This most recent failed walk repeats a path he took in the late 1980s, which he describes in his book The Proving Grounds. In it, he is flown into the upper reaches of the Sepik, crosses the central ranges, and then ends up on the shores of the Lagaip, and then returns to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. It’s hard to judge, but I reckon the total distance is about 50 kilometers as the crow flies. But that doesn’t really give you a sense of how onerous this walk is. On his website Allen claims that this walk was “the first recorded crossing of the Central Mountain Ranges of PNG”. This is incredibly tough terrain, and he should be congratulated for managing to do it. But he was not the first. Not by a longshot.

Ironically enough, Allen’s ill-fated trip to PNG happened in 2017, which is the 90th anniversary of the actual first white people who crossed Papua New Guinea: Ivan Champion and Charles Karius. Champion and Karius were patrol officers sent by the Australian administration of Papua to explore and map the island. Their epic patrol — which took over a year — involved dozens of people, including Papua New Guinean porters and police men who should be recognized (as Champion and Karius did) as key to the patrol’s success. Rather than getting dropped in the middle of the island as Allen was, Karius and Champion went up the Fly river, crossed the central ranges, located the headwaters of the Sepik river, and then went down it. It’s difficult to describe how difficult this patrol was, especially in 1927, before the advent of GPS or modern synthetic fabrics. Benedict Allen didn’t take a map because of some personal code of honor or something. Karius and Champion didn’t take one because there wasn’t one. And they went to make one. The patrol is described both in Champion’s book Across New Guinea from The Fly to The Sepik and in Champion’s biography of Champion, Last Frontiers”. 

There is also an example of people crossing in the direction that Allen came: From the northern side of the island. During World War II Catholic missionaries, priests, and nuns lived at mission stations up and down the Sepik. When the Japanese invaded, many of them moved upland, into the Sepik headwaters, in order to escape. Several of them, accompanied by the Australian patrol officer James Searson, ascended up into the central ranges, where they were met by the Australian gold miner and plantation owner Dan Leahy. After meeting in Maramuni, Leahy, Searson, and the Catholics ascended the central ranges and then walked down the high valleys in this area, rather than taking sailing down to the south coast. The journey was an incredible feat of endurance. The elderly nuns on that patrol did what Benedict Allen could not: cross the central range and then walk to a town. The walk had its price: Dan Leahy suffered hearing and vision loss for the rest of his life as a result of this trip. This walk is documented both in Fowke’s biography of Leahy, Kundi Dan, and in Theo Aerts’s The Martyrs of Papua New Guinea. Unfortunately, there’s no map of the patrol for me to show here. But trust me: It was a big walk.

Others, like Allen, started in the center and then worked their way out, but headed north. Jim Taylor, another government officer, undertook a massive patrol in 1938 and 1939 in which he walked from Mt. Hagen, in the center of the country, over the central ranges, and down the Sepik in canoes. This patrol was amazing for the stamina and endurance of both Taylor and his number two, John Black. Bill Gammage’s book The Sky Travellers  describes this patrol in meticulous detail, and includes the perspectives of the indigenous police and carriers who were on the patrol, as well as the viewpoints of the people who they met along the way. It’s probably my favorite book ever written on Papua New Guinea. Having read it, I can say with conviction the Benedict Allen is no Jim Taylor.

Benedict has also been bested by at least one other travel writer. Kira Salak’s Four Corners is an account of her recreation of Champion and Karius’s 1927-19 28 patrol. In this book she recounts her (successful) journey up the Fly and down the Sepik. She completed her trip in the period between Allen’s two attempts. To be fair, she did get a lift from Kiunga to Telefomin from OTML, the mining company active there. I prefer her book and her subsequent novel about PNG, White Mary, to Allen’s work.

Colonialism in Papua New Guinea can and should be criticized. But it was different in form and intensity than that in other areas of the world, especially before World War II. There was, as Edward Lipuma once put it, no Australian Pizarro in Papua New Guinea. These early patrols were exercises in natural history and cartography, and the explorers had strict orders not to shoot, which they did their best to obey. The patrols were chances for the Papua New Guineans they encountered to hold of things like salt and metal, which they needed. Police and carriers were central to the patrol’s success, and their lives and contribution to the nation were documented in works such as August Kituai’s My Gun My Brother . They helped strengthen the connections between Papua New Guineans and wider world, connections that have continued to grow in strength today.

