Brand Korowai

April 19, 2018 9:41 PM

Will Millard set out to spend a year with the Korowai tribe of West Papua, known as one of the most primitive in the world. Turns out they're on to him.
posted by divabat (28 comments total)

*twitches*
posted by cortex at 10:05 PM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

This cartoon is almost as old as I am.
posted by Silentgoldfish at 10:10 PM on April 19, 2018 [26 favorites]

…How much of this is real, and how much was staged for the benefit of viewers? I'm torn between laughter and sadness and disgust.
posted by Alensin at 10:26 PM on April 19, 2018

Monaghan and Just's Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction has a nice anecdote that places this kind of thing firmly within the history of professional anthropology too. The first part of this is basic info, but the anecdotal part is probably less well-known:

Many ethnographers, particularly in the 'classic' accounts of the 1930s and 1940s, employed what came to be called the ethnographic present in which communities were presented as frozen in time, outside any historical context, and without reference to neighbouring societies or encapsulating states. For example, one of the most admired classics, Raymond Firth's We the Tikopia, described the social organization and traditional religion of the Tikopia without reference to the fact that half the population had recently converted to Christianity. Indeed, anthropologists may sometimes be carried away by the romance of their own enterprise and value the 'unspoiled' traditions of a society far more than the people themselves do. A friend of ours visited Tikopia some twenty years after Firth had lived there, and was taken to a grotto by the sea where offerings to the gods of the old religion had been made. Seeing a single offering, he asked his guide who had left it there, and was told 'Fossi left it there'. 'Fossi', of course, is the Tikopia pronunciation of Firth's name.

Firth technically does reference the fact that half the population had been baptized and spends one 24 page chapter on recent developments ... in a 660 page ethnography. So on the whole, criticizing it is fair--ethnographies that really try to take history into account look very different.

Anyhow, the linked series sounds fun and, if it turns out to be more about the visitors than the folks they went to meet, could be reminiscent of the documentary Cannibal Tours (summary).
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:57 PM on April 19, 2018 [13 favorites]

This is my surprised face. (Anthropologists, take note!)
posted by Samizdata at 1:32 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Good to know Westworld can still surprise in its second season.
posted by ejs at 1:36 AM on April 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

The joke is on the Korowai! The “BBC film crew” was actually a group of German performance artists! And the article wasn’t published in The Spectator, it was a prank by The Guardian!

In the interests of full disclosure, this comment was created by neural net.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:10 AM on April 20, 2018 [23 favorites]

The part of the neural net was played by a couple of kids in Vladivostok.
posted by tobascodagama at 4:35 AM on April 20, 2018 [9 favorites]

Except the kids in the Vladivostok were just play-actors hoping to nab some sweet retro-cyberpunk tourist bitcoin.
posted by signal at 4:56 AM on April 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

I'm just simulating all of this.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:06 AM on April 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

I think it's more of a Grey Area…
posted by Pinback at 5:12 AM on April 20, 2018 [7 favorites]

I want to see this programme.

Does anyone recall the source of the story where the anthropologist studying the supposedly all-sharing village was asked by one of the villages to hide a large portion of the day's hunt, and when asked "I thought you shared everything?" replied "I've never had anywhere to hide stuff before"?
posted by hawthorne at 5:39 AM on April 20, 2018 [6 favorites]

what a time to be alive
posted by poffin boffin at 6:52 AM on April 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

i guess i'm just ambivalent about how much i love this. is my sadness about the loss of cultures worldwide really so easily overcome by my utter delight at white people obsessed with cultural authenticity getting so thoroughly gamed by people they clearly believe to be their intellectual inferiors? is it really that simple? yes. yes it clearly is. is this bad? do i care?
posted by poffin boffin at 6:54 AM on April 20, 2018 [18 favorites]

Now it can be told! I'm actually an anthropologist studying the strange and ancient rituals of the metafilter tribe. Please be frank.
posted by evilDoug at 7:24 AM on April 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

Here's an actual cultural anthropologist, who has worked extensively in New Guinea, but also studies cell phones. Video at the link related to his work on cell phones, including their effects globally (aimed at all ages, so they start off defining cultural anthropology).
posted by gudrun at 7:29 AM on April 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I am thinking of the story about how an Victorian anthropologists came back from Australia and reported that the aborigines there did not know how human conception worked, and believed that women got pregnant from sitting in the river backwards. And this was repeated for years.

Eventually somebody pointed out that it was far more likely that intelligent adults knew perfectly well how conception happens, but might be reluctant to discuss it with a salacious foreigner who was asking intrusive questions and prefer to say that babies are brought by storks, or found in the bottom of the garden in a cabbage leaf.

