I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea(notnottalmud.substack.com) |
I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea(notnottalmud.substack.com) |
Well Jared Diamond sounds like a stupid person.
I visited Timor Leste earlier this year and what an interesting country
Honestly, I am not so sure about this.
The author posits that sweet potatoes and tobacco moved into the highlands through intermarriage. Yet he later acknowledges that genetic evidence suggests no mixing of the highland people with the coastal people. So to me the mystery remains of how those crops got there.
"So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her."
The key phrase is "Beyond that point", where that point is up into the interior where there were no merchants. That's when marriage took over.
One of my most formative memories was finding out that few of the people who live there, even those who are literate, had books and some DVDs, were high school students, even had occasional access to computers with internet, knew that humanity had landed on the moon!
Anyway.. there is this scene where they were witnessing some big show-off between two tribes and at some point everybody stops as they notice the white dudes and have to decide if they have to kill them or not, in the end they manage to bribe their way out of it.. crazy stuff, they even go visit some tribal ossuaries where the bones of the enemies are kept.
Can't help but think of 'Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart' .. if you haven't read the book, you really should
really excellent insight into society and values there as it meets capitalism
https://www.amazon.ca/Trembling-Mountain-Personal-Account-Ca...
I suppose it's good that some Papua New Guineans evolved immunity to it- I had not heard of such immunity at the time, or at least it wasn't prevalent enough that it was confirmed, but it still of course is an "unspeakable" practice..
I hope I don't get it. https://youtu.be/gQDqRlMeJ4U?t=197
Maybe other places in the world, such as the river burials in India may develop immunity.
Unrelated. We have servers across the world; one in Mount Hagen. It has by far the biggest latency in the world; so I always use it as a "benchmark"; if it works in Mount Hagen, it works everywhere.
I’m American, so I have to pay $35 every time I enter Indonesia and I’m limited to the number times per year I can enter the country.
Australia is easier. Just need to fill out ETA for a $20AUD fee.
The extra night also eats into your limited vacation time. 18 hours in addition to the 20 hours flying means you’re losing almost 4 days of your trip just transiting.
Also, my flights aren’t intercontinental. I did this monkey dance going from tp hcmc to Timor Leste.
When the airport has a good connection to a major city then 12 hours during the day are enough, but I'm happy to bump it to 2-3 days.
I have managed to visit some Chinese and Canadian cities this way and it was both more interesting and much cheaper than taking a direct flight.
I visited Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Hawaii, and Turkey at almost no extra dollar cost. If I like the city I go back.
https://theconversation.com/asias-scamming-gangs-target-timo...
(More on those scam factories: https://theconversation.com/it-seemed-like-a-good-job-at-fir...
And from The Economist - lamentably paywalled: https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc)
Their primary currency usd.
They have all the child labor problems that other countries in the region have.
Everybody seems to know each other.
Unlike French colonialized countries, Vietnam, Timor Leste is proudly and vibrantly Portuguese. Similar to Macau but not as wealthy.
The public transit system is basically a tiny van that just drives around in loops around the city. You wave the driver down, jump in, and then tap your money against the metal framing when you’re ready to get off (there are no bus stops). I don’t know if you’ve been to Kenya, but it was like very similar to the vans in Kenya, except even smaller.
PNG has changed very rapidly. Parts of the country were in the Stone Age within living memory and are moving over.
The Torres Strait Islanders are genetically and culturally part of the peoples of New Guinea, which is why here in Australia we refer to "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", why the TSIs have their own flag that's different to the Aboriginal flag, etc. We non-indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand share the same predominantly British ancestry, a very similar (and intertwined) colonial / post-colonial history, etc.
You can learn more about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait_Islanders
The straight of Gibraltar is 10km and barely any Europeans have anything more than superficial knowledge about North-African cultures.
From what I learned from groups that work with the Korowai, the cannibalism stuff was very real at one point, but wasn’t really something they liked to do. It was a matter of fear, superstition and ritual, rather than a method of substance.
My poorly remembered summary (take with a grain of salt): if someone got sick, it was because of a witch doctor or someone possessed by an evil spirit putting a curse on them. Only way to deal with the curse/evil spirit) was the find the caster (through torture of course) and kill and eat them. If you just kill them the evil spirit will keep being a problem, ritually eating them is what actually disperses the evil. Naturally, intertribal violence also gets mixed into that to blur lines.
At some point long prior to my arrival, the Indonesian government managed to get consistent enough access to the area to start governing the area to a degree. One of it’s first priorities was convincing them to stop the practice, which sometimes involved the ever classic “gather them around, shoot one of their pigs and let them consider it carefully” method of persuasion when some were persistent about continuing.
So while cannibalism wasn’t completely gone at that time, in practice it was then mostly a story to tell curious and generous visitors. The Korowai greatly prefer instant ramen packets in any case.
Beautiful and interesting area if you have a naturalist bent, though otherwise not a place to go if you have a normal idea of “fun”.
I’m not generally a tropical/heat guy, but Indonesia is a country that I sometimes think of returning to.
He said about many of the tribes modernized within a generation or two, and the ones that didn't still dropped the cannibalism stuff in the 50s.
~ https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/screen-guide/kuru-the-sci...
Supposedly the Japanese during WW2 also resorted to cannibalism.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/qr1zth/in_sep...
(before he was president!)
Germans and Russians did too. Most humans with a survival instinct will turn to cannibalism if it their only means to survive. This is completely unrelated to cannibalism as a cultural practice.
Just curious if the hospital still exists there. Do you know?
All the units had air conditioning units, which I thought was sweet, considering many Cambodians don’t have that. But the prison bars on the windows and barbed wire surrounding the complex was a bit uncomfortable to see.
I was curious about the town, because it’s famous for casinos, scam centers, and Chinese manufacturers.
https://www.kcoleman.me/2026/09/08/Cambodia-Scam-Centers.htm...
What is this referring to? Indentured Servitude? Slavery?
Some good places to see them are the Asian Museum in Lisbon, the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam, the Ethnology Museum in Berlin.
What else am I missing?
> Jared Diamond thinks the people there are genetically smarter than Europeans
Never seen two consecutive paragraphs so completely contradict each other.
More specifically, he states: "My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not."
For a fun novel on the very subject, read The Dosadi Experiment.
Or for that matter killing ourselves in dozens of other ways due to lack of scientific knowledge, or ignoring it.
The trappings of colonialism were still all around when we stayed there in the mid 80s.
We had a house Mary who came over from a nearby village and worked for us, Mrs C. There was a hut behind each house for the house Mary or house man. Pidgin English was spoken. Betel nut stains covered the sidewalks in Lae.
Still it was an incredible experience for a 10 year old I'd like to go back one day, but it's unlikely I'll ever get the chance.
