In the spring of 1987, I stooped over the desk in my shared student office in Cambridge, England, running my finger across a map of Papua New Guinea and squinting at the tiny typescript. I was trying to establish the location of a cluster of tribes in the rainforest known as the Baining. Only one of those tribes was known to anthropology; the others were a mystery. As a young Ph.D. researcher, my ambition was to make friends with people as culturally different from me as it would be possible to find anywhere on the face of the Earth and to ask if I could live with them for two years.
After a very long series of flights and an arduous trek through the rainforest, I finally came face-to-face with the Mali—one of those elusive Baining groups I had been dreaming about. To my surprise, the Mali were much more like me than I could possibly have imagined. It wasn’t just that they had the same basic material needs and wants, but they also shared with me—and my compatriots back in England—fundamentally similar moral concerns, supernatural inclinations, loyalties and rivalries, as well as a deep appreciation of music, dance, and other artforms. Nevertheless, the Mali also had a great deal of knowledge and wisdom that was new to me. For one, they knew how to build very large families.
By large families I don’t just mean that they had lots of offspring—which was indeed true of many households in the village. What I mean is that they had the ability to conceptualize vast portions of humanity as one giant family, descended from common ancestors and related both physically and spiritually. Now, more than 35 years later, in a world increasingly torn apart by destructive regional conflicts and forms of polarization, I cannot help wondering if the wisdom of the Mali could help us to rethink the way we manage cooperation in the 21st century.
The Mali lived on a tropical island roughly twice the size of Wales, studded with mountains and active volcanoes and blanketed in jungle. They built their houses in small clusters around a village clearing of well-trodden earth. They used timber from the surrounding forest to create uprights and rafters, strips of interwoven bamboo for the walls, and long strands of grass to thatch their roofs.
They fed themselves on tubers and fruits grown using methods of slash-and-burn horticulture, supplemented by the meat of domestic pigs and fowls as well as bats, snakes, marsupials, and wild boar hunted in the forest. Some people grew coffee or copra to sell for small sums of money to traders. The fate of such crops was a mystery to their producers. Clearly you couldn’t eat the stuff. But the coins you received in return were very useful. You could buy bush knives and axes, which were more efficient at cutting down trees or butchering animals than traditional stone tools. But money also had another use. It could bring you closer to your ancestors.
I soon realized that families were more than just groups of living relatives. They encompassed a multitude of invisible spirits of the dead, who moved among us, taking an active interest in our comings and goings. As one of the leaders in my village put it, “The eyes of the ancestors see all our thoughts and deeds, and the things we say. The ancestors can sometimes discern observances and violations of the law, even though we are not aware of what we are doing” (my translation).
The red coloration should be created by lacerating our tongues and spitting out the blood.
The ancestors were thought to see into our hearts and minds and evaluate our behavior, as well as to observe everything we said and did. Every day the people in my village left out offerings of food and water in special temples so that the ancestors would come to eat and drink. When the spirits of the deceased gathered in this way, they were said to form the “village government.”
The village government comprised hundreds, possibly thousands of ancestors. Many were loved ones and remembered fondly—mostly victims of common diseases like malaria, which continually claimed people’s lives. But many were also remembered only by name, being from generations long past. The members of the village government loved them, and their living descendants loved them in return.
But the village members were always letting them down through their sinful ways. Somebody would forget to perform the right ritual, teenagers would sneak off to have sex in the forest, a man would promise to help his cousin in the garden and then fail to turn up. The ancestors saw it all. And that’s when money became most useful. There were special receptacles in the temple, where people could place the coins they had accrued from selling crops, and in return receive forgiveness for their sins.
This practice was inspired by Catholic missionaries. On his occasional visits, a priest would conduct a Mass and hear confessions in the village, but nobody believed his rituals did any good. People humored him out of politeness, but they knew that the real way to their ancestors’ hearts was through the temple rituals.
One day, the ancestors—gratified by the acts of devotion bestowed upon them in the temple rituals—would return from the dead and our giant family would be reunited. When this happened, it was said that the ancestors would have white skin and straight hair, just like the British, Germans, and Australians who had colonized New Guinea, bringing with them unfathomable wealth and technology.
As a young white man with passionate anti-racist convictions, I was horrified to learn about this dogma. For me, the obvious remedy was to eliminate the association between white skin, power, and wealth by establishing a more equal society in which all skin colors would be regarded with equal respect and pride. But for my Mali friends, the solution was to become one with the colonial invaders by themselves becoming white.
It was said that the returning ancestors would be rich beyond compare. And they would share this wealth with their descendants who, in turn, would peel off their earthly skin, and the many wounds and scars acquired from hard living, to discover unblemished white skin beneath. Then all of us would enjoy a period of eternal peace, health, and prosperity together.
