Category Archives: Pacific

by | 24 August 2006 · 8:15 pm

Rapacious Rats Deforested Rapa Nui?

Pace Jared Diamond, who “described Rapa Nui as ‘the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources’,” new archaeological results from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) suggest that it may have been rats, not humans, who deforested Rapa Nui—and Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.

For thousands of years, most of Rapa Nui was covered with palm trees. Pollen records show that the Jubaea palm became established at least 35,000 years ago and survived a number of climatic and environmental changes. But by the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of these large stands of forest had disappeared.

It is not a new observation that virtually all of the shells housing palm seeds found in caves or archaeological excavations of Rapa Nui show evidence of having been gnawed on by rats, but the impact of rats on the island’s fate may have been underestimated. Evidence from elsewhere in the Pacific shows that rats have often contributed to deforestation, and they may have played a major role in Rapa Nui’s environmental degradation as well.

Archaeologist J. Stephen Athens of the International Archaeological Research Institute conducted excavations on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu and found that deforestation of the Ewa Plain took place largely between 900 and 1100 A.D. but that the first evidence of human presence on this part of the island was not until about 1250 A.D. There were no climatic explanations for the disappearance of palm trees, but there was evidence that the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), introduced by the first human colonists, was present in the area by about 900 A.D. Athens showed that it was likely rats that deforested large areas of Oahu.

Paleobotanists have demonstrated the destructive effect of rats on native vegetation on a number of other islands as well, even those as ecologically diverse as New Zealand. In areas where rats are removed, vegetation often recovers quickly. And on Nihoa Island, in the northwest Hawaiian Islands, where there is no evidence that rats ever became established, the island’s native vegetation still survives despite prehistoric human settlement.

Whether rats were stowaways or a source of protein for the Polynesian voyagers, they would have found a welcoming environment on Rapa Nui—an almost unlimited supply of high-quality food and, other than people, no predators. In such an ideal setting, rats can reproduce so quickly that their population doubles about every six or seven weeks. A single mating pair could thus reach a population of almost 17 million in just over three years. On Kure Atoll in the Hawaiian Islands, at a latitude similar to Rapa Nui but with a smaller supply of food, the population density of the Polynesian rat was reported in the 1970s to have reached 45 per acre. On Rapa Nui, that would equate to a rat population of more than 1.9 million. At a density of 75 per acre, which would not be unreasonable given the past abundance of food, the rat population could have exceeded 3.1 million.

The evidence from elsewhere in the Pacific makes it hard to believe that rats would not have caused rapid and widespread environmental degradation. But there is still the question of how much of an effect rats had relative to the changes caused by humans, who cut down trees for a number of uses and practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. I believe that there is substantial evidence that it was rats, more so than humans, that led to deforestation.

Our work on Anakena, as well as previous archaeological studies, found thousands of rat bones. It seems that the Polynesian rat population grew quickly, then fell more recently before becoming extinct in the face of competition from rat species introduced by Europeans. Almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island show signs of having been gnawed on by rats, indicating that these once-ubiquitous rodents did affect the Jubaea palm’s ability to reproduce. Reason to blame rats more than people may also be revealed in the analysis of sediments obtained at Rano Kau, which, like the Hawaiian evidence, appears to show that the forest declined (leaving less forest pollen in the sediment) before the extensive use of fire by people.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 22 August 2006 · 5:37 pm

Remembering Iwo Jima, Both Victors and Vanquished

Joe Rosenthal has died. By a stroke of good luck, he was able to capture an image of victory after one of the most hard-fought battles of the Pacific War.

Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who captured the enduring image of the American fighting man in World War II with his depiction of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising a huge American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, died Sunday in Novato, Calif. He was 94….

His photograph of the flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, may be the most widely reproduced photo in American history. It was re-created on at least 3.5 million Treasury Department posters publicizing a massive war-bond campaign. It was engraved on three-cent Marine Corps commemorative stamps that broke Post Office records for first-day cancellations in 1945. It was reproduced as a 100-ton Marine Corps War Memorial bronze sculpture near Arlington National Cemetery. And it brought Mr. Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize.

But almost from the day the photograph was emblazoned on the front pages of Sunday newspapers as a symbol of embattled patriotism, Mr. Rosenthal faced suspicions that he staged the shot, posing the Marines. He always insisted that he recorded a genuine event, and others on the scene corroborated his account.

