it was exactly 21 years ago I was
rollerblading through these halls
I was just so excited about anthropology I had
to go see my professor to find out more
so I find his office and I go in the
door and there's a girl in there! and I had
scheduled this meeting when some dude
came rollerblading into the room and I
was like who is this joker?
and now we have three kids
we built our first house in New Guinea, or I should
say they built our first house in New Guinea.
All of them. Hundreds of people
delivered hand chopped wood from miles
around the entire thing was built from
local material except for the roof
and a few nails.
I helped a little bit
After two months of work it was ready.
They gave us a warm welcome
One of the joys of anthropology is that you get to step outside of your own culture
and see the world from a different point of view
we lived there together for a year and
by the time it was time to leave they
have given us a whole new way of seeing
the world and a lot of bilums
so after all these people did all this work to build
this house with me I wanted to pay them
so I went around and I tried to give
people money but this just offended them
turned out they didn't want my money
they wanted my friendship and this was
the first glimpse I had into a really
different way of seeing the world what I
came to understand is that for them
money is something that ends a
relationship and they don't want to end
the relationship when you do something
for somebody or you give somebody a gift
it's like it ties a string between you
and you don't want money that
essentially breaks the string you want
instead another gift to come back and
then that just like strengthens the string
through a lifetime of giving
people end up weaving together the
fabric of their society much like the
string bag itself it creates a web of
support and interdependence that ties
everybody together
so let's get out of here
and I'll tell you a story
I want to share with you the story of a really dear friend of mine. My wife and I moved to New Guinea in August
and for the first few months I hung out around a lot
with this guy Kodenim but in December he
started getting sick
and it was really hard to watch because he had
been like this really active guy always
out you know working in the garden and
playing and to see him get sick was
really hard he started to
like his stomach got really distended and really
big and then his arms got really thin
he didn't really think about this the same
way that you or I would, he didn't
really think of himself as medically ill
he turned to ideas of witchcraft what he
thought had happened was that somebody
had shot him with an invisible
witchcraft arrow and it entered his
stomach and that's why his stomach was
so swollen and then these this witch and
all of these witch's friends were coming
at night and actually eating his flesh
and that's why his arms were getting
skinnier how can we empathize with a
perspective like that how do we imagine
our way into that worldview
this is where the art of seeing comes in
I'm just going to leave those there
they'll be fine it's a small town
choices choices choices choices
So we're going to eat like Kodenim today; lots of sweet potatoes
thanks, thank you
So seeing big is all about seeing the really big picture stuff
all the things that
brought these potatoes to me
the infrastructure the social structure as
well as the beliefs ideas and values and
how they're all integrated together in a
big system that brings me sweet potatoes
for $1.29 a pound and this is all
I know about them. I don't know who grew
them I don't know who brought them here
I don't know who put them on the shelf I
just have a sweet potato and a receipt, and that's it
the big structures in New Guinea are very different I think a really good metaphor in New Guinea would
be this string bag itself so this string
bag is woven from a single piece of
string that's taken from the bark of a
tree it's rolled together by a woman who
then weaves it together for months and
months before it becomes a string bag
when you're handed a string bag or
you're handed a potato
you're told exactly where it came from
who made it all that struggle they went
through in making it and you get this
sense of strong connections to other
people you start to feel tied to them in
the same way that this string bag is all
woven together you start to feel woven
together with all the people around you
it gives you a sense of strong
interdependence rather than independence
our culture is all about choices,
choices, choices, choices, choices and
conveniences that give us a sense of
independence and individualism
I spent my money to get this potato it's my
potato and I cooked it myself and now
I'm going to eat it by myself in my
office
Things look very different in the village. You sit around the fire for hours as a sweet potato cooks sharing
stories the door is always open and
anybody who comes in gets to eat
as food is passed from hand to hand the
strings of social bonds are woven
together like the mesh of the string bag
if you grew up here your health is
always dependent on having good
relationships with others so it makes
sense that when your health fails you
might look to your web of relations to
see which one has gone bad. Kodenim
tells me that he thinks he's been given
a sweet potato at some point but that
when somebody gave him part of it they
kept the other part and when they kept
the other part they took maybe a little
piece of it and they maybe bundled it
up and they worked witchcraft on it and
when they did that everything that
happened to this piece of sweet
potato also happened to him and this was
confirmed for him by a shaman who did a
seance and this little bundle fell from
the ceiling of the hut we were in and he
picked up the bundle and he said this is
a piece of food that you have eaten the
witch has bundled it up and put it at
the base of a tree and what you're
feeling digging into your side right now
and digging into your stomach is the
roots of that tree digging into your body
Kodenim started thinking about all the wrongs he had done. He had stolen a pig from my father,
he had stolen a chicken from Ona,
he lied to Kenny and he had a strained
relationship with his in-laws
he approached my father first who
offered to do a ritual washing. My father
placed his hands on soap and in cold
water as a way of cooling the witchcraft
and then he poured water over Kodenim
as he said a prayer in his prayer he said
he would never want to harm Kodenim
that he was like a son to him
and the people standing around could
feel the gravitas of the moment.
