© National Geographic Yourshot (Editors’ Favourite with Editors’ Note, May 2018). Story and assignment: “While on a Walk.”

The decisive moment. I looked up to the towering coconut palms swaying overhead during an afternoon stroll near Balapitiya, a small fishing village on the southern coast of Sri Lanka's Low Country. To my delight, I saw a Sinhalese toddy tapper walking quickly for balance on tight coir ropes that ran from treetop to treetop at 30 to 40 feet above ground - all part of an elaborate process for harvesting the sweet milky sap of cut coconut blossoms. A serendipitous moment in the renowned land of Serendip.

The sap is ultimately fermented into “toddy” or palm wine and distilled into arrack - a stronger, more refined, and highly popular alcoholic beverage. The ropes are made of strong coir or coconut fiber. Portable equipment carried on these aerial circuits includes two types of knives in a wooden case to slice the spadix, a small wooden mallet or piece of bone to tap the sides of the spathe, a coconut shell containing green leaf paste to control the oozing sap, and a clay pot or gourd to collect the sap.

Toddy tapping is done by men from several castes in the region. An individual tapper can harvest a hundred trees or more in a day as individual treetop circuits are routinely completed. As far as I can tell, this dangerous high-ropewalk harvesting method is solely unique to Sri Lanka. It faces extinction today.

Noritsu Koki QSS-31 digital film scan, shot with an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic (SMC Pentax Zoom 45~125mm f/4), circa 1984. expl#80

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A conspicuous show of tribal power by Mursi boys with Kalashnikovs. The Kalashnikov symbolizes wealth, status, and power. Above all, the Kalashnikov provides protection during cattle drives and fire-power in armed conflicts with neighbouring tribes.

The value of a Kalashnikov can range from five to thirty-five cows and often figures into the bride-wealth or payment made by the husband’s family to the bride's family.

This semi-nomadic pastoral Mursi settlement is situated high on the bank of the Mago River, a tributary that joins the essential Omo River in the remote southwestern corner of Ethiopia. Shot under the noonday sun near the end of a long hot dry season regularly exceeding 40°C in the shade.

Spears and other traditional weapons in the region were replaced with automatic assault rifles in the 1980s when they became more accessible during the decades-long civil war in neighbouring South Sudan. A surplus of automatic weapons circulating in the larger Horn of Africa is also accessible through other channels, including the flow of small arms and ammunition from longstanding wars across the border in Somalia and nearby northern Uganda. SKS and AK-47 assault rifles were easily available, relatively cheap, and easy to use.

Large numbers of automatic weapons were also imported from the USSR to Communist allies around the world during the Cold War, including Ethiopia. SKS semi-automatic Russian-made rifles were a precursor to the AK-47 and were widely available after the fall of the Derg, the Communist military junta that ruled Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam from 1974 to 1987. The consequent disbanding of the Ethiopian army and police force produced a flood of automatic weapons on the market. They became accessible, in part, through established tribal links with arms dealers in the Ethiopian highlands further to the east of the Omo Basin and elsewhere.

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 southwest 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. expl#33

Peoples of the Omo Valley


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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

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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Peoples of the Omo Valley

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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.

~~~
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).

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Peul (Fulani, Fulbe, Fula) herdsmen with traditional wide-brimmed fibre-and-leather conical hats meet at the weekly market in front of Djenné's Great Mosque. A colourful multiethnic gathering of herders and traders converges at the mosque from the surrounding regions and fertile flood plains of the Niger River inland delta in central Mali. Digital film scan, Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, shot directly under the noonday sun, circa 1976.

The Great Mosque of Djenné towers over the market in a seemingly apocalyptic backdrop on this day. The mosque is considered the world’s largest adobe building and one of the greatest achievements of Sudano-Sahelian architecture, unique to the semi-arid Sahel zone that stretches across northern Africa just south of an encroaching Sahara.

These Peul herdsmen are likely from the class of “free nobles” (mostly nomadic herders, religious and political leaders, some tradesmen and sedentary cultivators) at the top of a highly stratified caste-based Peul society.

Ethnographers distinguish this class from lower-tiered occupational groups or “castes” (griot story tellers and song-praisers, artisans, blacksmiths, potters, woodworkers, dress makers) and descendants of slaves (labourers, brick makers, house builders).

~~~
Postrscript - The enchanting Arabian Nights imagery emanating out of this ancient marketplace at the time if this photo shoot (1976) is reminiscent of a seemingly bygone Sahelian era devoid of smartphones, credit cards and packaged safari tours.

Nowadays, nascent tourism is on hold and easy access to markets, pastures and farmlands is hampered as ethnic strife and inter-communal violence continue to erupt under a fragile or failed Malian state with a troubled history of military coups.

The current military junta relies on mercenaries from the private Russian-backed Wagner Group for its security needs, coinciding with the recent French withdrawal of troops from the region. By providing protection to the Malian military regime, the Moscow-centered paramilitary group has increased its power and access to Mali's scarce natural resources.

In 2018, Human Rights Watch reported that the Mopti region of central Mali has become an epicentre of inter-rethnic conflict, fuelled by a steady escalation of violence by armed Islamist groups largely allied with Al Qaeda’s advance from the north since 2015.

Recruitment to the militant Islamist movement from Peul pastoral herding communities has inflamed tensions within sedentary agrarian communities (Bambara, Dogon, Tellem, Bozo and others) who rely on access to agricultural lands for their livelihood.

Predominantly Muslim but opposing ethnic self-defence militias on both sides have been formed for the protection of their own respective communities. This has contributed to a continuous cycle of violent attacks and reprisals touching villages and hamlets, pastures and farmlands, and some marketplaces.

While communal tensions are profoundly connected to a larger ethnopolitical conflict unfolding in northern Mali, chronic insecurities around the ancient town of Djenné and in the broader central regions of Mali are exacerbated by longstanding indigenous concerns over a struggle for scarce natural resources - agricultural land for settled farmers versus water and grazing land for semi-nomadic Peul herdsmen.

Efforts at mediation in the area around Djenné and the grand mosque include a Humanitarian Agreement specifically among Bambara and Bozo farmers, Dogan "hunters" protecting farmers' interests and Peul herders, all committed to guaranteeing the freedom of movement of people, goods and livestock in the "Circle of Djenné" situated in the Mopti region of central Mali.

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