File this one under ‘public use of reason 101’.
On 28 November 2008 The Nation, one of Papua New Guinea’s two largest newspapers, ran a
story entitled Male Babies Killed To
Stop Fights which claimed that women in the Gimi area have decided to kill all their male
children in an attempt to stop an ongoing tribal fight by, as it were, cutting off the supply of
reinforcements. The story, sensational as it was, got picked up by the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation and even made its way to Fox News.
Now, on the one hand this story is so outrageously exoticizing, so sensationalistically othering,
so reliant on tropes of primitive, savage black people that it pushes all the buttons of
Politically Correct Anthropologists. On the other hand, Melanesianists like myself often are wary
of overly-eager professors who denounce myths of cannibalism and so forth because, well, Papua
New Guinea is a place where cannibalism was practiced, a place where real cultural
difference does occur, were there is fighting, and so forth: no one ever told anyone in
PNG that we in the academy had developed an elaborate set of rules about how they were supposed
to live their lives, if you see what I mean.
But even given these reservations, even given these reservations, this story still
sounds absolutely ridiculous to me and stands, in my opinion, as a classic example of Papua New
Guinea being trotted out again to serve Australian and American fantasies of primitive savagery.
For one thing, the Salvation Army has been in the Gimi area (so much for being
‘untouched’) and has worked to try to end the dispute, and they are quoted in the
original news story. However, in a follow-up story the ABC has reported that the Salvation Army denies that these
killings took place. According to this report “the Highlands women are making the point
that there are so many murders they might as well kill their newborn boys themselves, rather than
go through the pain of losing them in tribal fights.” Now this I believe, as this
sounds very much the way that people talk about pain and suffering in PNG.
Moreover, experts on Gimi say that this area fits the pattern that we see in a lot of the
world—that female infanticide, not male infanticide, is common. In an email to me Paige
West, a professor at Barnard College, wrote
Historically Gimi in Lufa and Unavi practiced infanticide through subtle neglect and exposure if
a baby was unwanted or if the mother was simply too overwhelmed by other young children
(especially if there was one already breast feeding when the new one was born) to care for the
newborn. This was more often than not done with female infants – so much so that in the
census reports in the 60s and early 70s there was a marked gender imbalance among Gimi. Gillian
Gillison’s work shows that in general in the 70s and 80s first born babies were more likely
to die than to survive (See Between Culture and Fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands Mythology for
Gillison’s in-depth discussion of Gimi ideas about conception, birth, and death).
Additionally, she writes:
No Gimi person I know would actually attribute the cause of fighting to their own immediate
family (if between patrilines), to their own extended family group (if between
‘clans’), to their village (if between villages), or to their ethnic group (if
between Gimi and others). They would attribute the cause of the fighting to whomever they were
fighting so to kill male offspring in ones own line in order to stop fighting is nonsensical.
and
The thought process that is ascribed to the mothers in the story in some ways seems to be a
Foucauldian management of population which is hard to imagine that any Gimi would apply to their
own children and kin. The idea that eliminating one’s own child to create some future
social benefit to all seems like a kind of governmentality that does not exist in Gimi society.
Essentially the extent to which kinship controls social relationships means that that arguement
would be a radical departure from Gimi social world views.
In sum, we have a typical story: inaccurate reporting which is picked up on on global media
because readers find it exciting to read about Papua New Guineans behaving badly. Is anyone
willing to defend the original National article in public? And, more importantly, when are we
going to have some positive news coverage of everything that is going right in Papua New Guinea?
UPDATE: Its fascinating to watch this story mutate—now Women on the Web is linking to the original story with the headline
Male Infanticide on Rise as Papua New Guinea’s Women Attempt to End War. This headline
makes it sound like the whole country is getting into the act (although to be fair the body of
the article just repeats what is in the original National article).
Recommandations
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and reject those that you are not interested in
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