The Ragged Edge of the World (8 page)

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Authors: Eugene Linden

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Whenever I have come upon a situation in which people are constantly fighting but few are getting killed, I tend to suspect that there is more than coincidence at work. The Columbia University anthropologist Marvin Harris once described the customs and taboos of Papuan belief systems as “tricks” that encourage natives to act in ecologically sustainable ways, regardless of their instincts. Thus
maselai
forests—tracts containing trees that house the spirits of the ancestors—remain standing even if a village has sold off every other tree, because the villagers believe that if you cut a
maselai
your wife will become barren and your crops will shrivel. Similarly, clan bloodlust might act to mute the effectiveness of individual homicidal urges, which likely enough serve their own purposes in clan relationships in the highlands. This was certainly the case in the war I visited. Both sides had worked themselves up to a frenzy and then filled the sky with arrows, but no one was killed during the official battle. All the casualties resulted from the odd warrior being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was to take one other excursion with the police during this trip, when Debessa asked whether I would like to accompany one of his sergeants to a village to pick up an alleged rapist and bring him back to Mount Hagen for arraignment. Debessa explained that this was one of those awkward situations in that the victim had been to a mission school and knew enough to bring a charge of rape, while the perpetrator was from a traditional village and probably had no concept of the crime.
The sergeant, the deputy and I hopped in a Land Cruiser and headed out. As we drove, I noticed a sign for the Baiyer River Bird of Paradise Sanctuary. I had never seen a bird of paradise, and I asked the officer if we might stop on the way back. He shrugged agreeably, why not?
The tiny, quiet village where the rapist lived seemed an unlikely spot for a violent crime, but just as a clan member might not consider it to be murder to kill a member of a rival clan, the same held true for rape if the victim was from a rival village. After some good-natured back and forth in pidgin between the sergeant and a village elder, the rapist was summoned from a grass hut. The smiling man appeared dressed in a grass skirt (
assgrass
in pidgin) and cassowary feathers, and the policeman gestured that he should jump into the back of the truck, which he promptly did. No handcuffs or guard seemed to be necessary.
I figured my side trip to the bird of paradise sanctuary was now moot, but as we approached its gates, the constable slowed and turned into the parking lot. I asked my new friend what he intended to do with the prisoner. “Hmm, right,” he remarked. “I guess we should bring him along.” Adopting a “when in Rome . . .” attitude, I bought four tickets (total cost, $4), and all of us set off for a tour. The deputy carried a butter knife, not the most serious weapon imaginable, but, I assume, sufficient to suppress any ideas of escaping that might come into the rapist's head.
No creature better captures the exotic flavor of New Guinea than the bird of paradise. Of the world's thirty-eight known species, thirty-four live only in New Guinea. Like most creatures on the island, the birds have been shaped by the relative paucity of ground-dwelling predators. Without the fear of surprise attacks on the ground from cats or other bird-eaters, they have developed elaborate courtship rituals, in which the males perform intricate dances to prove their worthiness as mates, displaying gaudy tail feathers that might be three times their body length. Their finery is as colorful and varied as ladies' hats at Ascot on race day, although there is much more drag-queen abandon to the presentations of the New Guinea males. For all the variety of design, ranging from elegantly curved feathers as tight as threads to long, long ribbon tails, most birds of paradise encounter only the designs native to the isolated forest niches in which they evolved.
The (accused) rapist seemed as engaged and interested as I was as we slowly toured the aviaries. He did not seem to be curious about why he was being shown the birds, only delighted to have a chance to admire a precious collection of creatures that he would gladly have hunted in the forest.
Then it was back on the road. One of the curiosities of New Guinea back then was that one passed an inordinate number of wrecks, even on roads not winding precariously up and down mountainsides. Many of the demolished cars and trucks looked brand-new. When I inquired about them, I was told that the wrecks were the result of money outpacing driving skills. As clans sold off timber and other resource rights, one of the first things they would do with their windfall would be to buy a Land Cruiser, a vehicle that would secure a bigman's status as a player. The Land Cruiser is a great car, but driving New Guinea's rutted, mired or rain-slicked roads of the 1970s would have presented a challenge to any driver, and was often fatal for the proud new owners.
The proliferation of these destroyed but otherwise spanking-new cars gave one enterprising Australian entrepreneur the idea of buying the wrecks and setting up an auto parts business. Alas, when he went to negotiate with various villages, he invariably came back disappointed. From the village elders' point of view, the value of the car was not in its utility but in its status, and their asking price was typically what they had paid for the truck before it bounced down to the bottom of a ravine. Indeed, one clan had its ruined Land Cruiser hauled up and installed as a monument at the entrance to the village.
My first trip to New Guinea gave me a feel for this special place, but it was motivated by a desire to understand how its tribal worldview differed from that of a consumer society. When I returned fourteen years later, it was to see how its tribes were coping with the continued onslaught of modernity.
CHAPTER 4
New Guinea Redux
I
n 1990 I returned to New Guinea, this time as part of the research for “Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge,” an article I wrote for
Time
on the loss of indigenous knowledge around the world. I flew in from Borneo, and my destination was the north coast, where I'd arranged to interview a number of remarkable men. One was Saem Majnep, a native of the Kalem clan from the Kaironk Valley in the highlands, who grew up to become a champion of preserving native knowledge. As a boy he discovered that his knowledge of local birds and ecology, learned on hunting trips, proved invaluable to Ralph Bulmer, who in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the world's leading ornithologists. Given the widespread disdain for native culture that Majnep had encountered in the expatriate and missionary communities, this was an eye-opening experience for him. It ultimately inspired him to become a motivational speaker who traveled the country assuring villagers that their hard-earned knowledge of the local flora and fauna had value and that it could disappear in the blink of an eye.