Truly an amazing place and people.
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/guns-germs-and-steel/themes/ge...
They managed to achieve eventual consistency in a distributed system, thousands of years before we even thought of it.
That infantilizes them, in my opinion. Their state then was an early state of many people around the world that made different choices that lead to different results. They made choices, those choices had consequences, and no one decided to do otherwise -- OR, if they did, they failed and have been lost to history. But lets not remove their agency.
Wrote a blog
Got nothing to say
They still do this, in fact.
50 years or so later I found there was a Cultural Festival in Simbai where about 20 tourists would go each year, and went out with some mates, along with prints of my dads slides. What followed was a trip I’ll never forget, as I was welcomed with a warmth and strength unlike I’d ever experienced, from the whole village and particularly from Wengi’s son Steven (his father had sadly died a few years previously). Whilst the donkeys had not transformed travel in a Simbai, and never bred, they were fondly recalled and had shaped the lives of both Wengi (forever known by others as Donkey) and Kanimnep. It was particularly joyous to be able to hand out pictures of peoples parents or family, who never had any photo of them or had any idea one could even exist, before some random person turned up one day
I left convinced that my father needed to return, and we did so four years later with me and my mother, which was a mind boggling trip - and another story.
It’s an extraordinary country, and incredible to have this documentation of first contact with tribes that had no idea the outside world existed. Highly recommend the First Contact book and film
We were welcomed in Simbai by many friends old and new. Steven and Aiden, eldest sons of Wengi and Kanimnep, were first to greet us at the airstrip, and Wengi’s daughters gave us a traditional sing sing escort to our guest house. It was a day of greetings, sing sings and smiles, and a hint at what was to come - the Wengis had planned a day of welcome activities the following day, with a ribbon cutting of a new guest house on a ‘donkey trek’, of which we only knew a few snatches. We also met Lyn, a priest from Norfolk UK who has settled in Simbai with her husband Tony for the last year working tirelessly to help the village and its people in every way imaginable. Sadly Tony was in Mt Hagen but Lyn greeted us so warmly and spent days with us with such joy, generosity and kindness.
I was expecting a memorable welcome, but nothing could have prepared us for what followed the next day.
We walked into town from the guest house with a number of escorts, and were greeted by a traditional sing sing, beckoning us up the hill, with seemingly the rest of the village there to watch and welcome. This was not like any sing sing I’d seen before however, as the songs called my name and my father’s, and we learnt that new songs had been written specifically to welcome us. They sang of how we were walking in the footsteps of my father and of the donkeys; we were enveloped by the singers, circling us and moving us up the hill, like dolphins moving a shoal of fish.
We passed under arches made of leaves and flowers, and arrived at the bottom of a hill. A path has been freshly cut into it, and at the bottom was a screen made of banana leaves, with a sign - ‘Welcome to Courage family’, and drawing of a donkey above the word ‘track’. This is their plan - to open a new trek for tourists, that follows in reverse the route my father, Wengi, Kanimnep and 4 donkeys took between Simbai and Aimone. At the top of the hill is a new guest house, literally just finished, the result of the hard work of many hands in the community. This day was the ribbon cutting, and a major celebration.
The sing sing group had progressed to the top of the hill, and were working their way down as we went up, still singing and drumming. My father had to break down the plant screen, behind which was Wengi’s wife and many hugs. We were given flower garlands, and at the top of the hill was a beautifully constructed guest house, with flowers pushed into the matted walls, as well as another traditional building and a room for eating, all with amazing views over the village and highlands.
A huge amount of people were sitting up on the hill, and we were sat as guests of honour opposite a screened podium, from where speeches are given by many in Simbai, including the priest and Steven, and then by my father, myself and my mother. The themes were consistent - of the joy of families, of coming together in communities and across borders and cultures, and the impact of friendship.
We visit the wonderful guest house, my father cutting the garland ribbon, and the celebrations continue with the killing and cooking of pigs, and feasts for all. I slept in the new guest house, my brain buzzing with the echoes of song and dance, handshakes and hugs. I felt like I really understood what ‘mindblowing’ truly means – the magic of the day was almost too much to process, me and my family being the focus of such extraordinary friendship and celebration, it was overwhelming. A day that showed the just how strongly friendships and bonds can be formed out here, it was extraordinarily uplifting.
Lyn told us that she has seen many incredible welcomes in her year here, but none that were like this. It can be hard for volunteers to know what impact their hard work and difficult times leave behind, but this clearly showed the long standing impact my father’s friendship made.
PNG is still a very young country, with many rough edges, but it has something that we have lost - the true spirit of community, of families truly living together, and many families coming together to work and play as a community.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4itqdahyk467qmi5u6xnu/DSC0067...
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p2mffw6r2zdgk45ycdtxa/IMG_077...
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3czn9rs6sreu9ir1svjl4/DSC0065...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694296
My mother (who is a doctor, although she's retired now) was part of the medical team who worked on this case: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arrow-attack-attempted-rape-in-...
My mother isn't mentioned in that article, but the "Allan Mason" it mentions is her husband
This reminds me of the Reciprocity and Re-Distribution system in the Inca Empire. There wasn't a system of currency or markets. But there was an Ayni (mutual aid) and Minka (collective work) system, paired with a Mita system: work done for the Sapa Inca which was in return "paid" by the Sapa Inca in feasts, food and goods/gifts. This was all glued together by the concept of Ayllu (family), where these obligations were established through family connections and of course the Sapa Inca had marriage connections with subordinate chiefs.
I myself can't stop thinking about the Inca Empire Economy and how it shows in reality that currency is not about the paper nor number nor symbols, and more about the "I owe you"s that move in the economy.
Gonna press X to doubt on that one, bro.
However, about half way through the author writes
> The only place on the whole island where the two worlds nearly collide is the Markham valley […]
Author then goes into a bit of detail on that place before giving two reasons why he believes “that”. Two reasons I cannot for the life of me parse
> The reason why I believe that, despite the minimal trade that existed, the highlands were functionally cut off, is that when the Europeans occupied New Guinea, they themselves did not ever speak of or show knowledge of the highlanders. Similarly, when the highlanders first encountered Australians, they had no concept of the coastal people, or where the shells came from, or any further concept of the broader world.
So the reason the highlanders world nearly collided with the coastal dwellers at Markham Valley is because the Europeans didn’t meet the highlanders when they occupied the island?
The other reason is to do with genetics, which I find equally detached from the core subject of those paragraphs.
The family is still in exile in the UK, and are trying to raise awareness via the Free Papua Movement which aims to separate West Papua from Indonesia and create an independent state. If you care about injustice in the world, have a quick read up on the situation and maybe share the link if you feel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Wenda
Imagine showing up in a remote village as an anthropologist and after a few hours the first thing the villagers ask you to partake in is the equivalent of a huge bong hit. And you don't want to offend anyone by refusing...
