Those 100-foot Korowai tree houses are mostly built for film crews
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingThe BBC's Human Planet showed a Korowai family in Papua climbing a bamboo ladder into a hut roughly 100 feet up in an ironwood tree, while the narrator declared height equals prestige in their culture.
British tabloids later revealed the scene was staged — the BBC paid a family to build the house for the cameras, then apologized to viewers. Writer Robert Moor digs into the rest of that story in a Lapham's Quarterly essay adapted from his new book In Trees: An Exploration. Those dwellings are mostly props for tourists and TV crews.
That image reached Western readers through a 1995 National Geographic story called "People of the Trees," which Moor saw at age twelve in suburban Chicago. He grew up obsessed and eventually flew to Papua to climb one. Anthropologists set him straight. Cambridge's Rupert Stasch coined the term "ultra-tall tree house" because so few existed traditionally. Gerrit van Enk, a Dutch missionary there from 1987 to 1990, told Moor he saw hundreds of Korowai homes but only two or three at treetop height.
Photographer George Steinmetz spent weeks hunting for one tall enough to shoot from a helicopter. He found one built by a man named Landi to escape a hostile clan, then abandoned because a 150-foot ladder to the toilet is no way to live. After the magazine ran, requests poured in. Korowai men now get $300 to $1,000 from film crews to build a sky-high house for a shoot. A Canadian filmmaker ordered six — an "Ewok village" — and skipped out on the bill.
The prestige claim is also backward. Stasch's research shows height correlated with fear of one's neighbors. Moor traces the Western appetite for jungle tree houses back to Daniel Carter Beard, the Boy Scouts co-founder, whose 1899 Harper's Round Table piece urged American boys to imitate "primitive" peoples. The Korowai still call visitors laleo, meaning zombies.
Image: Depositphotos.com
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