Published in Conrad Anker et al., "The Call of Everest: The History, Science, and Future of the World's Tallest Peak," National Geographic, May 2013, p. 114.
A renowned Tibetan Buddhist monastery of the Sherpa community, located in the remote Himalayan village of Tengboche at an altitude of 3,867 metres (12,687 ft) - a couple days away from Everest Base Camp on the trek through the Khumbu region of northeastern Nepal. A stunning Kongde Ri with a fresh dusting of December snow looms large in the backdrop at 6,187 metres (20,299 ft). Noritsu Koki QSS-31 digital slide scan, shot with an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic (SMC Pentax Zoom 45~125mm f/4) in the Winter of 1973.
The monastery was destroyed by a fire in 1989 when Nepal was still a Kingdom. It and the surrounding area has since been rebuilt. Today, several family households and an active monastic community of about 60 monks reside here. Life centres around prayer, meditation, and Buddhist studies in the Tibetan Mahayana tradition. This devotional way of life now seems to stand out in stark contrast to the yearly hustle and flow of climbers, trekkers, tourists, and an incursive environmental footprint of rubbish and human waste.
David Schweitzer/Getty Images ©
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© 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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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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"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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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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