Ep 46: The Death of a Language in Papua New Guinea with Don Kulick
When a language dies, why should we care? Don Kulick, a distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University and head of the ENGAGING VULNERABILITY research program talks to us in episode 46 about the death of languages. We delve into his book, A Death in the Rainforest: how a language and a way of life came to an end in Papua New Guinea, discusses his work in the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language and why that matters. We explore the evolution of anthropological fieldwork from historical methods to current approaches, benefits of learning about other cultures, and the importance of documenting dying languages. You’re going to love it!
His book:
A Death in the Rainforest: how a language and a way of life came to an end in Papua New Guinea
Notes:
•🌏 **Anthropology and Linguistics**
•Dr. Kulick’s journey into anthropology from linguistics.
•Interest in people who speak different languages.
•Multilingualism among groups in Papua New Guinea.
•Impact of language on worldview and self-presentation.
•👥 **Evolution of Anthropology**
•Comparison to Margaret Mead’s fieldwork methods.
•Emphasis on understanding specific people and cultures.
•Benefits of learning about other cultures.
•💬 **Language Evolution in Papua New Guinea**
•Transition to speaking Tok Pisin from traditional languages.
•Tok Pisin as a pigeon language with English-based words.
•Challenges of understanding and communication.
•📖 **Language and Culture Preservation**
•Importance of documenting dying languages like Tie Up.
•Socialization of children through native languages.
•Observations on cultural differences and understanding.
•🤔 **Cultural Exchange and Understanding**
•Value of experiencing different cultures and languages.
•Encouragement to step out of personal bubbles for understanding.
•Appreciation of diversity and differences in people.
•🌍 **Global Community Engagement**
•Call for thoughts on experiencing different cultures.
•Importance of learning languages and diverse worldviews.
•Community engagement for broader conversations.
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00:11
Vanessa Rogers
Welcome, welcome, folksy folks. Welcome to fabric of Folklore. I’m your hostess, Vanessa Y. Rogers, and this is a podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. Folklore is folktales, mythology, language, tradition. It’s the expression of culture. And in this podcast, we’re really after understanding the origins and the relevance of folklore. For instance, the high five, something that most people have experienced in their life, is a celebratory, nonverbal gesture that usually involves two hand palm prints together. And you might think that it’s been around for a really long time. But according to ESPN, journalist John Molam says the first high five wasn’t officially done until 1977. But they believe that it originated from the low Five, which has been part of the african american culture since at least World War II.
01:12
Vanessa Rogers
Now, no one actually knows where that transition occurred from the low five to the high five, but there are lots of creation myths around it. But what we really love exploring on this show is not just the what, but the how and the why, and what significance this folklore holds for us and why it should matter to you and why it should matter to me in today’s world. Ultimately, the show is about connection. Through our deep dive of folklore, we celebrate the differences and similarities in our human experience. And in the words of Kendall Haven, a recent guest that we’ve had on this show, our experience as Homo Neretus, the storytelling animal. So if that sounds like a podcast that you want to continue to listen to, make sure you hit that subscribe button.
01:55
Vanessa Rogers
Whether you’re listening on your favorite podcasting platform or you’re watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button so that you get notifications every week when our podcast drops. We have an incredible show for you today. Don Culich, is that how you say your name? I forgot to ask you. Is a distinguished university professor of anthropology at Upsala University and the head of engaging vulnerability research program. His research and writing cover a variety of topics and disciplines, including sociolinguistics, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and queer theory. He’s written several books in English, including a Death in the rainforest, how a language and a way of life came to an end in Papua New guinea, which will be the topic that we are going to be discussing today. We’ll be discussing his work in the tiny village of Gapun. Is that in New guinea?
02:48
Vanessa Rogers
To document the death of the native language and why that matters. So thank you so much for joining us, dawn.
02:54
Don Kulick
Thank you. My pleasure. My great pleasure.
02:57
Vanessa Rogers
Well, let’s start with your journey into anthropology. How did you become anthropologist. What got you into that field? Why were you interested in it?
03:07
Don Kulick
I started university studying linguistics, languages. I started learning languages, basically. So one semester I was taking Mandarin, French, spanish and russian. I was always interested in languages, partly because there were no foreign languages spoken in the area where I grew up. So I was interested in stuff I didn’t know. So I took language classes. Then I took linguistics classes, because linguistics is about language. But about halfway through my linguistics classes, I discovered that at that time, and we’re talking now, the early 1980s, linguists really weren’t interested in the people who spoke the languages. They were interested in the languages themselves, as puzzles, as rebuses, as mysteries in them, structural mysteries. That’s all very interesting, but I was more interested in the people who spoke the languages. And at that point, I discovered anthropology, which I didn’t really know existed.
