Tag Archives: environmental portrait It takes a lot of time to prepare for a Papua New Guinean sing-sing. Ancient masks and costumes – some pieces carved from wood and others woven from leaves and grasses: all decorated with paint, shells or feathers – have to be checked and repaired. New costume details need to be fashioned from leaves and grasses. And […]  Once again, pictures of camels and colour are flooding my news feed: the Pushkar Camel Fair in Rajasthan is currently in full swing, and photographers from around the world are there, posting pictures that make me nostalgic for India. The Pushkar Fair, or Kartik Mela, is a multi-day livestock fair and cultural fête. Animal breeders and buyers descend on […]  According to the guide books, the Mursi people have “an aggressive reputation”. This fierce reputation is probably what helps them maintain their cultural traditions and their animist practices in the face of the “artificial” geographic boundaries enforced by the Ethiopian state, the tensions between themselves and other tribes, and the onslaught of modern tourism. That reputation, […]  If there is a single problem with the annual Easter-weekend Bluesfest music festival in Byron Bay, it is deciding what to miss out on! It is hard not have “music envy”. Every year that I attend, there are headliners that I have to forfeit. Or there are the days or years that I don’t go at […]  Papua New Guinea is intensely colourful. Papua New Guinea is also – thanks to rugged terrain and relative isolation from the outside world – exceptionally regional. This is certainly the case for the speakers of between 50 and 250 distinct languages (depending on how you categorise things) who live in tightly knit clans in small […] |
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