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Dani culture from Heider (2007) Seeing Anthropology
Fieldwork among the Grand Valley Dani of Irian Jaya, Indonesia (West New Guinea)
OVERVIEW
Location: Central Highlands of the Indonesian Province of Irian Jaya (formerly Netherlands
New Guinea), in the Grand Valley of the Balim River, 5,000 feet above sea level
Geography: High temperate valley surrounded by mountains
Population: About 50,000
Language: A Papuan language, like most of the New Guinea Highland languages, unrelated to
any other major language stock'
Religion: Belief in ghosts of dead people and spirits that live in the forests Economy:
Horticulture. The main food is sweet potatoes, which are grown by intensive digging-stick
gardening. The Dani also raise pigs.
Sociopolitical Organization: Kinship-based. Patrilineal sibs and moieties are crosscut by
territorial confederations and alliances. The alliances are the largest social groups and have
up to 5,000 people.
My first flight, in 1961, into the Grand Valley from the north coast of what was then the
Netherlands New Guinea was something of an adventure. The plane was a one- engine Cessna
that took off from the Sentani airfield where General MacArthur had his headquarters briefly
during World War II. The flight left early in the morning in the hope of getting through the
mountains before midday clouds closed off the passes. The flight lasted only an hour and
traversed the swamps and Lake Plains before entering the central mountain ranges of New
Guinea. As we flew over the low-lands, we saw few signs of human occupation, and only an
occasional isolated hamlet with its thatched-roof houses and sweet potato fields was visible in
the mountains. Suddenly, the plane burst out of the narrow mountain gorges into the Grand
Valley of the Balim River to reveal large and small collections of houses and everywhere the
complex ditch systems of the sweet potato gardens. The Grand Valley is a great flat plain, some
fifty miles long and as much as ten miles wide, with the Balim River winding slowly down the
middle.
Before airplanes, the Grand Valley Dani were among the most isolated people in the
world. Swamps, rain forest, steep mountains, and the apparent lack of any enticing ecnomic
resource like gold had combined to shield these Dani from outside traders or even explorers until
the late 1930s. Only after World War II, and well into the 1950s, did the first Christian
missionaries and Dutch colonial officials settle in the Grand Valley to begin their tasks of
changing the Dani. Even though metal was unknown to the Dani before 1938, these people were
not completely cut off from the world. Through out the Grand Valley, and indeed in virtually
every village across the mountains of New Guinea, people used shells from the distant oceans for
ornaments. One can picture a vast trading network, connecting village to neighboring village,
tying together practically every person to every other and then to the world. This network was
not effective enough to distribute metal tools, but it did deliver sea shells to every settlement in
the mountains. It also spread the sweet potato, which had originated in South America,
throughout the island. One even finds suggestive traces of a religious movement that spread for
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hundreds of miles across much of the highlands generations ago. Thus the isolation of the Dani
was only relative.
In March 1961, the plane from the coast brought us for the first time to Wamena, the
center for government and missionary activity in the Grand Valley. At that time, Wamena
consisted of a handful of prefabricated metal buildings and an airstrip occupying land that had
been abandoned by the Dani after a war. Today, Wamena has grown into a sprawling town with
stores, banks, churches, hotels, a movie theater, and homes for several thousand people who have
come from the outside to live and work in the temperate climate of the Grand Valley. The day
we first arrived in 1961, we paid our respects to the Dutch and the Americans in Wamena, then
moved across the Valley as soon as possible to set up our tent camp in a place that I called the
Dugum Neighborhood, part of what is now called the Kurelu region. We wanted to live with
Dani who were as unaffected by government or missions as possible. Even though the people of
the Dugum Neighborhood were only an hour or so walk away from Westerners, some
routes/were blocked by on-going wars; in other directions, nominal allies of uncertain
friendliness resided. Thus, in the Dugum, with few trade goods to be seen and little outside
influence yet to be felt, we had found something close to an "untouched" culture to study and
film.
