Recently somebody who shares my distaste for Jared Diamond alerted me to
an article that appeared in the April 21, 2008 “New Yorker”. Titled
“Vengeance is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to
get even?“, it is focused on so-called tribal wars in the highlands of
Papua New Guinea, where Diamond has conducted many field trips studying
the flora and fauna, as well as the bestial tribesmen apparently.
Using interviews with an ostensibly self-confessed killer named Daniel
Wemp, who is a member of the Handa clan, the innocent reader is led to
believe that the highlands of Papua are a kind of a Rosetta stone for
understanding wars and ethnic cleansing. The feuding in the highlands,
which usually involve slights such as a pig belonging to one clan
ruining the garden of another clan, leads to a steady escalation of
Hatfield-McCoy type confrontations that remind Diamond of the worst
crimes of the 20th century:
Indeed, Daniel Wemp’s bloodlust triggers memories of Diamond’s late
father-in-law Jozef Nabel (a Jew) who refused at the list minute to
wreak vengeance on Polish villagers who had killed his wife, sister and
niece in pursuit of loot. Nabel, who served in a Polish division
attached to the Red Army, eventually caught up with the perpetrators but
decided at the last minute not to wreak vengeance since the new Polish
government would be expected to carry out justice. But by relinquishing
control to a higher body, a kind of primitive, almost animal-like
satisfaction is lost as Diamond puts it:
"My conversations with Daniel made me understand what we have given up
by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state
societies and their associated religions and moral codes teach us that
seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly
needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely
permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who
has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm
themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state
governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some
personal satisfaction, by allowing them to be present at the trial of
the accused, and, in some cases, to address the judge or jury, or even
to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer."
The first thing that leapt out at me when reading Diamond’s article is
how devoid of social or economic context it is. You feel that you are
reading something out of the Old Testament-but without the deity
instructing the Israelis to punish the Egyptians, etc. Diamond makes it
clear that such considerations do not interest him. He writes:
"Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeper
underlying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the
participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a
woman or a pig."
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/jared-diamond-on-tribal-warfare-in-new-guinea/
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