04:05
Don Kulick
I’d heard about it, but I assumed that it was something that had kind of died out in the late 1970s when Margaret Mead, who was the only anthropologist I’d ever heard of, when she died. So I didn’t really understand that it still existed as an actual discipline. To the extent that I thought about it, I thought that it was something that studied historical societies like archaeologists, because I didn’t realize that there were any more exotic places really left to discover, as it were. So I studied anthropology, and then I realized, wait a minute, these are people who are interested in people. And then I thought, wow, so I could get money. I could be paid to go somewhere where I never otherwise would have gone.
04:50
Don Kulick
I could get paid to hang out with people who I never otherwise would have had an opportunity to even talk to. How do I sign up? How do I do that? So I studied anthropology, and then I decided this is what I want to do. And I got into a graduate program, and at that point, I wanted to combine my interest in language with my interest in people. Now, Papua New guinea was and remains the place on the earth where the most languages are spoken.
05:21
Vanessa Rogers
Wow.
05:24
Don Kulick
When Papua New guinea became independent from Australia in 1975, there are about 3 million people there, as far as anyone could know. About 3 million people. In that population of 3 million people, there were about 800 different languages spoken, and that’s 800 different languages. We’re not talking dialects, we’re not talking varieties. We’re talking very mutually distinct languages. Now, most of those languages are not documented, and whether it’s 800, whether it’s 600, whether it’s 1200, we still really don’t know because most of them remain undocumented. But I thought to myself, well, wait a minute. There’s a lot of languages there. And I thought some of them must be dying because a lot of them were very small. I mean, about a third of the languages in Papua New guinea were only spoken by groups that were about 500 people.
06:14
Don Kulick
500 people spoke a language by themselves, a different language. And I thought, Papua New guinea, it hasn’t been subjected to colonialism and Christianity and capitalism for all that long. At that point, it was just over 100 years. We’re not talking the Andes, we’re not talking the Americas. We’re not talking Africa, which has been subjected to those forces for centuries. We’re talking just over 100 years. And so I thought, but still something must be happening to these small languages. And so I wanted to see what would happen when a language would die, because we know what happens when people study language acquisition. People study how children learn languages. People study language acquisition.
06:59
Don Kulick
So if you want to learn spanish or french or russian, we know there’s people who have studied how people do that, but at that point, there wasn’t a lot of knowledge how languages actually die. What happens to them when they die? Now, there were studies done by anthropologists and linguists of, like, the last speaker. So in a place like Australia, where the overwhelming majority of the languages have died, largely because the people were killed or forcibly, their children were forcibly taken away from them. So what people have done is they’ve looked at old 80 year olds who still speak a language that no longer really is spoken. So there were those kinds of studies. But I thought, well, when a language starts to die, how does that process start? And again, the reason I thought of New guinea is because there’s so many languages.
07:49
Don Kulick
So I went to New guinea, and.
07:52
Vanessa Rogers
How many languages are there?
07:54
Don Kulick
Again, the number that people, linguists sort of say is 800 languages, okay? And the population these days has grown exponentially. So there’s three times as many. There’s about 9 million people in the country now, and there’s fewer languages because several of them have died. But again, we’re talking 800 languages in a place that is about the size of the state of California. So we’re not talking a big place and we’re talking a relatively small group of people. But among those people, there’s all of these little languages. And the reason for that could be interesting. The reason people thought, oh, they’re speaking all these languages because they’ve been isolated from one another, they don’t have contact.
08:40
Don Kulick
That’s not the reason at all, because the largest languages, that is to say, the most speakers of the languages are in places where it’s relatively easy to get around, like up in the mountains. Sorry. Where it’s difficult to get around. Those places are where you have the biggest numbers of speakers. The places like where I worked, where it’s easy to get around because there’s rivers and there’s creeks and people can travel around in little canoes. That’s where the most languages are spoken. So, again, where it’s easiest to get around, where it’s easiest to meet people, you have the most languages. And that means that people in Papua New guinea, for reasons that nobody quite really understands, have decided that language is the way they differentiate themselves from one another. So you know how people will differentiate themselves from one another? By clothing styles.