Sounds like there's some controversy about this video though. There was some accusations that it was staged, and / or that this was NOT the first contact this tribe had.
> They practice cannibalism, and Michael Rockefeller was likely eaten there
is kind of misleading. If you read Carl Hoffman's book Savage Heart you see that the tribe that are suspected to have eaten Michael Rockefeller probably gave up cannibalism for good not long afterward (i.e. the early 60s).
He must have tasted pretty bad then.
Me too, this track is certified classic at this point, cant get it out of my head.
https://archive.org/download/fsol-papua_new_guinea-vinyl-199...
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea_(instrumental...
Why not Pink Floyd's Mudmen and other tracks from Obscured by Clouds (named after the PNG highlands)(eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-u7BPpAYsM ) or even something with voice of a PNG artist, eg:
> the music has nothing musically or culturally to do with the country of Papua New Guinea. (https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dak3ViigS61/)The duo (Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans) actually chose the title purely for its mysterious, exotic, and atmospheric feel
Off-topic
I can't stop crying about West Papua. It is such a horror story, an ecocide and a genocide happening simultaneously.
Very sad indeed. Everything somehow kept getting worse after the cannibalism and the related neurological disease.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy
The moral of the story is that things, when they are coveted, can destroy our humanity. I feel like we are destroying ourselves with modernity and to bring that to a culture like this is dangerous.
(the modern world has plenty of problems, of course)
I had heard this before but my question now is, did they develop this tradition recently? If it were a historical thing wouldn't that genetic mutation have evolved a long time ago? One would expect that if they had this tradition for a long time the genetic mutation that happened so rapidly would have happened long ago, yet it did not. I'm curious as that thought struck me just now.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family...
They see it as some great holy mission from god to go out into the hinterlands and convert the local people from their local existing belief system to their own particular form of Christianity. The "mission aviation foundation" collects considerable amounts of money to operate bush planes for this purpose.
Edit: PNG is really the most egregious example, but there is clearly a phenomenon that exists of evangelical christian missionaries that seek out the "least developed" or most "bone in the nose" pre-technology isolated cultures and then do fervent work to convert them into dedicated followers of their own specific niche of Christianity. You'll see it in very rural parts of Africa as well. If you spend some time in the churches where they raise funds for these and look at the presentations of the guest speakers brought in to solicit funds for their ongoing missionary campaigns you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00conn
The documentary movie related to that book:
"Mal", bad, in the latin
So it's a benefit almost for everyone.
It would have been really interesting to hear original pre-contact music.
Basically, two tribes were separated by a river. If someone was caught alone near the river by the other tribe they would often be killed, and there were also occasional cross border raids that might kill a couple people.
In their culture they believed this created a spiritual imbalance. To satisfy the ghosts of the people killed the two tribes would schedule a formal massive fight on the border.
They would shout insults and throw spears and shoot unfeathered arrows (they had not discovered feathered arrows). You can't really aim an unfeathered arrows and they weren't all that good at spears at that distance either so casualties were random and rare, and usually only people who didn't pay enough attention and failed to dodge.
They would usually end as soon as someone got serious injured, or if it rained or got dark. They weren't really trying to actually kill each other, they were just satisfying their obligations to the ghosts.
In the early '60s the Dutch and then Indonesia forcefully put an end to it, and Christian missionaries arrived and managed to convert the population, and the spirit-and-revenge system that required appeasing ghosts through ritual warfare went away.
That Dani are now part of the modern world, but they have an annual Baliem Valley Cultural Festival where they dress in traditional tribal clothes and recreate the ritual arrow and spear battles (safely, I presume!) to preserve their history and to attract tourists.
(kinda pricey though)
Various neighborhood kids would take the dirt fort and try to hold it against the other neighborhood kids who came and ... everyone threw "dirt clods" at each other. A few rules like "no rocks" were understood.
Otherwise the battle resumed every day the workers weren't working on the dirt pile... it was glorious. Win or lose you returned home each day dirty as could be, and very happy you did your duty that day alongside your friends from the neighborhood.
That is a long way of saying that sometimes I see some strange "tribal" stuff that seems weird to me, and actually no I kinda get it.
Fighting always works better when only your side is doing it.
1. It is really interesting that we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, and was soon to walk on the moon.
2. Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.
In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson
Not at all surprising given that base instincts come from genetics and genes take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to change significantly.
And there's more: the relationship between the state and its army changed a lot. The role, the rights and the duties of individual soldiers changed a lot. Just to give you some examples: the Lieber Code is the one created during the US Civil War -- it's perhaps the first to mention the concept of unlawful orders, exonerating the soldiers who wouldn't follow such orders. Traditionally, St. Maximilianus is described as the first conscientious objector to draft, a concept that, too, went through multiple iterations... And, really, we didn't even scratch the surface mentioning these. Military history is probably the most eventful and rich sub-field of history.
For what it's worth, cops in America in certain scenarios act the same way, faced with similar upside/downside risks.
Not really, we just got better at it. Combat in the Ancient Near East consisted of bludgeoning your opponent with maces, clubs, and other blunt instruments. It took awhile to kill someone. We seem to equate "violence" with the duration spent killing someone (as though "dragging it out" is worse), but the end result between the millennia is the same: person A kills person B. We can just do it now in seconds with a single well-placed bullet instead of multiple minutes of agonized bludgeoning.
contact, even if benevolent, would probably kill them all via disease. that doesn't include potential social and cultural upheavals, etc.
you either keep everyone out, hard, or you lose everything.
> After several days, six Sentinelese—an elderly couple and four children—were taken to Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the operation wrote that the entire group "sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents".
Oh you mean October 7th Hamas standards or the Israeli Gaza genocide standards, or maybe the US in Vietnam standards?
In Burden of Dreams [2], the documentary about the making-of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, some of the tribal extras would occasionally go off in their motor boats for raids on neighbouring tribes. It's so interesting to me, tribal life would be fascinating to experience.
Northern Territory Police are investigating a series of disturbances in Ngukurr after a 14-year-old boy was speared in the back on Saturday afternoon.
Police respond to armed disturbance in Wadeye involving up to 100 people, bows, spears
Going back to the 1970s and 80s: Kiaps, known formally as district officers and patrol officers, were travelling representatives of the British and Australian governments
Kiap Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FK5N_ObFeQ
Do you often have violent power fantasies? Do you find yourself daydreaming about them regularly?
https://www.sail-world.com/USA/Russian-luxury-yachts-offer-p...
