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| [Note Guidelines] Photographer's Note |
OK, this is the 1st scanned image that I post here. Not perfect, as the print comes from an old slide...
(Taken while I was based as a tour guide in Malaysia for 11 months 17 years ago, doing an 12-day round trip with French tourist every 2 weeks : we were doing the regular Melaka-Kuala Lumpur-Penang etc. tour, then we were flying to Sarawak (Borneo island) and ending our tour in Singapore).
This is the headman of one of the longhouses that we visited regularly ; they are the Iban people (a subgroup of the Dayak tribes). They have been resisting the seductions of Protestant missionaries for decades and remain animists, and they still prefer to live together in those longhouses on stilts, a dozen families living side by side, sharing the meals and having one room for each family, with access to a common corridor.
He is wearing a typical hat with old feathers, some of them from endangered species such as the Argus pheasant (the feathers with the « eyes », on the right), and with 5 silver coins arranged in a pattern of flowers.
On his throat and on his shoulders are traditional tattoos with different symbols, those tattoos a proof of manhood and the ones on the throat are particularly difficult and painful to make, without anaesthesy of course.
They were (his brother is behind him) out in the morning, to demonstrate how they were hunting with their "sarbacane" (a sort of long blow pipe, made of hardwood, with which they are blowing poisonous darts). (The blow pipe can be seen in the background ; it is NOT a metal bar !)
In this particular tribe, some former head hunters are still alive and I had one of them as a special friend : a sweet and lovely old gentleman, quite decent and jolly ! He had been employed by the Malaysian government to kill some communist guerilleros in the peninsula, in the 1960s. Each killed person allows the perpetrator to have one of his fingers tattoed, and my old friends was proud and unrepentent of his many tattoed fingers (the guy here, one of his cousins, had none of those tattoes if I remember well).
We were always visiting the same 3 longhouses, so I got to know these Iban tribesmen very well and they were greeting me with always the same warm embrace : "Kettiiii ! Namma ? Namma berita ?" = Hi Cathy ! What are the news ?" - extremely friendly people with a great sense of humour and after all, with the same feelings like ours !
I loved this particular basis to work : with my sophisticated French tourist, many of them having just arrived from Paris, after the comfortable 4 or 5-stars hotels in the cities on the peninsula, we would suddenly have to sleep on the teak floor, under moskito nets, while the pigs were rummaging under us and while the roosters only some meters away were keeping us awake most of the night (they don’t start at 03 :00 am, believe me !).
It was very interesting and it took a lot of skills to convince my group that the experience was worth it, that they should not hesitate to be kissed by the short tribesmen and to dance with them at night, to try their homemade alcohol etc ; also, to explain all the practicalities, including how to use the local toilets. Some of them could adjust very easily, while others had problems and would complain a lot (I have so many remembrances of that time, and so many funny anecdotes, but this is not the place). |
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