“The picture was not posed,” Louis Burmeister, a former Marine combat photographer who was among four military photographers alongside Mr. Rosenthal as the flag went up, said in a 1993 interview for “Shadow of Suribachi,” by Parker Bishop Albee Jr. and Keller Cushing Freeman. [It’s amazing how persistent that rumor is in newsrooms that can’t spot photographs that are not just posed, but photoshopped, from current war zones.–J.] …

After being declared 4-F by the armed forces because he could see only one-twentieth as well as an average person, Mr. Rosenthal joined the United States Maritime Service, taking photos of Atlantic Ocean convoys. In March 1944, he went to the Pacific on assignment for the A.P. and later photographed the invasions of New Guinea, Hollandia, Guam, Peleliu and Angaur.

On Feb. 19, 1945, Mr. Rosenthal accompanied the early waves of a 70,000-man Marine force ordered to seize Iwo Jima, a 7.5 square miles of black volcanic sand about 660 miles south of Tokyo. The island, defended by 21,000 Japanese troops, held airstrips that were needed as bases for American fighter planes and as havens for crippled bombers returning to the Mariana Islands from missions over Japan.

By coincidence, the Japan Times [registration required] recently ran a fascinating profile of Gen. Kuribayashi, who commanded the Japanese forces on the island.

The warrior Japan chose to lead this fight to the last in the spring of 1945 was a mercurial, contradictory man: a samurai descendant and loyal servant of the Emperor who detested much of Japan’s authoritarian, military culture; a fanatical Imperial warrior devoted to his family; an elite graduate of Japan’s top military academy who read Shakespeare, spoke fluent English and narrowly opted for the army over a career in journalism.

“The United States is the last country in the world Japan should fight,” Kuribayashi wrote in a letter home days before his doomed forces inflicted massive casualties on U.S. forces landing on the 22.4-sq.-km (7-sq.-mile) island.

The tensions in Kuribayashi’s character, and his reluctance to go to war with the U.S., slowed his rise through the ranks of Japan’s military, says grandson, Yoshitaka Shindo. “My grandfather was sidelined because he didn’t fit in with military thinking. He had friends in America and respected the country.”

According to colleague Army Capt. Kikuzo Musashino, “The general spoke about his years in America, saying they had enormous industrial resources. He said: ‘When war comes, they can convert all that ability into military use. The people who planned this war in Japan know absolutely nothing about this. Whatever way you look at this war, we can’t win.’ “

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Filed under Japan, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 20 August 2006 · 11:27 am

Surviving Nine Months Adrift at Sea

This Sunday’s inspirational reading comes from a story that appeared last Thursday on Canada.com.

Three Mexican fishermen who disappeared in the Pacific Ocean nine months ago have been rescued nearly 8,000 kilometres from their home, saying they survived by eating seagulls, drinking rainwater and reading the Bible.

A Taiwanese tuna boat scooped the men out of the water about halfway between Hawaii and Australia on Aug. 9. They had drifted all the way from San Blas, a fishing village about 160 kilometres north of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where they were last seen in late October or early November, 2005….

Crew members aboard a Taiwanese trawler spotted the men’s small boat and realized they were alive, said Eugene Muller, manager of Koo’s Fishing Company Ltd.

“They seemed to be in very good health, given what they just went through,” Mr. Muller said in an interview from Majuro, the capital city of the Marshall Islands. “Other than being very hungry and having lost a lot of weight, our crew said they didn’t need any medical attention.”

The survivors told a Mexican radio station that it rained nearly every day of their ordeal, providing them with fresh water to drink. One of the men had a watch that kept track of the days. They passed time by reading a copy of the Bible one of the men brought along.

“We ate raw fish, ducks and seagulls. We took down any bird that landed on our boat and we ate it like that, raw,” Mr. Vidana, 27, said from aboard the trawler. He said they frequently saw ships during their months at sea, but were lucky to be picked up because they were asleep when trawler’s crew saw them.

“We never lost hope,” Mr. Vidana said. “They passed us by, but we kept on seeing them. Every week or so, sometimes we’d go a month without seeing one, but we always saw them so we never lost hope.”

via Althouse via Bizzyblog

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by | 28 July 2006 · 8:11 pm

Alex Golub on Unfulfilled Consumers in PNG

Another Pacific-area article that caught my fancy is Alex Golub‘s Who Is the “Original Affluent Society”? Ipili “Predatory Expansion” and the Porgera Gold Mine, Papua New Guinea in the latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific at Project Muse (subscription required). Here are a few paragraphs from the introduction and conclusion (some references removed).