I was 26 years old, a graduate student in anthropology, planning to do research for my
Ph.D. dissertation on material culture as a member of the Harvard Peabody Expedition. The
expedition had been organized by Robert Gardner, an anthropologist and filmmaker at Harvard.
Gardner had brought together a team that included Peter Matthiessen (author and naturalist),
Michael Rockefeller (photographer and sound recorder), Eliot Elisofon (Life magazine
photographer), Jan Broekhuyse (an-thropologist and Dutch government official), Samuel Putnam
(medical student and photographer), two policemen (whose protection we did not need but who
were of great help in interpreting during the early days of the expedition), and a cook. Gard-ner's
main goal was to make a film which he would call Dead Birds (described on pages 92-95). The
expedition as a whole stayed for five months in 1961. Eventually, I spent a total of nearly three
years in the region, gradually expanding my research on the Dani from stone axes to emotions.
In early April 1961, we were still getting settled into our camp in a grove of tall auracaria
trees with its own spring of pure water. On our second day we were awakened by shouts
traveling across the valley floor to announce a battle. Our neighbors were part of a group of
1,000 people on the southern front of the Kurelu Alliance, which was composed of about 5,000
people. Beyond the sweet potato gardens was a deserted strip of no-man's-land, and beyond it lay
the gardens and compounds of the enemy alliance, the Widaia. Although the Kurelu and the
Widaia were then members of different alliances, dozens of years earlier they had been allies,
and they shared the same culture.
As men on both sides prepared for battle by putting on their best feather and shell
ornaments and checking their weapons, we considered what we should do. Of course, we were
eager to see and film as much as we could, but we did not know what to expect, and we could
not predict how the Dani would receive our presence. An additional complication was the fact
that the other outsiders in the Grand Valley—the missionaries and the government officials—
were committed to ending Dani wars by persuasion and, if necessary, by force. They had
succeeded in some parts of the Grand Valley, but battles were still taking place between the
Kurelu and the Widaia. Both the government and the missionaries knew, of course, that we were
living in an unpacified region and so implicitly condoned our presence—and our cameras—at
battles. Also, a Dutch patrol officer who later wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Dani,
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together with two local policemen, were attached to our expedition to help us and, presumably,
to keep us out of trouble. Nevertheless, we, as outsiders, would be taking a great interest in
warfare and religious activities that other outsiders were trying to stop. This conflict of interests
was inevitable, but only much later did we discover how strongly some of the missionaries
resented what they saw as our threat to their moral authority.
We watched the first battle from a distance, only gradually learning through interpreters
the Dani explanation of those events. Over the next weeks, we saw a total of eight battles.
Months later, after the other expedition members had left and I had gradually improved my
command of Dani, I got a better perspective on the warfare. From the beginning, of course, we
could observe and photograph a great deal. There were the artifacts of war, including weapons,
ornaments, watchtowers, and even the bamboo knives that served as surgical tools to remove
arrows from bodies. There was the landscape of war, those fields on which the battles were
fought, the abandoned no-man's-land, and the frontier with the watchtowers and other defensive
arrangements like artificial ponds for ducks whose sudden noisy flight would warn of an enemy
raiding party. We could also see and record strategies of ambush, attack, and retreat on the
battlefields. In addition, we observed some ritual acts like the decontamination of the corpse of a
man lost in a raid against the Widaia. The body had been returned by the Widaia, but its wounds
were stuffed with magical objects that had to be neutralized before our friends could safely carry
it home for cremation. Finally, we saw the emotional tone of the battles, which was a mix of
excitement and wariness. The quiet raids were probably grim, but we could clearly see how the
great battles were noisy and, despite the dangers, had a sportive element.
Later, when I was able to talk comfortably and privately with Dani leaders, I learned
much more about the background, history, and motivations for Dani warfare. In part, it
represented a ritual intended to loudly show the ghosts how much the living were doing for them,
and to urge the ghosts to go away and leave the survivors alone. Later we realized how fortunate
we had been to observe these battles of the Dani. After the Dutch and then the Indonesians
imposed peace on the Grand Valley, no more great battles took place and much of what we saw
was lost and could not be retrieved by later interviews.
