The Culture Of Bamboo
On a trip to Thailand in
1994 I crossed the border into Myanmar (once known as Burma), a land where
survival is more important than resource conservation and paradoxically,
survival is dependent on those resources.
Alan Rabinowitz (Director of the Science and Exploration
Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society) wrote a remarkable book titled: “Beyond the Last Village: A Journey of Discovery in Asia’s
Forbidden Wilderness”. The book documents his travels to the most remote
areas of Myanmar to set up a wildlife research and conservation program and survey
the country’s natural resources. His insights regarding the integration
of bamboo into the lives of the people and cultures he met are the most insightful
I have read.
The quote from Rabinowitz’s
book below is by kind permission of Island
Press.
“As I sat around the fire writing notes in my journal, a young girl entered
the house with a large bamboo container filled with water from the stream. Her
mother stood in the corner making butter in a bamboo churn with a specially fitted
plunger that was forced up and down repeatedly with great effort. The man of
the house poured tea into a bamboo cup for Khiang and me, and then went back
to cutting dried bamboo leaves to fletch newly spliced bamboo arrows for his
crossbow.”
“This wasn’t the first time I’d marveled at the incredible
versatility of bamboo. Many a night I lay in my sleeping bag listening to bamboo
leaves flutter in the wind, or hearing the hollow stems knocking upon one another,
almost drumlike, as the plants swayed to and fro. Everything about bamboo evoked
images of beauty and vitality, even its name. Malay in origin, the term bamboo
is thought to be onomatopoetic for the explosions that occur during a fire, when
the air in the sealed bases of the hollow bamboo trunks expands and blows the
stalks apart.”
“Throughout my years of work in Southeast Asia, I had continually been reminded of how essential bamboo was to the lives of the people of the region. On this trip I’d
seen bamboo used for medicinal cures; for cooking and eating utensils; to build
bridges, houses, dams, plows, and livestock pens; for hunting and fishing; and
to make baskets and water pipes. And I was certain this list barely scratched
the surface. A thorough investigation of bamboo by an early-twentieth-century
author listed at least 1,546 uses of the plant in Japan alone.”
“Because there are more than 1,000 species of bamboo worldwide (60 percent from Asia), it was been suggested that archaeologists would be justified in defining a Bamboo Age comparable with the Stone or Bronze Age. Given that bamboo has played a role in virtually every aspect of life in Asia, some believe that it has influenced human cultural evolution more than any other plant in the world. Until the mid-twentieth century, ancient Asia was categorized in the West as a region of “cultural retardation” because
of the paucity there of stone tools, believed to be prime indicators of more
advanced learning and cultures. Now it is recognized that sophisticated Asian
cultures relied heavily on tools from bamboo, which, unlike stone tools, were
not preserved in the fossil record.”
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