Posted on 16.07.2013, and 30.11.2014
The Dani (also spelled Ndani) are a people from the Grand Valley of the Baliem River, a broad, temperate plain lying 1.800m above the tropical jungles of Papua, of the island of New Guinea. They are one of the most numerous tribes in the highlands, and simultaneously one of the most well-known, despite the fact that were discovered only in 1938. At least 50.000 Dani live on the valley floor, and another 50.000 inhabit scattered settlements along the steep-sided valleys around the Grand Valley. Temperature is mild, rainfall moderate, wildlife harmless and disease rare, so it can said that this is one of the world's most pleasant corners. Sweet potatoes are important in their culture as food, but also as the most important tool used in bartering, especially in dowries, and this is reflected in the over seventy different names used for this vegetable. They grow also ginger, taro, cucumber, carrot, greens, yam, and a single fruit: banana. As most Papuans, they consider pigs the most important living creatures besides people. Pigs mean wealth and social importance. Only the possession of several wives is as important and usually a man who has many pigs will have more than one wife.
Their tools are made of stone and bone, wood and bamboo. A few of the more exotic materials, such as seashells, furs, feathers and the finest woods, reach the Grand Valley along the native trade routes. Metals, and even pottery, were unknown to the Dani, but despite their primitive tools, their houses and gardens are complex. Their settlements are collections of compounds enclosed by a stockade, within which are four kinds of structures, arranged according to a traditional pattern. At one end of the oval courtyard is the circular domed men’s house. On both sides were long rectangular family or cooking houses and smaller circular structures in which each woman slept with certain smaller children and her husband, when he was not in the men’s house. Finally there are houses divided into stables where the pigs were kept. More about their houses I wrote here.
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