Australian colonialism in Papua New Guinea was far from perfect, but by global standards it was not bad — although I recognize in saying that I’m setting the bar pretty low. My point here is simply this: Compared to the actual explorers who came before him, Benedict Allen’s walk is small beer. Even by his own, Boy’s Own Adventures standard, he pales in comparison to great patrol officers such as Hides, Taylor, Searson, Champion, and others.

It’s also striking to note just how little Allen learned about PNG when compared to anthropologists who have done fieldwork in this extremely remote location. Take a look at Proving Grounds and then look at Mark Dornstreich’s remarkable 1973 thesis on this same area. Here is a map that Dornstreich published in the thesis showing ethnic groups in the area:

I promise you: This was not easy fieldwork. Unlike Allen, he took his family to the field. His son remembers “Once, my father walked for three days to get to the nearest vehicle, so he could drive to get medicine for my mom’s malaria.”  Best of all Dornstreich went on to have a remarkable 30 year career as a farmer pioneering the local and organic food movement. Now that’s a story.

I could go on: About indigenous trade routes in Papua New Guinea, about the guides and hosts who so graciously offered their hospitality to Allen when he was lost and ill, and so forth. But I hope the point is made: Allen’s writings not only diminish the accomplishments of Papua New Guineans, they diminish the accomplishment of other white explorers! And this despite the fact that so many of those explorers accomplished so much more than he did. You don’t need to be some sort of rabid professor obsessed with political correctness to realize the limits of Benedict Allen’s brand of “exploration”.

As an anthropologist, I’ve been going back and forth to Papua New Guinea (PNG) since 1998. PNG is the size of France and has a population of around 8 million people (that’s almost twice the population of New Zealand). So it’s not a small coral atoll somewhere. It’s a large, regionally important country, as well as a classical location for anthropological work, from Margaret Mead to Marilyn Strathern.

Unfortunately, Papua New Guineans have not received the education system they deserve. Universities struggle to stay open. The few museums in the country are underfunded and underappreciated. There are few libraries. While there are many Christian bookstores, there are few secular ones. Since much of the country is tropical, books simply don’t last as long as they do in colder climates. Today, sadly, you can grow up in Papua New Guinea without any real knowledge of its past or the great cultural achievements of its many civilizations. Many young Papua New Guineans growing up today aspire merely to become Australian, because they can’t have pride in a past they have never heard of.

Most of PNG’s cultural patrimony, therefore, lies outside the country. And PNG experts have worked hard to make our work about the country available online. The Australian National University has put over 300 books online open access, most of them about PNG. The University of San Diego has digitized and freed patrol reports for the country. In a country with a short written history, these colonial reports are often the best way for Papua New Guineans to access the past.  UCSD also has 54 theses on highlands PNG open and available. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg of the PNG material. And of course the Internet had content that is not about PNG that Papua New Guineans would love to know about. Free music, movies, news, novels, world history — the world is literally at the fingertips of people. If they have connectivity.

PNG’s telecom laws were liberalized in 2007 (iirc), and in the course of a decade the country has gone from almost no connectivity to a world where almost everyone has a mobile phone. When I first visited Papua New Guinea, it was always exciting for us when yesterday’s newspapers arrived. There were just a few land lines out of the valley where I lived — and I was living new a mine, a development enclave. I had it much better than most people.  The growth of mobile telephony and Internet access has transformed the country.

We PNG researchers have done our best to get what we know back into the country. There are still lots of things keeping Papua New Guineans from accessing all this freed content, of course. Literacy levels are too low to read a Ph.D. thesis (and to be fair the same thing is true in the US!). Reception and network coverage are major issues as well. And of course even if you wanted to read War and Peace in Ambunti, trying to do it on a tiny mobile screen is not easy. Education, signal, and affordances disincentivize digital learning in PNG.

But there is something else that keeps people from accessing this information: Not only difficulties accessing knowledge, but no expectations or habits of searching for access. Digicel, perhaps PNG’s most popular mobile phone company, allows users to use Facebook for free, but charges them for other data. There are upsides to this policy: Free social networking for a country where many people have little access to cash, the creation of an active civili society online, and much else. But there is a danger here as well: That Papua New Guineans learn that Facebook just is the Internet.