09:33
Don Kulick
So if I want to differentiate myself from that group, we’ll adopt different clothing styles, or we’ll adopt different hairstyles, or we’ll adopt different kinds of cuisine, different kinds of cooking styles, or we’ll adopt different kinds of rituals to separate ourselves. To differentiate ourselves from other people. There’s not a lot of differences when it comes to religious beliefs, of growing food, ways of hunting, ways of dressing. There’s not that much difference in those dimensions. But language, that’s where they have their difference. So people have decided, for whatever reason, that the way I differentiate my group from your group is that we’re going to speak differently. And that process, over time, has resulted in all of these languages that are quite different from one another. So it’s just wonderful that’s a way that people can differentiate themselves, and they have.
10:39
Vanessa Rogers
But you’re saying that they’re not just, like, different dialects, they are entirely different languages.
10:44
Don Kulick
Completely different languages.
10:45
Vanessa Rogers
That’s amazing.
10:46
Don Kulick
It’s amazing. I mean, the language that I ended up working with is a language called Tayap. And that language, when I arrived in 1985, was spoken by exactly 89 people. That was the language, and it’s an isolate, so it’s not related to any other language around it. It’s not like french and Spanish are romance languages, and italian is a romance languages, English is a germanic language, so they’re related to one another in that way, isn’t related to anything. So it’s just like a drop from the moon. And it was spoken by 89 people. And the thing is that nobody in the 1980s, there were some old people there who were born in the 1930s, and they, of course, knew their generation.
11:30
Don Kulick
So I could get stories from these old men, basically from the turn of the century, about who was in the village, who spoke what language, and the language was never, to anyone’s remembrance, anyone’s knowledge, spoken by more than about 100 people. And that’s it. It was never a big language, and it just contracted. It was always a very tiny language. So there are different languages. So in the place where I work, there’s Tayap. There’s a language called Kopar, which is completely different. It’s like the difference between English and, say, Russian. And then there’s another language called Ajora, which is another language, which is completely. It’s the differences between Tayap would be like Basque, which isn’t related to anything. CoPar would be something like Greek and Ajora would be something like Russian. So they’re that different. They’re that different from one another.
12:30
Don Kulick
And these are people who live within.
12:32
Vanessa Rogers
2 hours of each and can. Do they have other language skills so that they can communicate with other villagers from different places or they completely.
12:47
Don Kulick
Traditionally, the people in the place I worked with, Gapun, they were all multilingual, so they spoke all the languages. They spoke them all. Nobody learned Thai up because it was a very small language, and the villagers didn’t want other people to speak it because they thought it was good to have a secret language, which their language, in fact, was. And so they valued that. So they learned everyone else’s language. So there were men in the village when I was there in the 1980s, old men who grew up during the war and after the war, World War II, who spoke five languages. Different languages. Totally different languages. Well, they spoke like, three or four, and then they understood two more. So they were incredibly multilingual, extraordinarily multilingual at that time. And since then, things have changed, which we’ll talk about.
13:36
Don Kulick
But at that point, there was an incredible amount of multilingualism among groups in Papua New guinea, because there was no overarching language, there was no English, there was nothing that was bigger than those languages. If I wanted to talk to you and you spoke Ajora, then I needed to learn Ajora, and I learned it. I did it. I spoke it.
13:58
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah. Now, as a linguist, one of the things that I’ve heard from, I believe I heard it in a TED talk, but I also have this concept that if you are speaking in a different language than your own, that your worldview is slightly changed based upon the language that you’re speaking. Can you speak to that at all? Is that true? Is that something that you’ve experienced yourself?
14:25
Don Kulick
I speak several languages, and one of the things I notice about myself is not that my worldview changes, but my presentation of myself changes. So I think that people experience me as a person differently when I speak, for example, Swedish or Tokpisin, the language I speak in Papua New guinea, one of the languages I speak in Papua New Guinea, I think that different parts of me will be foregrounded and different parts will be backgrounded. So I think that people experience themselves differently when they speak different languages, because different languages have different kinds of tonalities, different languages have different ways of expressing.
15:07
Don Kulick
So when I speak Tokpisin, which is the language we’re going to talk about, because that’s the language that the villagers that I worked with are shifting to, when people hear me speak TokPisin, they think that I’m very aggressive, but Toky, it sounds very aggressive, but I’m not being aggressive, but the language makes me sound that way. So I think there’s that I don’t really know. Linguists have done different kinds of experiments about how if people experience the world differently if they speak different languages, I think that’s a very difficult thing to say. And at the end of the day, I don’t really know what it means. I mean, what does it mean, experience the world differently?
