Page 34 - UD Research Magazine Vol5-No1

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The UD team stayed in a traditional Ese'Eja dwelling, camping in tents brought from home. Although the Ese'Eja live in remote areas, their communities do have satellite dishes.
As hunter-gatherers, the Ese'Eja are always in search of their next meal. While hunting for white-lipped peccaries, which resemble hogs, Jose Ekiney spied a small pond filled with fish. In minutes, his pockets were full.
The Amazonian region of Peru: The Ese’Eja are the indigenous people of the Amazonian region of Peru. More than 60% of Peru
is covered by the Amazon rain forest, more than in any other country. It
is one of the most biologically diverse areas on Earth.
But during the three-week expedition with a UD team focused on documenting
the culture of the indigenous Ese’Eja people of Peru, Griffiths also was something
of an anthropologist, cartog- rapher, medicinal botanist, Spanish language interpreter, oral historian and material cul- ture specialist. And that’s not to mention the day he became a traditional hunter—learning how to find the precise type of tree that provides raw materials for bows, bowstrings and arrows; fashioning those items by hand; and finally shooting with them.
“This whole project was in- credible, and I learned so much,” Griffiths says of the team’s work. “I’m an engineer, and I got in- terested at first because I wanted to learn about the polluted riv- ers in the area. I never thought I’d be going into people’s houses and interviewing them about their lives and their possessions and their histories. It was amaz- ing to develop such new skills.”
His experience was far from unusual in the University’s “cul- tural mapping” pilot project designed to explore the Ese’Eja, a hunting, gathering and fish- ing community whose numbers have plummeted in recent years
and whose traditional culture is threatened by development, industry and restricted access to ancestral lands.
When Jon Cox, a photog- rapher and assistant professor of art at UD, began planning the project, he says he knew the team would need to conduct fieldwork in numerous areas
of study. While photographers and a videographer were docu- menting the lives of the Ese’Eja, others would be collecting data about the community members’ lives, histories and traditions in a variety of ways, from mapping GPS coordinates to recording stories told by elders.