Karl Heider Discusses Dani Houses - Preview

After I'd been with the Dani for 18 months, I came home for a few months, just to clear my mind, look over my field notes, so forth. At that time, there was a big curriculum project being worked on, to introduce the social sciences to the grades schools of America. The first year was going to be the Netsilik Eskimo, and that project was already well under way. The second year was going to be: introduce kids to horticulture, that is to say, digging stick horticulture: no ploughs, no draft animals, no tractors. So here I'd done some film work, and I was going back to a proto-typical sweet potato horticulture society. They commissioned me to shoot footage for the second-year program, which, in the end, didn't happen. The Netsilik--the first year Netsilik Eskimo materials were finished, produced, distributed to the schools of America, and then a political firestorm wiped out the whole project. We were left with this footage that I'd shot. They turned that over to me, and I edited these two films, Dani Sweet Potatoes and Dani Houses, out of that footage, starting with-- well, it was still didactic. It was still meant for teaching. I started out with two, one-hour films with word-print duplicates that one messes around with. I would take them around, and show them to classes or to clubs or whatever around Harvard, and get peoples' reactions. I'd sit up there, and do narration. At first, I had a very complex narration that lasted an hour. Slowly, I cut, cut, cut, cut the footage down, and made the narration much more sparse, to the point. I wound up with Dani Houses that we'll see now, which is 16 minutes long, instead of an hour. When I went back, I knew I'd seen a whole lot of house building. I followed it. My dissertation was on the material culture, so I was really paying much more attention to material culture, houses, artifacts, whatever, than I was to a lot of other ritual or whatever. I came across two guys who were building a new compound, way up on the side of the mountains surrounding the Grand Valley. I went up there, for a while, every day, to film each stage of the construction. This worked fairly well, but there were some problems-- well, one of the problems was it was very wet weather, and I had to carry the equipment up and back every day that I went. I had a Bolex 16mm camera, and the film, and a large, good tripod. I also had a very good Nagra tape recorder, but I simply couldn't do both the camerawork and the soundwork at the same time. So I left that back down at my house. I did the filming, starting off as they had begun-- they were well underway, clearing the ground and collecting the lumber for the houses. Since they were mainly concerned with pigs, their own pigs, they start off with building a pig sty. And what we'll see at the very beginning is working on the pig sty. There's no sound. Film was shot in 1963, it says. There's no sound other than my narration. I could have gone through Michael Rockefeller's taping, but I decided not to. I decided that would be too artificial. So all we hear, really, is my narration. [Hieder as narrator] Two Dani men, who were friends, and who live in neighboring compounds, have decided to join forces to build a new compound. They've chosen a site in the forest where their pig herds can be close to fresh rooting ground. [Heider] We're looking out over the Grand Valley, and one man is working with a fire-hardened digging stick. Another man is bringing in lumber for the house itself. The area, the construction site, was on one of the major paths from the bottom of the valley up into the mountains, where people would go to collect materials from the forest, to collect wood or orchid fiber or hunt marsupials, tree kangaroos, that sort of thing, or even birds of paradise. Often, people would come by the construction site and stop off and help out for an hour or so. Basically, it was the two men and their sons, who were there all the time. Here's the boy who's learning. The father wasn't saying-- he wasn't explaining how to build a house. The boy was learning just by watching. I was very disappointed. I wanted to know what they would say, how a father would explain to his son what each step of the process was. And I suspect a comparable thing in America. The father would be saying, "Okay, son, now we do this, and that'd to do, that's to make it work-- blah, blah, blah." Talk, talk, talk. These men rarely said anything, and just went ahead and did it. And the boys would be told, "Okay, now, push." Or whatever. And they would find out about how houses were built that way. The men would stay. They would bring their breakfast. They'd bring sweet potatoes, smoking their cigarettes. Oh, they were men who lived in the neighborhood where I lived, and I knew most of the few hundred people in that neighborhood quite well.