I fear that most Papua New Guineans are learning that the only thing you can do with a phone is use Facebook. To me, it’s a social network run by a company, but it’s not The Internet. To me The Internet includes Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Project Gutenberg, the BBC, and much else. But that is because I grew up with all you can eat bandwidth and a web browser with a customizable home page. It takes a lot of digging and a lot of money to access these sites in PNG. And worse, you might not even think to look for hem at all. There is a danger that young Papua New Guineans today will think of Facebook as a place to talk to friends, not to think of the Internet as a place to learn.

This doesn’t just give Facebook a ridiculous competitive advantage in PNG. It doesn’t just create consumers of information rather than creators. It limits peoples curiosity about the world. It fails to give them an understanding of the technology they are using. And as for what Facebook is doing with all the personal information it is gathering from Papua New Guineans… I don’t even want to think about it.

It would be too strong to say that PNG is a nation captive to Facebook, and it’s hard to say ‘no’ to free services for the grassroots. I’m not even against liberalizing telecom law in PNG — that had good effects. But hidden within this gift is a way of accessing information which limits not just what people can see, but what they can imagine they can see.

None of the theses, patrol reports, books, historical photographs, scanned newspapers — none of Papua New Guinea’s patrimony is available on Facebook. And the generation of Papua New Guineans who grow up using just Facebook will never think to look for that patrimony elsewhere. They won’t even know it exists. Or that they could look for it. Sadly, the great civilizational achievements of Papua New Guinea — which should be a source of pride for the country — will remain the purview of non-Papua New Guinean experts, no matter how hard we try to repatriate it.

It is not crazy to imagine ComCast partnering with Fox News to make Fox media content free to all Internet users, while readers of NPR must pay more. It’s also not crazy to imagine Time Warner partnering with the New York Times for free and charging extra for Breitbart. Net neutrality is not a partisan issue — it’s a democratic one.

Anthropologists of previous generations went to Papua New Guinea seeking humanity’s ‘earliest stages’ — ‘they’ were the relics of ‘our’ evolutionary past. Today, anthropologists who study Papua New Guinea go there to learn about ‘our’ future. Papua New Guinea’s experience with Facebook demonstrates the drawbacks to allowing service providers to privilege some Internet traffic over others. Even when the short-term benefits of free service seem like a good idea, the long-term costs are bad for people — and bad for democracy.

As one of the “Malinowski’s Legacy” conference participants put it, good ideas have many fathers but bad ideas are orphans. Allan Darrah’s observation came as we were discussing the origins of the symposium at the Wanigili Centre in Alotau a day before its beginning. As far as my share of the paternity in this conference goes, the idea was generated during a road trip to Buffalo with Joshua Bell, who argued for the need for a third kula conference. It was then put forward to a group of Massim scholars at the 2012 ASAO meeting in Portland. And if 2015 seemed the right time to all (the 100th anniversary of Malinowski’s arrival in the Trobes gave us a perfect excuse to update Massim anthropology), there wasn’t much agreement on what would be the right place.

For my part, I wanted this conference to be a return of sorts and I claimed that it needed to take place in PNG or it wouldn’t take place at all. I think nowadays there is little excuse to keep anthropology far removed from the place where it originates. It is no longer a matter of bringing Pacific and other native scholars to Europe or America for our conferences but rather taking back “our” ideas to the people who help us form them, scholars and non-scholars. If we can’t discuss kula with our partners in the Milne Bay, chances are we haven’t learned much about exchange in these last hundred years…

The idea of hosting the conference in Alotau was met with reluctance by some if not outright opposition. It was indeed a very challenging endeavor, but at that point it had become a non-negotiable clause: a conference on the Massim in the Massim was long overdue. In going ahead with that, Michelle MacCarthy was successful in getting us a $5,000 grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Key to the conference’s success was also the commitment of the presenters to come to Alotau and the participation of local institutions, schools and individuals.

