Dead Birds

Duration: 81

Year Published: 1963

Creator: Harvard University Film Study Ctr

Format: 16mm

Color: Color

Sound: sound

Description: Presents an excellent ethnographic cross-section of the life and customs of the Baliem Valley people of Western New Guinea. Explores the nature of primitive warfare and its motivations. Shows traditional mutilation and death customs, as well as food production, housing, mythology, clothing, ornament, and art., Shows how the Dani of Western New Guinea have focused their energies and values on the elaborate system of intertribal warfare and revenge. Explains the immediate and allegorical meanings of the term "Dead Birds."

Complete Record: Presents an excellent ethnographic cross-section of the life and customs of the Baliem Valley people of Western New Guinea. Explores the nature of primitive warfare and its motivations. Shows traditional mutilation and death customs, as well as food production, housing, mythology, clothing, ornament, and art., A photographic and ethnographic study which was sponsored by the Peabody Museum from February 1961 to November 1963 of the Dani, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem, high in the mountains of western New Guinea. For the Dani people, constantly at war with each other, the term dead birds is used for a person killed by the enemy. The other, more poetic meaning derives from the Dani belief that people, because they are like birds, must die. , , NOTE: Two (or more) records have been merged together to create this data.