© National Geographic Yourshot (Editor's Favourite, September 2018). Story and assignment: “Everyday Moments.”
Dani women with carrying nets prepare a traditional Melanesian cooking pit lined with grass and heated stones of fine grain limestone. The occasion is a Papuan pig feast that took place inside the oval courtyard of a Dani compound, set high in a remote corner of West Papua's central highlands, 1600m/5200ft above sea level - "Grand Valley" of the Balim River, Irian Jaya, Indonesia.
The Cooking Pit
The main steam bundle was built up with alternate layers of wet long grass, pork, a whole pig skin with its heavy layer of fat, vegetables, ferns and more heated rocks. Water was poured on the rocks from a gourd to make more steam. Banana leaves were added to several of these layers to help capture the steam.
Smaller grass-wrapped steam bundles containing sweet potatoes, vegetables and other greens from the elaborate gardens nearby were also placed in the pit. One of the small steam bundles can be seen at the centre of activity around the smoldering pit.
This preparatory process took about an hour, then another hour or more for the cooking, and several more hours for food distribution and feasting. The entire process took close to a full day that included a ritualized killing of the piglet with a bow and arrow, a gathering of materials for the earth oven (wood, grass, stones, food), making the fire, and heating the stones.
It is the men's role to kill the pig, make the fire, prepare the heated stones, undo the steam bundles, cut the pig skin into strips with a sharpened bamboo knife, and distribute the food according to a predetermined pattern of exchange and reciprocity among members from this and several other neighbouring compounds or hamlets. The piglet was provided in exchange for a full day’s solo access to this Dani compound.
The Gardens
The sweet potato (over 70 varieties) accounts for about 90% of their diet. The gardens involve complex mazes of sophisticated irrigation ditches cut deeply across the fertile grand valley floor. Sharpened, fire-hardened digging sticks are used to weed and maintain the gardens. Both men and women spend most of their working lives in the gardens.
Finger Mutilation
The segments of four fingers on the left hand of the woman at the centre of activity were cut off as a child as a traditional form of sacrificial grieving or mourning for a close relative who had died. Most females above the age of about ten have lost four to six fingers in connection with funerals and efforts at impressing, placating or driving away the ghost of the deceased.
Finger mutilation or the traditional practice of chopping fingers off at the first joint is now officially banned, although it seems likely that this longstanding neolithic cultural practice continues today in a few isolated pockets of the region.
Ethnographic accounts indicate that daily life for a woman in Dani culture is largely limited to a routine of drudgery that generally appears to have a sullen or depressive effect on most women.
First Contact
The indigenous peoples of West Papua migrated from southeast Asia and the Australian continent about 30,000 to 50,000 years ago during the Ice Age when sea levels were lower and distances between islands shorter.
Western "first contact” with the Grand Valley Dani was established in 1938 during American-led botanical and zoological explorations the central highlands, less than sixty years before this photograph was taken.
Today, about 50,000 Dani live in small compound clusters or settlements scattered across the fertile and densely populated "Grand Valley" of the Balim River (about 40 miles long by 10 miles wide) in West Papua's central highlands.
Trembling on the Edge of Change
The Grand Valley Dani are accomplished gardeners and pig farmers with a Neolithic (late Stone Age) culture and technology that anthropologists see as "trembling on the edge of change.” They have relied on polished stone adzes and axes, sharpened pig tusks, bamboo knives, and fire-hardened digging sticks - tools that are gradually being replaced with iron and steel.
Accelerated contact with the outside world is inevitable. The road from the coast up to the grand valley and beyond has been under construction for more than two decades and is near completion. Little has been done to prepare indigenous Papuans for the expected influx of migrant outsiders from other over-populated islands (especially Java) under Indonesia’s state-sponsored transmigration resettlement programme.
The autonomous and culturally distinct peoples of this remote region are on the brink of sweeping social change. Completion of the road up from Jayapura on the coast, alienation of the land to outsiders, lumbering, organized tourism, the advent of cash and alcohol, expanding state intrusion into indigenous Papuan affairs, the inundation of permanent Asian transmigrants with competing outsider beliefs and practices - all pose a serious and growing challenge to the traditional Papuan way of life and very survival as an independent and culturally unique indigenous nation.
High resolution Noritsu Koki QSS digital film scan, shot with a semi-automatic Pentax point-and-shoot pocket camera, film developed in a Sulawesi street-corner shophouse, circa 1996.
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Ethnographic efforts at demystifying Dani Neolithic cultural practices and ritualized inter-clan warfare in the region are associated with the early ground-breaking Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961-63. They include:
• Anthropologist Karl Heider’s accounts in “The Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West New Guinea,” Aldine Publishing (1970); and “Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful Warriors” (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology), Wadsworth Publishing (1996).
•Filmmaker Robert Gardner’s classic social documentary, “Dead Birds” (1965).
•Writer Peter Matthiessen’s gripping first-hand accounts in “Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea,” Viking Press (1962).
This photograph pays homage to the extraordinary black-and-white analog images of West Papua’s Yali and Korowai peoples that appear in the epic “Genesis” project and publication (Taschen, 2013) by eminent social documentary photographer and photojournalist, Sebastião Salgado.
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