I'm unsure if that's an accurate description. I would say it is more accurate to say that West Papua is being genocided. Indigenous West Papuans are being genocided by settlers from Java. More than 500,000 West Papuans have been killed according to estimates by indigenous groups. It is hard to verify since Javanese settlers (Prabowo is Javanese) control the army and no media or journalists, and not even Indonesians are allowed to enter West Papua. This year, thousands of excavators were shipped on barges into West Papua. Western corporations like Freeport McMoran are complicit. It is horrific to see videos that have come out. There is one which I saw, I still get nightmares. It is an indigenous Papuan man being skinned alive in a drum of water. The name that was spread was Defianus Kogoya. It is so sad... West Papua was one of the most beautiful places on this planet with inland seawater lakes that had non-venomous jellyfish in Misool. Cave systems with handprints said to pre-date the Toba erruption. All of this being destroyed.
Uh, no? There's an active tourism industry particularly around the Baliem Valley and the Raja Ampat islands. You can fly into any of the larger cities without a permit, and while travel in the interior does require permits (surat jalan), these are usually readily granted.
This is not to dismiss the scale of state violence against the OPM and any civilians caught in the net, but Papua is hardly a hermetically sealed off North Korea.
I can just add it has been going on for a while in recent history and noone talks about it.
Gives you opportunity to think how deeply flawed our media is.
I am shocked it’s not reported about in Western media.
In regards to Suharto, it seems the 1965 coup attempt that got him into power was a surprise even to the US embassy in Jakarta, but of course they welcomed it, considering the previous president (Sukarno) was anti-imperialist and was flirting with the 3rd largest communist party in the world (after USSR's and China's).
Somewhat relatedly, a documentary moviemaker realized what was behind the curtain of Indonesian society and said "it's as if I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.". He made a documentary following a man who was sanctioned by the Suharto regime to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
> This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.
Someone's quick on the draw this morning
Suharto was responsible for his own rise. He took money and intel from wherever he liked and was basically an independent & ruthless strongman. Neither he nor other Indonesians need to be infantilized by lazy neocolonial narratives.
- they had a meeting with some locals and the locals discussed the need for retaliation for something, and their plan was to rape someone's daughter
- a kid bought a mini packet of chips on credit from a general store, the debt wasn't repaid and the end result was the general store getting burned down
- a fellow employee forgot to lock their car doors (everyone gets told to do this) and was car-jacked, but he got his car back because the car-jacker couldn't drive a manual car
- the embassy had high fences and security, but just in case, each house within the embassy compound had a central panic room in case the outer wall is breached
It's sad because I know of people who worked there in the 1970s (for Australians it was close to home but a bit of extra money because it was overseas) and it was apparently fine back then, but lawlessness has well and truly taken over.
1. Mining
2. Missionary work and ancillary things related to it.
3. Anthropological and linguistic research, biology/ecosystem related research and similar.
Edit: And not that it really matters, but neither of my folks are religious.
And yet you couldn't help yourself.
> a 1,000 metre climb over about 30 km takes you straight up onto the edge of the eastern highlands
i.e. because the Markham River provides a pathway from the Lowlands into the Highlands.
The paragraph you quote concerns a different proposition, as may be clearer if some of the subordinate clauses are elided:
> The reason why I believe that […] the highlands were functionally cut off, is that […] they themselves did not ever speak of or show knowledge of the highlanders. Similarly, when the highlanders first encountered Australians, they had no concept of the coastal people, or where the shells came from, or any further concept of the broader world.
I have a personal theory that people living hunter/gatherer or very small scale subsistence agriculture lifestyles historically did not have a ton of surplus calories to spend on hiking over multiple ridges and mountain ranges to discover who's living in the valley 45 km away. The complexity of the jungle environment also makes it very difficult to 'bush whack' through somewhere that no trail exists. And if a foot trail isn't frequently used it will become overgrown very quickly.
Google "language isolates in papua new guinea".
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=language+...
> The reasons why I believe that ... the highlands were functionally cut off is ...
It's morally indefensible in my opinion for a bunch of random people from many thousands of km away to go off to some pre-technology rural villagers' home territory and basically say "everything you believe is wrong, here's our god, you must follow and believe in him or you're going to hell".
If people want to go do bush plane things in remote areas and work in very challenging environments as weird foreigners, there's plenty of ways to justify that in the form of a secular NGO (something like Medecins Sans Frontiers) without combining it with missionary work.
At this stage in the ecocide and genocide of West Papua, any eyes are welcome no matter what their biases. If they want to convert people to their belief system, honestly I couldn't care right now as long as they protect the indigenous West Papuans from being genocided by Prabowo and his cronies and the beautiful ecology of the island from being ecocided.
But...why? If they are just saying that, why is that indefensible? The villagers' are free to reject that message (or a more accurate version of it), as are you or anyone else.
"Democracy" and "human rights" is basically that but on steroids. Surely you're not a cultural relativist that simply going to allow uncontacted people to be racist and misogynist willy-nilly?
https://www.amazon.com/First-Contact-Guineas-Highlanders-Enc...
Also lol to it's explanation for no beasts of burden in Africa. Sorry, folks have actually mostly domesticated the zebra. The explanations for why Zebra's were not domesticated after all this time are a massive cope. Even worse copes are the non recognition/misunderstandings of Elephant usage in large numbers for warfare / burden from Africa to India,
"It is possible that having evolved under pressure from the many large predators of Africa, including early humans, they became more aggressive, thus making domestication more difficult.[104] However, zebras have been trained throughout history. In Rome, zebras are recorded to have pulled chariots during amphitheatre games starting in the reign of Caracalla (198 to 217 AD).[105] In the late 19th century, the zoologist Walter Rothschild trained some zebras to draw a carriage in England, which he drove to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate that it can be done. However, he did not ride on them knowing that they were too small and aggressive.[106] In the early 20th century, German colonial officers in East Africa tried to use zebras for both driving and riding, with limited success."
Oh and also Africa had cattle and donkies and the donkey was actually domesticated in Africa.
West African empires like Mali, Songhai, and the Oyo Empire famously maintained massive cavalry units. They adapted horses to tropical conditions, using them for state-building and warfare long before the arrival of Europeans.
Also uhh Camels!
Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
Diamond says that the reasons Europeans colonised South America (rather than vice versa) is largely due to geographic factors, not due to any inherent genetic superiority of European over South Americans. I don't see how that is racist. Quite the opposite.
Also, domestication is the process of breeding animals over multiple generations to make them more pliable and is not the same as training individual animals to pull a carriage. The very first sentence of the paragraph that you quoted from the Wikipedia article on zebras is "Attempts to domesticate zebras were largely unsuccessful."
> Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
I don't see how this is true, even somewhat? Saying that the environment you're in shapes your culture, progress, and overall development as a society, makes perfect sense. Saying that the environment does not play a huge factor in this leaves open only the option of that development being genetic/hereditary, doesn't it? You'd be blaming the failure or shortcomings of civilizations, current and previous, on the genetic predisposition of their peoples. That feels far more racist to me than saying, "This area did not have X resources in available and sufficient quantities to allow them to develop Y improvement".
I understand that this was often used to justify colonialism, which I want it to be very clear I strongly disagree with. But, it would feel deeply wrong to say that all things are possible to progress in all areas. For example, we could NOT expect some hypothetical area with very poor soil health and little water to become a great improver of early agriculture. Likewise, areas with no easy access to copper, tin, iron, etc, would be unlikely to begin using those resources for farming implements. An area with all of this in abundance would have a much EASIER time developing these things.
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
The contemporary role of missionaries is complicated. My mother is a (now retired) doctor, who formerly (>10 years ago) worked for a Seventh Day Adventist church mission in the Solomon Islands (I also mentioned in another comment she worked in the PNG, that was with Australian Doctors International, a secular charity–although even part of that work involved working with a French doctor who happened to be a Catholic nun). My mother isn't a Seventh Day Adventist, she isn't even particularly religious (lapsed Catholic) – her personal motivations weren't about religion, it was about charity, and also the professional and personal experience. She just somehow (I think through some work colleagues who happened to be Seventh Day Adventists) became aware of the mission and ended up working for it–it was essentially volunteering, they may have reimbursed some of her expenses, but whatever she was paid was a fraction of what she'd get working as a doctor in Australia. The mission wasn't currently converting the local population – that had already happened generations ago - and much of the local population combined Christianity with elements of their indigenous belief systems. I guess coming from a Catholic background gave her some personal tolerance for the religious aspect, even if it was never her motivation.
Call me apologist, but I can see no real problem with that. They are willing to take risks and have enough motivation to spend resources. Whatever I think about their belief system in my opinion they are free to do that.
It's not 1800s, if the given population doesn't like missionaries, as far as I'm aware it's equally free not to listen to them. Or to throw them out.
If a missionaries message was basically "Believe in God and you'll have limitless shells", and backed it up with a crate of shells, they would all be converts.
The given population doesn't know that though...
That is, pretty famously, the "great commission" given by the founder of the faith.
>Christian missionaries who treat the population of PNG as some sort of religious terra nullus
Apparently it's not a religious terra nullus, since PNG's parliament recently voted 80-4 to identify themselves as a Christian nation.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/544665/papua-new-guinea-d...
This article is clearly not about missionaries, why would they be required to mention them? Half the world been impacted by missionaries one way or another, we'd never hear the end of it if it'd be mentioned every single time...
It's like trying to describe Idaho and neglecting to mention the potato farming area in the fertile flat land within a few hundred km radius of Boise, for example.
Missionaries put a very specific special emphasis and great deal of attention on PNG as a "target", so yes they're worldwide, but they're very much more so in PNG.
"The captive women told the Spaniards that Carib men traveled by canoe to neighboring islands, killed or captured men and carried away young women. Chanca says the women were kept as servants and concubines. They further alleged that children born to these captive women by Carib men were eaten, whereas children born to Carib women were raised."
IMHO People had it rough before missions. These particular natives left right there and were ready to sign up!
Being able to write and use technology stops no one from being a savage, if they're that way inclined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Natives:_USA
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfovX-ia33tF-6W_gfTvL...
...basically this is the "take a few near-pre-contact villagers around the U.S. and show them how cool the rest of the world is" that the article talks about.
There was another show (might have been "Going Tribal(?)") which did the reverse, where a "modern man" tried to integrate into daily life tribal life, eg: setting fish traps, mauling taro root, trying not to scare away rabbits while hunting with bows and slings, etc.
Not when life is filled with warfare, murdering other people, and having loved ones killed?
Explain to me how is this different from safari hunting trips where you can get attacked by a wild animal (often an agressive one thatvattacks villagers) and have to shoot it to defend yourself? And the argument of them being human versus safari trip featuring an animal is not something that is given, you have to show that their lives are worth more than the animal life
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/somali-pirate-luxury-cruis...
My interest in this is purely philosophical. If you have a what is effectively a lawless country, where native populace has the desire to kill you, to what extent could you engage with that in a moral framework?
Average american already has their hands full (slash "their brain full") with local matters - family, friends, community. It's hard enough to get attention to spare to turn to national matters, much less stuff that happens on the other side of the world in non-allied poor countries.
Hell, then love self flagellating about how they themselves (the west) are the worst people on earth, which is also a political agenda and is only convincing if you ignore pretty much all of human history and large parts of the current day reality elsewhere in the world.
This one works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoP2PnU60s (but according to https://tools.watannetwork.com/blocked in Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and United States)
For some reason a lot of people have a huge problem with this explanation, actually preferring either environmental determinism or racism. This is in spite of what seems to be a lot of historical evidence for it in the form of causal influence: ideas are introduced somewhere (inventions, methods, philosophies, languages, mathematics, literature, etc.) and large changes follow.
Diamond makes broad genetic/intelligence claims about whole populations, rankes societies as "advanced/backward" constantly and describes conquest as inevitable
"in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners"
"modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent"
"some societies seem hopelessly conservative, inward looking, and hostile to change."
Actual quotes from this so called bastion of liberalism
"China’s connectedness eventually became a disadvantage" [because] "a decision by one despot could and repeatedly did halt innovation."
China = monolithic, obedient, centralized, despotic, stagnant; Europe = pluralistic, competitive, innovative.
Diamond turns "Chinese authoritarianism" into a transhistorical condition produced by the land itself. I'm all about the LVT and Georgism and all but this is doing too much service for land.
In other words, the old Orientalist story survives perfectly well after the race science has been supposedly removed from the chassis. Better still, Diamond treats Ming maritime policy, imperial bureaucracy, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution as variations on the same ancient geographical bug, as though two thousand years of Chinese politics were basically the Yangtze River repeatedly pressing the "authoritarianism" button with it's floods!!!
This rings absolutely true? Do you not think any societies are more hostile to change than others?
That first sentence "attempts were largely unsuccessful" is a cope from wikipedia editors who are mad that it keeps being brought up by race realists who are using this blurb to justify their own racism. Consider that it was a literal Rothschild who did the most recent almost-domestication. 4chan is on this like fly's are on horses (but not Zebra's, or horses painted like Zebras - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22333-7)
The part I quoted without the unnecessary pre-thinking done with that first sentence is all I need. It was quite possible to get most of the way there over short periods of time with money and effort.
Sometimes people even downvote by accident when they mean to upvote—easy to do on your phone
Also, I find anything which says “conservative religion isn’t purely bad” tends to reliably attract some downvotes. A lot of people feel hurt or even traumatised by conservative religious groups (often not even the one under discussion), so I can understand why they do it.
