Dutch Anthropologist Adrian A. Gerbrands talked at New York’s Museum of Primitive Art about the religious art of the Asmat, a little-known Papuan people who live in New Guinea.

Before his tragic death on an expedition to Netherlands New Guinea last year, young Michael C. Rockefeller, 23, managed to collect much of what he was searching for in the far Pacific: the religious art of the Asmat, a little-known Papuan people who live on the waterlogged Casuarinen Coast. Last…