Vanishing Cultures

An eldely Dani woman with a sharpened, fire-hardened digging stick pauses for a moment from work in an elaborat 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.

Finger Mutulation
The segments of two fingers on each hand were cut off as a child as a traditional form of mourning for a close relative who has died. Ethnographic accounts indicate that 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 practice of cutting fingers is now officially banned, although it seems likely that this longstanding Neolithic cultural practice continues today in a few isolated pockets of the region.

The Gardens
The Dani are highly skilled gardeners and pig farmers with a Neolithic (late Stone Age) culture and technology that relies on polished stone adzes, axes, and digging sticks. These tools are now being replaced with iron and steel.

The sweet potato gardens involve complex mazes of sophisticated irrigation ditches cut across the fertile grand valley floor. More than 70 varieties of sweet potato are the staple food accounting for about 90% of the Dani diet. The Dani spend most of their working lives in the gardens.

Ethnographic accounts indicate that daily life for a woman in Dani culture is limited to a routine of drudgery that seems 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 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.

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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) and Peter Matthiessen’s “Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea,” Viking Press (1962).

Tags:   West Papua Dani Grand Valley Indonesia Balim Valley Irian Jaya Melanesia highlands “South Pacific” Oceania indigenous tribe tribal culture ethnic bodyart portrait context portraiture street documentary digging stick clan mourning grieving finger mutilation Balim River valley travel gaze LPAbsence tradition Neolithic stone-age DavidSchweitzer DocumentaryPhotography StreetPhotography HumanInterest VisualAnthropology PhotoJournalism people DocumentaryPortrait StreetPortrait VanishingCultures film analog

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"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

Anthropologists tend to downplay the meaning and significance of the few ancestral mummies or desiccated corpses that can still be found in the central highlands of West Papua (Irian Jaya, Indonesia).

This corpse is kept in the sleeping loft of a Dani men’s house where it has dried and turned shiny black from smoke rising from the ground floor, perhaps for more than a century but more likely around 60 to 70 years. It is adorned with fresh barkcloth neck strips and a long koteka or penis gourd. Ornamental wrist bands of pandanus fibres are worn by the Dani guardian.

Dani corpses are normally cremated during elaborate funeral rites. It is likely that this corpse was not cremated because it was of a man of great importance, a venerated "big man" or leader of a major political alliance at a time not so long ago when ritual warfare was a constant and ubiquitous part of everyday Dani life.

The desiccated corpse may be perceived by the Dani as having supernatural value, a way to placate the ghosts. Ethnographic accounts tend to suggest this but the ethnographers seem reluctant to draw any clear definitive conclusions.

There is little evidence that it is the object of organized ancestral worship more common in other Melanesian cultures. At the very least today, it is a "sensational" photo op staged for tourists and other passing strangers.

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 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.

~~~
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) and Peter Matthiessen’s “Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea,” Viking Press (1962).

Noritsu Koki QSS-31 digital film scan, shot with a compact semi-automatic point-and-shoot Pentax camera, circa 1996.

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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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Vanishing Cultures. The skulls of deceased "kastom" priests were placed in this natural shrine or "house of skulls" in a segregated men's area on one of the small artificial man-made coral islands inside the Langa Langa Lagoon - off the west coast of the larger island of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, Melanesia, Oceania. Noritsu Koki QSS film scan, circa1997.

It is reported that the last kastom priest on this island died in 1980. His skull was ultimately placed in the shrine with the skulls of the other priests. He was also the last priest on the lagoon to perform the shark-calling tradition. Sharks were seen as reincarnations of their ancestors. (Kastom is a pidgin term broadly referring to traditional culture, beliefs and practices, including customary law, religion and magic in Melanesia.)

Many of the Langa Langa communities converted to Christianity by the 1960s and ultimately moved to the mainland where they found better access to land for subsistence farming. The move was encouraged by missionaries who seemed anxious to promote a clean break with this traditional pagan past.

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Opposing subclan members gathered together on a late January afternoon in the surrounding hills just outside Mount Hagen, Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea (1,677 m, 5,502 ft). A cool thick mist had set in. They came to “share the talk” and discuss the issues surrounding a longstanding inter-clan dispute over the loss of an eye during a fight between two boys from opposing subclans. A couple of young men from one subclan showed up with a homemade rifle and axes "in case of trouble" during the negotiations.

Several public moots or gatherings had occurred previously but without much success in reaching a negotiated settlement. The victim clan was never satisfied with the number of pigs offered as payback compensation. Pigs are the favoured payback currency, seen here tied to traditional tethering stakes.

An official third-party mediator with institutionalized powers to impose judgments is often crucial in arriving at a satisfactory inter-clan settlement. The government mediator with raised hands here is pressing for a final negotiated agreement through mediation and consensus. An agreement was finally reached much later that evening as pigs were exchanged through this traditional Melanesian dispute resolution mechanism.

The cultural logic of “payback” in traditional Papuan dispute resolutions is grounded in the notion that the clan is collectively responsible for the actions of its members. It is customary to actively seek compensation when one of its members becomes a victim. Opting out of the dispute-resolution process is not a cultural option.

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