Dead Birds
1961
Filmmaker: Robert Gardner
Assistant camera: Karl G. Heider
Anthropological advice: Jan Broekhuyse, Peter Matthiessen, Karl G. Heider
This film about the Dani was made by Robert Gardner in 1961
when traditional intertribal warfare was still being waged in that part of
The film follows two Dani: Weyak, a grown man, and Pua, a boy. The opening shots give a fine sense for the Dani landscape, and in the course of the film, many different aspects of Dani life are shown: digging stick horticulture, salt production, funeral ritual, and children’s play.
Some of the most memorable sequences show Dani warfare. Hundreds of men and youths face each other on an open field or a long, rocky ridge, firing arrows across the lines or maneuvering to get close enough to throw their spears.
Dani wars are fought between alliances, the largest political groups. An alliance has perhaps 5,000 people whose living compounds and sweet potato gardens lie scattered over several square miles of the flat valley floor. The boundaries between alliance are marked by a broad no-man’s-land consisting of ridges, streams, and fallow gardens.
Dani social organization is made up of alliances, some of which are at war with each other and some of which have precariously friendly relations. The alliances themselves are groups of small confederations. At any one moment, this seems to be an orderly arrangement, but in fact, Dani political units are quite unstable.
From a structural standpoint, we have seen that the Dani conflict resolution mechanism works fairly well in resolving trouble cases within confederations. But when there are grievances across confederation boundaries, or between people of different, supposedly friendly alliances, it is much more difficult to resolve them. Grievances pile up, resentments fester, and eventually, one side or the other ends the peace with a sudden attack, killing many people, rearranging frontiers, creating new no-man’s-lands, and setting off a long-term state of war between the newly constituted alliances that lasts for years.
The course of a war is punctuated by battles and raids that continue long after the original disputes are forgotten. Eventually, these alliances in their turn explode, a new alignment is made, and the new cycle of war begins.
In 1961, when the events of Dead Birds took place, the Harvard Peabody Expedition lived in one of the confederations of the alliance led by Gutelu (“Wise Heron”). While they were there, they observed battles and raids along the frontier with the alliance called Widaia, made up of Dani with virtually the same culture as that or their friends. They called this the period of ritual war, for the people emphasized that was necessary to placate their own ghosts. Four years later, the alliance split apart when on faction made a surprise attack at dawn on the other faction. This had little to do with ghosts but much to do with the settling of old scores, and they called this the secular phase of war.
If all societies practice war to some degree, the Dani are at the extreme end, for they were in a state of perpetual war with one or more other alliances.
War is carried out by the men. Dani women work their gardens with very sharp digging sticks that could be used as defensive weapons, and although some people sometimes suggested that women would fight off enemy raiders, They heard of no stories of women actually doing it. And there were certainly no stories of women joining in battle or raiding parties.
War results in homicide. Reliable data were hard to obtain, but from the genealogies that were collected, they figured out that 28.5% of male deaths were due to war, and 2.4% of female deaths due to war, and that 25% of Yanomamo deaths were caused by violence, but this figure included fighting within villages as well as raids between villages.
Dani warfare seemed to have restrictions, if not formal rules. As was mentioned above, the Dani did not shoot arrows in volleys, and there were no night raids. (Heider 1997: 246).
Setup Questions
1. How many men are at the battles?
2. How many times can you see a man snatch up an enemy arrow and fire it back?
3. What is the emotional tone of the battles?
4. How much group coordination (as opposed to individual action) do you see in battle?
5. The opening lines of the film’s narrations tell of the Dani origin myth, which identifies people with birds. Also, the captured war trophies are called dead men or dead birds. What other evidence of this human-bird identity can you see in this film?
6. What role do birds play in the film?
7. How many different tools do the Dani have?
8. Discuss Dani art.
9. What is the emotional tone of the funeral?
10. Can you distinguish the Big Men (the leaders) from other men? If so, how?
11. What do you learn about Dani women?