Five days with the Mentawai

This adventure started after two nights with only two hours of sleep, two nauseating Air Asia flights (Singapore – Kuala Lumpur – Padang) and a hell of a seven-hour boat ride where I became seasick. I’ll skip the details and fast forward to this scene: a tall blonde sitting on the back of a scooter bike behind an Indonesian man half her height, speeding over bumpy roads lined by wooden houses and friendly faces. Holding on to my seat for dear life, I felt a smile on my face as the fatigue and malaise faded into the background. This, finally, was the start of my trip to the island of Siberut, west of Sumatra.

Cut scene. Same setting, but with pooring rain and the tall blonde in a yellow poncho. It didn’t take long for the first tropical shower to hit us, and we’d better get used to it if we wanted to survive the rainforest! After the rain had subsided, our group of seven travelers got onto a motorized canoe. I felt like I boarded a theme park attraction, but no – this was the real thing: we were transported an hour into the jungle, away from any cellular or internet connection, where we would spend the next five days living with the Mentawai tribe.

The Mentawai are the indigenous inhabitants of the Mentawai island chain and one of the oldest tribes in Indonesia. They settled here thousands of years ago, when there were no or only very low waters around what are now islands. They lived an isolated existence until they encountered the Dutch in 1612, but the Mentawai were lucky that their challenging jungle environment was not very fit for colonial exploitation. More recently however, the Mentawai got severely threatened by governmental assimilation efforts. Today, they only still live in the forests on Siberut, as it was the only island large enough for them to flee and hide.

We would be staying with two different families in their traditional houses, called uma, made out of wood and built on piles. After our canoe ride, we squished through the mud to our first uma and got warmly welcomed by our host family. The stars of the reception were three elderly men who greeted us wearing nothing more than loincloths, tattoos and beaded accessories. These were the people we knew from the photos: we had just stepped into a documentary. It would clearly take me a while, maybe the entire trip, for me to realize that all of this was in fact real.

In the following days, with our first host family as well as the second, we were invited to observe how the Mentawai’s connection to the forest and animist beliefs are reflected in the activity of their daily lifes. The three elderly men – shamans – took us into the jungle (us in rain boots and armed with rain jackets, them barefoot) where they showed us how they created loincloths out of a tree and collected ingredients to make poison for arrows. We followed two women who went fishing in the river, wearing banana leave skirts for good luck. A young shaman-to-be in his twenties took us searching for worms in dead wood (and some of us even tried them – I was only brave enough for the fried version). At night a chicken and a pig were ceremonially killed for us for dinner, and we got a dance performance from the shamans. We got bracelets made out of rattan and saw how traditional tattoos were done (and one of us, to her later regret, even got one herself).

While we marveled at the traditional activities and outfits (or lack thereof), it was at the same time very apparent how modernization has penetrated and influenced even some of the most remote units of humanity. Except for the elderly men, almost all people we met in fact wore t-shirts and shorts. Some had watches. Everyone chain-smoked cigarettes. And the meals we were served were for a large part made out of food that was brought from town, including rice and vegetables.

Of course, the way we encountered the Mentawai was not as a people frozen in time; instead it was about catching their ever-changing culture at this moment in history. One could maybe smile at the shaman’s fanny pack but admire his necklaces and bracelets, when the beads in fact also don’t come from the island but were in the past received from traders. At this point in time, the Mentawai culture, or at least the part of it that we saw, is created by the man who loves to drink Coca Cola, the six-year-old kid who knows exactly how to use a smartphone, the lady who wears pants under her banana leave skirt when she goes fishing, the shaman who couldn’t get enough of seeing videos of his own dance performance, and European animals like pigs, chicken and cows served on brightly colored plastic plates. All of this is the Mentawai today.

Forcing people to participate in dominant modern culture against their will is one thing, but it would be equally condescending to discourage anyone from developing in the way they wish to. At the same time, many would recognize the intrinsic value of preserving traditions and knowledge to not let them be gone forever. And that is the goal of the kind of tourism of this trip: ethical cultural immersion. Tourism has given the Mentawai a source of income and a raison d’être in modern Indonesian society; tourism may very well soon become the only reason that the Mentawai lifestyle is still kept alive.

But while I understand the benefits of ethical cultural tourism, I couldn’t help but feeling ambiguous about my role in this. I noticed inhibitions and reservations that I couldn’t readily explain. Was I feeling like a kind of voyeur? A paying client expecting to be entertained? (Dance, monkey, dance!) What was real and what was show? Did genuine connection feel obstructed by the money and stuff the Mentawai asked us to give to them (like our clothes)? Was it wariness against romanticizing ‘primitive’ culture? Was I too much on guard against potential ‘noble savage’ interpretations with a New Age twist from some of my spiritual fellow travelers? Was it the group travel, requiring me to navigate our own group culture taking shape and spending full time with people I didn’t know before the start of the trip? Or just the inability to deal with my own awkwardness here? Probably all of it.

If we had been anthropologists, we’d say that the main research method for data collection we used was participant observation: taking part in a social setting and simply watching what’s going on. Of course, by participating, or even just observing, we become a player that influences the situation itself. I think key is that we shouldn’t fool ourselves that we are looking for an authenticity that existed without our presence, or if the Mentawai had still never been in touch with modern society, but aim to observe and experience the culture that was at that moment being created in the dynamic between the Mentawai, the visitors and the rest of the world, that we ourselves formed a constitutive part of. And that was a beautiful thing to witness and learn from.