The Rights of Primitive Peoples

PAPUA-NEW GUINEA: A CRUCIAL INSTANCE

IN the contemporary climate of opinion, all peoples of the world are claiming the right of nationhood, with all its perquisites-sovereignty, economic self-sufficiency and membership in the United Nations. Within this situation, the condition of "primitive peoples"-peoples who only recently lived a self-sufficient life without script or any relationship to script- occupies a peculiar place.

The world may be roughly divided into: modernized nations, some of which are also new nations, in the sense that they were colonized from Europe within the last five hundred years and are dependent upon a European tradition-for instance, the United States, Australia, Argentina; old, traditional or exotic peoples with traditions antedating those of the high cultures of Europe, currently struggling with problems of absorbing new economic and political forms-China, India, Burma, Thailand; and new nations within which the earlier forms of cultural life, while often elaborate and highly organized, lacked script and depended upon an oral tradition-for example, many of the countries of Africa south of the Sudan, Tonga, Samoa, etc., where political power has now passed or is passing to the immediate descendants of peoples who were substantially primitive until they came in contact with modern European or Asian cultures.

Furthermore, within many of the countries dominated by a European or Asian tradition there are minorities which have preserved in their present-day forms of life considerable traces of the unsatisfactory compromise relationships worked out when they encountered the high cultures of Europe, Asia or Africa and were pushed into undesirable land, isolated in special occupations, made dependent and deteriorated wards of the state or were converted into an uneasy peonage, peasantry or proletarian labor force. The word loosely applied to such groups is "tribe," a catchall term for ethnic groups that preserve an internal organization which is both somewhat independent of and indifferent to the superordinate forms of organized state government with which they come in contact.[i] They continue to rely on a spoken form of their own language; if they attain literacy in the super-ordinate culture it is usually of a very limited kind; in values and expectations they are turned inward toward their own "tribal" cultures. World attitudes toward such primitive or tribal peoples are heavily influenced by differential knowledge of or contacts with nomadic tribes of the Middle East, Eskimos in Greenland, Australian Aboriginals, the Maori of New Zealand, Indian populations in Mexico or Peru, Gypsies, Navajo Indians in North America and so on.

In such encounters the extent to which these decendants of former primitive people have preserved forms of their earlier cultures, or insist on new distinctive costumes and manners, is conspicuous; and the ways in which they have adapted to the technologies, ideologies or social customs of the states within which they live are less conspicuous. The fact that they continue to live in tents or hogans or igloos, or dress their women in long skirts, and that they cling to their native tongue and speak it to their children, sets them apart. Furthermore only those primitive peoples who have maintained such a separate and tribal status are visible at all; for ten thousand years comparable groups have become the peasantry and the proletariat of complex societies, speaking the language and following the customs of the state of which they are a part. They may often constitute quite special regional groups and give the special style to a region of a modern state; they may, also, like the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, the Basques, the Croatians, the Ukrainians, still provide the cultural background for various sorts of irredentism. What is forgotten is the circumstance that they and also those against whom they are rebelling were once the descendants of peoples with an exclusively oral tradition, living in self-contained tribal groups. So, whether the primitive peoples in question have been living in uncomfortable symbiosis with an organized state for a thousand years or five hundred years or only a decade, the emphasis is upon the groups which have not consented to assimilation, and it is to experience with these groups that all new encounters are referred.

The standard expectation is that "primitive peoples" when they encounter "civilized" peoples react by refusal to become assimilated, and after various efforts by missionaries and government, revert to their primitive styles of life. Then, according to the ethic of the period of encounter, they may be hunted like game, have a price set on their heads like vermin, be relegated to reservations or subjected to elaborate plans for education, rehabilitation and welfare. When an account of a new African state is prefaced by remarks of how recently the majority of the citizens lived (or still live) in a tribal state, the expectations of the future fate of the country are pessimistic in spite of the fact that it may have large modern cities and a sizable university-educated and sophisticated urban population. Or in the case of new states like the Philippines or Indonesia, the continued existence of some relatively unassimilated pagan tribes on some of the smaller islands compromises the national image of the country, and we hear derogatory phrases that include references to "savage" or "heathen" customs. The centuries of sophisticated contacts with Asia and Europe are not allowed for; the primitive minorities come temporarily to stand for the whole.