In that sense, the Massim Cultural Foundation played a major role in supporting the conference and all the side events and activities that made it such a hit. Local, Provincial and National Governments, as well as the National Museum and Art Gallery, were all represented during the conference and commitments were made on the occasion to increase collaboration among these to enhance the promotion of the Massim cultural heritage.

We had conceived Malinowski as the departure point of the conference, but not necessarily as its arrival. Yet it was soon clear that some of his ideas and methods were still alive and quite influential in the social sciences. To some degree, all the papers engaged with one or several concepts first raised by Malinowski over a hundred years ago. This necessarily succinct summary does not allow for comments on the individual papers but we are hoping to get the conference proceedings published soon.

Yet what made this conference stand out from other such events was the participation of the Milne Bay people who came to Wanigili daily in great numbers, thanks in part to the fact that attendance to the conference was free. For almost a week, a couple hundred people “camped” on the Wanigili grounds, sharing their knowledge of things Massim in multiple ways. Some of the attendants claimed to have learned about their culture through the books written by anthropologists (as Narokobi put it more than 30 years ago) and were eager to add more nuanced layers to this knowledge in their own ways.

Throughout the Q & A sessions and in the open forum for discussions held after the conference closure, it became manifest that the Massim is the land of anthropologists. Not so much because it has traditionally attracted more anthropologists than other areas (at some point during my fieldwork in Kiriwina there were five of us!) but because Massim people are “village anthropologists,” as a Trobriand friend so eloquently put it when addressing the Hagita High School students. Trobrianders have become masters at analyzing their own cultural practices and beliefs in reflexive ways, often anticipating the researcher’s questions.

The creative quality of Massim culture was also highlighted when we debated about exchange, with people using a profusion of metaphors and analogies to illustrate those instances in which exchange lies at the heart of the village life. Gardening, mortuary ceremonies and old and new rituals centered most of the dialogues around the papers presented. And of course, kula, that most fascinating of exchanges, still much practiced in the region in ways that are not always those described in the classic literature, owing perhaps to its own changing and creative nature.

The people in attendance participated widely with their questions and comments, some of which took on uncommon shapes, such as the telling of a legend or the recounting of a kula path and the people involved in the exchange of valuables. Other forms of participation included the performance of songs and dances, the act of carving and the explanation of carved artworks or simple gestures of remembrance involving genealogies of ancestors and relatives, the stories of history and the history of stories. The various photographic exhibitions on display during the conference provided an additional visual cue to some of those comments, as did the kula valuables and the woodcarvings at the Wanigili Centre.

Overall, it was an intense week with many fruitful outcomes. As the conference convener I am pleased that this event motivated so many people here in the Milne Bay and that we managed to somehow return something to the place where our research originates. I can only hope that we can keep the exchanges going and that more people see the need for these initiatives to move away from academia, one step closer to our interlocutors. After all, they too are anthropologists.

Everyone knew Bougainville was important when it happened, and there is a large literature on the conflict — often written in the heat of the moment — recording the events that transpired. Given this crowded terrain, it’s fair to wonder whether Kristian Lasslett’s new book State Crime on the Margins of Empire: Rio Tinto, The War on Bougainville and Resistance to Mining can add anything new. The answer is: “yes.” Lasslett’s book is a remarkable and extremely valuable addition to the literature on this area. Written from a Marxist perspective, it uses impressively detailed original research to present a fresh take on the Bougainville conflict, one that is highly critical of the existing consensus about what happened on the island.

Lasslett is a criminologist and a member of the fascinating new field of State Crime Studies, which seeks to describe, analyze, and denounce actions that would be considered crimes if done by anyone other than a sovereign country. Lasslett’s leftist agenda has a different reading list than most contemporary anthropology does: Laclau and Rancière are not on the menu but Marx and Trotsky are, and Lasslett sees Bougainville as an important case study of state violence being used to secure the interests of capital (in this case, mining). Since Lasslett uses the Bougainville case to elaborate a wider theory of state crime, it’s fair to ask whether he really has the deep areal expertise necessary to keep from embarrassing himself when writing this book. I hate to admit it, but as I picked this volume up I thought “this guy is not an anthropologist, and not a Pacific specialist, and not a mining guy. A million half-informed well-meaning NGOs types parachute into conflict zones like Bougainville. Does Lasslett really have real areal chops?”