In the 1970s, first-world fantasies of “ecologically noble savages” were key to the creation of alliances between indigenous groups, environmentalists, and affluent first-world publics. More recently, however, anthropologists have grown increasingly critical of such stereotypes of indigenous people. In areas as diverse as Amazonia, Australia, North America, and Indonesia, indigenous peoples find their political leverage derives from filling first-world fantasies that are often essentialized and stifling.

This dynamic has taken another interesting twist in Papua New Guinea. Unlike many Commonwealth countries, Papua New Guinea has no settler population, and, unlike many African states, it has no majority ethnic group. Furthermore, Australia’s administration of Papua New Guinea was both well meaning and under-resourced. As a result there has been little alienation of land and it is difficult to recognize Papua New Guineans as “indigenous people” separate from “settler” populations, as is typically done in Australia, Africa, and the New World. At the same time, however, Papua New Guinea is highly reliant on resource rents, and the activities of international logging, mining, and hydrocarbon companies present a picture of a David-and-Goliath struggle between local people and transnational capital that is comfortably familiar to many first-world activists.

Like scholars elsewhere, Melanesianists are increasingly dissatisfied with stereotypes of grassroots Papua New Guineans as ecologically noble savages. A growing literature has, for instance, emphasized the ways in which compensation claims for damage to the environment are part of a complex local politics. Glenn Banks has argued that compensation claims are often a way of expressing a sense of disenfranchisement by people outside of mining lease areas (2002), while Martha Macintyre and Simon Foale have argued convincingly that even for people within mining lease areas, claims of environmental damage are often expressions of dissatisfaction with social concerns couched in environmental idioms (2002).

But there is a danger that these responsible works could be misread by policy elites in Port Moresby, the national capital, who often see landowners as savages more nasty than noble. Papua New Guineans have one of the best track records in the world for extracting concessions from foreign developers and the national government, and the demands of landowners have become so strident that the overall perception nationwide is that they are corrupted opportunists who have given up their traditional culture in order to “go for money” (Filer and others 2000). Thus, at one industry conference in 2000, the president of the Papua New Guinea Chamber of Mining and Petroleum claimed that “people issues are at the forefront of the mining and petroleum industries” in Papua New Guinea. The industry’s biggest challenge, he claimed, were “community problems that could have been avoided” and that were caused by “so-called ‘landowners'” who ripped off the government. “The rip-off is so blatant,” he said, “[that] it penetrates into the fabric of the government” (Golub fieldnotes 2000). Other speakers were more blunt. “Community affairs issues will shut down this country,” said one mining executive, himself from the highlands region (Golub fieldnotes 2000)….

To an audience familiar with stereotypes of noble savages, the reaction of the Ipili to the mine can be startling. Elites in Port Moresby who romanticize a traditional “Melanesian Way” feel betrayed by landowners who fail to conform to their expectations. At the same time, first-world activists interested in finding “guardians of the forest” in Porgera will be disappointed indeed at the alacrity with which the Ipili, as they say, “traded their mountain for development.”

But it may be that the unease the Ipili instill in others is due to the fact that they are driven by concerns remarkably like “our own.” Their desire for new commodities, time-saving devices, and prepared food is in many ways not so different from what one would find in any major city in the United States. Thus it could be said that “they” are not as bad as “we” are, or, to put it another way, that “we” are as good as “they.”

So which is the original affluent society? Just as we see our own weak points in Ipili prodigality, so do Ipili imagine whites, as a version of their present or possible selves. This examination of Ipili culture reveals them to be a bit more like ourselves than we have been led to believe. Sahlins looked to hunters and gatherers to explode the Western, Hobbesian conception of infinite need. Studying the Ipili suggests that the West is not the only place plagued by need and want. Ipili do not denounce consumer society in the name of a pristine, authentic primitivism. They denounce it for failing to make good on its promises. The problem, as they see it, is not enough affluence.

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Filed under Indonesia, Papua New Guinea

by | 2 June 2006 · 1:07 am

Diaspora Month at the Head Heeb

The Head Heeb devoted special attention to diaspora during May. His last post on that topic concerned the Maori diaspora in Australia. Here’s a short extract.

