The Ragged Edge of the World by Eugene Linden Page B

double-edged sword of spreading pidgin, saw his role in part as one of trying to mitigate the pain and suffering that inevitably accompany encounters at the ragged edge of the world. “The problem,” as he explained it, “is that these people were forced to jump from the Stone Age to the atomic age with nothing in between. Many people in the highlands saw their first wheel in their lives in a plane. The director of aviation told me that he rode in a plane before he rode in a car.”
    He saw this as one reason why cargo cults flourished here but not in Polynesia. Father Mihalic recalled that when he posed that question to Margaret Mead, she pointed out that the first Europeans the Polynesians encountered arrived in ships. If something went wrong with a ship, ordinary men could fix it, and the Polynesians could see that the ship was something built by people, that it was a larger version of what they built themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, European machines—for example, the steam engine—had become so complicated that they required specialists to attend to them.
    From his earliest years in the order Mihalic had been a different type of missionary. Before he came to New Guinea he, like most members of Divine Word, went through training in anthropology, linguistics and ethnology. His order believed not in supplanting cultures, but in learning about them and then attempting to build upon them. He was proud that on occasion his order had stopped the government from burning haus tambarans.
    Mihalic witnessed the alienation from traditional cultures growing from generation to generation. “Students would wince when I talked about how their dad or mom lived. They don’t like history, because history is embarrassing. You won’t find anyone in the library reading about Papuan history—for students it’s the least interesting subject on campus.”
    He then went on to describe how this delegitimization of traditional knowledge led to larger problems in the society. “You leave your family and go to school, which takes you away from the village for many years. You live in a school atmosphere where everything is given to you. You’re told that education is the key to a job, but then you graduate and can’t get a job. You can’t go back to the village, because that would be uncomfortable. Besides, you’d miss the glamour. To make it even worse, in many cases your parents don’t want you to come back. They’ll say, ‘We spent all our money on you, and you’re still sponging off us—go out and get a job.’ ”

    After leaving Mihalic I wanted to get the perspective of a Papuan who had successfully dealt with those pressures. In Port Moresby I met up with John Maru, who then worked in New Guinea’s Ministry for Home Affairs and Youth (and who later became chief superintendent of the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary). He had grown up in the Sepik region in a village about 20 kilometers from the coastal city of Wewak. One of eight children, Maru acknowledged that he had no idea how his father managed to pay the school fees for all of them.
    At first, after graduating, he said that he viewed the bonds of the traditional culture as useless, and the endless gift exchanges (elaborate ceremonies in which pigs and other items are exchanged to seal bonds between different families and clans) as a waste of time and money. He also freely admitted that the price of his schooling was ignorance of the local knowledge of his village. “If you asked me what plant to use if you were hurt or sick, I just wouldn’t know,” he remarked a bit ruefully.
    But through his job in youth services, he also saw firsthand the costs of alienation from a supporting culture. “If you get rid of these gift exchanges,” he noted, “you also lose your relationship to your family.” He added, “An extended family ensures that there is