Facts about the Korowai Tribe Tree House
- George Steinmetz
In 1994, the Arts & Entertainment Channel film premiered in the United States under the title Treehouse People: Cannibal Justice. Then in 1996, National Geographic published a photo series entitled "Irian Jaya's People of Trees".
Since then, the Korowai tree house has become very famous and has been published in dozens of magazines and newspapers. There were about twenty television stations reporting it. Starting from the United States, England, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Vietnam, even television from Indonesia itself, TVRI.
suku korowai papua
- amusingplanet.com
The Real Korowai House
The main house of the Korowai people is a house named Xaim. This house is a house that is usually built on pillars from small trees that become stakes. Generally, these Xaim are between 10 and 30 feet above the ground. About 3 to 9 meters from ground level. The average house of this type is only about 15 feet or 4.5 meters.
The Korowai people also have houses that are built only one meter above the ground or even have no stilts at all. This house is known as Xau. However, photos of this house are very rarely published.
The description of the house that has caught the attention of the global world is the third type of house called Lu-op, meaning a house that has to be climbed, the Korowai people very rarely make this type of house. These 'climbing' houses are generally 15 to 35 meters high above a large living tree.
A very famous photo of a 'climbing' house is a photo taken by George Steinmetz in 1995. The photo was later published in National Geographic in 1996. A few months later this photo was republished in Reader's Digest, and it has since become the most reproduced photo for various purposes.
The Korowai people say that their house is mostly the Xaim type. Seven out of ten houses are of this type. Meanwhile, three out of ten houses are Xau models. Only one in fifty new homes is a Lu-op or climbing house.
