. Something deeper was happening. People could remain physically alive while their worlds gradually disappeared. Languages could survive while the relationships that once gave them meaning slowly dissolved. Land could remain geographically present while its cosmological significance was forgotten. Religious conversion could transform not only beliefs but also the ways people imagined time, ancestors, morality, the future, and the universe itself. Education could simultaneously empower individuals while weakening relationships with older knowledge traditions. Development could improve material conditions while contributing to the erosion of cultural continuity.

None of this fitted neatly within a single discipline. Nor could it be explained by one concept alone.

What confronted Indigenous peoples was not simply a historical event. It was an unprecedented civilisational calamity. Entire worlds, accumulated over thousands of years, were being reorganised through expanding systems of religion, education, economics, science, technology, administration, and law. These processes reached into consciousness itself — into what I have come to call the Cosmobian cosmological holocaust.

Then came one of the most disturbing recognitions. I began asking whether colonised peoples had gradually become the vessels through which civilisational systems reproduced themselves. What if the most successful form of domination was no longer external control but the gradual transformation of the host? What if people unknowingly carried, reproduced, defended, and transmitted the very structures that contributed to the disappearance of their own worlds?

This question led me toward the metaphor of the parasite. Not because I believed civilisations were biological organisms, but because parasitology repeatedly revealed patterns — behavioural manipulation, host transformation, reproduction, adaptation, survival — that offered powerful analogies for understanding certain historical processes.

Every pathway I followed seemed eventually to arrive at the same destination. Whether I began with land, language, education, economics, religion, psychology, technology, politics, memory, ecology, or philosophy, every road converged upon what would later become the Eight Atlases of Human Existence and the Seven Existential Cages. The transformation I was observing did not occur within one dimension of life alone. It unfolded simultaneously across the entire architecture of existence.

It was like waking from a long dream inside the belly of an enormous beast. Not one nation, one religion, one government, or one historical empire. A much larger civilisational process — one that continually transformed living worlds into resources, relationships into commodities, memory into archives, land into property, and peoples into participants within systems they rarely recognised in their entirety.

One of the most painful realisations followed. Many of the grand ideals that modern civilisation presents as unquestionably good — development, progress, modernisation, growth, efficiency — appeared increasingly to function like brilliant rainbows stretched across the sky. Undeniably beautiful. Inspiring hope. Promising better futures. Yet beneath those colours, I increasingly saw something else.

Landscapes transformed beyond recognition. Languages disappearing. Ecological relationships collapsing. Memories fading. Entire cosmologies struggling to survive beneath narratives celebrating progress. As though the rainbow had become so captivating that few people noticed the crime scene beneath it.

At that point I realised my own way of looking at the world had to change. For many years I had been looking in the direction civilisation invited me to look. Now I wanted to turn the camera around. To examine the observers rather than only the observed. To ask who possessed the authority to define reality, classify humanity, measure progress, organise knowledge, and determine which worlds deserved to continue.

That search eventually gave birth to two closely related projects. The Psycho-Cosmocide Paradigm — an evolving framework for investigating the transformation of consciousness, cosmology, memory, relationships, and the conditions that sustain human worlds. And Wonesis — a philosophical search for the conditions through which those worlds might continue, recover, renew, and imagine futures beyond mere survival.

 

Learning From Indigenous Worlds

No single people, civilisation, university, or discipline possesses the whole story.

My journey therefore became one of learning across worlds. It began in the mountains of my own homeland, where relationships between land, ancestry, memory, and existence were not separated into academic disciplines but lived together as a single reality. Those early experiences quietly established the foundation upon which every later question would rest.

When I arrived in Australia, I entered another ancient Indigenous world. Australia became much more than a country of study and residence. It became another teacher.

Over more than two decades I had the privilege of learning from Aboriginal Australia — not only through books and universities, but through friendships, conversations, community work, and relationships built over many years. One of the greatest honours of my life has been my acceptance by the Wangkumara people. I have never regarded that relationship as a title or achievement. It is an ongoing responsibility. A reminder that Indigenous knowledge cannot be separated from relationships, trust, reciprocity, and respect. Knowledge is not simply something one acquires. It is something into which one is gradually welcomed through humility, patience, and accountability.

Living in Australia transformed my understanding of Papua. For the first time I began to recognise recurring patterns extending beyond my own homeland. The histories were different. The languages different. The ceremonies different. The cosmologies different. Yet beneath these profound differences I repeatedly encountered familiar questions. How does a people maintain its relationship with land after dispossession? What happens when ancestral languages become endangered? How do communities carry memory across generations after repeated historical disruption? How do Indigenous peoples participate in modern institutions without losing themselves?

These were no longer only Papuan questions. They were Indigenous questions. Human questions.

As my reading expanded, I encountered Indigenous scholars, philosophers, historians, artists, and community leaders from across the world. Every Indigenous people had developed its own intellectual traditions for understanding existence. These traditions differed enormously. Each offered insights that modern academic disciplines frequently overlooked. At the same time, I became equally convinced that no Indigenous tradition should be romanticised. Every society possesses strengths. Every society possesses limitations. The purpose of comparison was never to prove that one civilisation was superior to another. It was to learn.

