In his major book, The Wild Honey Clan, Ad Borsboom discusses several strategies that Australian Aborigines employ to transmit knowledge, without making use of written messages. He mentions the use of a variety of metaphors, and the imagining of such metaphors in stories and dances, that are, moreover, regularly told and performed (2006: 101f ). In this brief note I shift the focus to the role of observation, in part because during my research among the Western Dani, I did not acquire the linguistic facility to record long stories, in part because I focus on other types of knowledge, and, maybe, in part because of different cultural orientations among the peoples concerned.

In 1960, while preparing for my field work among the Western Dani, I presumed that I would learn a great deal about their way of life by observing how young Dani were taught skills by their elders. This presumption did not come true at all. Shortly after my arrival among the Wanggulam, the group of Dani among whom I had decided to work, they started preparing a new set of food gardens. Much of the work was done by parties of men helping each other on a reciprocal basis. Although they worked together in the same locality and on the same job, for instance cutting trees and removing undergrowth, they did so independently, by themselves.

That appeared most strikingly during fence building. Dani fences, serving to keep pigs out of food gardens, are sturdy structures. They consist of roughly adzed, irregularly shaped planks, put horizontally on top of each other, and held in place by vertical poles on either side of the planks. They were tied together with rattan. On top short poles are put crosswise and the structure is topped off by a mixture of grasses, vines and other small plants to protect it against the heavy rains. Each man built a separate section of the fence, about three meters long. Having finished that section, he might start building another, a bit further on. Never did I see a young man helping another man so as to learn on the job. They all seemed to be knowledgeable fence builders.