The answer is: Yes. The greatest strength of this book is Lasslett’s profound mastery of the primary and secondary sources on Bougainville. His deep research — clearly conducted in Pacific libraries and in close collaboration with Pacific people — has produced a level of erudition that, in my opinion, establishes him as one of the world’s top experts on Bougainville. And, most amazingly of all, he has done so despite the fact that he is a junior scholar who, unlike many Bougainville scholars, did not live through conflict.

Lasslett’s book is a revisionist history which is frankly critical of the existing literature and the scholars who produced it, especially Anthony Regan. The more original and controversial a claim is, the more important it becomes to make the case convincingly, and so in taking on established scholars, Lasslett set the bar very high. His research is more than up to the task. In addition to library, archival, and grey literature work, Laslett also did a great deal of original interviewing for this project, producing some amazingly frank assessments of the mine by mine executives and PNG politicians, civil servants, and soldiers. Lasslett’s work is partisan and activist, and also compelling and convincing precisely because he marries his strong political commitments to rigorous research and careful presentation of evidence. I wish other scholars — including myself! — had such high standards. Ultimately, I am not an expert on Bougainville, so I will be interested in seeing what the small community of scholars of the island have to say about this book. But as an expert on mining in Papua New Guinea with a strong background in the history of the country, I found Lasslett’s work to be superb. I would recommend it as the one book people should read about the island and its conflict — especially in conjunction with the more popular backgrounder Bougainville Before The Conflict. 

That said, I should emphasize that the book does have its drawbacks. It is ethnographically dense. You must really be interested in reading about what happened on Bougainville, week by week to enjoy the volume. And — I can’t really tell at this point — I think you already have to be an expert on PNG history to tune in to the story. I’ve interviewed Rabbie Namaliu about his time as Prime Minister during the Bougainville conflict, and so I was very interested in reading Lasslett’s take on Namaliu’s performance during that period. But your mileage may vary.

Additionally, the book is written in a high Marxist style full of abstract noun phrases and cynical analysis of real politik. Again, for me this was a refreshing throwback to my Cold War childhood when people sat in cafés and read Lenin and were pissed off at Reagan. But I imagine for many readers it will be a slog. Perhaps in the future we will have a popular version of this history by Lasslett, but for now if you want to work through this book you’ve got to be all in, both ethnographically and theoretically.

Lasslett is committed to showing that rigorous Marxist theory can explain the Bougainville conflict. I strongly agree with his argument that we must move beyond abstractions like ‘landowners’ or ‘the company’ to reveal that complex actually existing reality of political action during the crisis — this demand for particularity is a fundamentally anthropological impulse. And I was convinced by Lasslett’s claim that a Marxist framework could be used to analyze Bougainville, but I wasn’t quite convinced that only a Marxist framework could make sense of it. The Weberian in me feels like you don’t need to be a Marxist to understand that when a company has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into mining infrastructure, they’ll be reluctant to walk away from it. As a result, I sometimes found myself skimming over passages which insisted that close reading of certain sections of Capital provided the key analyzing events which seemed to me amenable to a common-sense analysis of political maneuvering. Again, I think your mileage may vary here.

Lasslett is associated with the Jubilee Australia, an NGO critical of current attempts to re-open the Bougainville mine, and his book is published by Pluto, a publisher proud of its tradition of leftist and radical publishing. Some may be put off by Lasslett’s decision to write such a specialized book given the publicity and importance of the Bougainville conflict, but I believe his choice here was justified. This specialist scholarly monograph provides the erudite anchor for a whole chain of other texts written in other genres: reports, press releases, twitter flamewars, and more. Considered on its own, some might fault it for not doing enough to reach a broad audience. But when considered as part of an ecology of activist publishing, this book plays an important role.

I can’t comment about the importance of this monograph for state crimes studies. But as someone who focuses on the anthropology of mining and of the Pacific, I think this volume deserves to be widely read and deeply engaged with. Pacific scholars — who might not hear of the book through their usual networks — should take note and anthropologists of mining should definitely have it on the agenda. There are barriers to entry, to be sure, but for anyone truly concerned with these issues, there is no doubt that this volume establishes Kristian Lasslett as an important figure in contemporary debates.