Cannibalism of slaves is very well-known.
Where are you getting your information from?
A History of Warfare by John Keegan is a good introduction to military anthrolopogy, with an extensive bibliography.
(Attacking them in their beds, pah, don't you think maybe the neighboring tribe thought about that and had someone on watch?)
That depends a lot on scarcity. If you are a male and you only get one chance at mating, you will probably fight to the death. If you will get plenty of other chances, then you might accept the results of a ritualised non-lethal combat (e.g. giraffes headbutting each other, rather than kicking). Its just evolution + game theory.
It's common among animal species for males to fight over females, but it's highly uncommon for them to fight to the death, because that is not evolutionary adaptive - it risks the individual as well as the genetic diversity of the group/species (and evolution is selecting for survival of the species, not the individual).
Meanwhile, premodern societies depend on the ecosystem as a whole which tends to adapt over time; the individuals in such societies are more self sufficient in terms of ability to survive the elements.
So it’s just as likely those not dependent on modern technology will do fine against the vicissitudes of climate change as much as those who are dependent on it. At least in terms of ability to survive. At least, their expectations of survival baseline won’t change nearly as much in the face of natural disaster.
To put in plain terms, we keep inventing far better "spears" (including kinetic, bio, and chemical) that allow one to kill many, while still behaving like cavemen.
Thanks to the Balkanization of our media landscape, and social media targetting: "a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain" can be tailored just for you. It has never been easier to make us behave in crazy ways.
I genuinely believe that the existing incarnation of "social media" could lead to the death of billions of humans.
To your other point, I have a friend who thinks social media and online porn drive fetishism, and that fetishism drive a lot of the new 'illiterate' political movements. I don't think I totally agree with him on the illiterate part (I mean, Renaud Camus certainly managed to read Maurras before paraphrasing him, in an objectively worse way, sure, but still), but I have trouble arguing against his other points. He also thinks that this fetishism taken too far will push people towards a death cult, and kill millions
For example, "self-domestication" by executing or ostracizing individuals that don’t fit into the culture.
In modern times it is more likely that culture and education augments genetics such that your violent tendencies are repressed, you are brought up leading a soft and comfortable life, taught to be polite and kind, etc. Contrast to maybe someone brought up in a warzone or some other place.
I mean post apocalyptic shows like the walking dead express this quite well (at least the first few seasons) where once society falls it's just a free for all and back to our roots again.
Sorry, I copy/pasted half my reply from an old comment.
My preferred source for these things is Palmer’s Language families of the New Guinea Area [0] (part of the extremely comprehensive book, The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area). Page 10 has a nice map of language families and isolates.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/86071361/The_languages_and_linguist...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/TNG_map....
The meaning of the historical linguistics term "family" doesn't map directly to our common usage.
A language family is a collection of languages for a which we can identify a significant number of shared core historical grammatical and lexical features.
Just because languages belong to different families doesn't mean they don't have a shared ancestry, just that we can't see it in the modern languages.
If anything, in PNG population genetics identifies the highland populations as closely genetically related, but their languages have diverged to the point that signs their shared ancestry have been lost.
There is an theory that the linguistic diversity PNG represents the state of human societies in Southwestern Asia just before the emergence of agriculture - possibly explaining why many ancient attested languages like Sumerian, Elamite, and Assyrian which were in close proximity appear to be entirely unrelated to each other.
Indeed! Palmer counts ‘862 languages comprising 43 distinct families […] and 37 isolates’, (where an isolate is a language with no known relationship to any other family). I should add that the map you linked shows the branches of only a single language family, namely Trans–New Guinea — most of the other 42 families are in the grey areas. (Though due to uncertainties in historical linguistics, that map includes some groups as part of Trans–New Guinea which Palmer considers separate families, for instance Timor—Alor–Pantar [there part of ‘West Trans–New Guinea’] and South Bird’s Head.)
When a more 'advanced' group use their wealth, technology, medicine etc to control a less developed group - yes that can be a problem.
ideally something not too far removed from how the world works today
You've used "never" and "always" as if Christianity, Christian missions, and the cultures they try to reach are a monolith and the same everywhere. You've also insisted that any aide must only be to strengthen the power of the missionaries, and has nothing at all to do with the character of the very message itself.
You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them (https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/publications/going-...)
yeah thinking "we shouldn't influence poor locals because obviously we can do it so easily" is a little condescending.
I know people from the west who reject religion but pretend just enough to get some benefit from the church, why assume locals are too dumb to do it.
there were historic cases where native people rejected a religion and paid price in blood. THAT is a problem. if there is no forcing, there is no problem.
Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel. They wouldn't bring aid without bringing the Gospel. But like that idiot who tried to convert the Sentinelese, they would bring the Gospel without aid, if they felt so compelled. I don't think it's incorrect to say that everything else is a means to the common end. Christianity is an assimilationist religion. Jesuits may do it differently than Catholics who may do it differently than Baptists, but conversion is always the end goal.
>You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them.
I mean, they didn't, that isn't ever really how that works. Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity, as will the influence of Western culture. I couldn't read the article you posted unfortunately but I did find an article that basically seems to tell the story[0]. I also found an article written by someone of Tiwi descent that tells a less friendly, or at least more complicated story[1].
I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal. It may not be fair but history demonstrates that the relationship between Christianity and indigenous peoples is one of exploitation, suffering and colonization more often than not.
[0]https://www.abc.net.au/religion/tiwi-christianity-aboriginal...
[1]https://www.thenorthernmyth.com/2017/12/20/graverobbers-god-...
> Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
Shouldn't that be a good thing according to your logic? Its not like the global ideas mart is less different from their own society than what the missionaries bring and it would be quite presumptuous to say that your beliefs or those that you consider "global ideas" are better for as yet untouched tribes than those of christian missionaries.
Why not?
Why don't you read through the article before you comment on how incomplete or not it is? It's literally not about missionaries but about something else, the first contact with those tribes, which wasn't missionaries at all, but seemingly gold prospectors, if I skimmed correctly.
It's a well documented historical fact that a great deal of the "exploration" of the interior of PNG was by Christian missionaries.
Sure, but not in this case, that the article we're supposed to be discussing, is about! Does every article about PNG need to include that Christian missionaries at one point were there, even if the events the article discusses isn't about Christian missionaries? Like some sort of legally enforced disclaimer in the footer or whatever? Why the crusade here, against some random article about something else??
Note though that even in the Mediterranean, routes where most of the enemy was killed were relatively rare.
Observe the weapons. Most of them are sharpened sticks and they had a limited supply. Less deadly than swords and no mass manufacturing of weapons either.
The spears would be lucky to penetrate the ribcage. But they could go through the gut or throat, and if they were embedded in a thigh, they could easily cause sepsis.
