Tag Archives: Pacific

Breaking News: Intrepid Explorer’s First Contact with a Vanishing Race of Noble Savages

I’ve been too busy to actually sit down and read Paul Raffaele’s Smithsonian article on getting “up close and personal with New Guinea natives who say they still eat their fellow tribesmen” until now. What finally prompted me to do so was this recent article in The Age responding to a “60 Minutes” segment about Raffaeles and the boy Wa-Wa. (I discovered both articles via the unflagging anthro-blogging of Anthropologi.info.)

I was amazed by how cliche ridden Raffaele’s article is. It was startlingly reminiscent of the kinds of articles National Geographic published a century ago: The intrepid explorer ventures into a dangerous and unknown territory for the sole purpose of making contact with natives who practice bizarre and grotesque rituals and are deeply suspicious of the explorer whose humanity they question (but finally accept). The experience causes tears to well up in Raffaele’s eyes.

Responding to the “60 Minutes” version of the story, Sarah Hewat writes:

Before we go pointing the finger, let’s look for the primitive fetishist within. Those who saw the 60 Minutes report perhaps did not notice the shorts being worn by members of the “forgotten” tribe, and the black plastic bags they were holding? And did audiences notice that they were speaking Bahasa Indonesia, rather than, as was claimed, an ancient dialect?

Now, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that people are still accused of witchcraft and killed (even eaten) for the crime. But one would like some good-old-fashioned ethnographic understanding of the practice rather than the raw exoticism that Raffaele offers up. In India, witchcraft accusations are closely related with the marginalization of the Adivasi population, battles over land, and gender relations. In short, they are a thoroughly modern phenomenon. But Raffaele portrays these practices as some kind of enduring primitive trait, and I find that pretty hard to stomach.

Dazzled

I tend to think of culture as collated qualia, the systematic structuring of sensory perception(s) into ‘meaningful’ relations. While obviously cultures consist in diverse narrative, symbolic, textual, institutional, and interactional modes and media, I am rather more attracted to analyses of “form” over and above those of “norm.” This is probably true for a lot of us. We gravitate to the ritualized, the ceremonial, the dressed-up. The beautiful (or the monstrously ugly).

It’s unsurprising then that one of my very favorite books in the history of anthropology is Andrew and Marilyn Strathern’s amazing Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen (1971). I have had to purchase my own copy because too often, library-held editions have been brutalized by people cutting out the full-color plates in the back. To my mind, if one wanted to get a feel for social life in highland New Guinea — for the vibe which animates it — this volume is a stellar guide. It is one of the most serious and comprehensive studies of adornment that I know of. It carefully records ways in which social form is encoded in structured relations between, for example, colors or bush materials. I recall myself seeing a koi wal (feather plaque from Hagen) for sale once in Goroka market and knowing something about it (for example, its name) precisely because of this text.

The color plates of throngs of greased and shining bodies, or spectacularly feathered warriors and wig-wearers, are simply dazzling.

I allude to Marilyn Strathern’s later reflections on ‘the ethnographic moment,’ that encounter that lives on as an image in your mind, guiding your analysis because it is so phenomonally real or present long-after the fact. She writes: “It is worth remarking… that special knowledge which inheres, say, in theological or scientific expertise has never held quite the place in anthropological accounts as materials which appear esoteric *because* they require revealing (beg immediate interpretation). An initial surprise becomes a suspension, a dazzle, and some kinds of ‘special knowledge’ are more likely to dazzle than others” (Property, Substance, and Effect, pp. 10-11).

One can see, reflecting on a text like Self-Decoration, how Hageners might indeed have that effect. The language feels appropriate, and Strathern narrates an interruption: of her pursuit of rudimentary research in gardens and on genealogies by her first sight of mounted pearl shells. Star-struck: the glimmering white center of the ruddy mounting board dazzles also Hageners.

For me, what begged interpreting was the emotional quality of a ceremonial exchange I witnessed. The occasion was a gift of cash in the name of an elderly man to his mother’s kin, and in particular to her brother. The gift giver clutched the recipient to him in a submissive gesture and cried sorrowfully, wailing the word ‘mother’ over and over. It is one image I cannot remove from memory, and I return to it again and again when I think about highlands sociality.

