The holim—a dried gourd worn as a penis sheath—won’t keep you warm or dry. Like the modern necktie, it announces who you are. Different materials, different worlds; same bold grammar of masculinity. One is silk on a boardroom table, the other a calabash shaped by hand, yet both signal status, identity, and belonging far more than utility.

Among the Dani, sexuality is treated as energy to be managed. In some communities and periods, couples limit intercourse to procreation, and men and women may spend long stretches living apart. After a child is born, husband and wife may wait years before resuming intimacy. Practices vary by place and time, but the principle is consistent: desire is disciplined, not indulged.

Neckties, of course, follow a different history. Still, the urge to perform masculinity appears universal, repeating across continents as elongated, gloriously impractical ornaments—symbols first, clothing second.

For decades, Indonesian authorities promoted “modern” dress across parts of Papua—T-shirts and shorts in place of holim and other traditional attire. Policies like these aimed to standardize culture in the name of development. Much didn’t take. Cultural memory is stubborn; some things survive precisely because they aren’t convenient.

If you write at length about such a garment, you owe it the courtesy of understanding how it’s made—and, perhaps, what it feels like to wear. I asked our guide to arrange both. The second request demanded a swallow of courage. I am modest by habit, and this particular item doesn’t so much hide modesty as frame it. But adventure begins where curiosity insists on participation.

Our guide gathered six porters. One of them, Yeskil, would be my teacher. He’d come with us from Wamena to Kilise, the first village where we would sleep. He acted as the village’s day-to-day headman, stepping in whenever the official leader was absent—which was most of the time.

Yeskil was small, lean, and impossibly agile. After hours of hiking, climbing, and crawling, he moved as if the mountain were a flat road. Though older, he had a twenty-year-old’s build. I, by contrast, had the soft geometry of a middle-aged office worker whose karate days now lived mostly in stories.

In the village, he showed me the craft. You start with a calabash: slice off the broad end, scrape out the pulp through the narrow curve, then leave it to dry for about a week. Afterward you warm it and bind straight sticks along its length to fix the long taper. A tiny hole is bored near the base for a short loop; a longer cord is tied at the tip and secured with a twig like a little plug. Holim finished.

This one was ready. The only thing left was the wearing.

I handed my camera to our guide, passed the video recorder to Jesper—already grinning—and ducked into the low, smoky hut. Sun-warmed gourd, dry-fiber scent, dust motes drifting in a pane of light. The floor creaked as I stepped out of my clothes. Naked is naked; there’s no way to overthink it into something else.

Calmly, expertly, Yeskil fitted the holim. The gourd slid into place; the lower loop was set; the waist cord tightened and tied; the twig-plug clicked lightly into the tip. He stepped back, frowned with artist’s concentration, then crowned me with a necklace of wild-boar tusks and a headpiece of cassowary feathers. The effect was… unmistakable.

I stepped into daylight. Laughter—warm rather than mocking—spilled from the group. Cameras clicked; video whirred. Then I slipped back into the hut and pulled on my ordinary clothes, surprised by what rose alongside the embarrassment: a distinct, quiet pride. Not in spectacle, but in the act of crossing a private threshold—of testing where curiosity ends and participation begins.

The holim changed how I looked at the necktie. A tie whispers of offices, contracts, and the choreography of meetings. The holim speaks of gardens, hearths, and the long continuity of a people who have chosen to keep certain meanings alive. Both are declarations draped on the body. To wear the holim, even for a moment, is to feel symbol outweigh function and to sense how an object can hold a community’s grammar of honor, adulthood, and belonging.

It’s easy to treat such things as curiosities—museum pieces that confirm our distance from them. But standing there, borrowing a sliver of someone else’s language of dress, I felt the opposite. I felt how cultures rhyme across impossible distances: how a gourd and a strip of silk can both become badges, how discipline can give desire its shape, how memory resists being standardized.

I left Kilise with photos, yes, but also with a different kind of souvenir: the knowledge that some truths are understood only when worn.