When I imagine a life of pure freedom, I tend to picture a tree house. This is an image pulled directly from my childhood in the suburbs of Chicago. But the tree house I envision is not the slapped-together pile of plywood and two-by-fours one usually thinks of when one thinks of a “tree house.” It is a spacious, elegant, gently decaying structure in a far-off jungle.
I first saw this tree house in an issue of National Geographic when I was about twelve years old. The cover of that month’s issue featured an image of a mountaineer rappelling down a thin rope into a blue-black tunnel of glacial ice, which normally would have enthralled me. But scanning the table of contents on the right-hand margin, my eye was drawn away from the glacier to another story. The title read, simply, “People of the Trees.”
I turned to page 34. The article described a tribe called the Korowai, whose lives were spent roaming the swampy forests of Papua (then known as Irian Jaya). I read on with steadily intensifying fascination. The Korowai wore only leaves and vines, as well as the occasional bone through their noses (specifically, “the thin bone of a bat’s wing”). They hunted with bows and arrows, eating insects, reptiles, and birds. And, on rare occasions, they practiced ritual cannibalism, to “absorb” the “powers” of the slain person. I did not find this story unsettling, or even particularly surprising; its outlines had long ago been etched into my young mind, albeit crudely, by countless cartoons and comic books.
What did surprise me were the lofty tree houses in which the Korowai lived. The story opened with an image of a huge, somewhat decrepit hut built in the uppermost branches of an ironwood tree, more than a hundred feet above the forest floor. It was reached by climbing a long, spindly wooden ladder. According to the home’s owner, he built it to “see the birds and the mountains and to keep sorcerers from climbing my stairs.” I remember lying on the carpet of my room and staring at that photo and feeling an ache of yearning so intense that it bordered on bruise. This, I thought, was how humans were meant to live: far from the suburbs, deep in the jungle, high in the air, hidden away in a place where magic still exists.
Decades later, while sifting through various childhood relics, I ran across that old issue of National Geographic and read the story about the Korowai again. My callow love of the exotic had faded with time, but to my surprise, I found myself admiring the Korowai way of life for entirely new reasons. Their communities had no rulers, no police force, no prisons, and no bureaucracy. Until very recently, they relied upon no modern industrial products for their survival. They lived in small family units on large plots of mostly wild land, but they traveled widely throughout the forest so they could visit family members and exchange goods, stories, and songs. One’s “wealth” (excess food, spare tools) was expected to be shared with anyone who needed it. The Korowai seemed to sincerely believe in the equality of all people and, more incredibly still, to actually behave in accordance with this belief. They also identified on a personal level with the forest around them, knowing that they needed to tend to it to keep it alive, just as it kept them alive.
Rousseau, who despised the foul air and stifling social conventions of “over-crowded cities,” portrayed the “pure state of nature” as a fundamentally solitary existence; humans, being relieved of the bonds that hold one to another, are thus free from domination. But the Korowai way of life offered a stark rebuke to this notion. They were able to maintain an extraordinary level of freedom, it seemed, precisely because they were tied inseparably both to one another and to the forest. True freedom, seen in this sylvan light, was nothing more and nothing less, than a state of wild co-flourishing.
Once I finished reading the story, I paged through it once more, admiring the images of lean, gleaming bodies bent in postures of labor and leisure: an artfully blurred shot of a man carrying a dead cassowary, a woman pounding sago flour with a stone axe. At this point in my life, I was coming to see Western civilization as a monstrously gnarled thing, contorted around its past mistakes, teetering on the brink of collapse. It occurs to me now that these images moved me so powerfully because they portrayed a way of life that had survived wholly outside of that history; to even imagine it was to momentarily escape into something that felt somehow both fresh and unfathomably ancient. I had no doubt that the life of a forest-dweller was more difficult and more dangerous than my own. But wasn’t it also freer, fairer, and in its way, richer? I felt its quiet pull, like a child finding an open door at the back of a house crowded with unpleasant guests, and through that door, a stand of tall trees glowing darkly in the dusklight.
