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Food for the Spirits
Food for the Spirits is a documentary that will explore
the changing relationships among health, biodiversity and spirituality
as experienced by the tribal people inhabiting the tropical
rainforests of the Gogol River Valley in Madang Province, Papua
New Guinea. It will
specifically focus on the struggles, challenges and experiences
of these changes as seen through the eyes of the Marik tribal
people who inhabit the Gogol river valley.
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| Gogol River
- dry season |
For years the tribal people inhabiting
this area structured their lives in ways that drew economic,
social and religious meaning from the Gogol River and surrounding
tropical forests. In the past one hundred years, however,
their way of life has been dramatically changed by the advent
of European colonization, Christianity and economic globalization.
Plantation economies competed with traditional subsistence
agriculture; Christian missionaries spread divergent views
of religion and spirituality; and large scale commercial
logging of the rainforest permanently altered the natural
and cultural landscape. These sources of culture contact
and conflict have forever changed the many symbolic meanings
that the people of the forests once expressed through their
relationships with the river and the forest, with the land
and customary tribal boundaries, with one another, and with
the Spirit world. New relationships, however, are in constant
creation; nowhere are these more dramatically expressed
than in their changing perceptions of health, illness and
death. Food for the Spirits,
in partnership with Yagaum Rural Health Center, will explore
these relationships through historical and contemporary
contexts.
A series of
questions therefore underlies Food for the Spirits. What
are the relationships between culture change, nutrition,
biodiversity and spirituality as experienced by the tribal
people of the Trans-Gogol valley? How are these relationships
traced through historical and contemporary context? How
do local perceptions of nutrition, the environment and the
body enhance or hinder responses to sickness and health?
What role does spirituality play? What impact does Christianity
have? What efforts ought to be explored to promote holistic
community development in ways that integrate health and
spirituality? What can be done to help the people of the
Trans-Gogol valley create a more hopeful future?
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