The Ragged Edge of the World (6 page)

After further discussion of traditional medicine, the Penans addressed the role of ritual and taboo in their lifestyle and traditions. Yahya Sipai from Long Kidah said that an evangelical mission had been established in his area ten years earlier and had had a profound impact on their lives. In the old belief, women were not supposed to eat monkey, leopard, bear and python, but now that they had converted to Christianity, all dietary restrictions had been lifted. Korau Kusin from Long Kidah added that while they maintained some medicines that “attest to the natural,” they had done away with those that attested to the old belief. I interpreted this to mean that they had kept those medicines that cure because of natural properties but had done away with those that involve spells and magic of the old beliefs.

For instance, the wood bark and roots from a five-foot-tall plant called
kenyatong
used to be employed as a balm to cure internal pain, but because it carried with it a taboo (it had to be handled according to a strict procedure—if put in a fire the wrong way, it would be harmful), it was now considered unchristian, and Korau Kusin would no longer use it, even though it provided effective treatment. He added that he and other elders would still tell children about the wood, but they would also warn them that it was now prohibited.

When I asked whether you could be a Christian and still be a Penan, one chief shrugged and remarked that the old way of life was still the same, irrespective of beliefs. He didn't mind giving up the use of potions to kill people. Others in the group, however, argued that switching beliefs came with a price. One Penan said that in the past, if you had good dreams you would have a good hunt; if you dreamed that you would catch a wild boar, for example, the next day it would come true. That didn't happen anymore, he said—while you might have the dream, the boar wouldn't appear.

This precipitated an animated discussion about the pros and cons of Christianity. I got the sense that Christianity was winning not because the Penans had embraced Jesus Christ as their savior, but because life was on the whole simpler under one god. As one chief put it, “Before we had all these taboos. If we had to walk from here to there, we had to think,
What was my dream last night, what route should I take?
Now we just go there.”

Between the government, missionaries, loggers, competing hunters, liquor, Western movies and the lure of the towns, these chiefs and their still loyal longhouse members were being assailed from all sides. I had come to Borneo thinking how sad it was that out of the hundreds of millions of people who lived in the archipelago that extends from the Philippines through Malaysia and Indonesia, perhaps only a few thousand maintain the arduously acquired knowledge of the flora and the fauna. Listening to the accounts of these chiefs and hunters, however, I came away thinking it somewhat miraculous that anyone had been able to hang on to it at all.

At least, for that moment, that knowledge
was
still alive. The Penan group grew most animated when the conversation turned to hunting techniques and the various auguries they used to track boar. One bird, which they called
matui
and which looked a little like a hornbill, signaled the presence of certain kinds of fruit and correlated with the migration of the boar. So did a black, chickenlike ground bird with red and white feathers on its head. Another, whose Penan name was
be'ui
and which was described as a blue ground bird, signaled that not only boar but also barking deer were nearby.

The obsession with fruiting seasons may seem strange to those of us from temperate climes—after all, in one weekend any American schoolkid can learn when trees and berries fruit in New England—but the Borneo rainforest doesn't work like that. By far the dominant trees are dipterocarps, and, given all the seed predators waiting to pounce on fruit once it appears, the trees have evolved a strategy called masting to ensure their reproduction. What this means is that they produce an overwhelming amount of fruit at unpredictable intervals. This strategy, along with the great diversity of trees in the rainforest, reduces the odds that predators will adapt to a fruiting cycle and enhances the probability that seeds will survive. Thus, flying scouts like birds or insects provide invaluable intelligence to Penans and possibly animals as well about where the fruit and those animals who eat it can be found.

And yes, all the forest Penans gathered in Marudi knew about the butterfly. They called it
yap lempuhan,
a fast-flying insect that appears rarely but serves as a sign of fruiting season for many types of trees. Later, in Miri, I was introduced to a Penan secondary school student away from the highlands for his studies. When I asked him about the butterfly he looked at me as if I had three heads.

To put in perspective what I had heard from the Penans in Marudi, and during subsequent trips to longhouses in the highlands, I sought out Dr. Jayl Lanjub, an anthropologist trained at McGill University, then working with the state planning unit. He was fully aware of the problem of the loss of indigenous knowledge, noting that there were glimmerings of awareness in the government that something noble was vanishing. The maddening thing for Lanjub was that efforts to help the Penans were doing just as much damage as the destruction of the forests. “When a kid goes to secondary school,” he remarked, “he's only home for three weeks a year. That's not much time to go out into the forest and learn.” One of his proposals was to arrange for schooling in service centers that were a lot closer to the longhouses. From what I can gather, this policy has been implemented, though not to the degree the Penans would like.

He also said that he took the Penans' own protestations about their devotion to traditional knowledge with a grain of salt. “They talk a good line,” he told me, “but like anybody, given the opportunity they are going to take the path of least resistance.” For instance, he noted that whenever the planning unit visited the rural villages, its inhabitants requested guns. “Hunting with a blowpipe is very difficult,” he explained.

When I left Borneo in 1990 there were eight nomadic groups. Now there may not be any that are truly nomadic, though a number of settled Penans still hunt and gather in the dwindling forests. The decline of nomadic groups has been matched by an increase in settlements, from about 78 in 1990 to 121 today. Some sense of deep identification with fellow tribe members might maintain Penan identity long after the last Penan forgets the significance of
yap lempuhan,
but that is only partial solace for what will be lost.

The march of so-called progress has been accompanied by a cultural entropy in the metaphorical sense, as distinct, well-ordered societies disperse into an undifferentiated mass after encounters with modernity. We can only hope that cultural dynamics are not as rigid as the laws of physics.