15:54
Vanessa Rogers
The TED talk, and I don’t remember who was the speaker, but he specifically was referring to how people thought of future. And I can’t remember which language they were comparing it to, probably a Native north american one.
16:11
Don Kulick
There’s a very famous linguist named Benjamin Lee Wharf who made that claim. His comparison was native american languages, which are structured grammatically, very different than a language like English. And his argument was that many native peoples see time as a cycle. They don’t see it as we see it as a kind of a continuum. We have the past and then we have the future, whereas native american communities see time as cyclical. So Monday is not a new day. Monday is the return of last Monday. Again, I buy that. I think it’s an interesting idea, and I think it’s probably in some senses true, but I don’t think it depends on the language, because what that means is that if a native american person doesn’t speak their indigenous language, then they won’t have that sense of time.
17:03
Don Kulick
I don’t believe that, because I think a sense of time is something that you get socialized as a child to understand, and it doesn’t have to be in the native language. It’s about a lot of other things than language. I mean, I take it that some people may experience time differently or think of time differently. I completely accept that, but I don’t think you need the language to have that experience.
17:32
Vanessa Rogers
That’s very interesting. In the start of your book, one of the things that you address is how anthropology has evolved from the time of Margaret Mead, for instance, today. Can you talk a little bit about that evolution and what that looks mean?
17:47
Don Kulick
It’s evolved in many ways, actually. But the thing I talk about in the book was how earlier anthropologists, and I take Margaret Meade as an example because she’s still, I think, probably the best known anthropologist that many people have heard of. Margaret Mead was a very imperious woman. She didn’t suffer fools. And the way she did fieldwork, the way she collected her data was basically to summon people. She would summon them into her household and she would ask them questions and they would answer those questions and then they would be dismissed. That’s something that I don’t think very many anthropologists do these days. I certainly didn’t do it again. She was a great. She was an amazing field worker. She got remarkable data. She was extraordinarily perceptive.
18:37
Don Kulick
So I don’t want to do her down in any way, but she was a white woman in working in a colonialist period. If she didn’t do that, it would have been in many ways inappropriate for her in many ways for her to do that. But that sort of imperiousness. I’m coming to you and tell me what I want to know is something that I think that very few anthropologists, if any, we don’t operate that way these days. We’re very humble. I turned up in this village in 1985 and I said, hi. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what I am. But I would like to stay with you for a year and write a book about your language. And I was totally in their hands. I was completely in there. They could have done with me whatever they wanted to do.
19:35
Don Kulick
And thankfully they were welcoming. Thankfully, they were curious. They were like, who is this guy? And that curiosity, it made them very generous. They were incredibly generous. They were incredibly welcoming. They built me a house. I mean, come on. But I didn’t know what I was doing. And I didn’t go around saying, I want you to answer these questions that I have. I kind of was there for the first few months. I barely understood anything they said. So I was just like a stupid child. So I think that there’s that kind of difference as well. I was not imperious. I was very humble and very thankful and very grateful. And I must have come off like a stupid idiot, which I, in fact, was there. So that’s the difference between anthropologists then and now.
20:33
Don Kulick
I also think another difference is that at that point in the early part of the early history of anthropology, that is to say, before the 1960s, anthropologists were interested in generalizing about human behavior, about human minds, about human practices. And I think that interest in the universal, really, we don’t really care about the universal anymore. Most anthropologists, I think, are not interested in saying anything about the human mind. There was a very famous french anthropologist, Claude Le Vistros, who wanted to tell us about what the human mind throughout history, throughout cultures. It was a legitimate question, and maybe it’s still a legitimate question. I don’t know, but it doesn’t interest me. I want to know about specific people and what specific people think and what they do specifically.
21:29
Don Kulick
And that is, to me, the joy of anthropology is to see, I can get to know people who I otherwise would never, ever have gotten to know. And I know what they laugh at. I know what they eat for breakfast. I know what they like and what they don’t like. That is the joy. And I can communicate that to people who otherwise would not know about these people.
21:53
Vanessa Rogers
And what would you say is the benefit of learning about other cultures in this way? Well, for you, it’s joyful. It brings you joy to do that. But for the world, how is it helpful?
