Marc Randazza talks back to the New Guinea tribesman who says he’s suing Jared Diamond and the New Yorker for reporting as fact what he says were merely tall tales he spun about blood feuds on the island (earlier).
Marc Randazza talks back to the New Guinea tribesman who says he’s suing Jared Diamond and the New Yorker for reporting as fact what he says were merely tall tales he spun about blood feuds on the island (earlier).
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You would think that anthropologists would have learned by now not to take the natives stories at face value. I remember taking an anthropology course in college many years ago. The course discussed Margaret Mead’s work on the sexual mores of the natives in the Pacific islands. There was only one problem. The natives had made it all up. It is obvious that the real rubes are the “sophisticated” Westerners who believe the stories told by those “simple” natives who would not even know how to lie. I bet the natives got a good laugh every evening recounting to their friends the fact that this credulous woman fell for their stories hook, line and sinker.
Yep… I remember finding a book in the University of Florida’s library about the Sicilian fishermen from Gloucester, Mass. I happen to be from there, and most of the interviewees in the book were my relatives. When I opened the book and started reading what they had told this Ph.D. student, I realized that they were all screwing with him.