Dramatic events like battles or funerals occurred only every couple of weeks. Most of the
time, I just followed people around on their routine chores. Dani daily work revolved around the
sweet potato gardens, pig herding, cooking, and, less frequently, building or rethatching houses.
In my own life, I had never done any of these tasks but I set about to learn them.
To work out the gardening cycle, I made maps of large field areas and visited them every
few weeks to get an idea of working patterns and to chart the progress of the sweet potatoes. It
soon became clear that each family group had gardens in several different areas at different
stages of growth. A woman would go out in the morning to clear the brush off a garden that was
about to be replanted, then move to another to spend some time weeding, and finally drop by a
third garden on her way home to dig up enough tubers to feed her family for the next day or so.
Be-cause there were no regular seasonal cycles in the Grand Valley, new sweet potato beds were
being planted constantly and harvested every day throughout the year.
The labyrinth of deep ditches that separated the beds served to control moisture. In rainy
periods, they drained water away from the sweet potatoes; during dry spells, they channeled
natural streams through the system. These ditches represented a tremendous investment of labor.
I often saw cooperative work teams of men clearing out old ditches and slopping the rich bottom
mud onto garden beds preparatory to planting, but I never saw any new ditches being dug. In the
Dugum area, at least, population size seemed to have reached an equilibrium with avail ability of
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prepared gardens. Someday, archaeologists will be able to tell us how old this intensive
horticultural pattern of the Dani is.
Dani houses consisted of round domed structures with grass-thatched roofs. I spent much
time at construction sites, for I was always able to find men with whom to talk. They made
planks with their stone axes and adzes and then lashed walls and roof poles with split vines. Dani
building always seemed a bit casual. Wall planks were never tightly fitted together, although this
looseness had the advantage of letting smoke from the central hearth escape easily. People slept
in the dark loft under the roof dome, and the smoldering embers in the fireplace provided enough
warmth to keep people comfortable through the night and enough smoke to drive out
mosquitoes. After a year in the expedition tents, I built my own house next to a Dani compound.
It was light and airy, but I had to use a sleeping bag and mosquito net to sleep comfortably.
Stone tools were still being used by everyone in 1961. They were of particular interest because
by the second half of the 20th century few other peoples in the world had not somehow gained
access to metal tools. The year before, I had done archaeology on a Classic Mayan site, Tikal, in
Guatemala. There we were excavating ordinary house mounds, 1,000 years old, and found
polished stone tools very much like those that the Dani were still using. The main difference was
that I could talk with the Dani, explore their cultural schemas about tools, and watch them
actually use the tools.
The Dani of the Dugum got their stones from a quarry far to the west of the Grand
Valley. The blades were traded into the Grand Valley as finished tools, ground to a cutting edge.
Much local variation was seen in the hafting of the blades (how the blades were attached to their
handles). In the Grand Valley, they were hafted as either axes, set in a single wooden handle with
the cutting edge parallel to the handle, or as adzes, with the blade perpendicular to the L-shaped
handle and lashed in place with braided cord or split bamboo. There were a few other tools.
Some men had small, finger-sized chisels that were used to make the hafting hole in an axe
handle. In the Western Dani area, these small tools also had ritual importance; in the Grand
Valley, however, they were only utilitarian. Small, unretouched stone flakes served for casual
cutting or for preparing and decorating notched arrow points. The most versatile tool was a
simple bamboo knife. Bamboo is a grass; its silica content makes it an ideal cutting instrument.
After use, it can be re- sharpened by pulling off a few strands to make a new edge.