22:14
Don Kulick
Well, I think generally it’s better to know. I think it’s interesting to know about other people. I also think that we have a responsibility to know about other people. I mean, one of the things that I agree, Margaret Mead was very adamant about this. She said, know white western people who have basically wrought irrevocable changes to other people, to people in other places, Africa, the Americas, Australia, places like New guinea. We have upended their lives through capitalism, through colonialism, through Christianity. We have a responsibility to know about them. We have a responsibility to understand them, because we have been responsible for a lot of shit, and therefore we need to understand the sort of things that we do. And I take that to heart.
23:04
Don Kulick
I really take it to heart, because one of the things that I found about the people I worked with in Gapun is that they think a lot about white people. They’ve only met maybe ten white people in their entire lives, in their entire history. In their entire history. They’ve only basically seen, like, ten white people. But they think a lot about white people. And the question they ask themselves is, why do white people have all this stuff? Why do white people have airplanes? Why do white people have outboard motors? Why do white people have manufactured clothing? Why do white people have money? Why do white people have all of this stuff and we don’t have it? And a lot of their time and effort is spent trying to figure that out.
23:44
Don Kulick
So I see a vast inequality there, that they think a lot about us, but we don’t think about them. And I think that we have a deep responsibility to think about them, partly to understand our own history. It’s like, what have we done? What have we done to these people? But also because we do have a responsibility, because we have upended their lives. We have in many cases, I think, destroyed their lives. And so we can’t just sit back and say, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. It’s not my resistance, I don’t know. I think that’s inexcusable. I think it’s irresponsible. So I think that one of the things that anthropology does is that it points out these things to people who probably would rather not know.
24:24
Don Kulick
But I think, as I say, I think that’s an irresponsible and indeed unforgivable stance to have today.
24:32
Vanessa Rogers
When you say that they think about white people, do they have an opinion? Is it negative when they think about white people? Or do they have a sense of jealousy? Or is it just confusion?
24:46
Don Kulick
It’s complicated. Well, it’s complicated because I’m now talking about the people that I know best, the people who live in capital, who I’ve been working with, what, for 35 years. So again, what they wonder is, again, why do people have all this stuff? Why do we have all this stuff? It’s a curiosity. It’s like, well, how has it come to pass? And they think they’ve figured it out. They think they figured it out. And their theory, such as it is that white people have a more powerful God. Because remember that most of the people in Papua New Guinea’s experience with white people during the first part of the contact period from the 19 hundreds, well, basically continuing has been with missionaries, christian missionaries. And christian missionaries want to convert people. So christian missionaries say, we have a God and the God has given us.
25:44
Don Kulick
God gives us life. God gives us. And they also really indicated, I can’t say what they say, but they had certainly been interpreted by people to say that God gives us all this stuff. So God gives us money, the glory of God. And the villagers take the glory of God to mean cash, airplanes, output, motors, money, that’s the glory of God. And so the villagers are like, well, if that’s how they get it all, then we’re going to become Christian, too. And they had no problem at all with abandoning their traditional beliefs and their traditional goals. They had no problem at all with that because they thought they would be getting something for it and haven’t, which is one of the great tragedies of both their lives and I think our lives.
26:37
Don Kulick
We told them to give up everything, but they didn’t get anything in return. So they think they figured it out. But there’s a twist to it, and this is the very Papua New guinea twist, which I love, and that is that they believe that they created the white people. So they have myths where one of their culture heroes created two kinds of people out of different kinds of bark, dark ones and light ones. And they were brothers. And these two brothers fought with each other. And the light skinned brother went away. He went away? He went away. Where did he go? Well, he went to the countries, that is to say, he went to where we are. So it’s a very complicated, it’s a very interesting sort of. It’s like a chinese puzzle. There’s a box within a box.
27:29
Don Kulick
So they think that they basically are the beginning of everything. And one of the puzzles that they want to try to solve is, wait a minute. So we started it, but why don’t we get it? So there’s admiration, just to get back to your question, is there jealousy? There’s admiration, there’s curiosity, but there’s also like a disappointment. It’s like, well, wait a minute, but why won’t they give it to us? Because it’s really ours. Why won’t they give us everything that they have? Because it’s really ours. So there’s a kind of a resentment. Resentment, I think, is an adequate word. They wonder, why are they so ungenerous? Why are these white people so ungenerous? And that’s something that occupies their thought quite a lot.