The community I lived with frequently gathered in the village meeting house, to discuss how best to strengthen our bonds with the ancestors and hasten the miracle of their return. Sometimes people would ask me questions about England and listen in astonishment to my tales about the rituals of my college in Cambridge—especially the strange rules relating to dining etiquette, such as the wearing of gowns, saying grace in an ancient language, and passing the port in one direction only.
People wanted to know if the food was laid out in the same way as in our village temples? Did all the paintings on the walls around the dining hall depict our ancestors? Why was King’s College Chapel so big? How many ancestors did the college have? Sometimes people would ask me probing questions about why I was sent to live with the Mali. How did I acquire the seemingly endless supply of money in my pockets?
I explained that my doctoral research was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council—public funds, raised from taxes. There was no other way to explain this in the local language than to use the word “government.” But as soon as I uttered it, I realized I had been misunderstood. The entire community fell silent. “So, you were sent to us by the village government?” asked one of the elders.
Later, one of my closest confidants told me of a rumour that my presence in the village was a sign. “A sign of what?” I wanted to know. He said they believed I was an ancestor, and this was a portent that more would follow. It seemed to me quite incredible that anyone could mistake me for an ancestor. I was possibly the most incompetent person in the village when it came to almost anything of importance: gardening, hunting, cooking, or even speaking properly. “And what do you think?” I asked. He paused, apparently mulling it over. “I think you are an ancestor,” he said at last.
Becoming an ancestor was one way of joining the Mali family—albeit rather unusual and not without its drawbacks. Another way was to be initiated into the tribe. I first learned about this from one of the elders, who had become used to my endless questions about the arts of warfare and raiding, how to catch pythons without getting killed, or which kinds of magic were needed to find a lost dog. When I started asking about initiations, his voice dropped to a whisper.
Most of what he told me involved the secret techniques for making dancing costumes and masks. But two aspects of his account became lodged in my memory more firmly than the rest. One was that the red coloration on the masks should be created by lacerating our tongues and spitting out the blood to use as paint. The other was that we should have penis extensions fastened to us by a belt secured at our back by sharpened bones driven through the skin at the base of our spines.
When my time came to be initiated, I got off lightly. I was put through a sanitized version of the rituals, in which red paint was used instead of my blood and my dancing costume was secured by a knot, without having any sharp objects thrust into my body. But even though I was spared the most painful elements, I will never forget the pride I felt when I danced before the entire community, along with the other initiated men dressed in all our finery. I was part of the Mali family—whether or not I was also one of its progenitors.
The entire community fell silent. “So, you were sent to us by the village government?”
Then one day there was a terrible storm. As high winds and torrential rain swept through the village, some of us huddled together in the meeting house, trying to keep the fire going. People began to tell stories about tropical storms, and someone mentioned the time that a cyclone hit Australia, to the south of us.
Stories about Australians whose houses had been destroyed had traveled far and wide. To my astonishment, I learned that the people in the community and hundreds of others like it throughout the rainforest had been so appalled to hear of the suffering of their “brothers and sisters” in Australia that they decided to donate much of the money they had collected in their temples to help victims of the storm.
Nobody seemed to realize that their rich neighbors in Australia were mostly well insured or that their emergency services were well equipped to help them get through the disaster. Or maybe it didn’t matter. The way they spoke about it, the Australians were like family to them. And when family is in need, you do what you can. That’s what family is for.
I returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1989, and I was soon back at my desk surrounded by books. But I found myself frequently reflecting on this extraordinary act of generosity and especially the idea that family could be extended to include people from other cultures one will never meet and even to the dead who may one day return. As an anthropologist, I had read many theories about kinship, but none of them seemed to capture exactly the ways of thinking I had encountered in the rainforest. It gradually dawned on me that kinship boiled down to the sharing of something essential to oneself with other people.
This special “something” could be some feature of your body. Where I grew up in England, we talked about shared blood among family members. In other places it might be bones or even something intangible like the Polynesian concept of mana—the spiritual power or lifeforce associated with heritable positions of high social status. But however we conceptualize it—and whatever we call it—this essence is something we inherit from our ancestors. It connects us to them and to each other.
This is how we create tribes based on shared descent—and how we create the idea of ethnic groups whose shared ancestry is passed down in the form of traits we can see on the body. My family in the rainforest connected themselves in this way to me and even to people in Australia they had never met. This helped me to understand better their belief that we all share the same skin underneath.
But there was another way of sharing essences with other people. This way involved sharing something in the mind rather than in the body. It involved sharing experiences and memories that were essential to your autobiographic self, your sense of who you were as a person. That’s how the initiation rituals worked. They created memories of emotionally intense, life-changing experiences that were shared with other members of the group and with their ancestors.
If the tribe members in Papua New Guinea were capable of using these same methods of group-bonding to help people in faraway countries, then maybe they could teach us how to tackle cooperative problems on an even larger scale. By realizing that we are indeed one global family—descended from common ancestors—perhaps all of us may be capable of the same acts of generosity.
Lead photo: The Mali, an Indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, in a ceremonial dance. Photo courtesy of Harvey Whitehouse.
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