Not all the pictures are from Papua New Guinea, so I guess technically there aren’t 420 images that you can use when teaching Pigs. But in this case, it is important to emphasize not just quantity, but quality. The pictures are high-quality, and they are very well cataloged: each one has extensive metadata describing when it was taken, and what and who is in each picture. They are organized by topic so you can see, for example, just the pictures with pork in them if that’s what you’re into.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll state right away that the people who did this work are friends of mine, so I’m hardly an impartial observer. But it seems to me that collections like this are The Future. As the Internet gets more and more turgid, filled with ad-encrusted crud and unverifiable assertions, carefully curated open access collections like this are so, so welcome.

The Rappaport photos are hardly novel. Museums and libraries all over the world are making their collections available — just check out the institutions participating in the Flickr Commons project. But the key step between availability and use is discovery: making sure people know about all the great resources out there.

That’s hard to do for libraries, for whom just producing digital collections is work enough. We need to use these collections regularly, and credit them when we do use them. It’s only when word of mouth spreads that people will really develop a sense of the many hidden treasures out there available for research and use.

So this week, the next time you need a picture for a powerpoint, why not get this process rolling and use a picture from the Roy Rappaport collection?

To be sure, neither Hoffman nor Diamond are Michael French Smith, whose readable, thoughtful, and informed A Faraway, Familiar Place is the best book written for a lay audience about Papua New Guinea today. Unlike Smith, neither author has a Ph.D. in anthropology and decades of close connection with a single community in PNG. But Hoffman gets things right that Diamond doesn’t.

First, Hoffman gets his facts straight and Diamond doesn’t. As someone with little experience in Papua New Guinea and West Papua (the two political units that share the island of New Guinea), Hoffman is keenly aware of the need to get his facts straight. As a journalist, he assumes his work will come under scrutiny and has a professional commitment to empirical rigor. Diamond, on the other hand, is almost too anthropological in his reliance on anecdote and assumption that the people he describes will never read what he writes. Does Hoffman make mistakes? Yes, a few. But Diamond’s writings on death and revenge have holes big enough that you could drive a truck through them. Hoffman is a careful professional. And where human reportage is concerned, Diamond is an amateur.

Hoffman’s work is shocking in its willingness to confront the most un-PC aspects of life in New Guinea. You only need to go about 20 pages into Savage Harvest to find a vivid description of people killing and butchering Michael Rockefeller. Most anthropologist and Pacific Islanders will be so turned off by these representations of Melanesians that they will just close the book and walk a way. But Hoffman’s willingness to deal with these aspects of Melanesian culture actually make him more careful about what he is saying rather than less — he clearly knows he needs to tread carefully in this minefield. I am sure many anthropologists will disagree with me when I say that Hoffman is relatively successful in doing this. But most will agree he’s better at it than Diamond, even though Diamond often deals with topics that are not spectacular and stereotypical.

What makes Hoffman’s work more appealing than Diamond’s is Hoffman’s empathy and ability to learn from others. The final third of Savage Harvest describes his time living in West Papua. As he gets to know people — if only briefly — you can clearly see him leaving behind the stereotypes he came there with. Hoffman’s own journey, as naggingly incomplete as it seems to an anthropologist, demonstrates a thoughtful and introspective personality. Diamond, on the other hand, seems genuinely changes by his time in New Guinea, but seems too used to studying birds to really get people. As someone who has conducted fieldwork in a dangerous area of Papua New Guinea, I felt for both of these authors — but felt more for Hoffman.

Anthropologists will find Hoffman’s writings difficult to stomach, given our predispositions. But they are worth reading and assigning in class — especially as a first book about the Pacific, to pique interest for a deeper and more nuanced account of life there. Jared Diamond? Not so much.

Winner of the SVA’s Jean Rouch Award in 2012, Stori Tumbuna is the only ethnographic film I can think of for which one has to watch out for “spoilers.” Indeed, what starts off as a seemingly generic ethnographic film soon turns into a Blair Witch-esque horror film. Despite the title of this post, I don’t intend to write any spoilers —I really don’t want to ruin for anyone the pleasure I felt watching this film the first time — but there really is only so much I can say about the film without giving too much away… The story is so well crafted and shifts gears so subtly from ethnography to horror that the discerning and suspicious viewer will likely find themselves caught up in the excitement without even noticing the switch.