II

Within this setting, the process of nation-building in the eastern half of the immense island of New Guinea does, nevertheless, present very complicated problems. In this area,[ii] governed by Australia, live some 2,000,000 Melanesians and Papuans, a dark-skinned people with a superficial resemblance to Africans and a physical appearance that evoked the racial exclusiveness of their European discoverers. They had been cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years and at the time of discovery lacked any knowledge of script, metals, the wheel, the plough or of any form of political organization capable of uniting originally disparate peoples into political units larger than congeries of hamlets of a few hundred people and occasional temporary larger alliances for purposes of raiding or warfare. Their backward state can be reasonably attributed to their isolation. They had not, as have many other so-called tribal peoples, lived cheek by jowl in uncomfortable symbiosis with more civilized neighbors with whom they did not choose to amalgamate, or who, for various religious, racial or political reasons, refused to incorporate them-as is the case, for instance, with alien groups within China, India and parts of Southeast Asia and some countries of the Middle East and Africa. They can therefore be regarded, in the contemporary ethic of the mid-twentieth century, as having been treated unfairly by history, as having lacked a location on the earth's surface that would have given them an opportunity to accept the culture of more advanced civilizations, and so prove their superiority, or to reject or be rejected by it and so prove their inferiority. As the exploration and pacification of the interior of New Guinea is a post-World War II phenomenon, it has involved the most striking discrepancy in recorded history between the newly discovered and the discoverers, men who lived in a stone-age horticultural state of technology confronting members of an airborne society. The relevant Metropolitan powers-Germany, Great Britain, Australia, the Netherlands and Indonesia-can all be saddled with responsibility for the continued backwardness of the peoples whom they have ruled under various colonial mandates and trusteeship arrangements.

The forms of social organization in the Territory of Papua-New Guinea, although differing in detail, can be characterized for the entire area as clusters of hamlets, the inhabitants of which have ties of common or claimed descent, common language and territory, and intermarriage. Between the clusters there occur trade, warfare, headhunting and, less frequently, intermarriage. Hereditary positions of authority hardly exist: those who organize large-scale feasts, exchanges and war parties are "Big Men" who emerge briefly and who cannot pass on their power directly. Absent are the institutions or practices on which state-like forms have been based, such as rank, conquest, tribute and annexation. Instead, the principal value of an enemy group has been that it provided a means to attain honors and prizes for bravery. Expanding populations did sometimes drive neighboring groups from their land, sometimes permanently, or sometimes exterminated, another group, but the type of social organization did not lend itself to the development of complex stratified societies. There is a tremendous premium upon differentiating one group from another, the smallest details of dialect being seized upon and elaborated; there is great specialization of crafts and materials for trade, with various forms of compulsive barter to stimulate trading partners to fish, hunt, make baskets, net bags, spears, wooden bowls to provide for the needs of those who lack particular foods or objects or manufacturing skills.

Contact took place under such conditions that missionizing and governing groups had minimum estimates of the potentialities of the people. Before World War II efforts to educate the peoples of Papua-New Guinea were very limited indeed. Training as clerks, catechists and elementary schoolteachers was just sufficient to staff local establishments at the lowest levels. There was no tertiary education and very little secondary education of any kind. Those trained within the missions were not admitted to ordination. Intermarriage with the colonists, from which slightly more socially advanced groups elsewhere have produced a native élite, was almost totally lacking.

When the trusteeship power, Australia, was confronted in the post-World War II climate of world opinion with demands that Papua-New Guinea be given early independence, the enormity of the problem became evident. Other new nations are less viable in terms of size and economic resources than Papua- New Guinea, but none faces the prodigious problem of governing a territory in which the people to whom authority within the country would fall have all come so recently-some within the last ten years-directly out of stone- age cultures. For this is a country in which cannibalism and headhunting are in some parts only just coming under control, where old feuds over land and fishing rights simmer beneath the surface even in fully missionized villages, and in which no educated élite has been built up.

In the debates which will undoubtedly quicken in tempo and intensity over the future of Papua-New Guinea, many of the perennial questions of the relationships between isolated tribal peoples and the civilized peoples who attempt to conquer, enslave, convert, pacify or improve and elevate them come to the fore. If the progress toward independence and if the attainment of independence itself are accompanied by violence and disorder, this will have repercussions in discussions around the world regarding the political competence of peoples emerging from early states of technical and political development. It will also reinforce arguments that confuse the consequences of racial discrimination with an attributed lesser capacity of peoples with darker pigmentation of the skin.