The exact size of the Maori diaspora is difficult to determine, but it appears to be growing rapidly. The New Zealand statistical bureau estimates that, by the mid-1980s, some 27,000 Maori were living in Australia, representing “just over 6 percent of the New Zealand Māori descent population at that time.” By the time of the 2001 Australian census, this number had grown to 72,956. Given that the ancestry question in the Australian national census relies on self-identification and that respondents may select up to two ancestries, this figure may understate or (more likely) overstate the size of the Maori minority in Australia, but it indicates at minimum that 20 percent of New Zealand-born Australians self-identify as Maori. This, in turn, means that (1) Maori form a greater proportion of the New Zealand-born population in Australia than they do in New Zealand, and (2) between 1986 and 2001, Maori emigrated to Australia at a considerably faster rate than white New Zealanders.

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Filed under Australia, New Zealand, Pacific, Polynesia

by | 30 May 2006 · 8:29 pm

Saipan Impressions: Chamorro and Carolinian

Carolinian village marker, GarapanWhen I went to Saipan I didn’t expect to encounter either of its two indigenous languages: Chamorro and Saipanese Carolinian. And indeed I saw next to nothing written in either language. Nothing in Chamorro but the greeting “Hafa Adai” (on every license plate), and nothing in Carolinian except a plaque (pictured here) in the American Memorial Park that marked the site of the old Carolinian village at Garapan.

But then I found KCNM-FM 101.1 on my rent-a-car radio and stayed tuned to it whenever I was driving. It played a wonderful assortment of contemporary Micronesian music, from Palauan enka to Chuukese country to Gilbertese gospel, which can all be sampled on Jane Resture‘s Micronesian Music Radio on Live365.com.

The music was interrupted periodically by NPR news in English and occasional announcements or classified ads in Chamorro, with prices quoted in English and telephone numbers in Chamorro. The Chamorro number system is now based on Spanish: unu, dos, tres, kuatro, sinko, sais, siette, ocho, nuebi, dies. (According to Wikipedia, the basic set of old Chamorro numbers was hacha, hugua, tulu, fatfat, lima, gunum, fiti, gualu, sigua, manot/fulu—far more Philippine-looking.)

Chamorros and Carolinians on Saipan are fighting an uphill battle to preserve their ancestral languages (and many have already surrendered). The resident population of the Northern Marianas is about 35% Filipino, 20% Chamorro, 10% Chinese, 10% Korean, 5% “Anglo”, with smaller numbers of Japanese, Palauans, and other Micronesians. Most of the retail clerks and wait help I encountered spoke Filipino and Filipino-accented English to each other. Most of the tourists I encountered spoke Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. The signage around Chalan Kanoa, which used to be the main Micronesian barrio when the U.S. Navy controlled most of the island, is now overwhelmingly Chinese and Korean, with some Japanese—and English, of course, one of the official languages of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas.

The most ubiquitous signs in Saipan say Poker. Many such signs are lit up round the clock. Almost every little country store has a Poker sign over one door, often next to one above the store entrance that says Food Stamps Accepted.

On 18 March 2005, the Saipan Tribune published three essays from a “contest held by the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs’ Chamorro/Carolinian Policy Commission to promote indigenous languages in the Commonwealth.” Let’s examine a few sentences of each.

Carolinian

Meta e welepakk sibwe kkepasal Refaluwasch rel?

Mwaliyasch Refalawasch nge eghi prisisu sibwe ghuleey bwe iyel yaasch IDENTITY me kkosch me eew malawasch ghisch aramasal Seipel. Sibwe abwaari me amalawa mwaliyasch leel olighat, fatattaral iimw, gangisch nge mwetelo mmwal nge sibwe kki yaali schagh.

When I took linguistic field methods back in grad school, our class worked with a speaker of Saipan Carolinian, which was not well described at the time, although a lot was known about closely related Trukese (now Chuukese). I’ve studied quite a few Austronesian languages, but you really need to be familiar with the Micronesian subgroup of Austronesian before this starts to look very familiar. Nevertheless, here are a few items that strike me.

Ethnonym: The Saipan Carolinian name for themselves is Refaluwasch. The name Carolinian is derived from the Caroline Islands, where the ancestors of today’s Saipan Carolinians came from, probably starting around the 1700s, after the Northern Marianas had been almost entirely depopulated.

Unusual sounds: I believe the Germanic looking sch indicates a retroflex affricate that sounds a bit like Yapese ch or Kosraean sr. The double consonants in word-initial position are a bit unusual and take some getting used to for English speakers who ignore the medial double nn in Japanese konnichi-wa.

