DER Documentary: Dani Sweet Potatoes

Dani Sweet Potatoes

by Karl Heider
color, 19 min, 1974

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Shot in 1963, this classic ethnographic documentary follows the sophisticated process of sweet potato horticulture developed by the Grand Valley Dani, a Papuan culture in the central highlands of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea). It follows the Dani sweet potato cycle from clearing off the old brush and weeds from a fallow field to planting, harvesting, cooking and eating. At that time the Dani had the simplest of tools - long pointed wooden poles used as digging sticks that are hardened in the fire and soaked in water - and they still used their stone-bladed adzes. (By now, most Dani use steel shovels, axes, and bush knives and make stone adzes only for the tourist trade.)

Even though their tools are simple, their field system is intensive and sophisticated, with an intricate system of ditches. Perhaps the ditches were originally necessary to drain swampy land, but they now serves as both drainage and irrigation ditches, depending on whether rainfall is too little or too much. The ditches also hold compost. Weeds and topsoil collect there, later to be smeared back onto the garden beds. Pigs are part of the ecological system, plowing up the soil in search of food and fertilizing it with their droppings.

In this film, we see people from a single neighborhood working alone in their own garden plots or, at times joining together in a cooperative work party.

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Dani Sweet Potatoes