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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Swahili racing teams come together several times a year to compete in traditional hand-crafted, arabic-styled Mashua dhows in the Lamu Archipelago off Kenya's northern Swahili Coast.
Intense village rivalries build over the years, often reaching pitch fever on race day. The winners will return with team bragging rights and a certain village swagger that may last several months until the next race.
These four magnificent racing dhows are in near-perfect formation, positioned towards the noonday equator sun on the first day of the New Year. They are in the lead as they prepare to tack around the buoy (top left) and change course, back again to the starting point at Shela, a small Swahili fishing settlement on the island of Lamu. Several dhows capsized at this challenging point in the race.
The finest dhows are selected from each village to compete and race under sail through a complicated series of buoys, combining speed and balance with elaborate tacking and maneuvering competence. About sixteen young men are crowded together into each of these hand-crafted dhows to give the necessary weight, balance, and stability against a stiff coastal wind.
The art of Swahili dhow racing requires considerable team skill as the dhows manoeuvre back and forth through the Manda channel and ultimately out to the edge of the open sea.
The races are usually organized in conjunction with a cultural festival or an Islamic religious holiday. This particular race and celebration of Swahili dhow culture is held yearly on New Year’s Day and is based in Shela, a small Swahili fishing village on the island of Lamu.
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Swahili racing teams come together several times a year to compete in traditional hand-crafted, arabic-styled Mashua dhows in the Lamu Archipelago off Kenya's northern Swahili Coast. Intense village rivalries build over the years, often reaching pitch fever on race day.
These four magnificent racing dhows are in near-perfect formation, positioned towards the noonday equator sun on the first day of the New Year. They are in the lead as they prepare to tack around the buoy (top left) and change course, back again to the starting point at Shela, a small Swahili fishing settlement on the island of Lamu. The winners will return to their village with team bragging rights and a certain village swagger that may last several months until the next race.
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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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"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
Biwa, an esteemed Kara elder and charismatic leader, vogued this near-surreal pose during preparations for an evening communal dance in Korcho, a small settlement set high on the east bank of Ethiopia's lower Omo River.
Adorned with finger-painted white-chalk body markings and brass earrings. The ivory lip-button and clay hair bun with ostrich feather reflect a "culture of heroism" shared with other tribes in the region, one that glorifies and rewards individual acts of bravery for killing an enemy or a dangerous wild animal.
The dry savanna grasslands and iconic Acacia trees at the fringe of the settlement are indigenous to this remote region. The region is part of Ethiopia's Great Rift Valley that extends south through the Horn of Africa to Kenya and Tanzania. Shot near the end of a long dry season regularly exceeding 40°C in the shade.
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Peoples of the Omo Valley
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