What is worth saying, however, is that this film is made with the utmost respect for the community and that it is a truly collaborative production. As the film’s webpage says: “Stori Tumbuna: Ancestors’ Tales was conceived as an opportunity for the Lak to tell their stories in their way.” And the DER website has this quote by anthropologist Michael Jackson:

“I know of no more successful or ingenious film that draws the viewer into another life-world while keeping faith with the tenor of its traditional narratives and respecting the lived experience of his/her interlocutors.”

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that it is the most successful film to do these things…, but it certainly does them well. For this reason I think this film is perfectly suited to any introductory anthropology class, or classes focusing on ethnography or narrative form.

(Please don’t post any spoilers in the comments!)

Scott repeats several common criticisms of Diamond in his review: he likes Diamond’s discussion of endangered languages and is disappointed by how obvious Diamond’s advice on how to live is. It is the final third of his review which really shines.

Scott’s first argument will be familiar to anyone who has read Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History: Diamond’s “fundamental mistake,” Scott writes, is to try to “triangulate his way to the deep past by assuming that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies… show what we were like before we discovered crops, towns, and government.” Rather, he argues,

The inference of pristine isolation, however, is completely unwarranted for virtually all of the 35 societies he canvasses [Scott excepts PNG]. Those societies have, for the last five thousand years, been deeply involved in a world of trade, states and empires and are often now found in undesirable marginal areas to which they have been pushed by more powerful societies… So thoroughly have they come to live in a world of powerful kingdoms and states that one might call these societies themselves a ‘state effect’… Contemporary foraging societies, far from being untouched examples of our deep past, are up to their necks in the ‘civilised world’ (this quote and all others are from Scott’s review)

This is an important point for people to realize: the people Diamond discusses were not on pause until The West showed up with a giant remote control labelled “colonialism” and pressed its play button. They are the results of colonial history, not something that proceeded it. Every single one of them (Papua New Guinea included).

Scott’s second point deals with the idea that “maintenance of peace within a society is one of the most important services that a state can provide” and that people naturally chose to live in them for the security they provide. Scott disagrees. First, he points out that the state centralizes violence, rather than curbing it. Second, and more importantly, Scott points out that, frankly, it sucked to live in an early state. Reading Diamond’s account, Scott writes, ” one can get the impression that the choice facing hunters and gatherers was one between their world and, say, the modern Danish welfare state. In practice, their option was to trade what they had for subjecthood in the early agrarian state.” This included a world of slavery, patriarchal authority, wars and rebellions, and labor exploitation. Diamond argues that the ever-present threat of violence in ‘traditional societies’ led people to embrace living in states. But in fact, Scott argues, hunter gatherers had many methods to avoid violence such as compensation and migration — methods which, I might add, Diamond himself praises at great length in his book. Their diet was healthier (another Diamond point) and their lifestyle was as well — Scott points out the dangers of germs (another Diamond favorite) in large, unhygienic early cities. “It’s hard to imagine Diamond’s primitives giving up their physical freedom, their varied diet, their egalitarian social structure, their relative freedom from famine, large-scale state wars, taxes and systematic subordination in exchange for what Diamond imagines to be ‘the king’s peace’.” Scott concludes.

Furthermore, Scott points out that violence in ‘traditional societies’ the Diamond examines is the result of living in “a world of states,” not living in one free of them. Much ‘tribal fighting’ is the result of non-state people scrambling to access the rare goods that state-dwellers desired but non-state people had access to: ivory, pelts, and so forth.

Those familiar with Scott’s work will not be surprised to see the angle of approach that he takes in this essay. Those who are familiar with the critical reception Diamond has received in the blogosphere will also see that Scott’s points have been made before, most especially in a post on Jason Antrosio’s Living Anthropologically blog. Still, it is nice to have these points made by a ‘big name’ in a ‘real publication’ and in under 4,000 words. To some — for instance: me — the idea of James Scott criticizing Jared Diamond for writing a big-picture book about that falls apart when subject to scrutiny by specialists will seem a little ironic. But this is a worthwhile review that deserves wide readership.