The Ragged Edge of the World by Eugene Linden Read Free Book Online Page B

much further, perhaps as early as the twelfth or thirteenth century, when traders from China and the Malay Peninsula would visit to collect bird of paradise feathers.) New Guinea’s forbidding ecology and fierce tribes discouraged casual visits, and until World War II, many tribes remained uncontacted, meaning that they had not encountered Europeans face-to-face. That changed quickly after the war. New Guinea is rich in resources that the West covets and that in recent decades have brought many Europeans and Asians to the island, accompanied by the familiar pathologies of the active frontier—alcoholism, alienation, the breakdown of families, and the loss of indigenous knowledge. In this case, however, Western contact has also produced some surprises. Papuans (Papua was the name originally given to the entire island), for instance, have demonstrated more resilience in responding to modernity than many other indigenous peoples around the world.
    I first went to New Guinea in December 1976, as part of the research for my book Affluence and Discontent . My purpose was to look into cargo cults, a bizarre phenomenon that took hold in New Guinea in earnest during World War II, when Stone Age tribes encountered airplanes and their cargo, and set about trying to integrate these seeming miracles into a view of the cosmos that held ancestors, not human endeavor, to be the transforming force in life. I was intrigued by cargo cults because I believed (and still believe) that they offer a crucial insight into the nature of consumer societies.
    New Guinea is one of the strangest, most dramatic, and—for a nation not at war—most dangerous places on earth. Its strangeness is due in part to geography, as it lies on the Australian side of the Wallace Line, that invisible biogeographical barrier that separates the flora and fauna of Indonesia from the remnant relics and oddities of what was once the supercontinent Gondwanaland (now Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea). There are no primates in New Guinea other than humans, few poisonous snakes, and no large predators; the biggest native fauna are birds, not mammals. The meager assortment of terrestrial animals includes the kus kus, a golden-haired relative of the opossum; some small kangaroos; and pigs, which were brought there by humans in the distant past. Fruits abound, but there’s not a lot of protein to be had, which may explain why different tribes made a habit of snacking on one another.
    A number of cultural aspects of New Guinea are to some degree a reflection of its unusual ecology. For instance, the absence of primates or any other large mammals meant that as much as New Guinea’s hunter-gatherers were a part of nature, they did not encounter any monkeys or apes to remind them that they themselves came from nature. By contrast, Africans are born Darwinians because the continent’s primates serve as a daily reminder of our roots. In the absence of such reminders, ancient Papuans were free to speculate on human origins—a prerogative they seized on with great creativity. A number of New Guinean creation myths (not surprisingly, an island with several hundred languages has produced a great many such myths), for example, held that people originated in the sky.
    Like many contemporary consumers, New Guineans are also highly materialistic; but delve deeper into this materialism, and Western consumers and Papuans rapidly begin to part company. Even today, good numbers of New Guinean natives believe that consumer goods (like people) come from the sky. It is this persistent conviction, which they cling to in some cases despite being physically shown how factories produce goods, that is key to the resilience of the Papuan worldview.
    The belief that consumer goods have magical origins is at the core of each cargo cult. Cargo cults offered an explanation for European goods that fit within a native’s traditional perspective. New Guineans would see great