Dazzled and mesmerized. Thought it was a tremendously demanding experience, I am frequently grateful that my research in New Guinea yielded the sort of encounter that animates and moves one’s thought, even years later.

Between Subjectivation and Subjection: Making ‘Kinship’ Feasible

I have been working through some ‘ancient’ anthropological topics with students, in particular, variations in kinship terminologies cross-culturally, an area of research founded principally by L. H. Morgan in his Systems of consanguinity and affinity in the human family (1871), and molded into an evolutionary ‘grand theory’ in his Ancient Society (1877). Starting out a course on kinship with Victorian anthropology is, I realize, a risky gambit. In a response paper, one student suggested that the view from the windows of 19th-century anthropology was ‘rather grey.’ What could be more arcane than revisiting Iroquois or Crow-Omaha kinship terminologies? Whether or not they are a boring topic, varieties of kinship terminologies are also not easy to wrap one’s head around. To the extent that they divide up a seemingly commonsensical world in an apparently non-commensensical way (for those of us reared in so-called ‘descriptive’ systems, the ‘classificatory’ can be jarring), they challenge our assumptions quite directly. Of course, recognition of this difference is what ignited anthropological interest in the subject and has sustained it through the years. But how to give these topics a contemporary twist?

We have also visited, among other things, Trautmann’s work, especially his recent article on “The Whole History of Kinship Terminology…” There, Trautmann criticizes contemporary models of transformations in kinship terminology, and in doing so suggests that comparative kinship studies might be one avenue into studying the very longue duree of human history. A broadly regional and deeply historical comparative framework may yield advances in ethnological history: “…the deep history that lies between, say, the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Victorian era, is not thickly populated by anthropologists, especially cultural anthropologists… For all the contemporary commitment of cultural anthropology to history, the deeper past is greatly neglected.” Trautmann suggests that attention to this sort of history would help correct biases built into certain functionalist or synchronic accounts.

So that is one call to give kinship studies a contemporary cast: give kinship a deeper history.

Even so, there are other languages or rhetorics that might make kinship terminologies a hot topic. (I leave aside, for the time being, the sexy and important topics of ‘biotech’ and ‘body’ in contemporary kinship studies.) If, for example, anthropologists of contemporary governments wished to sample of forms of interpellation that precede and exceed the normative force of state power (recalling here the policeman yelling at you on the street), they could do little better than to track the distributions of kin designations in everday practice and in legal discourse. This is precisely what the earlier SM discussion on adoption and ICWA points us toward: divided sovereignties (competing regulations of forms of life) along several axes — the indigenous and liberal, the minority and the majority, ‘kindred’ versus ‘citizens,’ to say nothing of men and women. Beyond the discourse of experts that is a focus of the current analytics of governmentality (whether neo/liberal, totalitarian, or whatever), anthropologists have rich and varied models for how populations are regulated in extra-state circumstances: precisely through the interpellation of subjects in self-perpetuating systems of signification we call kinship terminologies.

It is true that citizens of Melanesian states, for example, are ‘produced’ to some extent by the legacy of foreign rule in the form of the postcolonial state (such as it is in some places). Far more consequential, however, for how people conduct themselves in everyday life and for how they sustain themselves materially are the identities iterated and reiterated in daily, habitual, commonplace encounters with each other. In places like Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) eastern highlands, title to land, for example, is secured only in and through one’s affiliation with a clan that holds in a coprorate fashion the land. ‘Membership’ in a clan is manifest, is elicited, is ‘performed’ through the eventful (ceremonial exchange, committments in battle), but also, and more thoroughly, through the everday modes of address through which people interact (the relatively uneventful). Though I lived in a village, built a house there, ate food there, for my adoptive family, the most important thing I did was to call my kin by their proper terms (e.g., mama, papa, etc. or “ieno” and “ahono” in the local language). Doing so locked me into a structure of social relations that was both utterly constraining, inaugurating all kinds of obligations and protocols pertaining to moral conduct, and enabling. I could engage in action of a consequential sort only by being called into being by ‘reciprocal’ (I mean this in a nontechnical way) address. Kinship terminologies provide examples for two varied interpretations of the productive power of discourses: either the ‘subjection’ favored by Judith Butler and others or the ‘subjectivation’ favored by James Faubion and others. (See their brilliant work in Antigone’s Claim or The Ethics of Kinship.)

