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1-15 of 15
- Bruce's journey trough the Southern Ethiopian Omo valley ends in the river's delta at Lake Turkana (mainly in Kenia), the home of the Dassanech tribe, which absorbed various immigrant elements since its arrival circa 1800. The nomadic pastoral people defines wealth as cattle and goat herds, but the pastures are arid and bad weather can wipe out whole herds. Those without herds are called the Dies (poor), and live on the mosquito-infested marshy shores of the lake, where their main source of income is hunting and fishing in the shallow lake. Bruce experiences life in a typically destitute village, which barely offers any shade, and joins men on a nightly canoe hunt for the dangerous main prey, crocodiles, and their preparation. His female host, the stand-in for the absent village chief, also explains the system of totemic 'clans' which rather constitute hereditary professional casts.
- Bruce spends a month with traditional nomads in the Darhad Valley, near the Siberian border of Outer Mongolia. Barely arrived, he gets his first lessons in the two national obsessions: wrestling and horses in a mountainous land almost without car-fit roads. He soon attends in Rencenlumbe the Naddam, a festival of traditional contests, the main ones being wrestling and a 15 km bare-back horse race for riders from age 6 up. Twelve years after the fall of Communism, the valley gets its first own newspaper, yet 'revolutionary' remnants, often Soviet- Russian, remain common. An old Lamaist monk recalls the persecution which in 1938 destroyed the 1000 men strong monastery, never replaced. His hosts, Mishig's family, expect Bruce to help out when everyone migrates, four times a year, with the yak, sheep, goat and horse herds, whose self-processed produce makes them nearly self-sufficient. The whole dwelling is designed for easy mobility, mainly in gerts, an ingenious traditional type of tent.
- The Babongo people of Gabon take powerful hallucinogens which send them on a life-threatening, three day trip. Bruce Parry undergoes the initiation and finds it has some terrifying side effects.
- This time Bruce wants a taste of life with the Kombai, a Papuan tribe. They are so remote it proves an adventure in itself, even with a local guide, just to find and approach them in the vast, largely unspoiled forests of New Guinea. The men go naked except for a penis-cover, which is applied after a bewildering penis-inversion, and go on long hunting and gathering trips. They live in dizzying high, self-made tree houses, once a useful protection against headhunters from the south. In their tradition, cannibalism is practiced only as ultimate punishment for khakhua-kuma, evil human 'soul-eaters'. There is no metal, all tools are still made from wood and stone. Their staple food is sago, to Bruce's Western taste inedibly dry but easily available in the wood, leaving them lots of spare time. The favorite food are wild pigs and, for special celebrations, bred pigs; as delicious as those taste to the Westerner, so disgusting seems their smaller treat, fattened grubs, a smaller kind is put in the ear to eat the wax.
- Adventurer Bruce spends a month with the Hamar, a sorghum-growing and cattle-herding tribal people in the fertile part of the southern Etiopian Omo valley. After witnessing women willingly being flogged bloody with whippy branches for half an hour by the Maza, recently initiated unwed men, as prelude for a stark-naked youngster's initiation by jumping on and walking over the cattle they line up and hold, Bruce gets permission from the chief of Argude village to stay with elder Jammu and follow his adolescent cousin Suri, who prepares for weeks his coming-of-age initiation by the tribe's distinctive cattle-jumping, a requirement to become eligible for marriage and cattle-ownership. Bruce is even allowed to train in near-permanent seclusion with the Maza and jump himself. Hamar youth schooled in town starts questioning or even rejects the tribal traditions, increasing tourism and Ethiopian government objections affect their way of life. Besides sorghum beer, the ceremony also requires a lumpy version mixed with cattle blood.
- Bruce joins a village of the Suri, a particularly warlike tribe (belonging to the Surma people) of pastoral nomads in the Omo valley, in the Sudan-Ethiopia border region, which has long-running feuds with neighboring tribes in all directions, leaving them boxed-in in a rather poor territory of pastures. Since fire-arms spilled over from the Sudanese civil war, the area is dreaded even by the Ethiopian military. The favorite sport is donga: stick-fighting, which isn't ritualistic but often causes serious wounds, occasionally even a fatality, and yet is engaged without any protective armor, in fact even the fighters continue to be dressed extremely scanty, naked buttocks and/or genitals are often shown, adding to the sport's attraction as a way for bachelors to flaunt their virility. Bruce insists and ultimately gets permission to train for this highly unsafe test of manhood.