Dialects: The Trukic languages form one long dialect chain, where speakers on neighboring islands can understand each other fine, but speakers from farther apart have increasing difficulty. There is no contrast between l and n in most of the dialects. Where this speaker writes aramasal Seipel ‘people of Saipan’, a speaker of a different dialect might write aramasan Seipen. Similarly, the town of Tanapag, settled by a different group of Carolinians, also goes by the name of Tallabwog.

Chamorro

Hafa Na Prisisu Na Ta Praktika I Fino’ Chamorro?

Kumu uniku yu’ na pagton [sic] palao’an gi familia yan todu I dos saina-hu Chamorro, gi anai pa’go mafañagu yu’, hu hungok I sunidon Chamorro despues enao mo’na I fina’na’guen nana-hu yan tata-hu. Este I lengguahen Chamorro impottante na ta tungo’ sa’ I mismo lengguahi-ta dumiklaklara hafa nasion-ta na rasan taotao….

Pot uttimo, prefekto yu’ na patgon Chamorro ya ti bai hu sedi na bai hu maleffa osino bai hu na’ fo’na I otro lengguahi ki I mismo lengguahi-hu Chamorro.

A Spanish reader’s reaction to written Chamorro must be very similar to a Chinese reader’s reaction to written Japanese. The huge number of familiar borrowings let you know the subject matter, but the foreign grammatical framework remains opaque. You know what they’re talking about, but not what they’re saying.

Ethnonym: Many Chamorros prefer to call themselves Chamoru, perhaps especially Guamanian Chamorros, whose orthographic standards (at least at Unibetsidåt Guahan) seem to differ somewhat from those in Saipan.

Unusual sounds: Chamorro ch is pronounced like [ts] (and some capitalize both members of the digraph: CHamoru, like Dutch IJssel); while y is pronounced like [dz]. The apostrophe marks a glottal stop. Spanish syllable-final -r regularly becomes -t and syllable-final -l assimilates to the following consonant.

Grammar: One of my term papers in grad school was an analysis of the historical morphology of Chamorro and Palauan, both of which look more Philippine-like as you go farther back. And both are verb-initial to a significant degree. (So is Yapese, but it’s not very closely related to any other Austronesian language.) But Palauan morphology is far more opaque: with Philippine -in- showing up as -l- and -um- showing up as -o- in some environments. Chamorro is more straightforward. The Spanish loanword diklara, for instance, is both infixed and reduplicated in d-um-iklaklara. Compare Tagalog bili ‘buy’ and one of its inflected forms, b-um-ibili.

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Filed under language, Micronesia, Pacific

by | 24 May 2006 · 1:28 am

Saipan Impressions: Three Meals

No one goes to Saipan or Guam for the cuisine, but I did want to try something localized and not the standard American, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean fare near the major hotels. I had a bit of success, but it wasn’t easy. And I only had three meals to worry about.

Breakfast on the way back to the airport included the obligatory Spam: a Spam & egg sandwich combo (with coffee and donut) at Winchell’s, a U.S. West Coast chain whose menu may have been adapted to Saipan tastes. But I hadn’t expected the huge dollop of mayonnaise that dripped off at every bite (with a little help from me).

My first meal on Saipan was delayed until I returned from a drive to see the sights at the north end of the island, since there was almost nowhere to eat on that stretch of road. So I turned off into the port area on the way back and found the dowdy Seaman’s Restaurant at the end of a pier past a shipwreck listing in the shallows. It was 11 a.m. and I was the only customer—but a hungry one. The Chinese-run restaurant offered a $5 bento with Saipanese characteristics (pictured above). New England clam chowder substituted for miso soup, served with a Korean soup spoon. The rice and sashimi (with wasabi) were Japanese, the beef broccoli Chinese, and the fish jun vaguely Korean (with a wedge of local citrus to squeeze onto it), while the stewed chicken and onion looked like Philippine adobo, but with little pepper and garlic and even less vinegar or bay leaf. The ice tea was served with a squeeze bottle of sugar water, not packets of sugar or sugar substitute. Two orange slices served as a Chinese final course. It was just the sort of motley Pacific Island cuisine I was looking for.

