Baliem Valley Dani
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Baliem Valley Dani Leslie Butt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES The Baliem valley Dani are also known as the Dani and the Grand Valley Dani. The term Dani used here does not include the neighboring Western Dani, the Lani, or the Yali, who have been called “Dani” in the past.
LOCATION
AND
LINGUISTIC AFFILIATION
The Dani live in the 50 km-long Baliem valley, Jayawijaya district, Papua (also known as West Papua, or Irian Jaya), Indonesia. The valley is located 1,500 m above sea level in the middle of the mountain range which cuts through the center of the island of New Guinea. New Guinea was divided by colonizers in the 19th century; the Baliem valley sits on the western side and was part of the Dutch East Indies colony. Since 1969, the former Dutch colony has been incorporated into Indonesia. The Baliem valley Dani are speakers of the Papuan language, Dani, which falls into the Greater Dani language family.
OVERVIEW
OF THE
CULTURE
The Dani are well known because of the excitement that accompanied the discovery of their complex culture, terraced gardens, and densely populated communities in a mountainous region previously thought to be uninhabited. In 1938, an American pilot spotted from the air the valley’s tracts of symmetrical gardens and circular dwellings. Excitement over this New Guinea discovery was intense, and the press dubbed the valley “Shangri-La.” In the early 1960s, Harvard University organized a large expedition to the region. The well-known film Dead Birds (Gardner, 1963) and now-classic ethnography (Gardner & Heider, 1968; Heider, 1970, 1979; see also van Baal, Galis, & Koentjaraningrat, 1984) from this period have helped to fix the Dani as central to the global imagination about “primitive” populations and integral to the study of tribal cultures within the field of anthropology.
The outside world may not have known of the Baliem valley, but people have settled there and cultivated gardens for at least 7,000 years (Golson & Gardner, 1990). At present, the patrilineal Dani number some 60,000, and display the highest levels of cultural intensification and political integration of any group in the New Guinea highlands (Shankman, 1991). For their food staple, the Dani rely on root crops such as the sweet potato, introduced about 300 years ago, and the indigenous taro, which women cultivate in gardens on the valley floor and mountainsides. Women also raise pigs, which men strategically exchange to promote their status, and to strengthen their political alliances. People identify themselves by membership in a totemic clan. In the past, clans grouped into multi-layered political units, and large-scale pre-contact warfare dominated political activities (Heider, 1970). Even after pacification in the 1970s, clan groups still align to form large political alliances. Leadership is achieved through prowess in politics and exchange relations. Dani men use their influence in the public arena to try to regulate the lives of women. The Dani are polygynous, and most men seek to acquire more than one wife, with between
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