SubscribeBasically, in his attempt to disprove the classic deterministic European superiority scenarios, he comes up with a new scenario of European superiority that's equally as deterministic. Basically he's still saying Europe was destined to dominate the world, and if the clock you'd still get similar results.is pretty wildly off-base, as he repeatedly and clearly and annoying insists in the book itself that he is not arguing from any ideas of 'superiority' and that in fact he is aware that people might misread what he is saying as such. He spends a lot of time clarifying himself to avoid that end, in vain, clearly.
Complicating Wemp's case, perhaps, is an interview he gave to Shearer's researchers, in which he stated that the stories he told Diamond were in fact true.Even when the ASRL researchers were prompting him, the man said the stories were true. Then his lawyer says they're not true . . . and there's a lawsuit pending over the stories . . . hmmmmmmm. . . .
But a Wemp friend and legal adviser, Mako John Kuwimb, explains: "When foreigners come to our culture, we tell stories as entertainment. Daniel's stories were not serious narrative, and Daniel had no idea he was being interviewed for publication. He has never killed anyone or raped a woman. He certainly has never stolen a pig."
Wemp says, in one of dozens of phone interviews with StinkyJournalism since July 2008, “The facts are totally wrong in The New Yorker story. I have given all those stories to Diamond and those stories are very true and those names are not fake.” In other words, Wemp says he told the true stories to Diamond with real names but Diamond retold them wrongly by jumbling up information.Shearer also quotes transcripts of the fact-checking interview which suggests that there was some problem with the quotes, even if Wemp does not articulate it very well:
At the start of the interview, Jennings [the fact checker] asked, “Are the stories in the article accurate? Is it true?” Daniel answered, “Not accurate, not accurate.” Later in the same interview, Daniel reasserts his stories are real but Diamond’s are not. Daniel said, “Those stories that I gave him, it is all those stories that I gave him are those true stories, what had happened, the real names of the people. (emphasis mine)
Whether or not Diamond got the facts of Wemp's case right, it is true that the tribes of PNG do practice revenge warfare, says [Pauline] Wiessner, who has studied war in PNG's Enga Province, just north of the region where Wemp and Mandingo live. In Enga, more than 300 tribal wars have taken the lives of nearly 4000 people since 1991. That's one reason Wiessner, who is active in local efforts to bring peace to PNG clans, is worried about the outcome of the case if it results in a large monetary award: She fears that the money could eventually go to buy weapons that would make the wars even more deadly. "When these wars first started, they were fought with bows and arrows, but now they have M-16s," she says. And although Wiessner faults Diamond for apparently taking Wemp's stories at face value, she also believes Wemp himself violated clan ethics by telling them in the first place. "For him to have given the names of tribes and implicate[d] other people than himself," as Diamond reported, "that was wrong," she says. "He should have sought approval of the clan elders beforehand."
In Wiessner's view, The New Yorker article gave a one-sided view of tribal warfare. Although the death toll often seems high, she says Highlanders are expert practitioners of what anthropologists call "restorative justice": the mediation of disputes in which aggrieved parties receive compensation from those who have wronged them, thus avoiding warfare. "Diamond did not put it into that context," Wiessner says. She thinks that Diamond should travel to PNG and engage in some restorative justice of his own. "Diamond has been wonderfully respectful of PNG and has done so much to raise the image of the country in the world, until that story," Wiessner says. "He should be taken to a village court; he should apologize; he should say that he was told this story and he should have checked it; and in compensation, he should give some money to each tribe, for their schools, a health center, or some community project."
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posted by billysumday at 8:08 AM on April 29 [3 favorites has favorites]