Facts about the Korowai Tribe Tree House

VIVA – The Korowai tribe live in the southern coast of Papua. It is said that they live in tree houses with a height of about 10 to 12 meters above the ground. Unfortunately, in April 2018, the British news portal, BBC made a statement to the public that one of their reports about the Korowai tribe living in tree houses was not true.

The show is the Human Planet series about Papua which was shown in 2011. The film tells of the Korowai tribe as people who still live in tree houses.

The problem became complicated when another film crew came to the area, at that time the situation was different. The house that he wanted to cover turned out to be out of shape as it was before. The house was all that remained, the wood that made it up had partly crumbled in the wind and no one lived there.

Finally, the Korowai people said that the tree house was deliberately made for television impressions purposes only.

The BBC has issued a clarification, they say that the practice of journalism has 'violated their editorial standards', they also admit that they have corrected its editorial directives.

The BBC show that reported the discrepancy was a program entitled “My Year with The Tribe”. During the production process of the show, a member of the tribe told the presenter that the tree house was solely made for the purpose of making a film.

The presenter immediately said in the next broadcast that the tree house that had been broadcast before was completely artificial. The tree house is not where the Korowai people live. The house was made solely for the benefit of tourists and television.

An anthropologist from Cambridge, Rupert Stasch, in an article published in the journal Cambridge Anthropology in 2011, noted that the Korowai treehouse news had become very popular in the mid-90s.

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.

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.

In Korowai history, a climbing house is a house built by Korowai youths to enjoy amazing scenery. A place for shouting or voices from above.

The climbing house was never used for housing. For the Korowai people, a climbing house is a house that is not really needed. At that time the Korowai used to build this type of climbing house because there were requests from film crews and tourists.

For example, in March 2010, two houses built on the tallest tree were made for two customers. The first was for a group of German tourists and the second was built for a group of Japanese film crews who were going to make a documentary for Fuji TV which they called Unbelievable!

The booming news about the exotic Korowai house over the last twenty years is part of a global cultural phenomenon that presents a 'primitive' style appearance as something that's very popular in the market.