Distinguished Anthropologist and Indigenous Lawyer Rebut The New Yorker Magazine's Savage Portrait of Revenge Warfare in Papua New Guinea

NEW YORK, April 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- StinkyJournalism is pleased to present "Rebutting Jared Diamond's Savage Portrait: What tribal societies can tell us about justice and liberty," the other side of a now infamous story that led to a lawsuit against The New Yorker and bestselling author Jared Diamond.  

It's the true story of revenge warfare in the Southern Highlands region of Papua New Guinea, one that has never before been published. It is also the un-sensationalized account of the events and persons that were falsely presented in Diamond's April 2008 New Yorker article, "Vengeance is Ours."

An important original historical account of an actual war, "Rebutting Jared Diamond's Savage Portrait" is written by an anthropologist who has spent decades in Papua New Guinea and an indigenous lawyer who has lived there his whole life and witnessed some of the events firsthand.

Paul Sillitoe, renowned British anthropologist, and Mako John Kuwimb, Ph.D. candidate in law and a Handa tribesman, have written the first ethnographic history and the true story of the tribal warfare in the Wola area of the Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. Their piece, "Rebutting Jared Diamond's Savage Portrait," is the tenth in a series of articles called The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker that StinkyJournalism has published on the controversy surrounding the article "Vengeance is Ours." Previous articles were written by ethics scholars in the fields of anthropology and communications, as well as journalists, environmental scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists.

In his article "Vengeance is Ours," which was published in the April 21, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, Diamond wrote that Wemp and Mandingo were the instigators and leaders of a bloody and protracted war between the Handa and Ombal tribes--all untrue. After a StinkyJournalism investigation, The New Yorker removed the article from its Web site and has since been embroiled in a lawsuit. Indeed, it was one year ago that Papua New Guinea tribesmen Hup Daniel Wemp and Henep Isum Mandingo filed a lawsuit against The New Yorker and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and university professor Jared Diamond for libel per se in New York State Supreme Court, April 20, 2009. 

Sillitoe and Kuwimb write: 

"The popular image of tribal war is traceable to Renaissance times, when Europeans first encountered tribal peoples – is of savages condemned to disorderly, even anarchic lives of constant violence and frequent bloodletting.  We seek to refute this portrayal in general and Diamond's article in particular, which we believe amounts to nothing less than a betrayal. We were prompted to do this by the defamation of friends and relatives in the Was Valley of the Southern Highlands Province (SHP) of Papua New Guinea (PNG) who have, in Diamond's article, been cast in such a caricature of tribal life as inveterate murderers, plunderers and rapists living in virtual chaos.

It is astonishing that media outlets still grant space to such a view of tribal life after a century of anthropological research has debunked it.  Stateless or acephalous (headless – i.e. without authoritative officeholders) polities have long attracted attention and we have accounts of fascinating arrangements that substitute for central government. The Highlands of New Guinea have featured prominently in furthering our understanding of such tribal constitutions.  So here we go, yet again, to rebut the savage misrepresentation."

Read more at StinkyJournalism.org

PAUL SILLITOE is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University and Shell Professorial Chair of Sustainable Development at Qatar University. Sillitoe has long-standing interests in the Pacific, having conducted extensive fieldwork in PNG.  In fact, Sillitoe was living in the Was Valley SHP, conducting fieldwork during the K2 hostilities and saw the fighting firsthand.  Despite his world prominence as an anthropologist whose voluminous and meticulous research on the Was Valley is set to become an ethnographic classic, neither Diamond nor The New Yorker fact checkers ever contacted him.

MAKO JOHN KUWIMB is a Ph.D. candidate at the James Cook University School of Law, Australia, and a former adjunct lecturer for the University's Native Title Studies Center.  Prior to beginning his Ph.D. studies, Kuwimb was the First Secretary to the Minister for Lands & Physical Planning in the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea.  He also worked as a litigation lawyer with Warner Shand Lawyers and later had a private legal practice.  He lives and works as a lawyer in Port Moresby.

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SOURCE StinkyJournalism.org