The latest issue of Outside Magazine has
an article about the new thing in adventure vacations:
a First Contact tour. On these tours, run by guide Kelly Woolford, you get to trek into the rainforest of Papua New Guinea and make contact with a 'Stone Age' tribe that has never met people from the outside world before. Apparently such tribes do still exist (though obviously they won't for long if these tours get more popular). Michael Behar, author of the article, decides to go on one of these tours and see what it's all about. So in September 2004 he joins the tour and they set off on a boat down a river in Papua New Guinea. After cruising along for a few days they finally get off the boat and start trekking into the jungle. Four hours from the river they make contact. Unfortunately it doesn't go well. The tribesmen they meet (who are wearing black headdresses made from cassowary feathers), end up attacking them, and the tour flees back to civilization. But once he's back home Behar starts to doubt whether he really experienced a 'first contact'. He suspects that the entire encounter was staged for his benefit. Maybe Woolford had arranged beforehand for the tribesmen to be there. Anthropologists whom Behar tells about the contact support this suspicion, noting that the tribesmen appeared to be suspiciously free of skin diseases for people living in the jungle. Plus, why were they wearing those ceremonial headdresses? But Woolford insists it was all real, arguing that the tribesmen were free of skin diseases because they lived near a source of fresh water in which they could bathe, and that they were wearing the headdresses simply because they enjoy dressing up. So Behar is left not knowing what to believe. It does sound an awful lot like a
Stone Age Tasaday scenario to me. But even if it's not, the idea of a First Contact Tour is somehow very depressing.
Comments
-the headdress thing ceremonial attire tends to be time consuming and expensive to make, the investment it represents isn't something you risk "because you like to dress up"
-most of the tribes in the region have been contacted by either anthropologists or government officials (warrent officers etc...), and the easier their territories are to access, the more contact they have had. (next to a river=easy access)
-just because a specific village hasn't been directly contacted by westerners (if there are any anymore), dosn't make them "stone age savages." at the very least, certain western trade goods (metal axes for example) have certainly reached them (second or third hand).
-cannibalism has been forcefully eradicated from the region,
hope this wasn't too long-winded
(though I know it was)
In one of my classes, we watched a video called First Contact that was made almost 100 years ago, with a tribe in New Guinea. I remember mye teacher explaining that the tribe shown in this film was one of the last to not have made contact with the Western world. So big thumbs down from me. 😛
If it is real, it is a horrible, even criminal practice, for more reasons than I have time to write.
"First-world" peoples, and especially North Americans, need to get over the idea that the rest of the world is an amusement park existing for our entertainment.
I'm thinking that the only person who knows for sure is Woolford, and he'll deny it.
More than likely Woolford made arrangements with locals to provide the First Contact tribe. At $8000 USD per person, that's plenty to work with. The porters, the guide, are all not privvy to this - which explains their genuine fear and reactions.
The old joke about New Guinea is that the average extended family there consists of a mother, a father, a couple of grandparents, several kids, and an American or European cultural anthropologist.
To point out all errors, inconsistancies, and gaps in logic would take too long, since nobody's paying me to write a review, so I'll just say I strongly doubt that the author ever went to New Guinea at all.
For one thing, the Indonesian half of the island is called Irian Jaya or West Irian. For some reason, Behar keeps calling it "West Papua," I term I've never seen or heard before.
I totally agree with Big Gary C where he said ""First-world" peoples, and especially North Americans, need to get over the idea that the rest of the world is an amusement park existing for our entertainment."
Hairy, I have some people I'd love to send on your "Worst Contact Tour" as a surprise vacation! I think they'd just love it! 😉
http://www.michie.net/pnginfo/sil.html
I can already tell you it staged because the area he describes is the Sepik River and all the tribes have been contacted in that area. However, there are tribes in the deep rain forest of PNG that havent been discovered.
There are 800+ known tribes, and only 150 have been translated. So 650+ tribes dont know its illegal to eat eachother!