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I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea

I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea

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Comments (180)

  • vova_hn2
    The "Pre-bronze age war between two tribes in West Papua, 1963" video in the article is an embedded tweet. Twitter currently doesn't allow to view it without an account (extensively discussed on HN [0]). Fortunately, it is also available on Youtube [1] (longer version [2]).[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694296[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNHIP2FJzko[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI4uirwxx1Y
  • som
    My parents lived in the highlands in PNG in the late 70s and early 80s and my dad still speaks pidgin (mostly with his current neighbours who are from Port Moresby the capital). I've heard of lot of amazing (and pretty wild!) stories over the years. And met some interesting folk who up were up there with them - locals, missionaries and others. But despite our childhood being fairly steeped in PNG culture - and my name being from there, after a local who used to work with my dad - the closest I've been myself is the Torres Strait :/
  • skissane
    > People still shoot arrows at each other in urban centresMy 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
  • wodenokoto
    I think it is overall a well written and engaging article on a topic I knew nothing about.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.
  • culi
    Indonesia's dictator Suharto (who was put into power by the US) annexed West Papua in the 60's on behalf of US corporations. Indigenous groups united together to form the Free Papua Movement (OPM) and wage a guerilla war of resistance. The resistance is ongoing and most of West Papua (which is basically a colony) and PNG (which is basically a banana republic) want reunification
  • ggm
    A friend (now a very fine lawyer in London) travelled PNG during an election assisting in some fashion for several weeks if not months. She came home with a crimp in her hair and ridges on all her toe and fingernails from nutritional deficiencies. This is when I realised differences in standards of living were not theoretical.
  • jtotheh
    I was there in '84, I have a page here with pictures and recordings of an interesting encounter. The subjects are from a coastal town though, not the highlands, but they were at the "Highlands Show". https://vin-dit.org/amyours.html
  • broodbucket
    Random PNG fun facts: their most watched sporting event is State of Origin, a rugby league competition between two Australian states, over which many people have died in PNG. Australia recently allowed them a team in the NRL, its premier rugby league competition, essentially in exchange for PNG not signing a security agreement with China like the Solomon Islands did.
  • tthbalazs
    I used to watch https://www.youtube.com/@MissionaryBushPilot deliver stuff around PNG in a Kodiak. If you're into aviation, the videos are golden
  • merek
    Original footage of PNG tribe's first contact with white man in 1993, filmed by Jean Pierre Dutilleux, Belgian anthropologist:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynx14JEYbyI
  • axiologist
    The mentioned book "First Contact" at the Internet Archive:https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00connThe documentary movie related to that book:https://archive.org/details/firstcontact_201602https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact_(1983_film)
  • walrus01
    I did a ctrl-f in the article for "missionary" or "missionaries" and found nothing. There's a real problem (in my opinion) with weird evangelical Christian missionaries who treat the population of PNG as some sort of religious terra nullus. It's a bit weird to write a reasonably lengthy and detailed article about New Guinea and not mention the missionaries...?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.
  • a_bonobo
    It's really strange how close Papa New Guinea is to Australia (by territory, not people to people) and how little contact there is between the two countries, and how little interest there is. Australians couldn't tell you a thing about PNG, its people, or its politics (except those few who've gone to PNG for mining jobs). Compare with New Zealand - NZ is further away by continental distance, but closer to the main cities of Australia. Completely different relationship.
  • hermitcrab
    Fascinating read. I also found the stuff about PNG very interesting in Jared Diamond's 'Guns Germs and Steel'. IIRC he said you could trade and marry with the the tribes in the next valley. But if you want 2 valleys away, they would likely kill you.
  • gbraad
    Off topic: 1991 Future Sound of London, great song!
  • vertnerd
    My first exposure to this was reading Lost in Shangri-La (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Shangri-La), which concerns the search for an airplane that crashed in PNG in 1945, the recovery of survivors, and the ensuing media sensation (heightened because one of the survivors was a woman).
  • landgrave
    Nitpicking here, but Finnish and Hungarian both arrived to Europe after PIE language family.
  • pelzatessa
    >I can't stop thinking about Papua New GuineaMe 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...
  • jchook
    Never going to be able to see “PNG” written again without secretly thinking “Papua New Guinea” in my mind.
  • itake
    PNG is on my list to visit. It’s relatively complex to get to. Most flights either leave from Australia or Jakarta, they don’t run frequently enough to where you will probably spend the night in Jakarta or Australia in order to catch the flight the next day.I visited Timor Leste earlier this year and what an interesting country
  • jtotheh
  • mtrlbs
    That was a great read !
  • broccoluvr
    i remember been intrigued by Papua new guinea ages ago.. back in the day there was a documentary made by some italian dudes (my fellow countrymen) you could watch for free on YT, but i can't find it anymore..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
  • tt_dev
    Really well written
  • mintflow
    What a joy to read this article, and the shell dump to the highlanders seems make me know a bit more of how money works and why bitcoin's scarcity make it have that high price
  • cinkhangin
    This is those articles that I would just skip but I didn't...very interesting
  • mrngld
    > they had no way to evolve past this stage of developmentThat 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.
  • dgarciaf18
    this is peak rabbithole material
  • mike_tyson
    two great films in PNG are joe leahy's neighbours and black harvestreally excellent insight into society and values there as it meets capitalism
  • jgalt212
  • nephihaha
    One of my parents' friends had spent a lot of time doing research in PNG as well as remote parts of South America. He was the nearest real life equivalent to Indiana Jones I've ever met. He told us some wild stories about the place. He would have been old enough to see the place when cannibalism was still around.
  • etcetcetcetceta
    why is there so much gps blocking on inland PNG, does anyone know?
  • contingencies
    I have a small collection of traditional PNG artifacts. Spears, masks, oars, axes, etc. I really like them and consider them generally very under-valued as evidence of the dominant technologies over the majority of human history.Some good places to see them are the Asian Museum in Lisbon, the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam, the Ethnology Museum in Berlin.
  • anon
    undefined
  • kijin
    > So nearly all groups eventually internalized a similar set of norms, a similar food culture and similar political institutions, without ever being part of the same political unit.They managed to achieve eventual consistency in a distributed system, thousands of years before we even thought of it.
  • karel-3d
    I have read somewhere that the cannibalism claims are overrated and kind of artificially inflated by the natives. (Most natives are actually Christian.) I have not looked closely into it though.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.
  • avazhi
    > They were having bow and arrow battles as late as 1963They still do this, in fact.
  • tobin1994
    [dead]
  • ls-a
    [dead]
  • avadodin
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  • CarlitosHighway
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  • mig1
    [flagged]
  • anon
    undefined
  • lifestyleguru
    lol don't go there it's a trap. Civilization, despite all these people, is good.
  • yreg
    There was a discussion on it here yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wfdnus/why...
  • wswin
    What a useless title
  • philipallstar
    > They practice cannibalism, and Michael Rockefeller was likely eaten there, and maybe Joe Biden’s uncle too - 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 that protects against it, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans> Jared Diamond thinks the people there are genetically smarter than EuropeansNever seen two consecutive paragraphs so completely contradict each other.