Mission

Mission: The iCross-Cultural Citizen Project is a cultural anthropology course-based project meant to raise critical consciousness about the rich cultural diversity in our indigenous world. Being totally aware of the limitations of being outsiders, we are a group of multidisciplinary undergraduate students who believe in cross-cultural sensitivity and participatory agency aimed at disseminating information about indigenous realities as accurately as possible.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Dani Subsistence



The Dani live a tropical highland on Papua New Guinea, where they have created a very intensive irrigation system. They dig channels in order to gather water from the numerous streams that run through the valley in which they live in. These ditches are dug in a special fashion to allow the fields to be watered in the dry season and drained in the rainy seasons.  Their irrigation system also provides a way to fertilize their land with runoff of topsoil and rotting plants, which enables the Dani to skip fallowing their fields. The crops that are planted in these fields are mainly sweet potatoes. In fact, 90% of one’s diet is sweet potatoes. The rest of their diet is usually pork. Although their diet is very dull, the Dani people are quite healthy.

Schwimmer, Brian
             1997 Dani Subsitence: Intensive Cultivation. Electronic Document,
                        http://umanitabo.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/tutor/case_studies/dani/cultivation.html,    
                        accessed November 4



1 comment:

  1. First off, I was surprised to hear the Dani are primarily farmers and rear pigs. Although I maybe shouldn’t have assumed they weren’t farmers before I did my research, but I thought they would rely more on hunting because they lived in a valley that was surrounded by seemingly not crossable terrain limiting the influence of humans in the environment. Second, When I finished my research and started comparing the Dani culture to others, I noticed how “western”, one could say, their diet seemed. For example, in the film Milking the Rhino, the Maasai in Kenya had to learn the types of food western tourists ate in order to feed them at the lodge. Although I didn’t do research on the Maasai tribe, but based on the movie, one could infer the foods the Maasai eat are, to some extent, different than what Americans would typically eat. On the other hand, the Dani eat sweet potatoes and pork. Many could agree that this is food is culturally relevant to what’s eaten in America.

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