One January, while spending the antipodean winter in Australia with my husband’s family and realizing I was as close to Papua as I was ever likely to be, I decided to fly there, trek through the swamps, and visit the Korowai tree houses in person. After spending many months reading and watching documentaries about them, I was curious to learn if the reality of Korowai life—its flies and rashes and petty frustrations—matched up to the fantasy I’d constructed in my mind.
To get there required a lengthy journey, including three flights, a long ride in the back of a pickup truck, and a two-day trip upriver in a narrow wooden boat called a pirogue, followed by a half-day hike through the jungle. To help us get there in one piece, I tracked down a local guide named Bob Palege, who had led many tourists and journalists like me on this trip. When I spoke with him over the phone, Bob mentioned that he had recently received a similar request from a Ukrainian named Vlad Kutsey, who was a National Geographic photographer. We agreed to combine our little expeditions, in no small part because it would nearly halve the cost.
My husband Remi and I left for Papua from Perth. On our penultimate flight, the plane touched down just after dawn for a stopover in Timika, a trade city near the world’s largest gold mine. Sensing the wait might be lengthy, I rose to go to the bathroom. As I moved down the aisle, a hand reached out and waved me down. “Robert!” a man exclaimed.
“Vlad?”
Vlad shook my hand enthusiastically. He was wearing a little green army cap on his blond head; his nose, which protruded past the small brim of the cap, would over the coming days grow terribly sunburned. He was cheerful, voluble, and a bit clumsy, both physically and socially. He had seemingly been to every corner of the earth. Within moments of our meeting one another on the plane, he pulled out his phone and began scrolling through photos he had taken on past trips: volcanoes in Java, canyons in Cappadocia, ruins in Bagan. The photos were artfully composed, with a vibrant, almost surreal color palette. It was obvious he was talented and intrepid. But, as we talked, it also quickly became evident that he was not, in fact, a National Geographic photographer. His source of income was never exactly clear to me—he appeared to be some mixture of social media star / adventure tour guide / “brand ambassador” / part-time tech-industry worker, who also submitted photographs to contests on National Geographic’s website.
Our plane eventually took off again, flying over a landscape that resembled a rumpled green quilt, and landed in the city of Jayapura. In the baggage area, we met Bob, our guide, a squat Indonesian man with watery, smiling eyes. Atop his head sat a wide-brimmed leather fedora decorated with crocodile teeth.
As we left the airport, I struck up a conversation with Bob’s co-guide, Marius Refideso, a slim Papuan who perpetually wore an apologetic smile. Like Bob, he had been guiding people on treks to meet the Korowai since the early 1990s. I asked him what the Korowai were like back then. “Very scared of white people,” he chuckled.
I heard something similar when I later spoke with Johannes Veldhuizen, the first European to encounter the Korowai. He said that when he made his way up the Becking River in 1978, the tribesmen he encountered shook with fear. One reached out and touched his leg, to see if it was warm. Because of his pale skin, they had assumed he was a laleo—a kind of walking corpse, a zombie.
Veldhuizen informed me that the Korowai also believed in the existence of invisible, hostile beings, known as “underneath people.” These mysterious figures live in a shadow world exactly inverse to that of humans; when the Korowai are experiencing floods, the underneath people are said to be experiencing drought. The Korowai understand that, to the underneath people, they are the ones who are upside down. Parents warn their children that, should these two communities ever meet—should the great cosmic others be united—the world would abruptly come to an end.
For a long time, Europeans, too, believed the outside world was populated by monsters. The ancient Greeks and Romans thought that in the hinterlands lurked one-eyed people, headless people, goat-footed people, and people whose ears were long enough to use as blankets. Many of these people were depicted as being rather pathetic (like the cave-dwelling Troglodytae, who, according to Herodotus, “feed upon serpents and lizards” and “squeak just like bats”), but others were described with a tone of envy, such as the Hyperboreans, who lived in the far north, in perpetual sunshine. “No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles they live,” writes Pindar. One group of people, known as the Hylophagi, was believed to climb to the tops of trees and eat the tender branches that grow there. And then, of course, there were the Anthropophagi: the people who eat other people.