I stopped asking which knowledge system was correct. I began asking what each knowledge system could reveal that others could not. Knowledge ceased to appear as competing systems struggling to defeat one another. Instead I began seeing human understanding as a vast conversation stretching across cultures, languages, generations, and civilisations. My own work became one small contribution to that much larger dialogue.

 

What Papua Means to Me

People sometimes ask what Papua means to me.

Papua is memory. Relationship. Ancestry. Language. The landscape through which generations before me understood existence long before I entered the world. The mountains that carried stories before books arrived. The rivers that remembered names before archives were built. The forests that educated generations before schools existed. The relationships that gave meaning to life before modern institutions attempted to redefine it.

The older I become, the more I realise: Papua is not simply a place I remember. It is one of the conditions through which I remember myself.

Much of my writing emerges from the awareness that the greatest losses experienced by Indigenous peoples are often invisible to those who measure history only through economics, politics, military power, or national development. When a language disappears, something more than vocabulary disappears. When a sacred place is destroyed, something more than landscape disappears. When ancestral memory can no longer be transmitted, something more than historical information is lost. Entire ways of inhabiting reality become increasingly difficult to imagine.

This recognition has shaped almost everything I have written. It has also changed the way I understand sovereignty.

Political sovereignty remains profoundly important. Every people should possess the right to determine their own future. Yet sovereignty also exists at deeper levels. A people may regain political institutions while continuing to lose their language. They may achieve constitutional recognition while their ecological relationships continue to collapse. They may inherit governments while forgetting the cosmologies that once gave those governments meaning. My concern has therefore expanded beyond political sovereignty to what might be called memory sovereignty, linguistic sovereignty, ecological sovereignty, philosophical sovereignty, and cosmological sovereignty.

A people survives not simply because they possess territory. A people survives because relationships capable of carrying their world continue from one generation to the next.

Everything I have written can ultimately be reduced to two declarations. They express more honestly than any academic publication what Papua means to me.

Even if I were in heaven, surrounded by beautiful white gods, white angels, white gardens, white rainbows, white food, and every imaginable happiness, if I learned that Papuans on Earth had regained their land, freedom, and sovereignty, I would leave that heaven immediately, without hesitation and without asking permission, and return home to Papua.

Even if I were in hell, surrounded by darkness, suffering, pain, death, and every imaginable horror, if I learned that my homeland had remained occupied forever, and I were given the opportunity to return, I would never leave that hell.

These are not arguments. Not philosophy. Not politics. They simply express the deepest truth I know about my relationship with my homeland. Everything else I have written grows from there.

 

Looking Forward

The Psycho-Cosmocide Paradigm is not the conclusion of my work. It is the beginning.

Humanity is entering one of the most significant periods of transformation in its history. Artificial intelligence is reshaping knowledge. Biotechnology is reshaping life itself. Climate change is transforming ecosystems across the planet. Languages continue disappearing. Species continue becoming extinct. Ancient cultural traditions struggle to survive within rapidly expanding global systems. Technology increasingly mediates how human beings think, remember, communicate, imagine, and understand reality.

These developments create extraordinary opportunities. They also raise profound philosophical questions. What does it mean to remain human within increasingly technological societies? Can humanity continue advancing scientifically without accelerating the destruction of ecological systems upon which life depends? Can Indigenous knowledge continue contributing to global conversations without becoming absorbed, commodified, or romanticised?

Every civilisation possesses the capacity to create. Every civilisation also possesses the capacity to destroy the conditions that once sustained its own existence. History repeatedly reminds us that societies rarely collapse only because of external enemies. Many gradually undermine themselves through relationships they fail to recognise until it is too late. One of the deepest questions I continue asking is therefore not simply how Indigenous peoples survive civilisation. It is whether civilisation itself can survive its own assumptions.

Long before environmental crises became international political discussions, Indigenous peoples throughout the world understood that land was never merely property. It was relationship. Responsibility. Memory. Life itself. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions Indigenous knowledge may offer humanity in the coming century is not simply environmental management but another way of understanding what it means to inhabit a living world.

The future, if it is to remain genuinely human, will require conversations between worlds that have too often spoken only to themselves.

 

An Invitation

If you have read this far, you have already travelled much further than most.

You may agree with these writings. You may disagree with them. You may find them inspiring or frustrating or wrong. All of these responses are welcome. My hope has never been to produce agreement. My hope has always been to encourage deeper thinking.

Nothing presented here is final. Every book, article, working paper, framework, and concept remains incomplete — subject to revision, criticism, and improvement. These writings are not a destination. They are a companion. Not an authority. An invitation. Not a completed philosophy. An unfinished conversation.

The questions that have shaped my own life may not become the questions that shape yours. Nor should they. Every people must ask the questions arising from their own histories. Every community must confront the realities emerging from its own relationships with land, memory, language, ecology, and the future.

When I first began this journey, I believed I was searching for answers about Papua. Years later I believed I was searching for answers about Indigenous peoples. Later still I thought I was searching for answers about civilisation. Today I understand it differently. I have spent much of my life learning how to ask better questions. Understanding rarely begins with certainty. It begins with curiosity. With listening. With recognising that every human being inherits a world they did not create, yet bears some responsibility for the world they leave behind.