An elderly Hamar woman with cane at the weekly market in Turmi, a small multi-ethnic frontier town in the remote Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region of Ethiopia, East Africa. Adorned with seeded necklaces, brass bracelets, and goatskin clothing.
The Hamar are semi-nomadic herders and farmers who live in small settlements or hamlets scattered across the hills, plains, wooded riverines, and dry thorny bush terrain in Ethiopia's lower Omo Valley, near the border with northern Kenya and South Sudan. explore#133
© National Geographic Yourshot (Editor's Favourite, August 2018). Story and assignment: “Rethinking Portraiture.”
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Peoples of the Omo Valley
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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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© National Geographic Yourshot (Editors' Favourite, May 2018). Story and assignment: “While on a Walk”
A Dogon woman with calabash carrying bowls makes her way across the rugged crest of the Bandiagara escarpment in central Mali, West Africa.
She is on a long weekly trek to market that begins in one of the small adobe villages nestled among giant boulders at the base of the sandstone escarpment. Ancient walking trails that connect the villages in the sandy semi-desert plains below ultimately converge at a steep and stony staircase on the cliff’s sheer face leading to the market on the escarpment plateau.
The Bandiagara escarpment and its rocky scree has transformed over the centuries into a vast cultural landscape consisting of huge sandstone rock slabs riddled with holes, faults, burial caves, rock shelters and secluded adobe villages embedded in cavities high on the steep cliffside. Noritsu Koki QSS-31 digital film scan, Asahi Pentax Spotmatic (SMC Pentax Zoom 45~125mm f/4), circa 1976. expl#28
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A palaver ensues outside the Great Mosque of Djenné after Friday morning prayers - Niger River inland delta, central Mali, West Africa. Digital film scan, Asahi Pentax Spotmatic (SMC Pentax Zoom 45~125mm f/4), shot directly under the noonday sun, circa 1976. expl#18
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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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expl#78
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