I
f the ragged edge of the world is that moveable frontier where modernity, wildlands and indigenous peoples collide, then New Guinea has been on the front line of that silent struggle almost continuously since first contact between Europeans and the island's hundreds of tribes in the nineteenth century. (Contact with outsiders dates back much further, perhaps as early as the twelfth or thirteenth century, when traders from China and the Malay Peninsula would visit to collect bird of paradise feathers.) New Guinea's forbidding ecology and fierce tribes discouraged casual visits, and until World War II, many tribes remained uncontacted, meaning that they had not encountered Europeans face-to-face. That changed quickly after the war. New Guinea is rich in resources that the West covets and that in recent decades have brought many Europeans and Asians to the island, accompanied by the familiar pathologies of the active frontier—alcoholism, alienation, the breakdown of families, and the loss of indigenous knowledge. In this case, however, Western contact has also produced some surprises. Papuans (Papua was the name originally given to the entire island), for instance, have demonstrated more resilience in responding to modernity than many other indigenous peoples around the world.

I first went to New Guinea in December 1976, as part of the research for my book
Affluence and Discontent
. My purpose was to look into cargo cults, a bizarre phenomenon that took hold in New Guinea in earnest during World War II, when Stone Age tribes encountered airplanes and their cargo, and set about trying to integrate these seeming miracles into a view of the cosmos that held ancestors, not human endeavor, to be the transforming force in life. I was intrigued by cargo cults because I believed (and still believe) that they offer a crucial insight into the nature of consumer societies.

New Guinea is one of the strangest, most dramatic, and—for a nation not at war—most dangerous places on earth. Its strangeness is due in part to geography, as it lies on the Australian side of the Wallace Line, that invisible biogeographical barrier that separates the flora and fauna of Indonesia from the remnant relics and oddities of what was once the supercontinent Gondwanaland (now Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea). There are no primates in New Guinea other than humans, few poisonous snakes, and no large predators; the biggest native fauna are birds, not mammals. The meager assortment of terrestrial animals includes the kus kus, a golden-haired relative of the opossum; some small kangaroos; and pigs, which were brought there by humans in the distant past. Fruits abound, but there's not a lot of protein to be had, which may explain why different tribes made a habit of snacking on one another.

A number of cultural aspects of New Guinea are to some degree a reflection of its unusual ecology. For instance, the absence of primates or any other large mammals meant that as much as New Guinea's hunter-gatherers were a part of nature, they did not encounter any monkeys or apes to remind them that they themselves came from nature. By contrast, Africans are born Darwinians because the continent's primates serve as a daily reminder of our roots. In the absence of such reminders, ancient Papuans were free to speculate on human origins—a prerogative they seized on with great creativity. A number of New Guinean creation myths (not surprisingly, an island with several hundred languages has produced a great many such myths), for example, held that people originated in the sky.

Like many contemporary consumers, New Guineans are also highly materialistic; but delve deeper into this materialism, and Western consumers and Papuans rapidly begin to part company. Even today, good numbers of New Guinean natives believe that consumer goods (like people) come from the sky. It is this persistent conviction, which they cling to in some cases despite being physically shown how factories produce goods, that is key to the resilience of the Papuan worldview.

The belief that consumer goods have magical origins is at the core of each cargo cult. Cargo cults offered an explanation for European goods that fit within a native's traditional perspective. New Guineans would see great ships arrive and disgorge unimaginable wealth with no visible connection to the endeavors of the Europeans who brought them. (Papuans rarely saw Europeans working under any circumstances.) Local Europeans would also celebrate the arrival of ships, reinforcing the suspicion that the goods had magical origins. But the ultimate proof for many natives was the fact that the bumbling, sweaty whites who couldn't speak any native dialects just seemed too dimwitted to have produced such wonders. (This marked a decided downgrading of the original reputation of whites, many of whom were first viewed as deities, before the natives concluded that these strange newcomers did not live up to the behavior expected of a divinity.)

So, as the natives watched in awe, some local prophet would tell his one-talks (pidgin for people from the same clan) that the arrival of the rich whites was a signal that release from toil and strife was at hand. Often the prophet would announce that he knew the rituals that the Europeans used to produce the cargo, and equally often he would insist that the cargo rightfully belonged to the natives and that the whites had stolen it through treachery. Such claims often marked the point at which these cults moved from being quaint to being dangerous.

For me the persistence of cargo cults helped illustrate a simple but often overlooked idea: The mere desire for consumer goods does not a consumer make. In
Affluence and Discontent,
I tried to show that the genius of a consumer society is that it taps an endless source of power by translating religious needs into material appetites. The key to the power of a consumer society is that people are willing to organize themselves to earn the money to try to satisfy needs that can ultimately never be requited by material purchases. There's a lot more to the argument than that—a whole book's worth, in fact—but my basic point was and is that a consumer society is a system that integrates the production of goods and services and the consumption of goods and services. More specifically, a consumer society harnesses the very discontents it creates—in the form of disenfranchised and unrequited religious needs—to mobilize resources and extend its ambit. (For those interested, I developed this concept further in my more recent book,
The Future in Plain Sight
.)

Papuans loved the consumer goods, but they were not consumers. One of the most poignant illustrations of this involved a Papuan native named Yali who rose to the rank of sergeant major in the Australian army in recognition of his invaluable assistance to the Australian administrators of New Guinea during World War II. In most respects Yali was a model soldier, and he seemed to adapt well to modernity. During a training trip to Australia, he was taken to a factory where armaments were produced. When he returned to New Guinea he told his one-talks that, yes, he had in fact seen the place where goods were made, but the sneaky Europeans never showed him the secret room from which the ancestors directed the operations.