The Indonesian archipelago, in the middle of the rainforest contains a very isolated province south-east of Papua New Guinea. Inside the province lives the clan of Korowai, or ‘the treehouse people’. From the closest city, Jayapura, traveling to the clan requires a total of three days: by
1 Spirn, A. W.(1988b), “The Poetics of City and Nature: Toward a New Aesthetic for Urban Design,” Landscape Journal 7: 108-126. Human and Nature: A Complicated Love Story 3
airplane, dugout canoes, and a day of walking in the swampy jungle.2 The Korowai people live in the inaccessible jungle. They are hunter-gathers living in a small community of close knitted family ties who needs to share all they have in order to survival. Unheard of to the rest of the world before 1975, the Korowai are believed to have a population of 3,000, scattered in clans of ten to twenty people in the jungle.3 Even today, many of the korowai still have not been accounted for because they are difficult to locate.
The jungle seems impenetrable to many people, but
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Whether it is the location or the choice of construction materials, the Korowai takes advantages of the forest diversity to live their live. The Korowai usually build their treehouse eight to twelve meters above ground level, but in some upstream areas, houses can be as high as 45 meters above ground. 4 The strategic position of the tree houses protects families against mosquitoes, attack from the animals, evil spirits, and flood. The tree house is built with a sturdy tree trunk as the central pole, with four to ten smaller poles around it to support the floor frame. The roof is made of Sago Palm leaves and wood, and the frame of the house is made of branches tightened with bindings.5 They use dry tree trunk with notches as ladder to get up to the house, and due to their small body frame, they can swiftly climb up and down. The house has the capacity for 20 to
Cronon, William. Nature 's Metropolis, Chicago and the Great West. New York, NY: WW Norton & Company, 1991.
For many, Fresh Kills conjures up images of the “World’s Largest Landfill” - bulldozers pushing mountains of trash, flocks of seagulls fighting over table scraps, and plastic bags fluttering in the wind. After the closure of the landfill, many hope that this image will be replaced by Fresh Kills as a public park. The international design competition, Fresh Kills: Landfill to Landscape was the first step in transforming this image. Six finalists suggested six different visions of how Fresh Kills could be re-imagined. The winner of the competition, Lifescape by the landscape architecture firm Field Operations, proposes a design that focuses on nature not only as the antithesis of landfill, but as an agent of cultural change. James Corner, founder and director of Field Operations, first asked how might landscape architecture be a force that enriches and informs people’s perception of nature in his 1997 essay Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity. Through Lifescape, Corner proposes an answer to his own question, and the resulting design responds to Fresh Kills landfill past, and it’s post-industrial future as a park.
Humanity is but a facet of the sublime macrocosm that is the world’s landscapes. In the relationship between man and landscape, nature is perpetually authoritarian. In her free-verse poems, The Hawthorn Hedge, (1945) and Flame-Tree in a Quarry (1949), Judith Wright illustrates the how refusal to engage with this environment is detrimental to one’s sense of self, and the relentless endurance of the Australian landscape. This overwhelming force of nature is mirrored in JMW Turner’s Romantic artwork, Fishermen at Sea (1796). Both Wright and Turner utilise their respective texts to allegorise the unequal relationship between people and the unforgiving landscape.
The, “Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers”, is a ethnography written by anthropologist Edward Schieffelin, derived from his fieldwork with the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea. The main focus of the book of the book is how many of the fundamental notions that are implicit in Kaluli culture are found in the Gisaro ceremony, which Schieffelin uses as, “a lens through which to view some of the fundamental issues of Kaluli life and society” (p1).
Settled in Kenya and Tanzania, the Maasai enjoy a simple life with an abundance of culture. With roots in pastoralism, the Maasai live an intriguing life with traditions unlike any in the world. Language, marriage, societal statuses, the economy, religion, and health are fundamental in appreciating all that the Maasai have to offer. The warriors of the savannas’ red clothing signify power, and with that comes a powerful amount of knowledge that is still being learned.
He describes the beauty of the Masin’s environment including spectacular beaches, sea, and rainforest. Chapter one highlights subsequent chapters; for example, Chapter 6, which explores the Maisin’s efforts to conserve the rainforests and beauty that surrounds them. The first edition of this book ended with the 2002 campaign in which Maisin’s prevented logging on their lands. This current version extends to on-going threats of logging, mining and climate change. Barker’s fieldwork spans three decades and depicts what he learned about Maisin culture, values, spiritual ways and transitions over time. A brief history (p.23-30), covers events before and after independence of Papua New Guinea in 1975.