Obviously if this was filmed on video someone could have given one side a machine gun. Would’ve they used it or would have they still opted to maintain the tradition and fight the old way. The battle may have other reasons besides 100% dominating or wiping out the opponent.
Guns began to enter the region in the 70s and 80s in large numbers, which apparently changed the dynamic. Today's Port Moresby, the most modern part of the island, is apparently much more dangerous than these areas were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
"a bicameral mentality was the "normal and ubiquitous state" of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, at the end of the Bronze Age"
This is very wrong. Evolution is selecting for the total reproductive fitness of genes, and to a slightly lesser extent, individuals. There’s no mechanism that helps the process of evolution select for the survival or reproduction of the species. See any recent textbook on evolutionary biology, or read Dawkins, or even Darwin. I don’t know where you got this idea but it’s exactly wrong.
To the extent that human consciousness can be described from within itself as something distinct from a pan-consciousness of all things, is it farfetched to consider it as not existing until it did emerge? In what artifacts could someone discern the threshold at which consciousness arose?
The meat of the book is the references, not the extreme interpretation that catches most peoples' attention. No hallucinations please unless something like substances were involved.
The plasticity of the brain whether damaged or not is emphasized, and uneven recovery of language skills gives some clues.
Monkey see, monkey do was certainly a thing before humans arrived and it's not been left behind very completely at all.
In a world where almost everybody starts out in early childhood learning to read & write at the same time, and it is structurally taught largely to right-handed kids from right-handed examples, and this has been going on since like "written history"[0], this can not help but provide an overwhelming mainstream norm about what side of the brain is for what. Especially when it comes to language. You could almost think of it as a force acting to confine language, or more so the writing part of literacy to one side of the brain more so than the other. The bulk of the highest-educated and most respected vocabularies have been largely built through literacy rather than orally for quite some time, it wasn't always like that even with equivalent vocabularies, and that part lasted longer than the part since literacy got popular.
For those where it doesn't perfectly apply, like left-handed people, those who don't read and/or write, those who learned from left-handed people, those that taught themselves, etc, that all adds up to a small minority and of course there is great pressure to conform. But that doesn't mean the same language ends up in the same parts of the brain as the "normal" specimen in the jar.
The most recent development is the way more early writing is accomplished using both hands on a keyboard like never before when it was traditionally penmanship for generations back.
Now some people actually "think" in language more so than others, some not at all, plus often bilingual works too.
I'll go ahead and say it, if you were up there in the highlands where Dolly Parton was born back in the 19th century before they really got to building schools, you could find an "illiterate" culture often having a wider vocabulary than those in places like Boston where they had schools continuously since arriving on the continent. Unlike PNG the hillbillies of the Smokies descended directly from a literate culture, they just didn't bring many books that far up the mountains, and odds are they would be lost to mildew by the mid 1700s.
Sometimes you also get the idea that when they were feuding, they just didn't understand each other and everything was fine among the disagreeable factions as long as everyone stayed on their own mountain. People had lost the ability to read, and when they only had one book that was probably the Bible but they couldn't literally decipher it any more. It was still holy though for the faithful who would pretend to read from it while more or less "lip-syncing" the scriptural quotes that had been passed down orally ever since.
Maybe that's where the saying comes from; "If I had half a brain I'd <obviously do what the mainstream would do>." From those who have no history of using less than both halves even for language, so they naturally don't do what the mainstream does? While simultaneously recognizing that they don't even have the same first half that the formally educated (whom they often respect so highly) do possess.
With PNG you've got to figure all the highlanders have language and stuff well-imprinted in their brains like anybody else, "just" not with the pattern recognized as most common to outsiders.
That doesn't mean their superstitions were based on hallucinations of any kind, among different cultures you can expect different parts of different halves of the brain to be doing some of the same things differently. Especially when they have always been isolated from each other.
There might even be a tendency going far back into "modern" literate culture, where the "literate" half of the brain is generally respected most when it is brilliant enough to get by on its own, and that ends up predominating.
Anyone who comes along and has always used all their brain may still have an orthogonal advantage. That could be why professor Diamond attributed the PNG highlanders as perhaps more intelligent than most in general. Or with a cool million of them there's got to be an Einstein or two. What would an Einstein casually having twice as much brainpower than previously imagined be like?
[0] Recent written history, the kind that means the most to a literate culture. Note the way with some traditionally illiterate groups how oral history can easily go back many generations further.
In nonhuman animals, even in fierce disputes over territory and mating, killing is rare, because it's quite costly: you eliminate completely a healthy individual, and usually would run the risk of serious injury yourself, making both dying likely. Usually they e.g. resolve mating with displays of beauty/fitness, and territory with displays of force (chimpanzees for example have lots of display of force rituals, specially around selecting leadership, I believe) and sometimes non-lethal conflict (some species evolve apparatus just for this kind of conflict, e.g. antlers, so they can engage in conflict with low chance of injury).
Since we're referring to human cultures, something distinct we have is memory and communication -- information can get out on reputation, behavior, etc. of a group. I think if a group just goes out and murders another in their sleep (which TBF is not so easy), then I imagine for example word would also go out of their actions and may get into trouble with other groups, I'm sure spiritual traditions would also have a say about it, in favor of some sort of "spiritual revenge". But I suppose it's difficult to generalize.
I do think it's interesting to consider some forms of morality, or just metaphysical and logical understanding around ethics, as a kind of technology that enables people to live longer and enable more secure conditions, including preventing large scale conflict that can bring destruction on an industrial scale to entire societies (although misguided moral arguments ironically are also misused sometimes to enact destruction). Although I guess morality alone is not enough (because not everyone seems to internalize it well), and other mechanisms are also helpful to achieve more social stability.
(Also of note is that there can be such thing as too much stability -- for example, for some new more interesting and maybe more worthwhile forms of culture to emerge, old ones have to be replaced, so stability should be balanced with cautious openness to new ideas, technologies, methods, peoples (ethnicity), cultures, ..., and worldviews -- of course, as long as change is in the direction of improving our lives collectively. For example in some cases religious fundamentalism advocates for an absolutist cultural stagnation; we just shouldn't need one group to murder another to spread about new things)
While it might be true that "Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel" to some degree, it is also true that the Gospel brings aid. It is the message that generates the desire to help people.
Your accusations of "assimilation" are just too simplistic. Take, for example, bible translation. In Australia, Anglican missionaries did not put much effort into translating the bible into indigenous languages as the had essentially hooked their mission projects up to the assimilatory 'White Australia' policy of the government. BUT that was in stark contrast to their actions in the rest of the Pacific, where they put great effort into translating the bible into native languages.
> Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity
This again is just completely dismissing the agency of the converted people. Not to mention easily observed cultural particularities across the world. For example, I experienced a group of Solomon Islanders praying. In my Western culture, we would pray one at a time, but they all prayed out loud, all at the same time. Western values of a particular view of orderliness hadn't overridden their culture.
> I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal.
Fair enough. I do not deny at all the paternalistic, violent, coercive and assimilationist past (and still present) actions of the church. It is shameful and inexcusable. But I don't for a minute admit that this is because the church was being faithful to it's mission and founder. It's because it wasn't being faithful to the message that it perpetrated these crimes.
But again, it is reductionist to say that this is the only experience. Australian Indigenous culture, Maori culture, traditional PNG cultures are still alive and well, and Christian members of these people groups still choose to be Christian. A simple appeal to "power imbalances", "assimilation", "indoctrination" etc. to explain why they remain so is to rob them of agency.
Humanitarian aid also exerts influence, if anything by showing how advanced the more advanced group is. For someone whose religious practice involves traditional medicine or shamanism for treatment, western medicine seems like is obviously a religious influence and control. (It also has issues like alleged bartering treatment for sex or food supplies helping mostly the bad guys with guns)
and you're looking at locals like they are too dumb to reject a new religion. it's a condescending view. locals in Siberia did reject the new religion at first and paid the price in blood, it stopped when they learned to pretend to be Christian and keep their traditions under wraps. the situation seems completely different here.
The "mechanism" is just the process of evolution itself, and how it plays out in practice, e.g. via punctuated equilibrium.
Over shorter timespans the gene pool of a breeding population incrementally drifts according to the success of individual genetics, but then once in a while, over multiple generations, something in the environment (disease, food, competition, etc) may change quickly and the gene pool as a whole, not just that of individuals, is thereby tested, with accumulations of previously benign changes sometimes suddenly becoming critical. In this way evolution is acting on the entire gene pool - of the species or more correctly of that interbreeding sub-population.
Success in evolution, the ability of the species as a whole to adapt and compete, also requires genetic diversity, not only to avoid inbreeding, but also to provide species level resilience, and species level ability to quickly adapt. e.g. It seems that the success of sexual reproduction is because it is a way to "game the game" by increasing genetic diversity and therefore improve along these axis of resilience and fast adaptation.
There are also social species, such as ourselves, where the social group becomes port of the individuals environment, and genetics best-fitted-to-the-environment becomes a group dynamic.
and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation[1] that protects against it, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans
The suggested evolution is:
* there is one ancestor with a gene that protects against kuru.
* children and mothers without that ancestor often die from kuru
* children of that ancestor have a much higher chance of survival
* eventually everyone is a child of that ancestor
* any children of that ancestor that didn't get the protective gene also eventually die out
The gene is selected for. There are no population effects.
The key part in the paper is where they mention adult men with the gene, because they are measuring the counterfactual of the many males that died because they didn't have that gene (males that ate brains as young kids but then died because they didn't have the gene from that ancestor).
The paper is hard to understand in part because of the confounding effects of males not eating the brains. Plus the confounder of stopping cannibalism in 1960.
The idea of "Group selection" is fundamentally wrong - regardless of how sensible the belief feels. Anybody using the words "group selection" is indicating their belief system, and they usually then have biased narratives to 'support' their belief.
[0] horrifically incorrect sciencedaily link in Wikipedia.
[1] We don't fucking evolve genetic mutations
I believe that is wrong. Selection works on the level of the individual and their genes. Dawkins covered this extensively in at least one of his books. Any professional biologists care to comment?
You can tell it as a story (easier to teach) of individual success in surviving and having children, which isn't wrong, but it's also not the big picture.
There are a number of species where the female eats the male after mating - examples such as praying mantis and octopus. Both octopus males and females die after mating, the female after having protected the eggs, so it makes sense that she sometimes eats the male too (who is going to die anyway). But, examples like this are relatively rare, and for species specific reasons.
"Fighting to the death and mating are not the same!"
Your original question and your current statement are in confliction. Pick one.
This is the comment I was responding to.
The question was about pre-mating death matches between males, not post-mating snacking behavior of females.
Let's say that everyone has a skin color gene that makes them either red or blue. And a new predator turns up that only eats blue things. To you this is a tale about individuals, while it seems that an equally valid, and frankly preferable, view is this this isn't about individuals - it's about being red or blue and is a species level effect.
Words matter. Talking about "species level" is misleading because talking about an effect (blue phenotype) distracts us from the cause (a gene for blue).
And evolution is confusingly another step removed: the red survives because the blue did not.
Most of us struggle to see the counterfactual absence of a something.
The blue "species" never exists - our brains want to find groups and patterns. Our words mislead us.
The same thing is alluded to in the paper: the deaths of people without the gene is what is driving the gene to spread (through reproductive success of those that didn't die).
Reproduction is what matters (which death or sickness may interfere with).
Even the paper is confusing because it talks about 50 year old women (measuring survival bias; not whether they are expected to pass on genes at 50).
(reedits for clarity).
No population should be kept living a life we would consider extreme poverty out of some noble ideal. But we also shouldn't completely disrupt their way of life out of a different noble ideal. Wealth as we understand it isn't the only thing of value. Human connection, meaning anchored in community and deep roots, a sense of belonging and so on, are what really matter. Introducing modernity to such populations will sweep all of that away in one motion. These people would be left adrift in an alien world devoid of personal meaning, their only solace whatever addiction appeals to them most.
Like, if you're out shopping and some person starts up a weirdly friendly conversation with you that leads to a MLM sales pitch, you already know that's a thing which exists and why you're almost certainly not interested in participating even before the pitch arrives.
Not sure whether it's intentional in the context, but interesting Freudian slip type use of the word "crusade", you might want to consider its etymology and origins.
Your pink and blue example is actually a great model to work from. Think about the genes and the expression of those genes, and then think about what is being selected if all the blue animals are eaten.
Or think about what would happen if there was a mountain range, and pink animals were eaten on one side and blue ones were eaten on the other side.
Or think about what if one of the blue fathers has pink polka dots that gave it a 10% better chance of survival.
Always concentrate on watching that genes are passed on by reproduction - getting eaten doesn't have to be a problem if reproduction has already occurred (unless parental investment is needed or you get complicated like kin selection).
I am not a biologist. But 'The Selfish Gene' is one of my favourite books because of the concepts within. Unfortunately I think Dawkins went off the deep end later (with what I thought was religious zeal). The Extended Phenotype is even harder to read, but also worthwhile.
It is a fun topic because many phrases about evolution seem misleadingly about death rather than reproduction. And the meaning of the word evolution is absolutely twisted in everyday conversation. Ignoring the troubles with bible bashers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest - "fittest" has an unobvious meaning.