More than a thousand years later, writers like John Mandeville and Marco Polo claimed to have visited foreign lands where the people were only slightly less fantastical: men with the feet of horses, men who drank human blood, men who grunted like pigs. The great Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta recounted visiting an island where the men “have mouths like those of dogs.” They go naked (except for the occasional penis gourd for men and leaf covering for women), and they “copulate like beasts, without the least concealment.” He deemed them “a vile race.” A few of these tales seem rooted in truth, such as when Mandeville describes an island where “men and women go naked because of the great heat…hold all property in common, and are cannibals.” However, even the more accurate-sounding accounts nevertheless drew from deep wells of myth and xenophobia. The image of the man-eaters, for example, was already a stock figure in the Christian imagination; the practice was ascribed to Scythians, the Huns, the Arabs, and the Mongols, the latter of whom were said to “devour human flesh like lions, but prefer it roasted.” The overall lesson of these monstrous tales is that the farther one strays from one’s home, the stranger the people seem to become, until they blend into animals and creatures from dreams.
When the Western world learned of the existence of the Korowai in the 1980s, writers and documentarians fixated on a single detail about their culture: the fact that they practiced a form of ritual cannibalism. Televised documentaries about the Korowai had titles like Last Cannibals and Treehouse People, Cannibal Justice. Indeed, the Korowai did once eat people, although this topic is considerably more complicated than most travel writers make it sound. The Korowai traditionally believed in male witchlike creatures called xaxua, who secretly steal organs from a person’s body and replace them with sticks, leaves, and ash. To reclaim the stolen organs—to balance what anthropologists call a “flesh debt”—it was believed that the family of the deceased had to hunt down the xaxua, capture him, and force him to confess his crime. Then, they sent him to another clan, who would kill, butcher, and eat him. Therefore, the Korowai did not really see themselves as cannibals. From their perspective, they did not eat people; they ate witches. Which is to say, they slayed monsters.
Two days later, on the banks of the Brazza River, we boarded a wooden longboat, which was powered by a loud, smoky outboard motor. We sat single-file, cross-legged on the floor. Marius sat at the bow, looking out for floating logs and hidden snags, which, Bob warned, could punch through the hull and sink us, leaving us prey to the crocodiles that lurked below. The sun grew so hot that the black plastic tarp we sat on became scalding to the touch.
We paused here and there to fish along the banks, hauling in fat, silver-brown, toddler-sized fish called barramundi, which Bob would later fry up for dinner. (On days when we failed to catch any fish, we ate nothing but plain rice.) Early that afternoon, we passed between two groups of men dressed in T-shirts and flip-flops standing on opposite banks of the river. They were shouting and brandishing bows and arrows at one another. “Later, we cannot pass,” Bob said. “Because thousands of arrows.”
As we motored upriver, Vlad peppered Bob with questions about the Korowai.
“Do they know the world is like…” Vlad drew a circle in the air with his finger.
“No, but now they are learning from the kids who go to school,” Bob said.
“Are they still eating people?”
“Sometimes yes. But not so much anymore.”
“But sometimes they are eating people?”
“Yes.”
“Is the Korowai the most uncontacted tribe?”
“They have all been contacted now. They have many missionaries.”
“But are they the most uncontacted tribe?”
“Yes.”
“How many tourists go to Korowai? Not many, yes?”
“Tourists never go without guides,” Bob said obliquely.
“Is it true if they like a tourist, they will give him their daughter as a wife?”
“No. If a man takes their daughter, they will kill.”
“Ah, so it is not true,” Vlad said with a faint note of disappointment in his voice. “People on the internet are writing a lot of shit.”
Two full days we motored upriver, in the blistering sun. I hid beneath a wide-brimmed sun hat, sunglasses, and a white bandana, like Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau. From time to time Vlad would force the boat to pause so he could send a drone camera high above the river, then he would lift a Ukrainian flag up with both hands and shout, “Papua Jungl-ay!”
The banks of the muddy river were walled off with tall trees. Bob pointed out the species: acacia, agathis, ebony, ironwood. Neat rows of corn were planted, incongruously, amid the chaotic verdure.