After driving all over the island most of the day, I decided to see if any place looked promising within walking distance near the hotel. Moby Dick answered the call. A chalkboard listed fish kelaguen, a Chamorro dish of soft chunks of boneless raw fish “cooked” in lemon juice and tossed with slices of green and round onion, and sweet and spicy peppers. It was wonderful—and big enough to serve as an appetizer for two people. But I couldn’t resist ordering the local bottomfish catch of the day, either opakapaka or mafuti. I hadn’t heard of mafuti. When I asked what kind of fish it was, the Filipina waitress didn’t know any other name for it but brought it over to show me. I didn’t recognize it, but ordered it grilled. The whole fish came back to me a little bit overcooked, but I demolished most of it anyway. A Tagalog-speaking waiter later explained that “maputi” got its name from being a white fish. Tagalog for ‘white’ is indeed puti, but the fishname appears to be Chamorro, where the word for ‘white’ is a’paka’. So I don’t know what the story is. (More on Chamorro language later.)

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Filed under Micronesia, Pacific

by | 19 April 2006 · 3:06 am

Aussie Troops Back to the Solomons

Australian troops are heading back to the Solomon Islands to quell another outbreak of violence after the latest elections, the BBC reports.

Some 180 Australian soldiers and police have begun arriving in the country to try to impose order after a written request from the Solomons government. A smaller contingent of additional New Zealand peacekeepers are set to arrive on Thursday.

But the BBC’s Phil Mercer says there are concerns that the presence of more foreign troops could inflame the situation in the troubled city.

About 280 Australian police were already in the country as part of a regional force sent to restore peace in 2003, after violence stirred up by local warlords left hundreds dead and 20,000 displaced.

Wednesday’s rioting came after newly-elected MPs met in secret to elect a new prime minister.

‘Chinese connections’

Mr Rini, 56, beat off two main rivals in Tuesday’s secret ballot for the leadership – former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and Job Dudley Tausinga, leader of the new Rural Advancement Party.

He is accused of being too closely linked to former Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza’s administration, which was tainted by corruption allegations.

As usual, the Head Heeb is already on the case.

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Filed under Australia, Pacific

by | 27 January 2006 · 5:58 pm

Language Hat on Mother-in-Law Talk and Fieldwork

I should have mentioned earlier that the always enlightening Language Hat has been running a series of excerpts from R.M.W. Dixon’s Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker. His two-part post (here and here) on the special “mother-in-law” language employed by speakers of the Australian language Dyirbal takes me back to my grad school days in linguistics, including more than a few “Eureka!” moments that compensated for the drudgery, discomfort, diseases, and social frustrations of fieldwork (and college classrooms, for that matter).

The many-to-one correspondence between Guwal [everyday language] and Jalnguy [“mother-in-law” language] vocabularies was a key to the semantic structure of Dyirbal. If one Jalnguy word was given as the equivalent for a number of distinct Guwal terms, it meant that the Guwal words were seen, by speakers of the language, to be related. For nouns, it revealed the botanical and zoological classifications which the Aborigines perceived. For instance, bayi marbu “louse”, bayi nunggan “larger louse”, bayi daynyjar “tick”, and bayi mindiliny “larger tick” were all grouped together under a single Jalnguy term, bayi dimaniny.

It could be even more revealing with verbs. The everyday style has four different words for kinds of spearing, and also such verbs as nyuban “poke a stick into the ground (testing for the presence of yams or snails, say)”, nyirran “poke something sharp into something (for example, poke a fork into meat to see if it is cooked)”, gidan “poke a stick into a hollow log, to dislodge a bandicoot”. All seven of these Guwal verbs are rendered by just one word in Jalnguy: nyirrindan “pierce”.

After I returned from doing fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, the three of us who had spent most of 1976 living in little villages along the north coast of New Guinea were invited to share our experiences at a Q&A session for other linguists. At one point, we were asked how our linguistics training had helped prepare us for our fieldwork experiences. I answered something along the following lines: “Well, it substantially increased my boredom threshold, and that proved extremely useful in the field.”

UPDATE: Part III, the exciting conclusion here.

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Filed under Papua New Guinea

by | 29 November 2005 · 10:02 am

My Malaria Tales

In 1976, I got a chance to do linguistic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. PNG is a malaria zone, so I tried to get antimalarials before I left, but hardly any doctors in Honolulu knew about either malaria or PNG, and they wouldn’t prescribe anything unless it was for treatment, not prevention. So my first day in Sydney, en route, I went to a public hospital and waited a long time to see a doctor. (Australia, like Canada, gives free but limited medical coverage to everybody.) When the doctor finally saw me, he asked me all sorts of questions about PNG because he was to spend part of his residency there, but he said state policy was to give only one week’s worth of medicine at a time free. So I got just two Chloroquine pills, one week’s prophylactic dose. I was due to arrive in PNG within the week.

