Page 39 - UD Research Magazine Vol5-No1

more than the original 40 youngsters, as the cameras were shared among friends— of elders, families, plants, animals and daily life. In addition, children who had never before held a camera quickly discov- ered the “selfie” genre and produced many photos of themselves.
The cultural mapping team spent three weeks in Peru, visiting three villages inhabited by the Ese’Eja: Infierno, Palma Real and Sonene, all in the Madre de Dios Amazonian region.
One community was accessible by dirt road, and the other two only by water. The group traveled in local boats known as peki pekis, a kind of large canoe powered by an outboard motor, with one
village a five-hour trip along the river and the other a 10-hour journey.
When they arrived at each stop, the first order of business was to ensure that everyone in the community understood why they were there and that their goal was to help the residents accomplish what they wanted for themselves, not what outsiders thought they should want.
Cox and Andrew Bale, a photogra- phy professor at Dickinson College who earned his master’s degree in fine arts at UD, had traveled to the region a couple of months earlier to lay the groundwork with community elders.
“I thought we had everything set up from that visit,” Cox says. “But in May,
every time we went into a new village, we had to sit down for a meeting to explain what we were doing. And these were meetings that might last for an entire day.”
The team came to realize, says Rolón Dow, that “there are layers of trust.” Even when elders understood and approved of the project, some community members might still have been unaware or skeptical of the purpose.
She says a useful tool was Cox’s book from Tanzania, which the team showed to the Ese’Eja as an example of the kind of documentation they had in mind. And the village children, always curious and eager to approach the group, were good icebreakers, Rolón Dow says.
“It was not too long until our boats pulled up to a sloping beach with butterflies fluttering around.... As I sat there watching the Tambopata River flow by, entrenched by the green jungle canopy, hovering blue sky and howler monkey calls in the distance, I felt blessed.... Every time I walk through the jungle, I feel connected to the beautiful ecosystem around us. It’s so vital and vulnerable, integral to the lives of the Ese’Eja.”
—From anthropology student Chelsea Rozanski’s journal
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