We arrived at our destination, the village of Mabul, amid a sudden rainstorm. Stepping off the boat in a bright blue synthetic rain shell, I thought: We are going to look like extraterrestrials to these people. After all, what kind of soft-skinned freaks must cover themselves in space- age fabrics just to keep from feeling the rain on their skin? When we disembarked from the boat and scaled the riverbank, we discovered that every single person in the village was wearing Western-style clothing, and one little boy was wandering around with an umbrella. None of them remarked upon our rain gear.
The village of Mabul was a single red-clay road, bordered on one side by tin-roof shacks, and on the other by fields planted with sago palms. The wooden houses were arrayed cheek-by-jowl, and strung together with power lines. In its orderliness and bland uniformity, it vaguely resembled a shrunk-down, low-cost, concrete-free version of an American suburb.
Most of the villagers seemed to spend the afternoon sitting on their porches, waiting for the day to pass. Some of them owned smartphones, although there was no cell service. (I later learned from a missionary that the phones came preloaded with music, movies, games, and pornography.) A number of the men worked, panning for gold or constructing a new airstrip, but most did not. Bob told me that this village received one billion Indonesian rupiah (roughly $70,000) a year, to be doled out to its residents for certain work projects. This was all part of an aggressive campaign by the government to settle the Korowai, motivated by a mix of paternalistic concern for their welfare and nationalist shame at their “backward” lifestyle.
I spent the afternoon sitting on the balcony of a tin-roofed home, above a general store stocked full of cheap Chinese foodstuffs and cleaning products, conducting taped interviews with whoever would talk to me. Beside me sat a Korowai boy no older than two who listened to the song “Baby Shark” on repeat through the speakers of a cell phone; whenever the phone was taken away from him, he began to fuss.
The interviews I conducted that day were not especially productive; the Korowai people I spoke with tended to be shy, and the language barrier was considerable. Every question required at least one and sometimes two translators, layers of communication that often resulted in answers coming back that were entirely non sequitur.
Much of what I now know about the Korowai was collected by a Cambridge professor of anthropology named Rupert Stasch, who spent two years living with them. In his book Society of Others, he outlines the Korowai’s markedly egalitarian social structure, which, though idyllic in theory, has certain comical and even perverse aspects. For example, when a Korowai person’s loved one dies, the neighbors will come to express their condolences. Only, instead of arriving bearing casseroles and flowers, they demand the surviving family member hand over some of their former loved one’s possessions, a totally rational arrangement, which nevertheless strikes Westerners as upside-down and rather callous. The Korowai are also very fond of teasing, a form of “social leveling” that is common among egalitarian hunter-gatherers. The anthropologist Jerome Lewis writes that among the Mbendjele people of the Congo, “individuals who hunt a lot will become a target for teasing and mockery, even cursing, if people perceive that the group is eating their production too often.” Again, this struck me as absurd (why punish someone for bringing home the bacon?), but again, upon closer inspection, it makes sense, since it harshly discourages both overhunting and overinflated egos.
As one might expect, the recent shift to village life was proving difficult for people who were long adapted to living far apart and sharing everything. It turns out that one reason they could previously share everything, without driving one another crazy, was that they lived so far apart. Squabbles and theft now occurred frequently. The Korowai even have a saying—“It’s not your food, I’m going to eat it”—for when a person strolls into your home and takes your food.
Within a decade or two, it seemed clear, the oldest generation of forest-dwelling Korowai would begin to die off, and like nearly all colonialized peoples, each subsequent generation would settle deeper and deeper into a life of consumer capitalism. I found this trajectory depressing, and not just because some childish part of my soul was sorry to see them abandon their romantic treetop existence. I had often read about other hunter-gatherer tribes throughout the region who had been bribed to settle into villages, only to then witness their ancestral forests clear-cut and converted into palm oil plantations against their will. I asked one of the young Korowai men I spoke with how he would feel if, once all of the Korowai were settled, the government stopped sending them those massive checks, which could force the Korowai to take low-paying jobs, like those offered on palm oil plantations. He said softly that would be “very not fair.”
