Adi Erotic

The Adi are a Tani people of the central and eastern hills of Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India, living mainly in the Siang river valleys. They speak Adi, a Tani language of the Sino-Tibetan family with several dialects, and number in the low hundreds of thousands. The name Adi means hill or people of the hills.

Society and subsistence

The Adi comprise many subgroups, including the Minyong, Padam, Pasi and Bori, organised into clans with village councils known as the kebang that settle disputes by consensus. Subsistence rests on shifting cultivation of rice and millet, terraced fields, fishing, and expert work in cane and bamboo, from which they build houses, suspension bridges and fine baskets. Their cane and bamboo suspension bridges, slung high across fast rivers, are a celebrated feat of indigenous engineering, and every village has a communal house where the kebang meets. The dominant indigenous faith is Donyi-Polo, the veneration of the Sun (Donyi) and Moon (Polo) as supreme cosmic principles, expressed in the Solung and Aran festivals; Christianity has also spread. Communal dance and oral epic (the abang) are central to cultural life.

Appearance and adornment

Adi traditional dress is made largely of cane, bamboo and handwoven cotton. Men wear cane helmets, sleeveless coats and cane belts, and carry the dao in a woven basket-sheath. Women wear striped woven skirts with many tightly wound cane rings around the waist, the beyop, together with sleeveless jackets and strings of blue and white beads and brass ornaments. For festivals such as Solung both sexes add feather plumes, boar-tusk pieces and fur trim. Rice beer, known as apong, and hearty smoked and boiled dishes feature at festivals such as Solung, Aran and Mopin, which mark the farming year with dance, feasting and the recitation of oral epics. Modern clothing is now usual for everyday wear.