Dani Sweet Potatoes

1963

Filmmaker and Anthropologist: Karl G. Heider

This film follows the Grand Valley Dani sweet potato cycle from clearing off the old brush and weeds from a fallow field to planting, harvesting, cooking and eating. At that time the Dani had the simplest of tools—long pointed wooden poles used as digging sticks that are hardened in the fire and soaked in water—and they still used their stone-bladed adzes. (by now most Dani use steel shovels, axes and bush knives and make stone adzes only for tourist sake.)

Even though the tools are simple, their field system is intensive and sophisticated, with an intricate system of ditches. Perhaps the ditches were originally necessary to drain swampy land, but they now serve as both drainage and irrigation ditches, depending on whether rainfall is too little or too much. The ditches also hold compost. Weeds and topsoil collect there, later to be smeared back onto the garden beds. Pigs are part of the ecological system, plowing up the soil in search of food and fertilizing it with their droppings.

In this film, we see people from a single neighborhood working alone in their own garden plots or, at times, joining together in a cooperative work party. The men wear little more than what is necessary for modesty: a dried gourd sheath covering the penis, held in place with a string around the scrotum and another upper string around the body. Women wear the marriage skirts, made of many meters of braided fiber wound tightly around their hips. And women always wear a carrying bag hanging down their backs. One or more of these bags can be used to carry things, and there is an element of modesty in keeping the lower back covered in public. (Heider 1997:94).

Setup Question

1. How do the Dani fertilize their fields?

2. Why do so many men get together to spread mud?

3. What is the division of labor among the Dani?

4. Why do the Dani harvest sweet potatoes every day? What are the implications of that?

5. What tools do you see?

6. What does the film tell you about Dani Childrearing—how children learn to be Dani—and about the general tone of adult-child interaction.