The following morning, we set out for the tree houses. We left the village and were immediately swallowed by a vast forest. We trudged along flooded trails, the brown water rising sometimes to our knees. The air was damp, dim, breezeless, and hot. Remi was loving it. “Reminds me of Queensland!” he said, taking deep lungfuls of the humid air. I, meanwhile, was flushed, itchy, and covered in a slime of sweat. Whenever we stopped for a rest break, I took off my shoes and dusted my feet with talcum powder to prevent fungal infections, a trick I’d read in a jungle-survival book. I also fanned myself, using an in-flight safety card I had stolen for precisely this purpose. Our small team of barefoot Korowai porters, for whom this hike was a stroll and this weather was comparatively mild, looked at me with pity and confusion, just as I used to look at the polar bear that lived in the Central Park Zoo, forever panting, its fur tinged green with algae.
So this is the jungle, I thought. I’d often noticed that something about jungles brings out a kind of morbid verbosity in writers. One recalls Aschenbach’s equatorial delirium from Death in Venice: “a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank”; of Lévi-Strauss, in Tristes Tropiques: “as if some pathological disorder had attacked the riverscape…a terrestrial distemper”; of Ryszard Kapuściński, in The Shadow of the Sun: “sinking, slipping, into the labyrinths, tunnels, and underworlds of some alien, green, dusky, impenetrable realm”; and then, of course, of Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, describing “the great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons…a rioting invasion of soundless life.”
The jungle I was walking through was not as overwhelming as the ones they describe. Perhaps, I thought, one had to travel to central Africa, as Kapuściński and Conrad had, or deep into the Amazon, as Lévi-Strauss had, to be truly horrified by the sheer profusion of plant life. Or perhaps they were just exaggerating.
In The Forest and the Sea, the zoologist Marston Bates argues that
rainforest and jungle are frequently taken to mean the same thing. But I have never liked the word jungle. It has all the wrong connotations. You hack your way painfully through the lush vegetation of the jungle, dripping sweat in the steam- bath atmosphere; snakes hang from trees and lurk under foot; leopards crouch on almost every branch and there is always a tiger just beyond the impenetrable screen of foliage. There are hordes of biting, stinging, and burning things. The jungle is green hell. I doubt that there is any place, outside of books and movies, where all these conditions are combined.
Rainforests, in other words, are real places, with discernible ecological patterns; jungles, on the other hand, exist only in the mind.
As I trudged through the jungle (or jungle), I began to think about how, over the course of centuries, the notion of the savage and the sylvan had been fused into a single concept, like conjoined twins. Consider how, in The Maine Woods, Thoreau writes of the “primitive forests, beyond the bounds of…civilization, where the moose and the bear and savage dwell.” The phrase “primitive forest” has since fallen wholly out of favor, as has “primeval forest,” “virgin forest,” “untrammeled forest,” and “aboriginal forest.” Now, those same forests are called “primary” or “old-growth.” A similar transformation has taken place with the words we use to describe forest-dwelling peoples: They have evolved from “barbarians” and “savages” to “primitives” and “natives”; to “aboriginals” and “Indians”; and, finally, to “Indigenous” or “First” peoples.
It occurred to me that we can change which words we use, but the structural underpinnings of those words are much slower to change. So a relatively new term, like “old-growth forest,” comes to absorb other, older words—“primeval,” “virgin,” “savage”—like a new layer of cambial skin draped over old heartwood. Concepts like savagery, though outmoded, inaccurate, and untrue, nevertheless become the scaffolding of the new. Peel away the latter, and within it you inevitably find the former. I know this because when I excavate my own mind, I feel the chisel of my intellect becoming pinched in the dense, unseen core of these bygone beliefs.
Later, after returning home from Papua, I would do some reading into the history of the North American tree house. Because tree houses are so ubiquitous and so plain, I assumed that children everywhere have always built them, but this proved to be incorrect. The American tree house has a distinct history, and that history, I learned, is intricately bound up with the history of people like the Korowai.
The American tree house seems to have grown out of the chaos of the Civil War. In 1899, Daniel Carter Beard wrote an article for Harper’s Round Table entitled “Tree-Top Club-Houses.” In it, he describes growing up in Kentucky in the 1860s. Adults back then (understandably) had less time for parenting, so the children began to go somewhat feral. “Gangs of young toughs, under the leadership of local bullies…hunted down, pillaged, and beat every unprotected lad they could catch out of sight of his own home,” Beard writes. To protect themselves, Beard and his friends built a “large and strange nest” at the top of a sycamore tree. Beard strongly implies that he and his friends were the first boys in the area—or anywhere in America—to do so.
