Window onto a New Guinea tribe

Penguin Books, Australia are to be congratulated for their initiative dis played in reprinting for distribution in Australia a book which has a quite different approach to the task of making an anthropological report.

Gardens of War is but one of the scintillating results of the visit in 1961 of the Harvard-Peabody New Guinea expedition to the world of the Dugum Dani. in what was then Dutch New Guinea.

Robert Gardner produced the film Dead Birds and the tributes to his skill in portraying the unique life style of the Dani is recorded in the presentation to him of the 1963 Robert Flaherty Award and the Florence, Melbourne and Trento Film Festival awards.

The authors are not placing before us a weighty and academic tome which analyses to the infinite degree all aspects of the Dani way of life.

The purist anthropologist would un doubtedly complain that the visit to the Grand Valley of the Baliem was too brief to permit the authors to make a definitive statement about these people who believe in the myth that “tells of a contest which decided whether men would be like birds and

die, or be like snakes, which shed their skins and have eternal life. The bird won, and from that time all men, like birds must die.”

Gardner and Heider set out to present the quintessence of a society which says that “the Dani are warriors because they have wanted to be since boyhood, not because they are per suaded by political arguments, or their own sentimental or patriotic feelings. They are ready to fight whenever their leaders decide to do so.”

In her introduction to Gardens of War, Margaret Mead succinctly epitomises the purpose of the book.

“But essentially this is a visual book, a record of what any Western reader might have seen had he been set down suddenly among the Dani.”

“That is what we have here; an array of pictures that will remain long after the Dani, pacified, freed (possibly only unhappily) from the long, relentless cycle of killing and being killed, trapped perhaps in some less congenial treadmill of modern tech nological society—have ceased to live and move as they do now.”

One can only agree. The written word in Gardens of War is reduced

to the minimum, to the simple and direct statement, which supports and elucidates the visual impression. Some of the photographic work is outstand ing—from the solitude of the sentry standing alone on high upon the watchtower; to the wall of spears of the warriors about to enter battle, or to the pell mell confusion of the ritualised fighting.

We are spared the bare-breast syndrome; the colour photography is subdued and the natural colouring of the tropical jungle pervades the scenes, and always, it seems, the photographs have been chosen with sensitivity so as to sustain the dignity of the Dani.

A thread of continuity runs through the sequences of visual presentations.

In some instances, such as in the section on violence, the impression is quite kaleidoscopic, and yet there can be a sudden freezing of motion juxtaposed upon the action. This is seen in the solicitude shown as the spear point is removed from the wounded warrior, or when “the corpse of a youth killed in battle is displayed in a chair, decorated with shell goods and nets and surrounded by mourn ing women.”

One minor criticism can be made that, in some places because of the endeavour to provide as full a measure as possible of visual evidence, the photographs become too small and too cramped and then definition and meaning is lost, but this is a very slight flaw in a most commendable

production.

W. G. Coppell.

(GARDENS OF WAR. By Robert Gardner and Karl Heider. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria. $4.95*.)