World's Lost Tribes

TV SERIES REVIEW 

Title: World's Lost Tribes, The Adventures of Mark and Olly 

Year: 2007 

Running time: 50 minutes

Country: USA

Plot summary:

Join extreme travellers Mark Anstice and Olly Steeds as they embark on unique expeditions into some of the most remote places on Earth.

Explorer, Mark and journalist Olly have spent months with two remarkable indigenous tribes in West Papua - the Kombai and the Mek - trekking high into uncharted highlands, seeking total immersion in isolated cultures with histories of tribal war, sorcery and witchcraft.

In this hugely different world, Brits Mark and Olly attempt to live off the land, exactly like their hosts. It's a hardcore challenge because not only do they have to learn how to survive on a largely unusual (and often unpalatable) diet, they must also work alongside the tribes, learn new languages and understand each tribe's rituals.

Join Mark and Olly in their incredible adventures as they make friends, and enemies, and learn the secrets of these primal societies.

Mark Anstice and Olly Steeds have done more than their fair share of globetrotting.

With Mark's military experience and Olly's journalistic nous, they're a formidable team with the skills necessary to gain the trust, befriend and ultimately earn the respect of their tribesmen hosts.

Their expeditions in West Papau stretched them both mentally and physically in a new world where nothing could be taken for granted.

The pair had to dig deep at times, but did, and came out the other side with some unforgettable memories and unparalleled experiences.

Kombai Tribe

The Kombai tribe was discovered only 25 years ago, in the dense jungles of West Papua, New Guinea. The tribe's lifestyle - dubbed 'stone-age' - has remained unchanged for 15,000 years.

There are thought to be about 4,000 Kombai people. They are spread across approximately 250 small clans, each of which speaks a different language.

The Kombai are generally suspicious of outsiders, and few have shown interest in the missionaries who made contact with them. Anecdotal evidence suggests there has only been one convert to Christianity since 1982.

Living

The tribes usually live in treehouses 30 feet to 100 feet above the ground. These homes, which offer views above the dense jungle, are built as a means of defence against raiding parties. They also enable the Kombai to avoid sorcerers and insects, and to keep cool.

Eating

The Kombai are hunter-gatherers, moving from place to place during long treks in search of food. They eat cassowary birds, riflebirds, wild pigs, grasshoppers, tree kangaroos and snakes. However, their main protein comes from the larvae of the Capricorn beetle, also coined the 'sago grub'.

They also eat biscuit-like concoctions called sago, which are made from the pulp of the sago tree. The pulp is turned into flour and then baked or steamed. It is supplemented with green bananas, cucumbers, mushrooms, fruits and berries. Palm leaves and ferns make up their diet as well. The Kombai cook with hot stones.

Dress

Short and muscular in appearance, many of the male tribesmen wear a sago thorn pushed through the septum of their nose. They wear leaves or small penis gourds, both as adornment and to protect their genitals. These are worn particularly during feasts, although some groups of the Kombai wear a hornbill head instead of a gourd.

Kombai women wear the bones of the flying fox through their nose and dog-tooth necklaces. They paint their faces with chalk and berries mixed with soot from a fire. Their clothing includes skirts made from woven sago leaves or young palm frond leaves. To make their skirts, the women hold the leaves in their teeth and tear them into thin strips. After powdering their thighs with ash, they use their palms to tightly roll strips of material, which form a growing length of thread. The thread is then looped around their big toe, which anchors the macraméing of the skirts.

Customs

Cannibalism is still believed to take place, though rarely, among the Kombai and only ever in the context of kakhua - male witches, who in the Kombai's belief, are responsible for the deaths of many tribal members. Those accused of being witches are said to be killed, baked and eaten in the belief that the practice will free the spirit of the victim killed by the male witch.

Mek Tribe

In World's Lost Tribes: New Adventures of Mark and Olly, explorer Mark Anstice and journalist Ollie Steeds are on an extreme mission to contact and live with the legendary Mek tribe of West Papua whose way of life has barely changed in thousands of years.

On their last adventure Mark and Olly were adopted by the elusive Kombai tribe. Now they are trekking high into the uncharted central highlands, seeking total immersion in a culture with a history of tribal war, sorcery and witchcraft.

The Mek people are an ancient tribe that has survived for thousands of years in one of the most beautiful but hostile environments on Earth and Mark and Olly are the first white expedition to enter the Merengman village, located in a part of the jungle described as "hundreds of miles of dark and screaming".

After gaining their trust, Mark and Olly will live with the tribe for four months, totally immersing themselves in their way of life where they will experience weddings, witch hunts, and axe-wielding chiefs, while traversing deadly bridges, enduring sleepless nights with the tribesmen and eating local delicacies such as tadpole kebabs and frog heads.

In their incredible adventure, Mark and Olly will attempt to gain acceptance into the village with the reward of the Mek's traditional penis gourd, and experience the chance to document the wisdom of the ancestors that will soon be lost.