Beard’s article included a photograph of a stunning little tree house with a zigzagging staircase, as well as the first instructional diagram for how to build a tree house ever published in the US. This story was widely reprinted, both in other magazines and then in a series of books with titles like The Fair Weather and Rainy Day Handy Book, which featured a tree house on its cover. According to Beard, a tree house–building boomlet followed; he later recalled driving across the country and seeing “all along the route, here and there in back-yard fruit-trees, shade-trees, and in forest-trees, queer little shanties built by the boys, high up among the boughs.”
In this and subsequent writings, Beard takes pains to frame the American tree house as an Indigenous practice. “Primitive and savage men all over the world for thousands of years have built dwellings in treetops,” he writes. He lists examples in New Guinea, India, and the Philippines, though he could have also mentioned the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and the Congo. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, as the colonial powers reached their tentacles into more and more remote areas, newspapers regularly carried (often highly exaggerated) accounts of newly “discovered” tree house–dwelling tribes. A typical newspaper story, published in the Sandusky Register in 1892, ran: “Do you know that there are races in the world who build huts and take up their abode in trees? It is no unusual sight for travelers in Africa to come upon whole districts, living like birds in the tree tops.” One popular account, by the missionary Robert Moffat, described a single gigantic fig tree in South Africa with seventeen huts built in its branches.
This vision of the “primitive” tree house neatly overlaid the kinds of tree houses American kids were building, both physically and conceptually. According to the popular pseudoscientific doctrine of racial recapitulation—in which humans pass through each phase of civilization, from caveman to proper English gentleman, as they age—white children were thought to be closer to New Guineans than white adults. Rather than tamping down boys’ “savage” impulses, as Europeans had been doing for centuries, educators and philosophers began arguing that parents should be encouraging them. There was enormous anxiety that white boys—especially middle- and upper-class boys in urban areas—were being “overcivilized,” softening into “mollycoddles” and “milksops.” To prevent this, they were encouraged to engage in “savage play.”
At precisely the same time, Americans were growing fonder of the people they once deemed “savages.” The end of the frontier, rampant urbanization, and a belief in the tonic effects of “fresh air”—all contributed to a growing reverence for (at least, certain highly stereotyped aspects of) Indigenous culture. It is no coincidence that Beard, the would-be inventor of the American tree house, was also a founder of the Boy Scouts of America, which combined Indigenous signifiers (the wearing of feathered headdresses, the building of tepees, the performance of stomp dances) with those of the colonial military. It’s a deeply jarring combination of imagery, which only looks normal to us now because of its ubiquity.
These cultural forces reached an apotheosis with the publication of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, the tale of a highborn British baby raised by primates, who synthesizes the “brawn of the apes” with the “brains of the white man.” Upon closer scrutiny, the book is revealed to be little more than a thinly veiled white supremacist fantasy. One often-overlooked detail is that the apes in question are not any known species; they are, instead, a kind of subhuman, or prehuman, ape known as “Mangani.” “They have the minds of little children,” Tarzan explains. “That is why they remain what they are.” Tarzan outwrestles the strongest apes, and wins, using his “superior reason.” He also hunts terrified African warriors by hiding in the treetops and quietly slipping a noose around their necks. In doing so, Tarzan balmed the fears of urbanized whites, who felt increasingly soft, increasingly cut off from nature, and increasingly menaced by their slipping grip on racial hegemony. The book was a runaway bestseller. In the subsequent film adaptations, Tarzan was shown living in elaborate tree houses, furnished with turtle-shell sinks, bamboo plumbing, an ape-powered fan, and an elephant- powered elevator. In the introduction to the Penguin edition of Tarzan of the Apes, the literary scholar John Seelye recalls that, during his childhood in the 1930s, as a result of the Tarzan films, “the woods behind our neighborhood filled up with partial and remnant tree houses.” American kids have been building tree houses ever since—in the trees, and in their minds.