Several teared up
Two days later there was a larger gathering. This one was to deal with the chicken he had stole from
Ona, the lies he had told to Kenney and his strained relationship with his in-laws
as these sins were outed people stood up
to offer their forgiveness and at the
end a piece of soap was passed around to
everybody so that everybody could touch
it and then Kodenim could be washed by
the whole community
Of course they'd hoped this would work but two days later he died.
His death left a hole in the
fabric of the world
His family came to my father asking for
compensation. I was mad about this
I mean Kodenim stole my father's pig
and now my father was supposed to pay
them? It just doesn't fit with our sense
of justice, if anything Kodenim's family
should owe my father compensation. I
tried to stay out of it but my family
kept pressuring me to be involved as I
thought about what to do I realized
three simple truths; one I couldn't be
like them, I just could not buy into the
idea that witchcraft was real; that Kodenim had been shot with an invisible
witchcraft arrow, and that he'd been
eaten alive by witches in the night.
On the other hand, I also realized I
couldn't just be true to myself to be
true to yourself in a situation like
this is to shut yourself off from real
learning, to understand their point of
view I needed something I needed some
set of tools that could help me through
it so I turned to the anthropological
toolkit; communication, empathy, and
thoughtfulness. I would have to
communicate with them try to see my way
into their perspective and use all the
tools thoughtfulness that I could to try
to understand. One of the most important
tools of anthropology is the holistic
perspective it's where you try to
understand all the different pieces of
culture as interconnected and see how
they relate to one another so for
example we can look at the
infrastructure of their society and see
that they are subsistence based
horticulturalist, means that they're,
they live in these they live in these
small villages scattered throughout the
landscape with their gardens near their
villages this means that they have to
keep their villages fairly small or they
end up walking very far to get to their
garden. It's a level of social structure
we see that within each of these
villages they have their families but
they also have these sort of fictive kin
relationships. They treat each other like
family they share food together and
generally look after each other but what
happens when somebody dies is that
there's going to be some tension and
often that tension runs across the
family lines so that one family will
turn to the other family with suspicion
and in this case we're Kodenim died the
suspicion goes over here toward my
father
at this point this group now has an
option they can move out or they can pay
the compensation which will reunite the
village what's interesting is that when
you look out over a landscape like this
and you see all these villages, what
you're looking at is a history of
witchcraft accusations. People live
spread out like this because of
witchcraft accusations so one way to
think about this is that Kodenim sees
himself as made up of all these
relationships and one of these
relationships has become sick.
When Kodenim dies it leaves a hole in the
fabric and there's a danger now that
this witchcraft could spread and that
this hole needs to be filled.
family wants us to give a gift that will
fill this hole and reconnect all of
these strings that were broken when
Kodenim died.
In the end, we decided to give that gift
the gift that would tie
us all back together
it was a touching moment to see my
father and Kodenim father, who had
long thought of each other as brothers,
come back together.
As our hands joined and the handshakes followed,
I felt like I could actually see the
strings being retied.
I still miss Kodenim
but I have to say, Kodenim's death
was a beautiful death. In his final days,
he was able to admit his every sin and he
was offered forgiveness. It may not have
cleared his body of what it was that
killed him but a cleansed his soul. He
died at peace; and the hole he left in our
world was filled with gifts, kindness, and
goodwill.
