In Culture
Tribals threaten the Great Indian Hornbills with their desire for its various parts. The beaks and head are used in charms and the flesh is believed to be medicinal. The squabs are considered a delicacy. Tribesmen in parts of northeastern India and Borneo use their feathers for head-dresses, and their skulls are often worn as decorations. Their flesh is considered unfit for eating by the Nagas with the belief that they produce sores on their feet as in the bird. When dancing with the feathers of the hornbill, they avoid eating vegetables as it is also believed to produce the same sores on the feet. Conservation programmes have attempted to provide tribes with feathers from captive hornbills and ceramic casques to substitute natural ones.
The hornbills is called "homrai" in Nepal (giving the name of that subspecies) and "banrao" both meaning "King of the forest".
-
A Nishi tribesman wearing the traditional head-dress having a hornbill beak
-
A Nishi head-dress containing an artificial hornbill beak.
Read more about this topic: Great Hornbill
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The aggregate of all knowledge has not yet become culture in us. Rather it would seem as if, with the progressive scientific penetration and dissection of reality, the foundations of our thinking grow ever more precarious and unstable.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)