III

The principal questions that are already coming up for review are: Do civilized people have a right to destroy, by overwhelming power, the specific particular cultures of groups of people who owe the persistence of these local styles to their isolation? Do civilized people have an obligation to bring such people as rapidly as possible up to the standard of their own citizens by spending large amounts of money, time and manpower on education, health, and economic and political development? If civilized people have this obligation, should it fall on those particular modern or modernizing nation-states which are, often through some unrelated historical event, in a position of suzerainty, or is this an obligation of the entire industrialized world? What is known about the capacity for political development of individuals whose grandparents or parents lived a culturally isolated, primitive life-as individuals, as whole communities and as members of a recent aggregation of communities which have historically been inimical to their close neighbors and unaware of the existence of the more remote neighbors with whom they are now asked to identify themselves? What political models, old or new, can appropriately be invoked to create conditions in which political independence can be made viable?

The question of the right of any people to the particular style of culture which they have developed over time has multiple origins in European theories of human rights, self-determination of ethnic groups within the European setting, the tendency to identify language and the right to political autonomy; there also are confusions between race and culture, so that those with different customs were thought of as being intrinsically different as a group and therefore substantially unsuitable for complete assimilation. As there developed a society based on contract rather than status, the exclusion of certain groups who were physically distinguishable and culturally very diverse became a way of begging the question of their rights as individuals. Indians in the United States and Canada, the Aboriginal population in Australia, could be protected-as groups-and denied status as individual citizens. Forcing and bribing a primitive group to live on assigned territory-a reservation (the term is uncomfortably reminiscent today of the phrase "preservation of game")-and sentimentalizing their way of life was the outcome of this mixed position, reinforced in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth by the testimony of anthropologists as to the destructiveness of forcible acculturation and by missionization. Artists and humanitarians both responded to the intrinsic appeal of traditional culture, with its internal consistency and sense of harmony, and claimed that interference was wrong. These attitudes became variously expressed in policy toward native peoples within large states, in colonial policies like the Netherlands' respect for local customary law, and in the protective policies of colonial and trust-territory governments which kept native peoples attached to their villages or districts, prevented the alienation of land, limited recruitment and otherwise promoted the preservation of local cultures and retarded any development of wider allegiances and sophistication.

Since World War II, it has ceased to be ethically respectable to advocate cultural preservation except in those cases, like that of North American Indians, where the indigenous people are deeply imbedded within a historical ethic and a contemporary expanding economy. Those who argue today for the preservation of local languages and for slow change are identified with those who wish to prevent an indigenous people from receiving the benefits to which they are entitled. The emphasis has shifted from language, religion and customary law to the standardized categories of schooling, public health and political democracy. Attempts to perpetuate local identity or local ethnocentrism are identified as "tribalism"- ethically based factionalism which retards the development of modern states.

But aside from the demands for more education and for eternally supported economic development, the tendency has been to rely on the development of types of nationalism, the intensity of which depends on enmity toward some outside power-the ex-colonial or neo-colonial power, or neighboring states with a different political ideology (as when citizens of Papua-New Guinea fear "infiltration" from the inhabitants of West New Guinea) or difference in physique-which may be a matter of stature or skin color or small traces of previous disallowed ancestry. Alternatively, reliance may be placed upon religion as the basis of a wider identity.

If tribalism can be defined as a form of political self-identification which places ail ties within the group above ties to any wider group, then the forms of nationalism which are current in emerging states are in fact simply an attempt to produce a larger unit with the characteristic ethnocentrism of the component smaller units. Just as tribalism-whether it be of the Yoruba in Nigeria, the Uzbeks in the Soviet Union, the Pathans in Pakistan or the German sects living in isolation within the United States- can be seen as essentially incompatible with the demands of a modern state for individual responsibility and autonomy, so the forms of nationalism which are emerging in the formation of the new nations can be seen as the exportation onto the world scene of this kind of exclusive, ethnocentric self-identification. Nazism was of course an extreme example of an overweening sense of identity that was both ethnic and national.

So the question of the rights of indigenous and culturally backward people to the benefits of the modern world has become almost inextricably combined with their right to political autonomy-within a variety of historically accidental units-as the necessary condition of their obtaining their proper share of education, health and economic well-being. Questions of the superiority of regional economic and political arrangements become submerged under the discussion of what are essentially magnified "tribal" claims to all the trappings of nationalism.

There is little recognition of the contribution that those peoples who have stubbornly maintained their cultural differences, clung to their languages, and insisted on their separate identities have made to our understanding of the extent of possible variety in human cultures. It is, none the less, important; and vital issues remain, such as whether many of these passionately preserved local languages are to be swept away by the expansionism of the great powers or preserved through the timely adoption of some secondary world language. But they have less salience in world public opinion than the importance of a higher standard of living and greater political autonomy.

