The Lost Tribe: A Harrowing Passage into New Guinea's Heart of Darkness

Rating:
Summary: Boyscout gone bad
Review: *The Lost Tribe* is less a book about the Liawep, a mountain people of Papua New Guinea, than about Marriott and his comic-book fantasies of being an explorer. With his trusty sidekick Dunstan, Marriott suffers all the horrors the tropics can offer: falling into mud, eating unfamiliar vegetables, and being surrounded by people who always seem to glower. He's constantly trying to guess which deception will do him the most good, all the while speculating about the duplicity of the natives who don't ever seem to reciprocate his earnest desires for contact. (Some of this may be related to the fact that he and his carriers were obliged to sponge off the locals.) Marriott stays long enough to decide that Herod, his host, is a religious crank, allowing him to portray himself as the Liawep's pal while trashing missionaries and religion in general. His stay ends with a fire/explosion in which a number of Liawep die. Marriott's version is that it was lightning, but it seems the Liawep thought he bore some responsibility. Marriott reduces this event to a convenient plot device allowing him to assume to role of victim: he and his carriers bugger off, spurred on by all the paranoid fears he can muster. If anyone is lost in this awful book, it is the author.

Rating:
Summary: true to life
Review: I have had the opprotunity to visit Papua , New Guinea twice in the past year on medical teams. The village I was in was not very far from Liawep. Marriott paints an excellent picture of the people, culture and terrain of Papua, New Guinea. It was thrilling to read of his accounts and I "almost" wish I was there to share his experiences with him on that journey. It is truely a beautiful land filled with wonderful people. I give this book two very big thumbs UP!

Rating:
Summary: Poetic, a masterpiece of creative nonfiction
Review: I read this book when it first came out and was so impressed I actually wrote a fan letter -- my first -- to the author. I'm a writer myself, as so I read the book with eye to the craft, the poetry of each line, the voice, the overall structure of the narrative. Yes, many people have read it through the filters of PC thinking, as a naive white boy's "comic book" take on an indigenous people -- but this misses the point and the great worth of this book, which is a personal adventure -- however naive -- into an extraordinary place with extraordinary people, told with great heart and craft.

Rating:
Summary: fine travel writing
Review: It is not often that one finds travel writing elevated to the level of adventure. What's more, Marriott's prose is clear and sincere. Overall, a great read. If you have not got your hand on a good travel book in a while, invest in this one. I'm going out to get the "Savage shore".