Perhaps its a stretch to tie these observations to a previous discussion, but I do wonder sometimes when anthropologists struggle to find languages for thinking about social regulation in the contemporary period (as for example ‘governmentality’) why ‘the market’ springs to mind quite readily while that old workhorse of anthropology — kinship — doesn’t (so often). There are, I imagine, either intricate and important reasons why not, or perhaps simpler ones.

Melanesian Mining Modernities

Wow. I’m super psyched to see the latest issue of “The Contemporary Pacific”:http://hawaii.edu/cpis/publications_5.html is out. It’s a special issue on ‘Melanesian Mining Modernities’ edited by my colleagues Paige West and Martha MacIntyre. The reason that I’m super-psyched is that one of my articles, “Who is the ‘original affluent society’?” is in it. The table of contents and abstracts are “available on Project Muse”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_pacific/toc/cp18.2.html and if you subscribe to Project Muse then you can also download them all, “including mine”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_pacific/v018/18.2golub01.pdf. The abstract for my paper — which I apparently wrote at some point, tho I have no memory of it now! — goes like this:

The idea of the “ecologically noble savage” once linked environmental activists and indigenous people. Today the concept is increasingly seen as problematic. In the Porgera district of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, Ipili people confront massive social change brought about by the presence of a large gold mine. This paper explores how Ipili people find some aspects of global consumer culture to offer utopian possibilities for change, while others present dystopic inversions of their own culture. In doing so, it compares Western attempts to understand Ipili as noble or ignoble savages with Ipili attempts to make sense of the material culture and mores of outsiders. It concludes that both Ipili and westerners have unsettling insights into each other’s culture.

Of course after I wrote this piece I immediately discovered Affluence and Cultural Survival ed. Richard Salisbury and Elisabeth Tooker, which I should have added to my biography. Also, although I cite it, I didn’t have a chance to read Ira Bashkow’s excellent new volume “The Meaning of Whtemen”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/185143.ctl, which I know of only in dissertation form. But anyone who has ever submitted anything to Contemporary Pacific knows that they do not just publish any old thing — I’m amazed at the rigor and scrutiny of the review process there and my article is much better (although much more exhausting to write!) because of it. They even let me use the phrase “Johannine phenomenology”! So if you are looking for state of the art ethnography on mining in Melanesia, look no further.

Ambient Findability in Polynesia: a rant

As a pathetic hacker fanboy I try to at least keep up with the worldview of the digerati. I find this work interesting not just because I secretely want to be a sysadmin, but because people who work with technology are eclectic thinkers who often think big thoughts outside the box. And while they rarely read anthropology they do have a strong intuitive sense for the culture concept — they recognize that human beings have some biological givens which cannot be resisted (need for sleep and its repression figures strongly here) but at the same time they recognize that there is something arbitrary and conventional the needs that good design fulfill. My most recent foray into what might be called (after the publisher) the “O’Reilly Ethos” was “Peter Morville’s”:http://argus-acia.com/bios/morville.html “Ambient Findability”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ambient/, which seemed to me to be the best ‘big picture’ book that’s come out recently.

The problem with a book named ‘ambient findability’ is that it is in danger of being meme long, and once you’ve read the title you don’t need to read the rest of the book. Even the slim 179 pages of the book suggests that the author had trouble filling it out. Now there is certainly a lot of superb stuff in the book. The last third — which actually discusses information architecture and how people find stuff online — is fascinating and I recommend it heartily. The rest of the book attempts to locate this discussion in a wider account of how humans and animals dwell in and navigate through the world. The problems with this part of the book are hard to overlook. The breathless, Cluetrain-style prose (e.g. “We’re surely headed in the general direction of ambient findability. So strap on your seatbelts, power up your smartphones, and prepare for turbulence. Beyond this place, there be dragons. Or is it streets paved with silicon?”) is derivative and tired. And it doesn’t help that much of what it promises is a rehash of SmartMob hype that is already looking as prescient as late-80s promises of VR helmets and headgloves. But what really got me was a passage on Polynesia which not only upset me as someone who lives in this region, but because of the way it reveals how much of human wayfinding Morville should have noticed given his topic.