After four and a half hours of walking, the trees pulled back and the air brightened. Once my pupils adjusted, I found myself in a clearing filled with tall grass, ferns, and sago palms. The trail curved past two small huts that were raised only a few feet off the ground. Then I looked up to find a tree house, hovering atop six sawn-off tree trunks and fourteen poles. It looked as if a house had grown spidery legs and lifted itself about thirty feet off the ground.
The tree house was inhabited by a man named Markus Nguali, along with his wife, Gebil, and five-year-old son, Muatan. Markus looked about fifty years old, but his age was distributed unevenly: he had the deeply lined face of an old man but the taut, fatless physique of a teenager. Around his throat was a necklace made of pig’s teeth, and around his waist was a rattan belt, which, in the absence of pants, served no discernible purpose. His penis was wrapped with a leaf into a small green tube; it exactly resembled the last bite of a stuffed grapeleaf. While men throughout Papua traditionally cover their penises with gourds or hornbill beaks, effectively making themselves look bigger—sometimes, cartoonishly so—the Korowai practice is to invert their penises back into their bodies and then tie the nub off with a leaf. Again, this practice initially struck me as absurd. But, I later realized, is the practice of wearing pants really all that different? Males in westernized countries—with the exception of ballerinos, professional wrestlers, Fire Island party boys, and elderly French beachgoers—tend to choose clothes that disguise our genitalia behind flat expanses of baggy fabric, effectively rendering all men alike.
We would spend the next few days following Markus around, watching him perform what he called his “activities”: catching and cooking catfish; gathering pandanus fruit; climbing trees; chopping wood; and repairing his tree house. One afternoon, while watching Markus and Gebil harvest sago palms, Vlad craned his camera over little Muatan, who was curled up, nude, napping on a pile of sago fronds. He checked his viewfinder.
“National Geographic,” he said, approvingly.
Not far from Markus’ house, he had built a second tree house, which was far more beautiful than the one he lived in. In a nearby clearing stood a single, magnificent ironwood tree, and perched in its uppermost branches, at least a hundred feet off the ground, he’d constructed a small hut. This was the image I had come here expecting to find; it was almost exactly like the one I’d seen in National Geographic all those years ago.
One morning, craving some solitude, I decided to climb up into the very tall tree house. I got out of my sleeping bag at dawn, while everyone else was still asleep, and walked quietly over to the base of the tree. I stared up the length of its one-hundred-foot long trunk with a measure of dread. Then I grabbed hold of the bamboo ladder and began climbing. The rungs shifted and creaked under my feet with each step; I worried that their rattan lashings would snap. Around halfway up the ladder, I made the mistake of glancing down between my legs; I was faced with the sickeningly vast distance that had already opened up between my body and the yellow earth. I pressed on, rung by rung.
Finally, after maybe five minutes of steady climbing, I crawled up through a hole in the floor. It consisted of one big room, which was totally empty. Some pig skulls hanging above the fireplace were the room’s only decoration.
Remi later climbed up and joined me, and together we sat for the better part of an hour, watching the dawn melt into day. The view from the window was sublime: a choppy green sea of forest canopy, and above it, a flickery, ever-mutating cloud of starlings.
I admired the finer points of the tree house’s construction. The uppermost branches rose up through narrow holes in the floor and into the house itself, and then out through the roof. Smaller branches, growing within the tree house itself, still had little green leaves on them. This flourish was integral to the architecture: the crown of the tree had to be kept alive to preserve the stability of the overall design. It was one of the most spectacular rooms I have ever had the privilege to sit in. It was not just beautiful, but philosophically, aesthetically, and ecologically profound.
It was also, largely, an illusion.
One of the most surprising things I had learned reading Stasch’s work was that what he calls “ultra-tall tree houses” are an extreme rarity. Gerrit van Enk, a missionary I later spoke with who lived among the Korowai from 1987 to 1990, told me he had seen hundreds of tree houses over the years, but only two or three that were built at the very tops of trees. Today, virtually all of the very high tree houses in Papua are built for the enjoyment of tourists.
