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Viewing articles tagged 'culture'
Viewing articles tagged 'culture'
4 articles
Dega culture
A village, the land around it held in common, kinship that decides obligation, and a moral order older than any state that has claimed us. Around thirty peoples, each with its own building, weaving, music and dance, held together by an animist thread that runs through all of them, and by a gong tradition that UNESCO has placed on the list of the...
Jars, rice wine and the buffalo feast
A jar has a soul. The Êđê call it mngắt cheh, and if a jar stands empty for a while someone will put a handful of rice and an egg inside to feed it. A jar is also money: among the Êđê Bih a tang pôk jar was worth a buffalo and a tuk navi jar was worth an elephant. And a jar is law — when a man was killed, the killer set one jar at the feet of th...
Instruments beyond the gongs
The gongs are the voice of the highlands, but they are not the only one. Our peoples made music from bamboo, gourds, stone and a single string: xylophones, mouth organs, tube zithers, one-string fiddles, jaw harps, flutes and panpipes, and, once, from stones cut before any of our languages were spoken. Most of it was recorded by outsiders in the...
Hunting, the crossbow and the forest
Every highland household farmed, and hunting was part of most men’s lives, with the crossbow as its mark; among the Bru, boys began to learn it at five or six. The forest gave meat, fish, fruit, medicine and poison, and our peoples knew it the way farmers know a field. This page sets down what the record says about how we hunted, fished and trap...
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