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A Dani elder sings a prayer to make the rain stop at a funeral in the Baliem Valley, while his kinsmen crouch under the eaves of a hut to stay dry. The wearing of a “koteka” or penis gourd is fast disappearing, but this village maintains a strictly traditional dress code to secure the continued patronage of a foreign tour operator. Almost all the traditional cultures of the highlands are “phalocryptic,” a term anthropologists use to classify different forms of covering the penis, and not the testicles.

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©1993 George Steinmetz
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Irian Jaya
A Dani elder sings a prayer to make the rain stop at a funeral in the Baliem Valley, while his kinsmen crouch under the eaves of a hut to stay dry. The wearing of a “koteka” or penis gourd is fast disappearing, but this village maintains a strictly traditional dress code to secure the continued patronage of a foreign tour operator. Almost all the traditional cultures of the highlands are “phalocryptic,” a term anthropologists use to classify different forms of covering the penis, and not the testicles.

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