It is beyond me how sophisticated people with education and experience in world travel can be so dumb that they believe an entire culture is mentally subnormally and childishly innocent simply because they lack manufactured goods, when those people have to find, identify and construct what they need to survive, or negotiate and trade with other people to assist them with those three steps. One would think that being able to simply buy anything you need without interacting with people in the process would result in the dumber set of people...
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:43 AM on April 20, 2018 [12 favorites]

it's the same reasoning that vast numbers of monolingual american white people use to tell themselves that multilingual immigrants whose english is in any way accented or imperfect are "stupid". white supremacy is a huge bubbling septic tank stew of so many different kinds of grossness.
posted by poffin boffin at 7:54 AM on April 20, 2018 [9 favorites]

these endless documentaries about Noble Savages also irritate me (beyond the reasons already stated here) because they imply that West Papuan people who don’t live adequately “primitive” lives are far too boring and mundane to talk to or learn more about. nothing interesting culturally or politically going on with THOSE boring clothes-wearing lame-os, I’m sure!

Like I would love to see a documentary series about how people around the world interact with their mobile phones - thanks Gudrun for the link. Where’s THAT?
posted by faineg at 8:01 AM on April 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

I have two friends who are anthropology professors, both of whom did their field work in highlands PNG. From their stories it is definitely very foreign and very different there and there is a lot for an anthropologist to study and learn. Amazing stuff.

But it definitely goes both ways and they are a long, long way from the uncontacted noble savage fantasy. One friend is an expert in the relationship between the highland locals and the gold mines that operate there. It's a very modern and complex interaction, often quite ugly. But in no way are the PNG tribespeople ignorant of or protected from the modern world.
posted by Nelson at 8:19 AM on April 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I am thinking of the story about how an Victorian anthropologists came back from Australia and reported that the aborigines there did not know how human conception worked, and believed that women got pregnant from sitting in the river backwards. And this was repeated for years.

Malinowski, drawing on predecessors. This isn't quite right--the idea was (roughly) that the real agent in conception was an ancestral spirit being incarnating itself, and heterosexual sex was at best preparatory for the real action. Of course, in broader transmission, the idea got stupider and stupider. The notion of the people's pure ignorance of the mechanics of procreation has been rightfully debunked for decades, but at the same time a treatment of their understanding at the time of procreation as entirely Western-scientific now seems rather limiting, too. The ideas that heterosexual sex makes babies and that babies represent some form of reentry of a spirit force into the world aren't irreconcilable.

I mean, I'm not here advocating for the modern sensibilities of anthropologists who called their subjects "savages" or anything, but, as usual, the story is more nuanced and interesting than the canard.
posted by praemunire at 8:22 AM on April 20, 2018 [8 favorites]

Also, Will Millard isn't an anthropologist as far as I can tell. He seems to have a degree in Sociology and Southeast Asian Society, but not anthropology. Not that our discipline doesn't have a lot of problems, but you can't blame this one entirely on us!
posted by ChuraChura at 9:46 AM on April 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

"The ideas that heterosexual sex makes babies and that babies represent some form of reentry of a spirit force into the world aren't irreconcilable."
He he, Mormons.

If anthropologists want to study savages, they need to head deep into the piranha-infested swamp that is Washington, DC.
posted by BlueHorse at 10:11 AM on April 20, 2018

I'm actually an anthropologist studying the strange and ancient rituals of the metafilter tribe. Please be frank.

i can't be frank, that's the cat's name
posted by flabdablet at 11:57 AM on April 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

God, the temptation to troll or otherwise fuck with stupid racist white people must be considerable

Just all the time

Everywhere
posted by schadenfrau at 2:25 PM on April 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

I'm actually an anthropologist studying the strange and ancient rituals of the metafilter tribe.

We've actually got one of those. I think it was a thesis and not a dissertation?
posted by stet at 2:42 PM on April 20, 2018

Ha ha ha. How long before we reach levels of meta that keep any new anthropological study from having/ credibility? The root of the problem anyway is the conceit that anthropologists have no observer effect.
posted by blue shadows at 8:40 PM on April 21, 2018

Literally every person practicing anthropology right now is deeply aware of their impact on the community they're studying. Anthropologists' most common method for ethnography is called Participant-Observation for a reason. People are reflexive about their research and it's consequences. Even me - I spend a lot of time thinking about how habituation and my presence changes things for the primate communities I study.

This guy isn't an anthropologist. He's a Presenter for BBC shows that try to find something exotic to bring back to show the folks at home. Again, there are lots of things you can critique about anthropology. We're probably critiquing them to. This guy ... not anthropology's fault.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:22 PM on April 22, 2018 [4 favorites]