Even after metal knives began to come into the Dugum in the 1960s, people preferred
bamboo for butchering pigs because of the ease of use and resharpening. Similarly, most Dani
were slow to take up metal axes and bush knives, for the stone tools were easy to get and easy to
maintain, and the Dani were used to the motor skills necessary to wield the stone tools. Metal
tools, which would not break easily, could be used with more force and greater body twist, but it
took some time for the Dani to adjust to the new body movements. By now, all Dani are using
metal, and stone tools are made only to sell to tourists.
Gradually, as I came to speak better Dani and the people became comfortable with me, I
learned about the nonmaterial aspects of their culture—that is, the schemas that they held about
social structure, political organization, and religion. The intensive gardening on the broad, flat
floor of the Grand Valley supported dense populations. Within these populations, the families
were organized into patrilineal descent groups. In a patrilineal system, a person is automatically a
member of his or her father's group (in a matrilineal system, people belong to their mother's
group). The patrilineal, extended family groups were bound together into higher-level social
groups called sibs and moieties, larger organizations of patrilineally related families within the
same village. Descent structure was important in establishing land use rights and reciprocal ties
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and obligations and in regulating marriages. The alliances were the largest social units of the
Dani and were composed of several thousand people each, spread across many villages. In
contrast to the sibs and, moieties, which were largely social and economic in function, the
alliances were political. There were about a dozen of these alliances in the Grand Valley, and
until the 1960s, when the central government (first Dutch, then Indonesian) enforced peace, the
alliances were in a state of constant war with each other.
Despite the warfare described earlier, these Grand Valley Dani seemed to be very lowkey about most of life. There was little competition, and even the most important leaders (big
men) were hardly distinguishable in their attire or belongings from ordinary people. They
exercised leadership through influence and the force of their personalities but did not have the
power to make people obey them. Although there was a wide range of intelligence, even the
smartest people were not deeply intellectual. For example, they had no true number words to
total large quantities of pigs, cowrie shells, or the like. Their interpersonal relations were very
relaxed. Conflicts within the group were usually resolved by withdrawal. One party simply
moved elsewhere. The most surprising fact about the Dani was that parents did not have sex with
each other for five years after the birth of a child.
The Dani did not recognize any sort of supreme being but devoted their rituals to
placating the ghosts of their own dead. These ghosts were somewhat threatening and caused
illness and death, but the Dani did not live in terror of them. On the whole, their world was
benign except for the ever-present danger of enemy attack.
After my first long visits to the Grand Valley, which lasted a total of nearly three years
between 1961 and 1970, it was eighteen years before I returned. In 1988 and 1995, I made very
brief trips to see my old friends. It was discouraging. So many people had died, and despite the
economic prosperity enjoyed by Indonesia as a whole, the Dani had little part in this trend.
In the last few decades, as the Indonesian government has strengthened its control over the lives
of the Dani, much has changed. The relatively informal leadership of the big men, based on
consensus, has been replaced by the imposed power of the Indonesian army and police. The
Grand Valley has no natural resources that the world wants except climate. Close to the equator,
at an altitude of 5,000 feet, it is a temperate refuge in the tropics, Outsiders from elsewhere in
Indonesia, as well as from other countries, have flocked to the Grand Valley to live or to
sightsee, but the Dani themselves gain little economic benefit from all this influx, as even the
most menial jobs are snapped up by outsiders. Indonesian schools have produced a generation of
Indonesian-speaking Dani, and some move elsewhere in Indonesia seeking better opportunities.
More and more Dani have become Christian, and unlike many other tribal peoples, the Dani are
not being killed off, but rather assimilated.
The year 1997 was a terrible time for the Dani. The collapse of the Indonesian currency
and the general political and economic turmoil meant that normal services on which the Dani had
come to depend in the highlands were disrupted. In principle, they could have supported
themselves as they had lived until the 1960s, but El Nino, which had brought floods to some
parts of the world, caused a major drought in New Guinea. Many areas lost their sweet potato
crops, and hunger and disease were everywhere. By 1999 the drought had eased, but the Dani are
now so integrated into the world economy that they are still affected by the political and
economic woes of Southeast Asia.