When a culturally isolated people come into contact with the modern world, the question arises of how fast they can learn, as individuals and in groups. Learning, whether to behave like a stone-age primitive man, or like a member of a submerged urban proletariat, or like the heir of a royal family, or like a future physicist, has, as an essential component, the question of self-identification and expectancy. There are, of course, great innate differences among individuals in primitive groups quite comparable to the differences between members of civilized societies. But for the individual who has the original endowment to become a statesman or a scientist, an artist or a scholar, an organizer or an inventor, the socio- cultural environment within which he is reared is crucial. Thus the question of the educability of individual members of a primitive group is significant only when-as a method of bringing them into step with the modern world-individuals are taken from their villages and educated in boarding schools or as residents in communities of the dominant culture. If individuals are taken entirely away from their primitive villages, to whatever extent they successfully assimilate the different culture of those among whom they live, they may become too alienated from their culture of birth to play a useful role when they return to it. On the other hand, in boarding schools with partly acculturated indigenous teachers drawn from a variety of local cultures, pupils tend to lose their local identity while gaining a very inferior, watered-down, partial version of the majority culture into which they hope to move. The graduates of such schools tend to cluster in the growing towns, unable to deal either with the full representatives of the dominant culture or with their own kin and fellow villagers.

A third method of bringing a primitive people into the modern world is by community development, in which the entire community, from grandparents to grandchildren, participates in learning new forms of political and economic behavior.[iii] In such cases, it is possible to introduce new behavior models in the form of village teachers and technical assistance leaders through whom the children, supported by their active and aspiring elders, can move on into forms of education that need not become alienating. Even though the elders in many cases may attain only a caricature of modern behavior, the self-identification and progress of the children is much easier provided what they learn is of a sort to support change. But this kind of wide cultural progress of a community is dependent upon a large amount of genuine spontaneity and a sense of intrinsic potentiality and dignity, which most modernization activities inhibit. The educated villager who has embraced a different way of life looks down on his past, while the foreign technical-assistance expert, or in contemporary jargon the "change agent," is usually too intent on change to respect those who are changing. Contact with those who feel either humiliation or contempt does not promote rapid learning of a new set of cultural forms.

So while it may be said that there is no inherent reason either in the genetic constitution of primitive peoples or in their primitive social structure which would prevent them from skipping the intervening cultural forms in which they have not participated, current political inventions are so unfavorable that the results are likely to suggest that such learning is in fact impossible because of some intrinsic characteristic of race or level of culture. In actual fact, it is probably easier to move from membership in an isolated, proud, indigenous culture to full citizenship in a modern state than to reach the same level starting from membership in a culturally deprived group within a modern state, where generations of low status have created an expectation of inferiority and failure. Comparisons between the achievements of regions of New Guinea which have been within close and denigrating contact with Europeans for over half a century, and those which have had an opportunity to come straight into a world where they were treated with more dignity, are very illuminating. Although mission education has provided some linguistic sophistication and familiarity with European ideas of democracy and responsibility, those who are its product contrast disadvantageously with the individuals of the highland areas which are forging ahead very rapidly. The most primitive and latest entrants to the world scene may be those most able to learn, least encumbered with previous learnings, if they are presented either with a complete model of a viable modern culture-as immigrants are-or with a specially devised system capable of encompassing their divergences.

IV

In the light of these considerations, we may examine New Guinea more closely, with a primary emphasis on Papua-New Guinea. The merger of the administrative apparatus of Papua and the Australian Trust Territory after World War II has saddled the country with a conflict between the allegiances of former Papuan officials and former Trust Territory officials. Inevitably, this has produced repercussions among the indigenous peoples and heated attempts to find a name and national identity for the merger of the two divisions. This rivalry and hostility are a conspicuous example of the way in which external governmental powers have so often created artificial tribes, districts and kingdoms as part of their governing apparatus.[iv]

Within these two recently merged territories, there exist between five hundred and seven hundred languages spoken by the some two million people. Along with the diversification of language there is a bewildering degree of cultural diversity, of such a nature that an attempt by a government official or teacher to understand a local culture will qualify him to deal with perhaps five hundred or a few thousand people but often absolutely disqualify him from dealing with every other group he may encounter. There are no indigenous political chiefdoms or tribal organizations which could or can be used as the basis of political organization. The administration's practice of dealing with villages individually and restricting citizenship and political identity to registration in the village census books was both a consequence and a reinforcement of the low level of political organization.

