Balinese duck tender with traditional wide-brim rain hat under an early monsoon drizzle - returning from the paddy fields along a path through the original Monkey Forest near Padang Tegal Village, Ubud, Bali.
Digital slide scan, shot with an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic (SMC Pentax Zoom 45~125mm f/4) - before modernization and the onslaught of mass tourism that now compromise much of Ubud's original charm, circa 1972. expl#32
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© National Geographic Yourshot (Editor's Favourite with Editor's Note, July 2018). Story and assignment: “Not Just a Face.”
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Returning the photographer's gaze - sometimes with a proud and knowing smile, an indignant look of resistance and mimicry, or a long studied stare as the observer becomes the observed. The gaze is returned, the observer othered. Subject owns the gaze for a frozen moment.
A proud Maasai herder (warrior age-set) vogued this pose near the crater rim in the Ngorongoro Highlands of northern Tanzania. Elegantly adorned with glass-beaded necklaces, medallion and wrist band; an amber bracelet; stretched earlobes with glass-beaded sleeves and copper pendants.
High resolution Noritsu Koki QSS digital film scan, shot with a compact semi-automatic Pentax point-and-shoot film camera (38~105mm AF), circa 1997. expl#46
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© All rights to these photos and descriptions are reserved and protected by international copyright laws. Any use of this work requires my prior written permission.
A Dani war chief passes through the oval courtyard of a traditional fortress-like compound as he prepares for a ritualized mock battle that is about to take place 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. Digital film scan, shot with a Pentax point-and-shoot pocket camera directly under the noonday sun, circa 1996.
Battle Dress
He is adorned with a large decorated bib of nassa (snail) shells, an upturned boar’s tusk nose piece, rare bird-of-paradise plumes and other feathers, a bailer shell chest piece (with smaller shell pieces attached to a tightly woven bush-twine neck band of cowrie shells), an ornamental wristband of finely woven pandanus fibres, arm bands of dog fur, and the iconic long koteka or penis gourd – all part of traditional Dani ornamentation and battle dress. His forehead is smeared with a thick layer of charcoal-blackened pig grease.
Ritualized Warfare
Many Dani elders in the valley today were once engaged in an elaborate system of ritualized warfare, organized around changing political alliances and large shifting confederations across the Grand Valley. War was embedded in Dani culture as a constant and immediate part of everyday life. Brawls, feuds, and wars would begin with conflicts between individuals that would escalate to prolonged intergroup fighting.
Much of the fighting ended in the 1960's under an enforced Indonesian government pacification programme, although it is likely that certain forms of traditional fighting still occurred in isolated pockets of the region up to the late 1990's. Most fighting is now expressed through mock combat rituals that includes women and children in some of the ritualized running patterns.
Trembling on the Edge of Change
The Grand Valley Dani are accomplished gardeners and pig farmers with a sophisticated neolithic (late Stone Age) culture and technology that anthropologists see as "trembling on the edge of change.” Accelerated contact with the outside world is inevitable. The road up from the coast to the highlands 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 inundation of permanent Asian migrants from other over-populated islands (especially Java) under Indonesia’s official state-sponsored transmigration resettlement programme.
Alienation of the land to foreign mining interests, organized tourism, the advent of cash and alcohol, and expanding state intrusion into indigenous Papuan affairs - all pose a serious challenge to the traditional Papuan way of life and very survival as an independent and culturally distinct indigenous nation.
Repression and Resistance
Indonesian state control in West Papua is particularly reminiscent of earlier times in the Americas and elsewhere when aboriginal peoples were contained through a colonization strategy of political subjugation and cultural assimilation. Indigenous Papuan resistance in the highlands has taken several forms, ranging from mass protests and sporadic hostage-taking to low-level guerrilla warfare and a loosely organized yet persistent political movement for separation and the creation of an independent Papuan state within Indonesia.
At the time of this photoshoot (February 1996), indigenous insurgents of the Free Papua Movement (OPM) had abducted 12 European and Indonesian nationals on a biodiversity research expedition to the highlands in an adjoining tribal region just 70 kilometres away, roughly five days by foot. They were held as hostages in the mountainous forests, moving across rugged ridges and deep river valleys from one makeshift prison camp to another as members of the International Red Cross tried unsuccessfully to mediate the crisis.
Papuan insurgents conducted the raid with bows and arrows and a handful of guns. Indonesian Army Special Forces ultimately launched a militarized hostage rescue operation with helicopter gunships and crack counter-insurgency troops with limited success. The controversial South African mercenary group, Executive Outcomes, provided both training and operational advice. Two of the hostages were executed during the struggle. Organized Papuan resistance continues to this day.
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 were shorter. Western "first contact” with West Papua's Grand Valley Dani was established in 1938 during American-led botanical and zoological expeditions to the central highlands, less than sixty years before this photograph was taken.
About 50,000 Dani now 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.
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Ethnographic efforts at demystifying Dani Neolithic cultural practices and ritualized warfare in the region are associated with the early ground-breaking 1961 Harvard-Peabody Expedition. 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); also filmmaker Robert Gardner’s classic ethnographic documentary, “Dead Birds” (1965); Peter Matthiessen’s “Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea,” Viking Press (1962).
expl#40
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Daily communal life at a traditional Iban longhouse or Rumah Panjang tends to converge around an elongated wooden veranda that serves as an open social area and shared meeting space. This longhouse is naturally positioned along a remote rainforest stream about a half day's jungle trek from Kapit, a small riverine supply town that caters to the many Iban and Orang Ulu longhouse communities in the upper Rajang River region of Sarawak, East Malaysia (Borneo). Digital film scan, Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, circa 1973.
The wooden longhouse structure and veranda are raised on tall stilts with a row of separate family apartments sectioned off on the other side of the main housing structure. Notched logs are used as ladders that lead up to the longhouse. Traditional hand-tapped tattoos on the headman's back are seen as having magical protective powers.
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Postscript - Few traditional wooden longhouses of this kind remain today. Most longhouses are now made from concrete and milled timber with access to electricity, satellite TV, and the perennial corrugated tin roof. Nowadays, the Rejang riverine region can be reached overland by taxi or bus, and by air on cheap Expedia flights. Express boats with air-conditioning and cushioned first-class passenger seating ply the Batang Rejang daily, cutting longboat travel time from Kapit to Belaga by a day or more. Organized package tours to the longhouses flourish. Digital smartphones and credit cards dictate the travel experience. The modern era of fast travel and organized tourism has arrived.
Accelerated contact with the outside world has contributed to sweeping social changes and a gradual erosion of the region's original charm. While the legendary warmth and hospitality of the Iban longhouse communities persist, much of the mystery and serendipity of independent travel to this remote region deep in the heart of Borneo is sadly on the wane.
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Context - Around the time this photo was taken, a robust ethnic Chinese-dominated communist insurgency was fully underway in the region. Malaysia's postcolonial government was about to launch an ambitious counter-insurgency operation. Government agents would travel upriver on longboats or by foot through dense tropical rainforests to remote riverine settlements and indigenous longhouses “to explain” why it was in their interest to support the government in the renewed anti-communist insurgency campaign.
The campaign appeared to have been effective at the time because the Malaysian government soon scored a major victory with the surrender of a key insurgent leader, Bong Kee Chok, along with about 500 of his supporters. With the subsequent capture or surrender of other members in the movement, communist activities in the Rajang river basin began to subside. The communist movement of Sarawak finally ended in 1990 with a signed peace accord that coincided with the final collapse of outside communist support and the end to the global cold war.
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Every year on the day of the first full moon in late January or early February over a million pilgrims gather at various temples across Malaysia to celebrate Thaipusam, a vibrant Hindu religious festival in honour of Lord Subramaniam (also known as Lord Muruga, god of war in the Hindu-Tamil pantheon).
On this auspicious day of penance and thanksgiving religious vows and karmic debts are fulfilled through ceremonial acts of devotional sacrifice and bodily self-mortification. The skin, tongue or cheeks of devotees (mostly male) are pierced with metal vel skewers or small spears. Heavy decorative shrines or kavadis with as many as 100 skin-piercing skewers are prepared during the ceremony. Devotees are worked into a trance-like state before the piercings, aided by a preparatory programme of fasting, meditation, prayers and chants.
An elaborate piercing ritual is seen here at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple in Penang, the oldest Hindu temple on the island and one of the main starting points for the annual Thaipusam procession. This devotee will carry and dance bare-footed with the weighty kavadi on his shoulders along a gruelling four-kilometre processional route to the accompaniment of devotional music and traditional drumming patterns, sometimes lasting eight hours under the blazing tropical sun. His pilgrimage will end with the final ascent of more than 500 steps for a closing ceremony at the Arulmigu Sri Balathandayuthapani Waterfall Hilltop Temple on the outskirts of George Town.
The motivation for devotional sacrifice in return for prayers answered is expressed succinctly by one pilgrim at the Penang celebrations: "I want to give thanks for being granted with good health, my career and wealth." Another pilgrim put it another way: “My husband has been carrying a kavadi every Thaipusam for more than 20 years out of faith that it will bring blessings and peace.”
Thaipusam is rooted in Hindu-Tamil legend, brought to the Malayan peninsula by a diaspora of South Indian immigrants who came to work on the rubber estates during the British colonial administration in the late 18th-century.
Digital slide scan, shot with an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, circa 1973. explore#180
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