They have a vast array of baskets such as clam baskets, plaited cedar bark baskets, root baskets, flat baskets, soft twined basket or berry and cooking baskets. Commonly, it is made of the cedar bark, roots, grasses and rushes and they knit them together. Besides that, they added the tumplines to the basket so that they can easily carry on the back or travel in the canoes. Therefore, it’s firm and lightweight to help them move flexibly. For fishing, they use nets, traps and large V-shaped hook, which is called Halibut hook. They are made of bone, wood, alder and abalone shell. To lure the fish to swallow the bait, they put the piece of octopus into the hook. In addition, they carved the hook because they believe that spirit helps them to make the fish to bite the hook and caught the fish. On the other hand, there are many tools to built the house such as hammer, mallet, hand manual, chisels and wedges. Hand maul and head of hammer is made from stone such as basalt, jadeite and vesicular lava whereas the mallet is made from a big leaf maple and red alder. Both hand mauls and mallets are used for battering and hitting to split the wood. Another supporting tools in splitting the wood are wedges. It’s has different size but commonly it made from elk antler, crabapple wood or yew. The last one is the chisel, which helps people to carve into woods, bone and design symbol on the canoes or houses. It’s made by the beaver tooth, bone and chipped stone. Brows and arrows is used for hunting and war and they also used it in fishing. Thus, this tool is their priority choice and use widely in Native American tribe. Brows is made from wood especially from yew, young cedar, vine maple and elk antler. Quivers, which is made from wood and fur, is contained the arrows. There have various arrowheads type for each active. For example, serrated bone and serrated copper are for fishing; blunt wood and wood spear is for
To this day, the federal government and many people choose to leave the Yuchi tribe unrecognized and left with a bad reputation, despite the fact that their creative and insightful culture has no relation with any other known tribe. The Yuchi tribe created numerous things ranging from the Indian football game that celebrates an understanding of gender, to bigger and more significant things such as their own stock language otherwise known as Uchean. Even with the amazing historical culture and ideas of the Yuchi, they are only recognized as being uncooperative barbarians. The tribe had an early encounter with the Spanish and the Europeans during the Spaniard Juan Pardo's expedition where they gain the identity as being “warlike mountain chiefs”
“Ancestral lines” by John Barker is a book about the anthropologist’s experience in the Uiaku village located in Papua New Guinea. In the first chapter, Barker tells his readers briefly about him and his education, his and his wife’s experience with the Maisin community, and talks in great detail about the Maisin and their culture in the Uiaku village.
The Yanomami tribe lives in the rainforests and mountains of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. They are the largest somewhat isolated tribe in South America. As of today, their total population resides around 32,000 people. The territory of the Yanomami in Brazil is twice the size of Switzerland. In the 1940s the Brazilian government sent people out to delimit the frontier with Venezuela, and this was the first time the Yanomami tribe came in contact with outsiders. Religious missionary groups and the government’s Indian Protection Service soon established themselves there. The arrival of this large number of people led to the first widespread of the measles and flu which killed many of the Yanomami. The military government built a
The !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa are one of the few bands of hunter-gatherers left in the world. They survive by foraging for their meals while traveling, never settling in one specific area. Hunting and gathering was the primary mode of survival until about ten thousand years ago. Anthropologists have made assumptions about the hunting and gathering lifestyle of current populations because it seems like a precarious method of living. Moreover, the Kalahari area where the !Kung live in was perceived to be baron because it is a desert. However, a study done over a period of years beginning in 1960 led by Richard Lee disproved the common misconception of the life of these foragers, proving that they were not
Different anthropologists such as Nowak and Laird (2010), and Butler (2006), recommended that these residents of jungles contain an exclusive background; position, morals and everyday life is entirely through big adjustment. It can be said that the
The Batek of Malaysia is a hunter-gatherer tribe, they are located in the Malaysian rainforest in groups of families. They would be considered Foragers, They live in camps of five or six nuclear families. Nuclear families consist of a Mother, Father, and their children. “The nuclear family is most common because, in a foraging setting, it is adaptive to various situations.” (Cultural Anthropology Chapter 3.7 Social Organization)
Among the Mbuti, gathering as a mode of subsistence occupies a place of relatively little importance. But net hunting, in groups, takes up the greater portion of daily activity time. The Mbuti do not engage in much gathering of wild plants probably as a result of 400-500 years of contact with the agricultural Bantu. The Mbuti of today have little need to gather wild plants because they exchange game caught during their hunts for metal implements and agricultural produce [banana, cassava, sweet potato, rice, etc.]…The Mbuti divide into two groups; one is a group which uses bows, arrows, and spears as its basic method of hunting, and the second which uses nets. (Tanaka, 1978)
Kampung houses are built with many windows and doors and very few interior walls to let in natural light and allow for maximum air flow through the building to channel out hot air. The houses sit on raised stilts, this helps capture winds of a higher velocity and in turn provides cross ventilation which is important to passive design. It also allows the structures to avoid potential flooding during the wet season and provides residents an aspect of defence from dangerous wildlife.