As best I can tell, the boom in building ultra-tall tree houses began with the National Geographic article I had seen as a child. George Steinmetz, the photographer who worked on that article, told me that in 1995 he had spent weeks trekking around the area, asking the Korowai where he could find the rumah tinggi, tinggi tinggi (“high high tree house”), because he wanted one high enough to photograph from a helicopter. He finally located one, and managed to track down its owner, a man named Landi, who had recently been forced to move into the territory of a clan. To feel safer, he had built a tree house that was as far from the ground as possible. But it soon proved wildly inconvenient; one major problem, Steinmetz said, is that the Korowai are “ground shitters,” so each call of nature required an arduous climb down, then back up the 150-foot ladder—and Landi eventually abandoned it. By the time Steinmetz found it, the house was already decaying.
Thanks to National Geographic, that unusual image of a treetop tree house was fixed in the Western imagination as the iconic Korowai house. Other tourists arrived expecting to see houses that were similarly grand, and were subsequently disappointed with the relatively squat tree houses that Korowai people actually lived in. Film crews and tour guides began requesting that Korowai men build ultra-high-tree houses, for fees of between $300 and $1000; one Quebecois filmmaker commissioned the construction of an “Ewok village” of six tree houses. (The Korowai built them, but he never returned to pay for them.) This craze reached the peak of absurdity with the making of the BBC documentary Human Planet, which purported to document a Korowai family moving into a new, ultra-tall tree house. James Hoesterey, an anthropologist who worked on the series, told me that a BBC producer had sent him Steinmetz’s photo of an ultra-high tree house and asked him to procure a tree house just like it. “The main guiding obsession,” Hoesterey recalls, was: “We want as tall a tree house as you can build.” So, with the producer’s consent, he hired a Korowai family to build precisely that. (When news of this fabrication later came out in the British tabloids, it caused a minor scandal, and the BBC was forced to apologize to viewers.) “For the Korowai, the higher the house, the greater the prestige,” intones the documentary’s narrator, while the camera dramatically pans up the full height of the tree. This is false. Traditionally, the higher the tree house, the greater the fear one had of one’s neighbors. Today, the height of a tree house is seldom more than a measure of a Korowai man’s willingness to cater to white people’s fantasies about who he is, or should be.
When we tourists look at a Korowai tree house, we are not just looking at a Korowai tree house. We are also looking at a dream of our own devising. The architecture of the Korowai tree house has been deliberately refashioned to remind us of our own backyard tree houses, which were (often unconsciously) designed to evoke Indigenous tree houses. In visiting the Korowai, we inevitably project our own preoccupations upon them, like a tree casting shadows upon neighboring trees, which then grow around those shadows. At times this process is so complex that it becomes hard to tell what is real from what is fantasy. This process also takes place in reverse, when the Korowai look at tourists. Most Korowai people no longer see us as walking corpses, but they continue to refer to us with a slang word, laleo, meaning “zombies,” because, as Stasch writes, many still view the average Westerner as a “repulsive monstrosity.” At the same time, the Korowai have grown to romanticize the material comforts of our lifestyle. As far as the Korowai can tell, our food isn’t hunted or gathered; it’s “just there.” “They are always sitting just eating on and on what’s already there,” one informant told Stasch, which is why foreigners “all get huge.”
I can’t help but see a dark humor to all this. We Westerners, hunched over our desks or checkout counters for longer and longer hours, torture ourselves with the thought that hunter-gatherers work only fifteen hours a week, plucking most of their nutrients straight from the earth; the Korowai, meanwhile, tell themselves that our food is just there, effortlessly produced by invisible powers. The same shadowy psychological forces that drew me to Papua also impelled the Korowai to pass their afternoons watching soap operas about the sordid love triangles and dynastic squabbles of wealthy Jakartans. Capitalism is immensely effective at producing and profiting from these kinds of shimmering fantasies, which invert the lives we currently live. We know we cannot really reside in these fantasies, but on some level, that is precisely what makes them so compelling. Some very deep part of us yearns to escape from the harsh light of our earthly life into the shadowland of a dream.
Adapted from In Trees: An Exploration. Copyright © 2026 by Robert Moor. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved