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 traditional pig feast inside the oval courtyard of a Dani compound, set high in a remote corner of West Papua's central highlands at 1600m/5200ft above sea level. Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Digital film scan, semi-automatic Pentax point-and-shoot pocket camera, circa 1996.
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.
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© National Geographic Yourshot (Editor's Favourite, July 2018). Story and assignment: “Not Just a Face."
"To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the the real." Susan Sontag, On Photography
An elderly Dani woman with a sharpened fire-hardened digging stick pauses for a moment from work in an elaborate sweet potato garden near her compound 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.
Mourning and Finger Mutilation
The segments of two fingers on each hand 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 appears to have a sullen or depressive effect on most women.
The Gardens
The Grand Valley Dani are accomplished gardeners and pig farmers with a neolithic (late Stone Age) culture and technology. They rely 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.
The gardens involve complex mazes of sophisticated irrigation ditches cut deeply across the fertile grand valley floor. The sweet potato (over 70 varieties) accounts for about 90% of their diet. Digging sticks are used to weed and maintain the gardens. Both men and women spend most of their working lives in the gardens.
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.
High resolution Noritsu Koki QSS digital film scan, shot with a compact Pentax point-and-shoot film 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).
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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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© All rights to these photos and descriptions are reserved. Any use of this work requires my prior written permission.
"To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the the real." Susan Sontag, On Photography
Adorned with a wild boar's tusk, facial chalk markings, decorated goat-skin clothing and an ornamental clay lip-plate. Shot at a communal dance in a Mursi semi-nomadic pastoral settlement on the bank of the Mago River, a tributary that joins the essential Omo River in a remote corner of southwestern Ethiopia.
On the meaning of lip-plates in Mursi culture and society
The Mursi are one of the last groups in Africa where women still wear large wooden or clay plates in their lower lips. Most Mursi women wear lip-plates as an aesthetic symbol of cultural pride and identity, signifying passage to womanhood/adulthood. They are more frequently worn by unmarried or newly wed women and are generally worn when serving men food or during important ritual events (weddings, men's duelling competitions, communal dances, safari photo-ops).
Debunking popular myths
Contrary to popular opinion among travellers and other passing strangers, ethnographers found little or no connection between the size of a woman’s lip-plate and the size of her bridewealth (cattle, guns).
Anthropologists and ethnographers have debunked another popular myth surrounding the lip-plate in this region. They found no evidence that the labret originated as a deliberate attempt to disfigure and make women less attractive to slave traders, yet this myth seems to surface regularly in accounts by professional and amateur photographers, tourists, and bloggers alike.
The Mursi and Mursiland
The Mursi are semi-nomadic farmers and herders who depend on shifting hoe-cultivation (mostly drought-resistant varieties of sorghum) and cattle herding for their livelihood. They number less than ten thousand today.
Most Mursi live in small settlements dispersed across Mursiland, a remote territory of about thirty by eighty kilometres between the Omo and Mago Rivers in southwestern Ethiopia, near the border with South Sudan and northern Kenya.
The terrain varies from a volcanic plain dominated by a range of hills and a major watershed to a riverine forest, wooded grasslands and thorny bushland thickets. The climate is harsh and unstable with low rainfall and daily temperatures regularly exceeding 40°C in the shade during the dry season.
Cogent ethnographic accounts on the meaning of lip-plates in Mursi culture and society include:
• David Turton, "Lip plates and the people who take photographs: uneasy encounters between Mursi and tourists in southern Ethiopia", Anthropology Today, 20:3, 3-8, 2004.
• Shauna Latosky, "Reflections on the lip-plates of Mursi women as a source of stigma and self-esteem", in Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall (eds.) The perils of face: Essays on cultural contact, respect and self-esteem in southern Ethiopia, Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrika-Forschung, Lit Verlag, Berlin, 2006, pp. 371-386.
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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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