Radically Other

Savage Harvest:  A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

Don’t be deterred by the cheesy title (and the tiresome academicolonic subtitle).  Savage Harvest is a thoughtful, well-written, and compelling book.  Although its ostensible subject is the mystery surrounding Michael Rockefeller’s death in New Guinea, its core interrogates current theoretical models and assumptions about colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial encounters with the (non-Western) other.

The son of the immensely wealthy and politically influential Nelson Rockefeller, Michael Rockefeller was just 23 years old when he disappeared in what’s now the Indonesian province of Papua.  He was on a well-financed trip to collect Asmat art for the new museum his father had founded.  He disappeared in late 1961, and despite his family’s efforts, he or his remains were never located.  The official resolution was ‘death by drowning.’

But there were always rumors, rumors involving traditional Asmat practices of headhunting and cannibalism.  The explorer and travel writer Carl Hoffman set out to track down these rumors and the truths, if there were any, behind them.  The result is Savage Harvest . . . and the convincing conclusion that Michael Rockefeller was indeed killed and eaten by the very people he was attempting to ‘know’ well enough to acquire what he considered to be artistically significant objects.

The unraveling-the-mystery narrative is sufficient to make the book interesting, and Hoffman’s strong, direct prose drives the reader as relentlessly as the best crime fiction does.  But that’s only the first level of Savage Harvest.  The second is Hoffman’s retracing of Rockefeller’s journey.

One would expect that such retracing follows the pattern of many such ‘in the steps of’ narratives.  It does – in the sense that, fifty years later, Hoffman travels to the same places as Rockefeller did, even interacting with relatives of those who had most probably murdered the young art collector.  One might also expect that Savage Harvest ultimately would ‘be about’ Hoffman’s own journey: his attraction to the exotic, the dangerous, the authentic. 

It’s not (at least not much).  The important retracing is about cultural, political, and academic assumptions.   This is Savage Harvest’s third level of interest.

If the book is indeed about the author, as well as about what happened to Michael Rockefeller, it focuses on Hoffman’s being stunned by the radical otherness of the Asmat (remember, we’re discussing ‘encounters’ of just a couple of years ago as well as those decades earlier).  Even after a half-century or more of ‘civilizing’ – by Dutch missionaries and colonial officials, by Indonesian governance, by globalization in general – the Asmat present themselves to Hoffman as almost unknowable and almost completely alien.  Their core culture was/is built on revenge, revenge to help restore balance in a profoundly precarious world where enemies exist forever, throughout generations, and spirits of the dead pose constant danger to the living.  Headhunting and cannibalism are ways to restore balance, at least temporarily.  So is making ‘art.’

I put ‘art’ in quotation marks here because the beautiful sculptures the Asmat create to commemorate, activate, and appease spirits of the dead – the sculptures for which Michael Rockefeller traded fishing nets, tobacco, and ax heads – were/are central to Asmat culture in ways the young collector did not begin to understand.  The operative principle of this pre-technological society (until not very long ago, the Asmat did not have anything except stone tools and were one of the few extant hunter-gatherer societies) was/is retribution . . . the Asmat did/do not have a concept of time outside of diurnal cycles . . .  deaths were/are what’s needed to restore balance . . . eating the dead restored/restores balance in each eater, at least for the moment.  In anticipation of a retributive action, Asmat sculptors would carve bisj poles, up to twenty-feet high creations hewn from a single mangrove root that would represent, even embody the dead – and their need for compensatory action.  These bisj poles would be erected in an Asmat village until the compensatory action (killing and eating and anointing the poles with new blood) happened; then the poles would be abandoned in the jungle to rot and transfer their vitality to the earth. 

These were what Michael Rockefeller wanted to buy with trinkets.  And to do so only a few years after a Dutch colonial government agent had led a ‘punitive expedition’ against an ‘unruly’ Asmat settlement, shooting a number of villagers, an expedition that at the time Rockefeller arrived, remained unavenged. Rockefeller did succeed in purchasing these bisj poles, which now adorn the Michael Rockefeller wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he apparently paid for them with his life.

It is to Hoffman’s credit, I think, that he neither skewers Michael Rockefeller for ethnological naivety nor engages in cheap amateur analyses of rich Daddy issues (or twin issues, as Michael had a twin sister who, the book suggests, has avoided confronting the most evidence-backed explanations for her brother’s death).  Part of the way Hoffman avoids such targeting is by exploring the colonial contexts of the Asmat encounters with modernity (explorations that also help explain why Michael Rockefeller’s death was pretty much covered up by authorities in the South Pacific and in the First World).  Another part is how Hoffman presents his own experiences with the Asmat.

Despite the Asmat’s one-generational veneer of ‘civilization’ (they’ve converted, nominally, to Christianity and have entered, provisionally, into a market economy), to Hoffman they retain their radical otherness.  They remain focused on retribution as a means to restore cosmic balance.  Spirits remain threatening and demanding.  Time remains irrelevant beyond sunrises and sunsets.  Sexuality (male and female) remains polymorphous.  Privacy and individuality remain pretty much unknown concepts.  In other words, to Hoffman (and one is invited to presume, to almost all non-Asmat), these people remain awesomely and dangerously alien.

Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this is ‘true.’  But such a depiction of a remote, still quite isolated people is unusual.  Savage Harvest‘s use of historical and cultural information to ground and assess the writer’s own experiences allows the book to go against prevailing contemporary assumptions of universality (that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin, that we share a common humanity, yadda yadda) and cultural relativity (that all customs are equally valid and worthwhile).  Carl Hoffman’s book, instead, obliquely offers a different perspective.  There are, still in this world, domains of radical otherness.  Radical, as in at the root.  Essential.  Non-negotiable, even by Rockefeller-scale money or prestige-school education or top-level institutional (or publishing) support. 

Let me put it another way.  Colonial (neo-, post- included) writing usually falls in two camps, which can be organized roughly by the concept of jeopardy.  One:  the writer/explorer/collector/interpreter ventures into the unknown and is in jeopardy of losing his life (see Henry Morton Stanley’s books) or his sanity (see Conrad) because of the power of the Other.  In brief, he (usually but not always a ‘he’) could be killed, and the commercial/scientific/missionary/cultural knowledge he is trying to amass is at risk.  Two:  the Other (the primitive, the savage, the indigenous) is in jeopardy because of the power of the colonial official/westerner/missionary/scientist – in jeopardy of becoming extinct or irrevocably contaminated (the vanishing American Indian, the last of the Maasai, the erosion of authentic artistic production into tourist art, etc,). 

The first concept usually requires a danger-courting hero-narrator and inscrutably malevolent indigenes, often planted in a physical environment insalubrious for Westerners.  The second requires a needy pilgrim-narrator and Rousseauvian indigenes who experience life fully, unmediated by the burdens of civilization, yet who are vulnerable to complete cultural collapse when exposed to modernity.  Carl Hoffman’s Savage Harvest confronts and juggles these conflicted legacies of ‘native’/explorer/’exotic’ collector jeopardy in ways I’ve never quite before encountered.

In sum, I recommend this book highly . . . to those interested in non-Western art and its acquisition, in colonial history and theoretics, in travel writing, in South Pacific culture, or just in unraveling long-standing mysteries.  Savage Harvest is exciting to read, and it’s even more exciting to think about. 

Savage Harvest:  A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art.  By Carl Hoffman.  New York: William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2014.  Hardcover, paperback, and electronic format.