In the section “human wayfinding in natural habitats” Morville writes that “today… [the] ability to ‘read’ the natural environment has been lost” and a a result we “marvel at the mysterious skills of our ancestors, such as the Polynesians who navigated open ocean voyages without instruments.” Luckily for us (he writes) he writes, “ethnographers often provide a glimpse into the past by studying indigenous, living societies that have preserved their ancient culture and tradition.” He then goes on to quote someone quoting Raymond Firth’s account of spatial orientation in Tikopia where “the islanders use the expressions inland or seaward for all kinds of spatial reference… Firth reports overhearing one man say to another: ‘there is a spot of mud on your seaward cheek’.” Morville concludes that “only a very small island would support the particular system employed by the Tikopians.”

There is so much that is wrong with this passage I don’t even know where to start.
Continue reading →

Cool interactive aboriginal map

I’ve blurbed about the long-handled “Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies”:http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/ (AIATSIS to its friends) and their extremely prolific “Aboriginal Studies Press”:http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/aboriginal_studies_press in the past. One thing well worth checking out on their site is a cool “interactive map of aboriginal ethnic groups”:http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/aboriginal_studies_press/aboriginal_wall_map/map_page.

Most of my research is about how problematic maps which divide aboriginal identities and territorial claims into externally-bounded, internally homogenous “billiard ball” type units a la Eric Wolf can be. But I’m not an aboriginal expert, so what do I know about Australia? Plus also the map is really cool.

Land Has Eyes on DVD

I wouldn’t normally stoop to peddling anything but myself on SM, but I thought I should mention that “Vilsoni Hereniko’s”:http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/people_3.html award-winning film “The Land Has Eyes”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/ is “now available”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/dvdsales.htm for schools and libraries on a DVD. I’ve “mentioned the movie before”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/ and encourage everyone to see it if they are interested not just in Pacific films, but in good films regardless of where they come from. It is an especially good teaching aid because “free teaching guides”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/studyguides/index.html which incudes many free articles about Rotuma. Hereniko also has an truly excellent essay entitled “Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism”:http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/files/IndigKnow.pdf which is available for free download as well. I really like this article and I teach it all the time. Of course I live in the Pacific and share a university with Hereniko, but I think the article is useful for people outside of the Pacific — it is insightful in a lot of ways, and there are also lots of things for students to disagree with in the paper. Yet it’s written in such a way that the disagreements are remarkably fruitful, and in general I find it to have a sort of depth in discussion that just reading it doesn’t necessarily reveal. At any rate if you are looking for a film about Pacific islanders that is not Once We Were Warriors or Whale Rider then I’d encourage you to check out The Land Has Eyes.

No Word for Pollutants

Language Log has a long series of posts on the popular trope that certain societies have “no word for X.” The latest is this gem from The Lexicographer’s Rules:

word_for_pollutants

Langauge Log adds a depressing footnote:

Fiji’s population growth rate is moderate, but the urban and peri-urban growth rate is high, and is clearly outstripping infra-structural planning and development. Thus it is primarily responsible for the important social issues of environmental concern, such as housing, water and sanitation. Direct regulating control of water or air pollution and monitoring are absent. …

If only they had a word for pollutants … they might be able to have some laws to monitor things like this!

For those who don’t wish to read all the Language Log posts on the topic, here is a quote from Geoffrey Pullum that hits the nail on the head:

The late philosopher Jerry Katz maintained that natural languages were inherently without expressive limits: that because of their expressive power and the possibility of paraphrasing when the lexicon provided no short way of making reference to a concept, there were no limits at all on what could be said in a natural language: the set of propositions that could conceivably be expressed in some language or other and the set of English sentence meanings were the same set. It seems very likely to me that Katz was right. But this whole do-they-have-a-word-for-it thing seems to be tacitly predicated on the unargued assumption that he was wrong.

Finally, just in case anyone might be led to blame Whorf for this whole “no word for x” trope. (As Grant Barrett does in his original post.) It really has nothing to do with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Barrett links to this page which says that “neither Sapir or Whorf made it very clear whether they were arguing for strong or weak determinism.” I disagree. I think it is fairly clear that they are arguing for a weak or “facilitating” determinism.