If the trusteeship power had wished to educate those who would possibly inherit leadership roles, it would have been impossible to identify them without detailed study of particular small groups. Since World War II, a phenomenon called "cargo cults" has created a small amount of native leadership, in which individuals with outstanding charismatic powers have combined organizational skills and imagination with apocalyptic promises of an immediately transformed world. Most of these cults crumbled, either because the leaders could not realize the promise or because the administration looked on them as subversive. In Manus (Admiralty Islands) a genuine political movement developed out of a set of very local conditions in the late 1940s[v]. A highly gifted political leader, Paliau, now in late middle age, has been elected to the House of Assembly, established under pressure from the United Nations,[vi] and has become chairman of a set of local councils within the Manus archipelago. But he does not speak English, and under the pressure for education and wider experience which may foster a young élite group he is being passed by. Most of the elected members of the assembly have scant influence in their often artificial home constituencies.

In the face of such conditions there is a temptation for analysts to emphasize only deficiencies in the cultures of New Guinea and despair of ever building a viable nation state. Yet at the same time events are inexorably moving towards its creation. The same pressure which works toward the establishment of a nation-state-pressure from the other recently emerged nations, anti-colonialism, anti-neocolonialism, reverse racist thinking-works simultaneously in a case like New Guinea to promote indigenous nationalism and discourage trusteeship. The Australians do not feel that they have tremendous sins to atone for; in fact they have thought of themselves in a colonial predicament vis-à-vis the mother country. Their preference for a white Australia was predominantly a desire to keep other racial groups out rather than any interest in extending dominance over them. A large number of Australians disinterestedly administered Papua and New Guinea between the two world wars, when this was a lifetime career; but today, when the policy is to transform all services rapidly so that they will be staffed by indigenous personnel, there is no career line. Contracts have replaced career commitments. Idealism close to the Peace Corps type did produce a large crop of diverse and dedicated young teachers, but recruitment has been discontinued. Aside from defense-and here experts are divided on the advantage of continued responsibility for New Guinea-there is little incentive for Australia to continue to pour money and energy into New Guinea only to be abused as an exploitative colonial power.

Some form of authority as an alternative to the continuing demands on Australia would not necessarily solve the problem. If the responsibility were transferred to the United Nations the issues might shift somewhat from the repetitive reproaches that have become the style when the backwardness of any group of people is concerned. But the sense of national responsibility which is a strong element in Australia's commitment of funds and personnel to the process of nation-building in New Guinea would then be lost.

There does seem to be good reason, however, to shift the question from how much can a primitive people learn-to which the answer is, under the right conditions as much as any other kind of people can learn and sometimes more- to the question of how much are the present administrators and planners in New Guinea likely to be able to teach, given present conditions of ideology, funds and personnel.

The pages of New Guinea, a quarterly published in Sydney, indicate the extent to which the characteristics of a democratic nation-state are being thrust upon perhaps the least prepared group in the entire world. In a single recent issue the subjects dealt with included the fears expressed by a 32-year-old member of the House of Assembly from the Upper Sepik River that infiltrations from West Irian will bring disease, spies and Communists into the Territory; the right of asylum of primitive inhabitants of the interior; wildcat strikes; whether or not to outlaw card playing and problems of restoring wives and children lost in "lucky games" to their rightful husbands and fathers; gloomy prospects for coffee growing, money incomes and traditional standards of diet, clothing and housing; Australian responsibilities in connection with U.N. Trusteeship decisions; and the advantages of maintaining local customary law with a right of appeal to national courts. The list is one small indication of the bewildering set of political and other problems confronting two million people emerging from tiny clusters of population, without definite territorial or linguistic boundaries and with only a handful of very recently educated political leaders.

There seems reason to suggest that the way to deal with these peoples of Papua-New Guinea is to adopt more modern and more rationalized methods than those used in education situations where the students are more sophisticated. There is always a tendency, however, to use methods which are less rather than more rationalized-for example, to send technologically obsolete machinery to underdeveloped countries, when we should be sending teaching models based on the very most advanced machinery, possibly specially simplified for learning by the inexperienced.

