Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of East Anglia
Disclosure statement
Emma Gilberthorpe does not work for, consult, own
shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would
benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations
beyond their academic appointment.
In Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall,
the adventurer and naturalist took a journey through New Guinea, the
world’s second largest island. As he travelled along the Baliem River,
through some of the densest jungle on the planet, Backshall visited the
Dani people, which the BBC described as an “ancient tribe”.
I spent two years living with groups not far from the Dani, and was
disappointed to hear this sort of language still being used. This
distorted perspective perpetuates the myth of the “living fossil” or the
“backwards tribe”.
After all, what exactly is an “ancient tribe”? Surely, by definition,
an ancient tribe is either really, really old, or really, really dead.
The Dani are neither. Nor are they “backward”. The 25,000 or so Dani
people scattered across the Baliem Valley are very much alive and well,
prospering in a challenging region despite being faced with land
dispossession from mining, military control from Indonesia, and the
occasional film crew from “the West”. Just north of Australia, New Guinea is divided between Indonesia (west) and Papua New Guinea (east).Rainer Lesniewski / shutterstock
Indeed, the Dani have featured in several TV and film documentaries over the years. The first of these, Dead Birds, made in the early 1960s by anthropologist-filmmaker Robert Gardner,
followed two males as they went about their everyday business. Back
then, the Dani were a model of “tribal culture” representing what was
fast becoming an elusive example of “stone-age man”. They used stone
tools, practised gift exchange and fought over territory.
Such practices were typical across the island of New Guinea,
particularly in the vast central highlands. Over 50,000 years of
habitation, this almost impenetrable rainforest proved the ideal
environment for developing permanent agriculture, complete with drainage
canals.
The Dani themselves were only first “discovered” in 1938 when,
completely by chance, a pilot flying overhead spotted their cultivated
fields. But they had long been part of a complex social network of
exchange and interaction that reached across the island. Even the
government patrols and prospectors that once infested New Guinea were
restricted to more accessible coastal regions, so the island’s rural
inhabitants continued farming, trading and intermarrying across huge
distances.
By the time of “discovery”, the indigenous population had,
politically, already been divided in two. In 1828, European colonisers
separated New Guinea in half, right down the 141st meridian. By 1963 the
western half was formally annexed to Indonesia, while the east became
formally detached from Australia in 1975 to form the independent state
of Papua New Guinea.
The Dani people are therefore governed ultimately from the Indonesian
capital Jakarta, some 3,500km away, while an international border
separates them from their kin in Papua New Guinea. These culturally and
historically-linked groups have been fighting ever since to release West Papua from Indonesia.
Stone axes, grass skirts, missing fingers
The region’s cultural complexity has made it an ideal location for
anthropologists, and my own work has taken me to the Kutubu and Ok Tedi
regions in Papua New Guinea. In Ok Tedi, which lies just the other side
of the 141st meridian, my friends and hosts were very similar to the
Dani people that Backshall met. Like the Dani, they value the sal kambun (penis gourd) and bul bul
(grass skirts) as symbols of identity, and they value the stone axe for
its practical ability to outlive and outperform the modern alternatives
sent to replace it – steel axes and knives. The author filming ‘From the Horse’s Mouth: perceptions of development from Papua New Guinea’ in Ok Tedi.Emma Gilberthorpe, Author provided
The ritual amputation of digits is common across the island. As anthropologist Karl Heider recalls in his ethnographic examination of the Dani,
close female relatives of males killed in warfare (not those who die
from “natural” causes) “have their fingers chopped off”. This is not
unique to the Dani; in fact digit/hand amputation was not unusual among
men and women across the highland region before missionary intervention.
A mummified village elder in the Baliem Valley.Katiekk / shutterstock
In one of his most memorable scenes, Backshall was invited to sleep
alongside the smoke-dried remains of a legendary village elder. Such
mummification is actually quite rare across the highlands, even among
the Dani, who according to Heider cremate the dead in a detailed and lengthy series of funerary rites. The practice is typically associated with the Anga language group in Papua New Guinea and likely spread eastwards to the Dani.
In recent years, the Dani have been affected by mining, tourism and
ongoing attempts to “Indonesianise” their highland culture. But perhaps
the biggest threat of all comes from the military presence representing
Indonesian interests in a resource-rich land with what they see as a
“backwards” culture. Like the colonialists who described the vast area
of internal New Guinea as “uninhabited”, government bodies and
multinationals still view rural landscapes as Terra nullius, “no-one’s land”.
The illusion of “no-one’s land” and “the ancient tribe” is not
helpful to the amazing people who live there. My friends in Ok Tedi and
Kutubu are artists, school teachers, academics, gardeners, widows,
businessmen and businesswomen. And yet, everything they do remains
tightly entwined by a rich, resilient and dynamic culture.