Village on the Edge

I just finished reading Michael French Smith’s Village on the Edge with one of my classes this semester and I must say that I highly recommend it to everyone who is looking for an introductory level ethnography which deals with Papua New Guinea.

Set in East Sepik province on the island of Kairuru, Smith’s ethnography is ostensibly one about ‘social change’ — the book is organized around Smith’s two separate trips to Kairuru in 1975 and 1998. But the topic of the book is really much broader than this — Village on the Edge is really more a story of the changes that occurred in Smith’s life as well as the lives of the people on Kairuru that he met. In many ways, the book is about loosing the innocence of youth. The ‘social change’ that Kairuru experiences, after all, is Papua New Guinea’s fall from grace after independence and the effect that inflation, law and order problems, and crumbling government services have had on village life. Smith had his own fall from innocence as well — the book documents his own failure to find an academic position, his career in as a consultant, and his own quixotic relationship with a village he cannot really claim to ‘study’ as an academic anthropologist.
Continue reading →

Pacific Jews

Rex for some reason keeps his sideline writing op-eds for Inside Higher Ed a secret here on Savage Minds, but his latest piece has far too much anthropological content for me not to blow his cover. In it he talks about being Jewish in California, the Midwest, and now Hawaii. While the main point of the article (that being Jewish means very different things in each of these places) will not surprise our readers, Rex’s excellent writing and humor make the piece a pleasure to read.

I particularly enjoyed reading of one difference between Rex and myself which seems to go a long way towards explaining why he seems to take the whole Jewish thing a lot more seriously than I do:

As a Jewish professor from California, dealing with these stereotypes is even more difficult because I lack recourse to the solution favored by many colleagues: acting as if the complex negotiation of my identity can be accomplished simply by assuming that “Jewish” means “from New York” and leaving it at that.

Like the Hawaiian students Alex discusses, Taiwanese don’t really think of me as anything other than “American.” However, I’ve noticed that some particularly cosmopolitan Taiwanese take it as a matter of pride that they can identify my ethnicity. For them it is a sign that they’ve been to NY and know what a bagel is. Although sometimes they wrongly guess that I’m French…

Perils of repatriation

Last October the “DeYoung”:http://www.thinker.org/deyoung/index.asp museum in San Francisco reopened after extensive remodeling. One of the gems in their new collections is the “Jolika Colletion of New Guinea Art”:http://www.thinker.org/deyoung/collections/collection.asp?collectionkey=190m, which is one of the largest collections of New Guinea artifacts in the United States. This and their larger “Oceania”:http://www.thinker.org/deyoung/collections/collection.asp?collectionkey=39 collection puts the DeYoung on a par with the Field Museum, the Peabody, the Met, and the Smithsonian. In fact it puts it on a par with just about any museum in the world, as far as I can tell. Although I’ve not yet been, what make the Jolika collection unique is that much of the collection’s highlights are available for viewing, rather than shut up in the basement.

The collection used to belong to John and Marcia Friede and making it public now has raised serious issues about repatriation. Nature even has an article about it entitled “Guinea Experts Cry Foul On Tribal Exhibit”:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7085/full/440722a.html. Shouldn’t the museum try to return these objects to the descendants of their original owners?

The Nature article plays up a familiar anthropological morality play — righting the wrongs done by past colonial anthropologists to the indigenese — but the things look to be more complicated than this. The very fact that the nature article uses ‘Guinea’ in the title rather than ‘New Guinea’ indicates that someone is not as attentive as they could have been about the details of this case.
Continue reading →

Kant and Cook

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about “Captain Cook”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_James_Cook, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about “Immanuel Kant”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant. But in fact they had a lot in common. They were born four years apart, published at roughly the same time, thought a great deal about how political communities were and ought to be organized, and spoke with “George Forster”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Forster about, among other things, “race and human variation”:http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=fsapp6-56990-el2tclao-umm7jm:entitypagenum=4:0:recno=27:resultset=1:format=FI:next=html/record.html:bad=error/badfetch.html:entitytoprecno=27:entitycurrecno=27:numrecs=1. Nevertheless, I’ve rarely thought about both of them together. At least not until I read Brian Richardson’s new book “Longitude and Empire”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0774811897/qid=1142979236/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-5846516-4008032?s=books&v=glance&n=283155.