- Bruce Parry joins the Matis, an Amazonian tribe wrongly nicknamed the jaguar people, in the 1980s nearly extinguished by exposure to Western germs, still quite a problem, and much of the shamans' herbal medicine was lost with them. Even bringing the imposed gift stipulated by Brazil's Indian agency PENA, the chief would refuse filming, till he is convinced the BBC is not here to exploit them as a primitive spectacle like earlier crews (even asked to pretend they still went naked) but to show their real life and transition with many modern introductions, such as soccer. Bruce shares his host Tumi's home with various vermin and partakes in social life, which happens largely in the long-house, including meals and rituals such as dripping a gruesome root-juice in their eyes and his as preparation for an exhausting hunt, notably for peccary after a dance imitating that boar's sounds and capture, covered in mud which is washed off. Blowpipes even shoot monkeys from high trees, some babies are adopted as pets. Evening entertainment includes story-telling and nature-imitating dances, salsa learned by young men in town -they prefer their own lifestyle still- has its village premiere in Bruce's presence. Fresh-cut switches, flexible enough to whip around the belly, are used on the bare back to give hunters courage, and by foliage-dressed 'forest spirits' on pregnant women and otherwise never chastised children to stimulate growth and cure laziness. Frog poison is administered trough small wounds as a vomiting-inducing ritual hunter's ordeal. Domestic fun includes body painting, which has lost any symbolical meaning. After his greatest hunt and the meal, Bruce gets a warm send-off.
- Bruce visits the Adi, an isolated tribe in the foothills of the Himalaya between India (in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, carved from colonial Assam) and Tibet, ethnically closest to Bhutan, and shamanistic animists, enjoying governmental protection for their ancestral culture. They live in practically isolated villages, which few ever leave, practicing subsistence farming, clearing forests tracks every three year, and are omnivores, even live beetles, even fecal material is fed to 'toilet pigs'. The gam (elected chief, in a consensus model) of Jorsing village accepts to host Bruce, and gets everyone to help building a hut for him with simple forest produce, but many villages are beginning to use more permanent, comfortable modern materials, like electricity, connecting roads, even TV, all introduced by the Adi's own pragmatical choice. Apong, beer made from fermented millet, is crucial for social and ritual purposes, such as blessing the new hut. Bruce is 'adoped' by the 'gam', who brings some heirlooms. The measure of wealth are mithuns, a bovine species they keep in the forests, for work nor milk, rarely slaughtered except for offerings to the unseen, omnipresent spirits. The 'miri', traditional healer, is a female healer, whose influence and status wane because her healing inefficiency drives mostly youngsters to abandon animism in favor of modern medicine and often convert to Christianity, which however stresses prayer. They practice gathering and ambush hunting for days, using modern guns or traditional bow and traps, especially for deer, wild boar, monkey, squirrel and the surprising favorite: rat, which is eaten in the whole, fur and bones included. For the Aran festival, when neighboring villagers visit but Christians stay away, 'roti' bread is baked with raw-mixed in frog and cut-up rat; a mithun is strangled by hanging to be eaten with song and dance. Gratefull Bruce gets a send-off in style.
- In this episode Bruce stays a month with the Atie, a hunter-gatherer tribe, which lives in Tanzania, surrounded by the far more numerous, pastoral Maasai, who look down upon them as 'cattle-less primitives' and soil the pools by washing in them, so the Atie generally must drink dirty water. They significantly supplement their meager hunting harvest by braving bees for honey, for Bruce a personal phobia.
- Bruce passes five icy winter weeks with a traditional nomadic group -half live in modern villages- of the Nenets, a pastoral people on the Northern Siberian Yamal peninsula, inside the Arctic Circle, which holds a quarter of the world's known natural gas reserve. They live in tents, following reindeer herds, which are wild except for the semi-domesticated beasts of burden, given the huge distance a five month annual tundra migration. Everything is made and organized for the polar climate, actually too complicated for a novice guest to be much use. They also fish in the ice.
- On Anuta, an extremely isolated small island, part of the (formerly British) Solomon Islands, Bruce gets the chief's permission to share 3 weeks the arguably most authentic Polynesian way of life with its 250 inhabitants, just 24 families who form a single, close community, bound by 'aropa', the principle that all produce -the entire atoll, behind low reefs, is gardened- and fishery catch -in the shallow using tidally flooded walls, and by canoe at sea- is shared, which facilitated the conversion to now devoutly practiced Anglicanism. Schooling in the distant national capital Honiara implies some westernizing, yet medicine remains so primitive -the chief refused a popularly desired clinic, claiming prayer helps best- that Bruce's first aid kit, mainly the antibiotics, must save a man's life with a badly infected foot. The traditional woven bark has given way, except for ceremonial use, to textile sarongs or Western dress. Native names are replaced in practice by Western ones, one boy was even called Mel Gibson- his father and another man went missing fishing a sea, presumed dead.
- Bruce spends a month in Laya, a village of the Luna people in the inaccessible north of Himalayan Budhist kingdom Bhutan. The local spiritual (and social) headman teaches him about ascetic detachment, but the traditions are more animistic. Even by yak, the local bovine and burden animal, traveling to even higher Lunana has to be abandoned. Returning also means participating in the three days annual festival, including an archery competition
- Bruce joins one of the last authentic nomadic hunter-gatherer bands of the Penan people in the Malaysian state of Sarawak in northern Borneo. he's charmed by their kind, clever way to live in harmony with neither and each-other. But most of all he's sadly impressed by the tragic ruin of their ancient way of life by government-authorized logging, which ruins the primary rain-forest forever: even when it grown back, the resulting secondary forest never regains the necessary rich variety to properly support wildlife and the Penan.