© Text and image: Discovery Channel (www.yourdiscovery.com/worldslosttribes/)

Secrets of the Tribe TV series

FILM REVIEW 

Title: Secrets of the Tribe 

Year: 2010 

Running time: 60 minutes   

Country: USA 

Plot summary:

Explorer Mark Anstice and language and religion expert Ben Protheroe travel to Benin, West Africa to immerse themselves in the culture of local tribes. In each episode, they experience a different tradition.

Episode 1: Initiation. Hosts Mark and Ben travel to the West African country of Benin, where a local tribe teaches them about the voodoo rituals they practice and also invites them to stay and participate in a special mass circumcision ceremony.

Episode 2: Scarred. Explorer Mark Anstice and World Religions expert Ben Protheroe travel to the Somba tribe in Benin in West Africa to try to witness their ceremony of infant scarification.

Herdsmen of the sun

Title: Herdsmen of the sun

Director: Werner Herzog

Writer: Werner Herzog

Year: 1989

Running time: 43 minutes

Country: Germany

Plot summary:

Wodaabe - Herdsmen of the Sun (German: Wodaabe - Die Hirten der Sonne) is a 1989 documentary film by Werner Herzog. The film explores the social rituals and cultural celebrations of the Saharan nomadic Wodaabe tribe. Particular focus is given to the Gerewol celebration, which features an elaborate male beauty contest to win wives.

Although the film may be considered to be ethnographic, Herzog commented that: "[My films] are anthropological only in as much as they try to explore the human condition at this particular time on this planet. I do not make films using images only of clouds and trees, I work with human beings because the way they function in different cultural groups interests me. If that makes me an anthropologist then so be it."

The opening shots of the film depicts a celebration of male beauty, showing men dancing in elaborate costume, accentuating their height and whites of their eyes and teeth to attract women, as "Ave Maria" plays in the background (a 1901 recording sung by Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato of the Vatican).

© Text and image: IMDB

Les statues meurent aussi

Title: Les statues meurent aussi

Director: Chris Marker and Alain Resnais

Writer: Chris Marker

Year: 1953, France

Running time: 30 minutes

Plot summary:

Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) is a French documentary film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais released in 1953. It was sponsored by the panafrican magazine Présence africaine. Willing to answer to the question "Why African art is at the Musée de l’Homme, while Greek or Egyptian art is at the Louvre?", the two directors denounced the lack of consideration for African art in the context of colonization. The film was censored in France for eight years because of its anti-colonialist approach.

"When men are dead, they enter history. When statues are dead, they become art. This Botany of death is what we call culture". So begins the controversial documentary which raises the question of the difference between Western art and African, but particularly focuses on the reasons why occidental art tends to underconsider or destroy what it does not understand.

The enemy god - A yanomamö film

FILM REVIEW 
Yai Wanonabälewä: The Enemy God is a feature-length dramatic motion picture set in the Amazon rainforest. The film gives voice to a group of indigenous rainforest people to relate their own dramatic story. The film is made in partnership with Yanomamö communities in Amazonas province in the rainforest of Venezuela and proceeds from the film will go to benefit those communities as directed by Yanomamö leaders.
Yai Wanonabälewä: The Enemy God began with a request from a group of indigenous Yanomamö (or Yanomami), in order to find somebody that would allow them to tell their version of the history of their communities in the Amazon rainforest. After years of violence and fear, they want to tell the world about the new ways of peace and hope that they have discovered for their people. It is the story of a significant group, led by a respected headman whose Spanish name is Bautista. It is a true story.
Bautista Cajicuwa and his K'ekchi' fellow villagers acted as themselves in the film.
The Enemy God project is a multi-faceted initiative to raise awareness and involvement on behalf of indigenous people groups. Through The Enemy God project audiences will:
•See the self-determined transformation of an indigenous culture while preserving and honoring their uniqueness in their Creator’s eyes.
•Hear from and meet leaders from indigenous groups in the Amazon and other regions.
•Discover opportunities to partner with indigenous groups through short & long-term service, training, and advocacy.
•Partner with individuals an organizations dedicated to the empowering of indigenous groups all over the world.
See the film's webpage.

The Last Gods of Easter Island

The Lost Gods of Easter Island is a BBC documentary written and presented by David Attenborough. It explores the history of the civilization of the remote Easter islands. Attenborough embarks on a personal quest to uncover the history of a strange wooden figurine carving which turned up in an auction room in New York during the 1980′s.
The auction catalogue indicated that the carving was from Easter Island and the auctioneers told him that the sculpture had come from a junk-shop dealer in Pennsylvania. He knew that the, “grotesque head, attached to a body grossly elongated and as thin as a stick,” was more important than the auctioneers believed it to be and had such presence and power that he bought it.
He began an investigation to trace the origins of the artifact — an investigation that spans the globe and leads him on voyages to Russia, Australia, England, the Pacific, a Tahiti beach and finally to one of the most remote places on earth; and 15 years later, in a personal detective story that combines art, anthropology, and history traces the origin of the carving and in doing so tells the story of a forgotten civilization and of a people who inhabited one of the most remote places on Earth.