In PNG I had no trouble buying Chloroquine at a local chemist (pharmacy) and took them faithfully every Sunday. For months, I was fine. The only problem I had was early on, when my intestinal flora were changing to accommodate the local diet. I got the runs one night really bad. The village was maybe 100 yards from end to end, with the women’s outhouse out over the water (flushed twice a day by the tide) near my end of the village and the men’s outhouse clear at the other end of the village, across a coconut log bridge over the stream that served as the village’s only supply of fresh, cold mountain water. The men’s bathing hole was upstream from the women’s bathing, laundry, and dishwashing area, and people were really careful not to shit near the river. That night, I must have walked through the dark village 6 or 8 times, setting off the dogs each time, but not always having much to feed the fish with by the time I climbed up into the four-hole outhouse and squatted over the ocean. So, before long, I’d start the long trek back, setting off the dogs again.

I slept under a mosquito net in the village, although not always when I took trips to the neighboring village where several kids from my host family went to school. (They boarded there.) One day during August (I think), I felt really feverish, with flu symptoms, but the next day I felt better, so I let the village boat, with its loud, 2-stroke, Japanese Yanmar diesel engine, leave for town without me. It was an 8-hour trip up the coast to Lae, where the boat would sell its catch of fish, fill up with ice for the next catch, take on supplies and passengers, and be back in a week. That evening after I went for my customary bath in the stream, I couldn’t stop shivering. My hosts built up the fire and I hunkered down next to it until the shivers turned to sweat. By that time, I figured I’d better take a treatment dose of Chloroquine: 2 pills every 4-6 hours, rather than 2 pills every week. In a day or two the flu symptoms abated and I broke out instead with intense itching under the skin of my hands and feet. It hurt to walk over the rough path to the bathing hole. So the next time the boat came back to load up and take more fish and passengers, I was on board.

The doctor I saw in town thought maybe I had reacted to the Chloroquine, so he put me on milder Camoquine and, sure enough, the next time I came down with malaria symptoms and took a treatment dose, at least I didn’t have that horrible itch. (By now many strains of malaria in PNG are resistent to both.) But the timing was bad. I had come into town about Thanksgiving time, and my host, an American with an MA in ESL from Hawai‘i, had fixed up a real American meal with turkey, deviled eggs, and pumpkin pies. My throat was swollen, it hurt to swallow, and I was too sick to join the crowd for dinner, so I went off to bed. That night my fever broke and I soaked the sheets. The next day I felt much better–and ravenous. Fortunately, there were leftovers of everything except the deviled eggs. I ate a lot, but swallowed carefully.

Back in Honolulu, I got another severe bout of malaria. By this time, I knew the whole cycle real well–24 hours of fever and chills followed by 24 hours of dull headache. It was sure to be Plasmodium vivax, according to Merck’s Manual, so I managed to get referred to a Dr. Berman, the only civilian doctor in town who knew much of anything about malaria. (He had seen plenty of it as an Army doctor in Vietnam.) So I drove to the emergency room of the hospital where he was supposed to start a shift at 7 pm. He took a long time getting to me and I spent the whole time shivering under the air-conditioning vent in the examination room, trying to cover myself with little hand towels.

When Berman finally saw me, I made the mistake of telling him I was suffering from P. vivax and asking for a treatment dose of Camoquine or its equivalent. He sent me for a blood test, but couldn’t find anything, so he sent me away for another 48 hours until I would be in worse shape again. When he couldn’t see anything in that sample, either, he told me to come back when I was really in the throes of fever and chills. So at the peak of the next 48-hour cycle, I was driving shakily through traffic to his downtown office. This time, he managed to find the little buggers under the microscope. He returned with a sarcastic “Congratulations, Dr. Outlier. Your diagnosis is correct. It’s Plasmodium vivax.” Whereupon, I let him have it, telling him each of those 3 lab tests cost me $24 that my grad student health insurance didn’t cover, and that I had been through a week’s worth of the symptoms a 3rd time now, thanks to him. I think he ended up waiving any of his own fees above what my health insurance covered. He also prescribed some very powerful drug that was supposed to clear the creatures out of my liver as well. I’ve never had a relapse since then.

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Filed under Hawai'i, malaria, Papua New Guinea