
January 09, 2014
A colorful glance around the world the capture recent events in photographs.
A colorful glance around the world the capture recent events in photographs.
For four years, indigenous photographer David Díaz Gonzales has documented the lives and movements of his Shipibo-Conibo community, as many of them migrated from their native Peruvian Amazon to the city. A work of remembrance and resistance.
For Shipibo-Conibo women, sporting a fringe is usually a sign of celebration or ceremony.
YARINACOCHA — It was decades ago when the Shipibo-Conibo left their settlements along the banks of the Ucayali River, in eastern Peru, to begin a great migration to the cities. Still among the largest Amazonian communities in Peru — 32,964 according to the Ministry of Culture — though most Shipibo-Conibo now live in the urban district of Yarinacocha.
For four years, Shipibo-Conibo photographer David Díaz Gonzales has documented the lives of his relatives and neighbors from Yarinacocha, in the Ucayali area, to show how they strive to keep their culture alive and share their vision of the world.
Shipibo-Conibo professor Eli Sánchez Rodríguez, an expert in the history and customs of his people, says that the indigenous group's migration to Yarinacocha began in the 1960s, when the European Adventist missions began to send members of the Shipibo-Conibo people from Paoyhan (the main settlement on the banks of the Ucayali) to the city, to join their churches.
"The first Shipibo-Conibo family to arrive in Yarinacocha were the Rojas," says Sánchez Rodríguez. "In the following years we continued migrating due to the creation of the Amazon Hospital, where they brought us to be treated; and later, we also moved there to receive education.”
David Díaz Gonzales, a Shipibo-Conibo photographer who grew up and lives in the Nueva Era settlement, made it its mission four years ago to document and pay homage to the transitory group. He began photographing his relatives and neighbors from Yarinacocha, in central Peru, to show how his people try to preserve their culture nowadays — but also how it has been transformed.
“We who are living in urban neighborhoods, and not in our native rural communities, continue to practice our customs, despite being far away from our ancestors. Those customs have survived extreme hardships and are still being kept alive,” says Díaz Gonzales, whose name in Shipibo-Conibo is Isa Rono: "It means 'little bird' and 'snake' — my grandfather on my dad's side gave me that name," he says.
In the Shipibo-Conibo language, the name of the community is related to the words "monkey" and "fish". According to their mythology, people transit through different worlds: the world we inhabit, "Non Nete", and the world of water, "Jene Nete".
While some Shipibo-Conibo traditions are still intact, others have been changing and adapting. Take hairstyling, for instance: A woman with a fringe is usually taking part in a ceremony or celebration. In the Besteti Xeati, or "haircut festival" adolescent girls' fringes were cut to present them to society.
A haircut as weapon of protection.A haircut was also a farewell and a weapon of protection. When a man died, the widow would cut off all her hair as a sign of mourning, and to protect the family from another death or tragedy. "It was not just a haircut, but also a ceremony where the family of the widow and the deceased participated," professor Sánchez Rodríguez points out.
Formerly, that same ritual included clitoridectomies, or removing the girls' clitoris to "purify" them. Such female genital mutilation stopped being practiced between the 1950s and 1960s.
The kené design is drawn or embroidered by Shipibo-Conibo women to express various aspects of their culture, from traditional song to medicine and aesthetics.
Clothing is also very characteristic of the Shipibo-Conibo people. The women wear colorful blouses and skirts with geometric designs; the men, a kind of long tunic, adorned with designs of geometric figures. Currently, says Sánchez Rodríguez, not all Shipibo-Conibo men and women wear their traditional costumes on a daily basis — this is mostly done by older people — but rather for special occasions.
The elaboration of the garments is a laborious task, especially when it comes to men's kushmas, long and ornate tunics. These are woven by hand, from the fabric on. The women prepare the cotton, then turn it into thread and then into clothes.
The women wear the koton, the blouse, and the chitonti, the skirt. Both the chitonti and the kushma are embroidered or painted with the kené ― embroidered motif. The kené design, which made it into the country's official Cultural Patrimony in 2008, is done by women and decorates not only clothing but also other fabrics, as well as ceramics, weapons, shaman crowns — and even serves as body adornment.
But the kené is not just an ornament in the form of geometric figures: It expresses the worldview, knowledge, aesthetics and traditional medicine of the Shipibo-Conibo people, as anthropologist Luisa Elvira Belaunde explains. During Ayahuasca or Piri Piri hallucinatory-plant ceremonies, men and women are said to have visions of the kené, although only the latter are the ones who execute it. The kené is also the basis for traditional songs.
During his photographic journey, Díaz Gonzáles did a lot of research. He also got to make aluminum necklaces and earrings that some of his models wore. The necklaces are usually made of plastic beads or aluminum circles, and evoke how, when merchants from the city started reaching the Shipibo-Conibo by canoe in the 1960s, they would pay members of the indigenous communities in coins. As they did not know what to do with them, having never seen coins before — they started making jewelry instead.
Previously, the Shipibo-Conibo pierced their nose and chin to hang earrings shaped like circles, leaves or even Christianity-inspired crosses.
"I remember that my grandmother had a hole in her chin, but the one in her nose had already closed," says photographer Díaz Gonzáles. "I also remember the story of an aunt who had a chin earring in the shape of a cross, but the priest in her town would not let her wear it and threw it into the river because he said that was wrong."
David Díaz Gonzáles also spoke to the wisest among his people, like Shipibo-Conibo professor Eli Sánchez Rodríguez ― or "Pakan Meni" in his language― who has helped to systematize and spread the knowledge and folklore of this indigenous people. The expert has helped create school material for the teaching of Intercultural Bilingual Education (EIB), in addition to writing books about the culture of his people and even translating foreign literature, such as The Little Prince, into Shipibo-Conibo.
The national curriculum has never been designed to preserve our cultural identity.
The photographer also met with shamans, such as the renowned Ruperto Fasabi who is highly respected among the Shipibo-Conibo and who also happens to be the father of the rapper Wihtner Fasabi Gonzales or “Wihtner FaGo”. The shaman is the community's highest sage and acts as a kind of mediator between the worlds.
Díaz Gonzáles also photographed members of the "Comando Matico": people who, in the toughest times of COVID-19, turned to the benefits of the matico plant. Richard Soria, a member of this group, says that they discovered the properties of the matico while trying to alleviate the pain of COVID-hit patients with the plants that were growing in their gardens.
The Comando Matico also served to worked toward raising awareness around the alarming state of the hospitals in the region, about which the government does very little.
According to Soria, neglect starts at the education level: “The national curriculum has never been designed to preserve our cultural identity. Only one perspective has prevailed. In schools there has never been the desire to give importance to our culture. For this reason, we have formed indigenous organizations to make sure that the community, its culture and language, continue to exist. This is how we exist, as a resistance.”
Photographer David Díaz Gonzáles has moments of introspection and anxiety. During them, he thinks that someone like him, an indigenous artist in a world where indigenous knowledge is not valued, has to do something to right that wrong. Picking up his camera, he adds, "Whatever I do will remain as an example and incentive for my people, it is my responsibility."
For four years, indigenous photographer David Díaz Gonzales has documented the lives and movements of his Shipibo-Conibo community, as many of them migrated from their native Peruvian Amazon to the city. A work of remembrance and resistance.
Though different than concentration camps constructed by Nazis, the “filtration” facilities nevertheless are a return to another brutal history, reopened under Putin, and ramped up since the invasion of Ukraine.
After reseizing Kharkiv, Ukrainian soldiers reach the border with Russia. Meanwhile, Moscow continues its assault on Donbas, and has renewed missile strikes of the port city of Odesa.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.