The Ragged Edge of the World by Eugene Linden

did not feel I was encountering New Guinea.

    Back in Madang I immediately set about tracking down Saem Majnep. Diminutive in stature, Majnep is a member of the Kalem clan of the Kaironk Valley in the highlands, but he embodies the hope that New Guinea might come to terms with the modern world without abandoning the knowledge and culture that held its clans together for thousands of years. He was a student at a missionary school in the late 1950s when he was hired as a translator by the distinguished ornithologist Ralph Bulmer. Though he was studying evangelism in school, he spent his free time out in the forest with his relatives and friends learning about the habits of birds, the uses of plants and all the incunabula of a hunter-gatherer life.
    â€œUnprepossessing” doesn’t begin to describe how Majnep appeared at first glance, but he grew in stature almost from the first word. He was serious, but he had a ready smile and he radiated quiet dignity.
    His story underscores a simple but profoundly important aspect of the worldwide loss of indigenous knowledge: that the toxin of cultural amnesia is often introduced as normally and benignly as sending children away to school. “If you stay in your village,” he said, “it is easy to pick up this learning [about plants and animals] because it is all around you, but when people go to Madang, they lose it very quickly.”
    Bulmer picked up on Majnep’s local knowledge and realized that he had found something more than a translator in the young man. He began interviewing him about the feeding and breeding habits of the birds he had come to study. Bulmer appreciated that the practical ecological knowledge of Majnep and other villagers could save him an enormous amount of time. Majnep said that at first other villagers resisted telling Bulmer their stories, but soon came to regard him as honest. Ultimately Bulmer gave Majnep credit in many of his monographs on the birds of New Guinea, and Majnep published a few in his own name.
    As beneficial as this collaboration was for Bulmer, it was ultimately far more important to Majnep and the other villagers. Missionaries had tended to dismiss the traditional knowledge of the Kalem people as mere superstition, but here was a distinguished scientist from New Zealand who sought out their learning. This was an eye-opening experience for the whole village, and it had a profound effect on young Majnep.
    For the first time he felt that his traditional culture had value. He began noticing the ways in which people used that practical knowledge in their daily lives, where the knowledge was being used, and where it was being lost. For instance, he noted that even though many of the young were ashamed of what they regarded as the backwardness of their parents, almost everyone still relied on traditional medicines and felt some ambivalence about going to a clinic if they were sick.
    He also noted that a lot of critical knowledge was simply slipping away. Culturally illiterate young people no longer knew which trees made the best house posts or firewood, and would make themselves sick by burning what he called poison oak or by burning mango wood.
    Majnep grew up as an eyewitness to the ways in which a traditional society can gradually become unglued. He saw the delicate equilibrium of slash-and-burn agriculture fall out of balance as populations grew, and people forgot proper procedures for rotations, converting forests to grassland and reducing the casuarinas, whose wood was used as firewood and whose sap was converted to gum.
    He was also sophisticated enough to recognize that traditional beliefs can make people unwitting conservationists. One of the most powerful tools protecting the forest is the aforementioned maselai —the belief that the spirits of the ancestors inhabits certain trees, and if those trees are cut down, all manner of woes will be visited on the perpetrator. Majnep said that maselai still exerted a