Kon-Tiki expedition

© Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo

One of the most known and renowned expeditions, the Kon-Tiki sailing from Peru to Polynesia marked a huge step on the experimental archaeology field. Its originator and leader, Thor Heyerdahl, wanted to prove the possibility of a pre-Columbian interchange between South America and Polynesia. He achieved the goal by constructing a sailing raft made of nine balsa tree trunks, an available wood in the forests of Peru. A mangrove wood mast supported a main sail of 15 by 18 feet on a yard of bamboo stems.
A plaited bamboo cabin provided refuge for the six crewmen that sailed the boat through the Pacific Ocean: Thor Heyerdahl as Expedition leader, Erik Hesselberg as navigator, Bengt Danielsson as steward in charge of supplies, Knut Haugland as radio expert, Torstein Raaby in charge of radio transmissions and Herman Watzinger as meteorological and hydrographical data collector.
The Kon-Tiki carried 250 litres of water in bamboo tubes. For food they took 200 coconuts, sweet potatoes, bottle gourds and other assorted fruit and roots. The U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps provided field rations, tinned food and survival equipment. In return, the Kon-Tiki explorers reported on the quality and utility of the provisions. They also caught plentiful numbers of fish, particularly flying fish, "dolphin fish", yellowfin tuna, bonito and shark.
Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. (Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.)
The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947, at Callao, Peru, and after 101 days and over 6.980 km across the Pacific Ocean, they arrived at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7. They had mainly followed the Humboldt Current. The crew's first sight of land was the atoll of Puka-Puka on July 30. They made brief contact with the inhabitants of Angatau Island on August 4, but were unable to land safely. Incidentally, the Angatau atoll was reached after 97 days of travel, the calculated absolute minimum navigational time to reach Polynesia. Three days later, on August 7, the raft struck a reef and was eventually beached on an uninhabited islet off Raroia Island in the Tuamotu group. The team had travelled a distance of around 3,770 nautical miles at an average speed of 1.5 knots. After spending a number of days alone on the tiny islet, the crew were greeted by men from a village on a nearby island who arrived in canoes, having seen washed-up flotsam from the raft. The crew were taken back to the native village, where they were feted with traditional dances and other festivities. Finally the crew were taken off Raroia to Tahiti by the French schooner Tamara, with the salvaged Kon-Tiki in tow.
Thor Heyerdahl's book about his experience became a bestseller. It was published in 1950 as The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, later reprinted as Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft.
A documentary motion picture about the expedition, also called Kon-Tiki was produced from a write-up and expansion of the crew's filmstrip notes and won an Academy Award in 1951. This documentary can be viewed in Youtube in its whole length and it’s much worth the 58 minutes it lasts:

The original Kon-Tiki boat is now on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo.

Early Man and the Ocean

Conference: Early Man and the Ocean
Date: 23 to 26 September 2010
Place: The Kon-Tiki Museum and The Norwegian Maritime Museum (Oslo, Norway)
Price: Free for conferences (just notice on e-mail). For the film festival, the standard museum admittances apply.
Website: www.kon-tiki.no
Contact name: Reidar Solsvik (Reidar.Solsvik@kon-tiki.no)

Early Man and the Ocean 2010: Social Significance of Ocean Voyages is a combined conference and film festival.
The conference topic is maritime experimental archaeology and maritime history dedicated to how (pre)historical or experimental voyages influenced the society they were a part of or the society with which they came in contact.
The conference consists of three sessions on Thursday 23 and Friday 24 of September:
1) Significance of the maritime experiment – social and technological
2) Significance of Ocean Voyages 1 – Oceans Connect
3) Significance of Ocean Voyages 2 – The Sea as a Social Space.
Key note speaker: Professor Ben Finney, University of Hawai'i, "The significance of experimental voyages as a source of scientific knowledge."
The film festival 23-26 of September will screen over 20 films related to maritime experimental archaeology and first European contact with peoples in polar regions:
-BUILDING PHARAOH'S SHIP - Can the legendary trading vessel of an Egyptian queen sail again? WGBH/Nova
-LAPITA VOYAGE EXPEDITION - J. Wharram and H. Boon
-THE SEA STALLION'S VOYAGE - A trial voyage in film and music. Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde
-CILICIA - K. Balayan
-VIRACOCHA I & II - Eyes Open Production
-THE ABORA SAGA - D. Görlitz
-KABANG 2010 - Sea nomads from the Mergui archipelago sail the southwest coast of Norway. Ten Thousand Images
-THE LOG BOAT FROM GLOMMA RIVER - Norwegian Maritime Museum
-ROALD AMUNDSEN'S SOUTH POLE EXPEDITION (1910-12)