In Longitude and Empire Richardson traces the way that Cook’s novel cartographic and rhetorical techniques created new ways of knowing and recording human communities which helped reconfigure how Europeans thought about both themselves and others. Thus while Benedict Anderson claims that nationalism has its origins in South American colonies rather than Europe, Richardson adds that the idea of an externally-bounded, internally homogenous territory cum state cum ethnic group owes just as much to the South Pacific whose islands serves as paradigms of just this sort of model. His book manages to be exceedingly readable while simultanously addressing topics that are usually considered seperately — Pacific history and the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, for instance. Although I still have a few dozen pages to go before I reach the finish line, I can already whole-heartedly reccomend the book to all and sundry.

Even better, Brian’s “website”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/~richards/ includes “his dissertation”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/%7Erichards/Pols_Dissertation/Pols_Dissertation_List.html, which the book is based on, and a smart-looking piece on “books and their titles”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/~richards/Writing/DealingWithBooks.pdf.

In this day and age it is hard to find new things to say about eighteenth-century voyages in the Pacific, and after the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate we all suffer from Cook fatigue. But Brian’s book offers a fine example of humanistic social science which will interest many people whether they are Oceanists or not.

Making the Ipili Feasible

I haven’t been posting much on SM lately because I’ve had another project that has taken up most of my time — formatting my dissertation! Luckily it is now done, or at least in to the dissertation office at the University of Chicago. The dissertation, “Making the Ipili Feasible: Imagining Local and Global Actors at the Porgera Gold Mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea”:http://alex.golub.name/res/writing/Golub2006.pdf (1.5 meg PDF download) is now available for download at my website, but it is only semi-canonical — there may be changes to the formatting of the bibliography, page numbers, I haven’t checked that the PDF converted without a hitch from the Open Office version, etc. etc. The Official Version will be the UMI version, but that won’t be out for another eight months to a year, so I figured I will put this up. I am a notoriously poor speller and proofreader, so please do not tell me about typos in the final version — it will make me feel bad and might tip off the dissertation office. Anyway you now have 430+ pages of reading to make up for my lack of blogging.

Pacific prehistory in ten pages

Man, the beginning of classes has resulted in me being unbelievably swamped. However, I will break radio silence to point out one new article that I found when rennovating my syllabus: “Untangling Oceanic Settlement: The Edge Of The Knowable”:http://www.mun.ca/biology/dinnes/B2900/Articles/T8_18_531.pdf is the best short summary of the state of the art in Pacific prehistory that I have come across. Although Pacific prehistory is not my area of speciality by any means, as someone who has to teach it I am keenly aware how valuable a piece like this is, especially because of its interdisciplinary scope and concision.

Rats and Europeans

In September, I blogged about the decline of Easter Island, citing Benny Peiser’s critique of Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Although I cited the article approvingly, comments by Russil Wvong led me to reevaluate it. There were some errors regarding Diamond’s argument, and the journal in which it was published seems to have an anti-environmentalist axe to grind.

While not defending his article, Benny Peiser wrote an e-mail to alert me to a new study which casts doubt on Diamond’s thesis. USA Today reports that “rats and Europeans are likely to blame for the mysterious demise of Easter Island,” not simply deforestation and warfare as suggested by Diamond.

anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii at Manoa first blames the Polynesian rat. The rats probably deforested the 66-square-mile island’s 16 million palm trees. “Palm tree seeds are filet mignon to rats,” Hunt says.

While USA Today focuses on rats, another article describes Hunt’s analysis of the European impact:

While tribal warfare likely reduced the population of Easter Islanders, Hunt suggests that most of the decline probably was resulted from early 18th-century Dutch traders, who brought diseases and took slaves from the island. Research elsewhere indicates that “first contact” diseases — like typhus, influenza and smallpox — carry extremely high mortality rates, often exceeding 90%. The first traders to reach the island likely carried such diseases which would have rapidly spread among the islanders and decimated the population.

My own prejudices lead me to blame rats and Europeans for just about everything, so I’m inclined to trust Hunt’s research, but I’m sure this isn’t over…