My other quarry was Father Frank Mihalic, a missionary from the Catholic order Divine Word, who as much as anyone had helped unify New Guinea by first codifying a grammar for pidgin, the common language that allows speakers of New Guinea's 800 languages to communicate. Mihalic, who died in 2001, had been in New Guinea since 1948, and with wit and sensitivity witnessed its bumpy encounters with the modern world.
Not entirely through coincidence, I also met up with my then-girlfriend, Tundi Agardy, a marine biologist, who was coming to New Guinea as part of her work in coral reef conservation issues. Even in 1990, New Guinea was still well off the tourist path, and many of its north coast reefs were completely unexplored. Indeed, Tundi had heard tales of marine biologists who discovered new species of clownfish on virtually every dive.
We met up in Madang, a pleasant enough coastal town where one still had the luxury of an evening stroll without the risk of being robbed by rascals. Tundi has impeccable scientific credentials, but she also has a strong adventurous streak. In short order we had lined up a dive trip with some other marine scientists, as well as an expedition up the Sepik River.
There are not many cities in the world where you would choose to go diving in the main harbor, but that's where we went. With virtually no sewage systems on the island, it stood to reason that the harbor was collecting a good deal of what scientists euphemistically call “nutrients.” The waters in the outer part of the harbor were spectacularly clear, however, and it's possible that the reef waters were so starved for nutrients—the seas off New Guinea have perhaps the clearest waters in the world—that whatever was being delivered into the harbor was gobbled up before it even reached the outer harbor. Or, perhaps, we just missed the pollution. In any event, we got our dose of clownfish darting in and out of sea anemones as well as the usual cast of reef dwellers sporting colors with all the subtlety of a Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. The colors on such “poster fish,” as they are called, serve as a type of semaphore system, reminding individuals whom they school with, mate with, and avoid in the crowded quarters of a reef.
We got to the Sepik courtesy of Peter Barter, then arguably the most successful tourism entrepreneur in New Guinea's history. Barter bears a passing resemblance to former NBC anchor David Brinkley, and went on to several high positions in the New Guinea government, ultimately earning a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth. When I met him, he remarked, “Three types of people come to Papua New Guinea: mercenaries, misfits and missionaries. I was all three.” Barter was a bit of a showman, and I'm sure that I wasn't the first to hear that line. He first arrived as a Qantas pilot, then returned as a missionary pilot. As he got to know the country he saw an opportunity to bring affluent tourists in to see aboriginal life—and, he argues, benefit the locals as well. For every trip on the river, his foundation would donate about 5,000 kina, money that would go for boats, immunizations, school headmasters' salaries and the like. Tourists also created a lively market for scarification masks, shields and other artifacts, keeping skills alive.
I could argue in turn, and did, that there is a world of difference between creating artifacts for tourist souvenirs and carving sacred objects as homage to the spirits that animate a culture, but, given the array of threats faced by Papuan natives—which include fundamentalist missionaries who demonize their beliefs and burn
haus tambarans
(spirit houses used primarily by males for initiations and rituals), expatriates and teachers who ridicule their backwardness, and mining and timber companies that scorch the earth and poison the streams—Peter Barter's trips look veritably saintly. Moreover, the culture itself endured strongly in people's lives despite all these threats.
We joined a trip on the
Sepik Explorer,
one of Barter's boats. Our first stop was Manam Island. Most of my prior knowledge of the Papuan genius for interpreting modernity through a Stone Age mind-set came from readings and from conversations with anthropologists, missionaries and expatriates. On Manam Island, I encountered it firsthand.
The volcanic island sits 40 miles off the north coast of New Guinea. Since our visit, the volcano has erupted at least twice, most recently in 2004, an event that forced the evacuation of the entire population of about 9,500 people. Our destination was the village of Zogari. While the tourists bargained for artifacts with the villagers on the beach, Tundi and I set off, accompanied by an interpreter, to meet with the local parish priest, Teddy Boaroa. The last expatriate missionary had turned the parish over to local control some decades earlier, and with the white priests gone, the local spirits had been busy.
When I asked Teddy about the history of the island, he launched into a long story that beautifully merged Christian imagery with the traditional cosmology. We went on to talk to other natives, but just before we reboarded the boat, Teddy came running up to me. In the interim, he had taken the trouble to write down the history of Manam Island as he saw it. Here's the paper he gave me:
And here is a rough translation and interpolation as graciously done by Bruce Beehler, the renowned ornithologist and explorer who has spent many years in New Guinea.
THE STORY ABOUT MANAM ISLAND MANAM ISLAND MOVED FROM SANAE
Before, Manam Island was not like it is today, in the middle of the ocean. When the land was new, Manam Island was a part of the mainland. This place was called Sanae, near the Catholic Mission Station at the Ramu River mouth. Years ago, it [Manam] left the place called Sanae and came and shifted to the place called Biag at the place called Kayan on the coast. At Biag also it stayed some time, but the place had problems. Insects stung his balls and there were many gnats, so he left Biag and Kayan Place and went back out into the ocean. Just like today where you see Manam in the salt water (ocean). But Manam's true home is not the ocean but at Sanae. At this time when Manam originated, it had two spirits, a man spirit named Auroka and the woman spirit named Zaria. These two were the original man and woman of the original Manam (as in Adam and Eve). There used to be an image of these two on top of a volcano on Manam. Zaria was on the right and Iabu on the left just as man and woman. I myself saw these images twice when I was twenty-one. The place in Sanae that used to be where Manam stood is today a big swamp. In this swamp there are now Sanae people, not Manam people. Much of their two languages and the people themselves are the same. In the year 1965 I visited Sanae—and the swamp was there as it is today. That's the end of the story.
Teddy Boaroa

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