Decorum is as Old as Humanity

Brazil. Amazon rain forest. Under a thatch of white bird's down a Yanomami herald who came to invite a neighboring clan to a plantain soup feast waits in the center of the vast communal house's interior courtyard to be received by an elder. He has laid down his bow and arrows next to him.

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How About this for a Surf Board?

Colombia. Choco rain forest. Noanama Indian boy zipping over the Docordo River.

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The Joys of Grandfathers

Brazil. Amazon rain forest. Yanomami man and grandson.

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Where Hosts Push Drinks Down Guests' Throats

Brazil. Amazon rain forest. To help keep the peace with neighbors, a Yanomami clan invited another to come share plantain soup with them. Custom requires that hosts show much generosity and guests much delight with it, even  if it the soup must be pushed down their throats.  To keep up with the generosity, guests have no recourse but to also push a finger inside their throats once in a while to make room for more soup.  They get so bloated that  they end up looking high on drugs.

Brésil. Amazonie. Pour aider à conserver la paix avec des voisins, un clan yanomami en invita un autre à boire avec eux la soupe de plantain. La coutume requiert que les hôtes démontrent une grande générosité et les invités beaucoup de satisfaction, même s’il faut leur faire boire a la force. Et les hôtes font la queue devant chaque invité avec leurs pleines calebasses. Pour tenir le coup les invités n’ont d’autre recours, de temps en temps, que de s’enfoncer un doigt dans la gorge.

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Amazon Indians Never Kill Young Animals

To eat, the Indians of the Amazon rain forest must hunt. However, they never take from the forest more than what they need. We, too, kill animals to eat. We kill cows, sheep, and pigs. And not always humanely. We also kill wild animals to grace our walls with their heads or use their skins or tusks. We even kill calves and lambs. The Indians never kill young animals. After hunting down their mothers, they adopt them as lifelong pets, never to end as food. Women will go as far as breast-feed the youngest animals. 

Brazil. Amazon rain forest. Yanomami Indian brothers with pet opossums.

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Through Borneo, From Coast to Coast

In 1968, in a four-month journey across Borneo, the world’s third largest island, I traveled west to
east, up the Kapuas and Bungan rivers and down the Mahakkam, from Pontianak to Samarinda.
That was long before the loggers’ invasion, and long before any road was first hacked or bulldozed through the forest. I journeyed first by Chinese houseboat, and then by Dyak canoe. When rapids impeded our progress, which was often, we walked through the forest.

At the end of our upriver trip, we left our canoes on the Bungan and walked for eight days to the
Mahakkam through the jungle of the water divide. Because the Dyak had no use for money, I
needed eight porters to carry the trade goods that paid for services. Countless leeches hooked
onto us along the way, drawing streams of blood from our arms and legs.

The chain-smoking Dyak burned them off with cigarettes. A non-smoker, I plucked them off
by hand, sometimes leaving the head inside my skin. And since the leeches squeezed through my
shoes’ eyelets to lodge under my toenails, I had to walk through the jungle barefoot so as to spot
them quickly.

The Dyak, former headhunters, still had skulls hanging from their longhouses’ rafts, but they were
as hospitable as any people I had known, though they forced me to sing and dance for them before giving
me a place to sleep. Compared to their own amazing artistic shows, mine looked dismal, which I could see
on their faces.

Halfway down the Mahakkam, I ran out of trade goods when every hand was needed to harvest the
hill rice. I had to give away everything I owned except the clothes on my back and my photographic
equipment to find the help I needed to get out of the jungle.

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Not all Honey is Easy to Get

My wife hates to go to the supermarket. “It’s so boring,” she complains. Yes, but how convenient!

Martha did not always feel like that. When we moved here from Colombia, her country, 12 years ago, walking through a supermarket made her actually very happy. Somewhat like a kid walking through Toys R’ Us. At least a Colombian kid. She had used supermarkets before of course, but never that filled with so many small wonders. However, time wore off the novelty.

“Don’t be ungrateful,” I tell her.” Think instead of all the people worldwide who still have to hunt to get meat. Those who spend as much as a day to get a little firewood and dirty drinking water.

My mother herself, when I was growing up in my native Belgium, lost a whole morning every day getting our fresh food from the baker, the butcher, the charcutier, the fish shop, the vegetable and fruit shop, and the milk and cheese shop. And she had to lug her purchases on foot from place to place. And wait in line while some other customers engaged in small talk with the vendors.

Having shared the lives of more than 30 indigenous peoples in every kind of environment, from Africa to Asia and South America, I know why those people, who are as intelligent and resourceful as we are, have developed so slowly. They lose way too much time meeting their most basic needs.

Take for instance that old Yanomami Indian, about 65, of the Amazon rain forest. He craved the honey he had spotted about 40 meters up a tree perhaps 50 times as thick as he was.

”When you want honey,” Martha, “you make a trip to the supermarket. And you get the rest of the food you need right there. But that man literally risked his life to get his honey.”

First he cut two thick 30-feet saplings and rid them of their branches and tendrils. Then he yanked down some lianas, and tied them to the ends of the saplings and to a long heavy logger's ax to pull them after him as he climbed a thinner tree nearby. Some 30 meters up that tree, he placed one sapling against a fork of the forest giant, tied the bottom of the improvised ladder to the thinner tree, and pulled himself up on the sapling. Once at the fork of the big tree, he repeated the operation using the second sapling that he pulled up after him with the ax.

Now, standing at that scary height on top of the thick branch that held the bees’ nest, and using both hands to swing his heavy ax on that very branch, he got it down with the honey without falling down himself. The branch made such a racket crashing to the ones below that I briefly thought that it was him falling. But he got down fast enough.

Once on the ground, he and a grandson that had accompanied him stuck their arms inside the hollow branch and pulled from it handfuls of honey on which they gorged greedily. Living a life of constant exercise, those people can eat as much honey as they want without ever gaining a pound.

Are they happy? I swear that I never saw happier people, except among some other indigenous people.

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