The question of the handling of names, birth registrations, health treatments, electoral rolls, etc., in Papua-New Guinea is an example. Conventional names differ greatly from one linguistic and local group to another and are intricately related to the local forms of social organization. The names delineate clan membership, relationship to other clans, claims to land; relate an individual to particular ancestors, define reincarnation, memorialize the number of "mother's brothers" who contributed to a birth feast. During the early days of pacification the custom grew and spread of giving the census-taker names that were either false or little used among a number of names which an individual could claim. In our own history, the question of acquiring a stable surname was often solved in a variety of ways on the insistence of tax officials or others; in many cases names were simply assigned arbitrarily. The same kind of unsystematic process is now going on in New Guinea as insistence on the same name, on two names, on a surname, on using the "father's name" undefined, are being indiscriminately urged in different regions. Meanwhile, it is more urgent than ever before to identify individuals and locate them in an increasingly complex system of relations between citizen and state. A number assigned at birth and printed on a metal tag which could be replicated, plus a computerized retrieval system, would at one stroke set up a workable system. Such a rationalized system of names is more needed in New Guinea than in, for example, the United States because none of the intermediate conventions which make our system intelligible and workable, even if not fully rational, are present there. In the same way, it may be convenient to teach Australian schoolchildren, who have grown up on lessons on pounds, shillings and pence, to treat the new Australian dollars as if the dollars belonged in the pounds column and the cents in the shillings, and omit any reference to the decimal system. But for New Guinea schoolchildren, immediate recourse to the decimal system would be more intelligible.

A further advance could also be made if instead of looking at New Guinea as a long list of lacks and defects-no complex social organization, no hierarchical system of authority, no clear boundaries, no hereditary positions, no technical experience beyond the stone age, no common language, no calendar, no currency, no educated élite to undertake leadership-some attempt were made to look for unsuspected strengths. It is true that the largest completely effective political unit is about five hundred people and that small adjacent communities are frequently bitter enemies. But this also means that people do not have extended enmities. Regional loyalties and indeed loyalties to any group at all likely to be large enough to be troublesome are all artifacts of the present system of administration. People without strong loyalties to large groups might much more easily become citizens of a nation-state than those who have been bound by centuries of experience (either indigenous or colonial) of factionalisms based on such loyalties. Furthermore, the people of New Guinea have a long tradition of hereditary networks of trade friendships and show great adaptability both in maintaining these ties across enemy lines and in adjusting them to modern conditions like common service in the police. This cultural skill might be utilized in building groups of New Guineans who would be loyal to each other. It might be a feasible basis of an army which in turn might contribute the best form of order to a country where the maintenance of order will be a pressing necessity for a long time to come. But such steps require a willingness to use highly technical help to identify a real cultural strength. In the present state of opinion, such efforts are only too likely to be treated as subversive, or to become the target of political attack.

Primitive peoples are our contemporaries, no matter how isolated they have been from the ongoing stream of civilization or how much they have been damaged by contacts with civilizations which threw them back into reactive and self-defeating isolation. Their histories are as old as ours; their innate capacities are those of the same species. The more primitive they are, the less wounded by various forms of compromise and conflict, the more unspoiled intelligence and curiosity they can bring to the modern world. The one obligation which we may be said to have is to take the trouble to use every skill and invention we have to make the advanced cultures of the modern world possible to teach, and so possible to learn.

[i] Morton H. Fried, "On the Concept of Tribe' and Tribal Society'," Transactions, New York Academy of Sciences, Series II, v. 28, no. 4, p. 527- 540.

[ii] This area constitutes the Territory of Papua-New Guinea, resulting from the administrative merger of Australian New Guinea (Papua) and the Australian Trust Territory of New Guinea. The latter was established after World War I from the former German colony of Kaiser Wilhelmaland and the Bismarck Archipelago.

[iii] See the author's "New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation, Manus, 1928-1953." New York: William Morrow, 1955.

[iv] Neo Melanesian, a lingua franca based on Melanesian grammar and a predominantly English vocabulary, was the contact language in the Trust Territory; a little English-with a small smattering of Police Motuan-was that in old Papua The interchange of Australian officials with different linguistic habits has been disruptive. The influx of New Guinea men and women as laborers into Port Moresby has resulted in the spread of Neo Melanesian, and the recent ecumenical decision to issue an authorized Neo Meianesian version of the New Testament has given it a new impetus. The United Nations missions, on the other hand, have discouraged its use. Another adverse factor is the increasing dominance of the people of the highlands, whose languages are non-Melanesian.

[v] See Theodore Schwartz, The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946-1954. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, 1962. v. 49, pt. 2.

[vi] See F. J. West, "The New Guinea Question: An Australian View," Foreign Affairs, April 1961.