This is my send-off after a multi-night stay at Amantiru and Baitiru’s place in the Siberut Island rainforest. It was interesting how quickly I became used to the rhythms of jungle life. I recall thinking, upon first hiking up into Amantiru’s house, “Dude, that guy is wearing a loincloth.” A couple days later, having gotten to know my hosts a bit, I was more likely to think, “Amantiru is in a good mood, he must have had a good hunt.”
The loincloth is itself an indicator of how my views of Mentawai culture transformed during my time in the jungle. At first it was just an anachronism – something so strange to behold that a part of me wondered if Amantiru had been paid to wear it so as to make the village seem more traditional. Quickly, however, loincloths began to make so much sense in that humid environment that I began to envy the guys who owned them.
Indeed, loincloths aren’t just the result of limited fabric resources in the jungle; in a place that can be witheringly hot they actually made more sense than cotton or synthetic clothes that quickly became soaked with sweat, or began to disintegrate from over-use (I wound up wearing little more than my nylon athletic shorts when it was in camp – a poor-man version of a loincloth).
In noting this I’m not saying that traditional methods are always superior; just that they make perfect sense sometimes, and that sometimes they exist in tension with more modern things. Amantiru explained how his grandfather’s generation had no manufactured goods at all – no iron or plastic or sugar – and that when tourists first brought in bottled water the plastic bottles seemed impossibly beautiful in the elegance of their craftsmanship.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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