Rating:
Summary: DEFENDING INDIGENOUS PEOPLE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.
Review: Liawep is not a lost tribe. I am an anthropologist and I have been studying the "Lost Tribe" over the last three years and I am still carrying out my anthropological fieldwork among them. Every year I spend a couple of months with the so-called "Liawep" in Papua New Guinea. Liawep is not their real name but it is the name of one of their hamlets, the place where they were cutting the bush to build an airstrip when the events described in the book took place. Unfortunately I was not in Liawep during the "harrowing passage" of the book's author. Nevertheless, my Liawep informants counted me in detailed terms the story of his arrival and the tragical consequences of his blitz. During my latest visit to the Liawep, after this book was published in UK, I brought a copy of the book with me and I translated it to them, sentence by sentence. The Liawep people were disgusted by that book and they denied almost the totality of the events in which several of them were described by their own names. I was asked by Liawep leaders to diffuse in our western global society what is, according to them, the real version of the events whose tragical conclusion was the death of five people, four children and a woman. That is the job I am working at now with the aim of defending the intellectual property of this tribal people and preventing their exploitation. For the uninformed reader of "The Lost Tribe" it may be interesting to know that the book contains three kind of faults : 1) SCIENTIFIC FAULT : The Liawep are not a lost tribe. The Liawep are "lost" according to this book but not according to other papua new guineans or to the anthropologists working in the area. In the early seventies, the Liawep used to have regular contacts with Australian officers patrolling the area. At that time they were using steel axes and bushknifes and going in and out the nearest Governmental Stations. In the early eighties, Liawep women were married with men from neighbour villages working in the nearest mining towns. In this book the Liawep culture is misrepresented in terms of stereotyped "primitives" practices. Maybe the author has misunderstood or simply invented stories such as the Liawep elder who used to talk about his past as a cannibal. A certain kind of journalism often tends to exploit the well-known clichés on indigenous people such as cannibalism, savagery and others of this kind. This is a classical problem concerning human and social sciences. Let's imagine a comparison with "hard" disciplines like astronomy. No one would announce to the media that he had discovered a new planet without having serious competence and scientific training. As long as tribal people are concerned, a "lost tribe" is discovered every year by non specialists. 2) LEGAL FAULT : The book's author, as he himself write in his book, has illegally entered the region of Papua New Guinea where the Liawep have settled. The author had just a limited National Government Tourist Visa. Whoever likes to go for research purposes in that area, needs a Provincial Government Visa and is requested to make a series of medical examinations (thorax screen, HIV test, etc.) in order to avoid dangerous intrusion provoking the spreading of typical western diseases. That Visa was denied to the author by the Provincial Authority (the real names of Governmental Officers are quoted in the book). Nonetheless, he decided to enter the Liawep area as a clandestine, breaking the laws of an independent country. The author aimed at going in that restricted area looking for a tribe which he supposed to be lost and make his journalist scoop. In addittion to that, he wrote in his book about his illegal action in terms of proud heroism. A form of contemporary ideological neo-colonialism. 3) ETHIC FAULT : The book refers to an explosion during a nocturnal storm killing a woman and four children. The author did not knows their name. I knew them. The woman was called Wypam, two of the children, boys, were called Laup and Pula and the other two, girls, Nafawam and Yawari, all between one and ten years old. The book talks about a lightning which hit the house. The Liawep did not agree with this version. Liawep are forest people and they know very well the natural phenomena like lightning and how try to avoid them. They say that the white man was sleeping in the Mr Herod's house, the local Lutheran missionary ("so much for a lost tribe!" as someone wrote). According to the Liawep version, the white man moved, during the nightly storm, a part of his cargo faraway: from the pastor's house to another Liawep house, under the floor as those houses are traditionally built on pillars, elevated from the ground. This happened few minutes before the accident. The writer and his guides run away the same night, just after the explosion took place, scared by local people's reactions to the accident. They reached the nearest airstrip, a half a day walk from there. Among the terrified Liawep there was a shocked man (which is one of my friends and informants by the name of Fioluana, the Wypam's husband) who had lost three of his children and his wife in the explosion. He together with others pursued the white man until the airstrip where they contacted the local leaders and explained the situation to them. Following the Liawep version, the white man was guilty of the accident. In western terms this may be translated in a symbolic guilt, a sort of sympatethic responsibility, not a real one. Nevertheless the matter has to be seen in terms of local customs and laws. The Liawep intended to ask a compensation for the accident the white man had provoked. In Papua New Guinea payback to compensate accusations of sorcery or murder consists in goods or money. This is a common rule in the whole of Melanesia. According to the Liawep, the white man promised them to look for the nearest bank in town and he would send them money as a compensation as soon as possible. The Liawep allowed him to leave. As far as I know, the writer has never sent further payback to Liawep in any form. Once in town, the white man did not advice the competent local authority about the accident. He did not deem that there were in Liawep seriously wounded people who were still urging medical assistance. One of the children survived few days and then died. One wonders whether the writer was he scared because of his clandestine condition in that area of Papua New Guinea. Or maybe he intended to start as soon as possible with the writing of his great book to let the world know of his heroic travel in the "heart of darkness"? "The Lost Tribe" has been published without asking the permission to the Liawep people. After all, the book was conceived and published thanks to the Liawep. Or rather, because of the exploitation of the false information describing the Liawep as a lost tribe. Noboby, neither the author nor the editors have never thought, for example, of devolving a part of the book's profit to the Liawep. This would have provided a service of medical patrol in their own area or assisted the Liawep with food and water supplies during the dry season. I would like to warn the innocent reader of this book by stating that the book is not of an innocent kind. While this book is being promoted on the net, in Liawep people are dying of pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoea and other typical tropical deseases. They did not have enough medicines and medical assistance which costed the price of few copies of this book. Of course, health and nutritional problems of Papua New Guinea are not the fault of this kind of books. However, this sort of books, articles or movies, exploit a false image of indigenous people. This fake sensational portray has become more and more common all over the world, because it is rentable stuff. Except for the indigenous actors.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The book is an honest, yet slow account of travel into PNG's interior. The climactic episode allows for some excitement, but the author's confusing sense of guilt is ridiculous and tiring.

Rating:
Summary: You need more than two weeks to find a lost tribe.
Review: The Lost Tribe is an account of a journalists short (2 week) trip into one of Papua New Guinea's more remote areas. The book is descriptively well written, but is also full of inaccuracies caused by the authors lack of knowlege of local languages and of modern Papua New Guinea. The people he descibes may well be highly isolated but as with most of PNG, their names are included in the common role. Had he given imself more time he could have obatined proper maps which reveal the location of the village and the fictitious volcano he descibes. He could also have learnt Pidgin properly which would have been useful in getting himeself out of the situation that arose. What the author doesn't know is that after his departure from Wanakepa those villagers were forced to pay huge compensation for what happened. They would like the author to bare some of the cost. I'm sure this could be arranged through MAF whoom he can contact through the internet.

Rating:
Summary: A fine story of a disappearing people. Inspiring yet sad.
Review: This was an author I had hoped would deliver something that many travel-writers don't - a sense of the freedom and anguish of the way we once lived, portrayed through the experiences of the living. In review, he largely managed this. But I still felt strangely unsatisfied when finishing the book. A feeling that emerges from the fact that you leave the story without actually knowing all that much about the tribe. You see, in truth this book is more about a series of events along a storyline than an expose of a 'lost' tribe. Of course this has much to do with his difficulties in communicating with the tribe, but nevertheless it is a shame.

I did though feel that this story highlights the gulf still existing in the world across the spectrum of human cultures. It is for the reader to decide (or not) the value in maintaining or trying to close such a gulf, and for whose benefit - ours or theirs. For example, the impact of western religion on such tribes is shown in the book to be thoughtless and combattant in the way it is taught. Perhaps to be expected in the 18th or 19th century, but quite disturbing when it is in the present day.

In conclusion, I think Marriot has done the Liawep justice with this story, but the damage he did during the course of his stay will probably haunt him and the Liawep for many years to come.