28:16
Vanessa Rogers
How interesting.
28:17
Don Kulick
Okay, I would wonder thing, frankly, why are white people so ungenerous? They’re hitting a nail on a head.
28:26
Vanessa Rogers
I don’t know what I have found, and I don’t know if there’s any studies. I think there probably are quite a few studies around this, but I am not referencing anyone because I don’t know that I’ve read one, but from what I have read, it seems to me that generosity seems to be stifled the further up the wealth chain you get. The higher in the wealth chain you are, the less generous you are, and the closer to poverty level you are. The more generous you are because people have more empathy for one another, I think.
29:05
Don Kulick
But like I said, yeah, I don’t know. It would be a difficult thing to prove, I think, because people tend to be in sort of social situations where they mean, if your mother is dying, you’re probably going to give even no matter how rich you are. But I mean, one of the things about Papua New guinea which is interesting is because all of the relations that people have are based on exchange. So exchange is something that it makes you into a person. Exchange isn’t just something that you do. It’s like I bake a cake and I give you a cake and you bake some cupcakes and you give the cupcakes to me. That establishes a relationship between us. But in Papua New guinea that relationship is material. So if I give my child my milk as a mother, that child owes me something.
29:54
Don Kulick
And the reason for that is because the child has become a child through my work. And so when the child then owes me partly material stuff, I mean, the child has to give me pigs when the child is old enough to be able to give me pigs as a recompense for my work. But it’s always about exchange. And one of the mysteries that the Papua New Guineans have, they can’t understand it, is that they’ve given things to colonialists, they’ve given things to Christians, they’ve given things to capitalists, but they haven’t received anything in exchange. So that to them is like, again, wait, what happened here? It’s like, wait, I’ve given it to you and therefore I should get something back. And that is also something that stymies them. It’s like, why not?
30:45
Don Kulick
And again, in Papua New guinea there were not these hierarchies and that’s what makes the entire country very interesting. There were no hierarchies, there were no chiefs, there were no kings. Every society was basically anarchy. It’s like, know there were no hereditary positions. So it wasn’t know, I’m a king and my son will be king or I’m the mayor and my son will be the mayor. None of that works in Papua New guinea. In the mainland of the country it was, know, I’m a powerful man because people like me and I’m charismatic and, you know, organize a lot of pigs, but then I die and my son is a deadbeat. Power shifts, it goes to somebody else. There’s no hereditary thing and that means that the political system is very fluid and people kind of do what they want.
31:34
Don Kulick
That’s one of the things I loved about the people I worked with. Nobody could tell anyone what to do. No one could tell anyone what to do. They did it to the extent that they wanted to. And I thought that was just like, wow, we have these long meetings. Long. They would have long meetings about how tomorrow we have to go and fix the bridges. And then everyone say, yes, we have to fix the bridges. We’re going to go and fix the bridges tomorrow at sunrise, we’re all going to go the next day at sunrise. Two people would show up. Everybody else would just like, oh, I don’t want to do it. And still the society know. It wasn’t like it utter worked.
32:16
Vanessa Rogers
So. But there’s no clear head of that tribe, not at.
32:26
Don Kulick
Know. It’s right above Australia and it’s divided into half of it is occupied by Indonesia. The other half is the independent country of Papua New guinea, where is where I worked. But around that mainland, as it were, there’s other islands and they have a different kind of political system there. They have chiefs, they have a more hereditary system. But on the mainland of Papua New guinea, it’s just anarchy. People do what they want. And I thought that was just a wonderful system to see in action, really see in action. It’s the same with women. A husband cannot make a wife do anything she doesn’t want. A mother cannot make a child do anything that kid does not want to do because the kid will just run away and the mother will have to do it herself.
33:12
Don Kulick
So again, I thought that was exciting and quite wonderful. I write about that in the book because it was one of the things that I just thought, wow, this is just. Yeah.
33:24
Vanessa Rogers
Okay, well, paint the picture for us. Try and help us understand Papua New guinea in its totality. What do you see when you get there? Your smells. What are you bombarded with? Paint the picture for us.
33:37
Don Kulick
Well, again, the country is a very different. I mean, you have the capital city, Port Morsby, which is a city. So it’s a very. There are, you know, people sitting in marketplaces selling beetle nut, which is something that everybody choose, which is like, it’s a nut about that big. It’s a green nut, it’s a smooth nut, and people chew it. There’s a nut inside. And you have ground up seashells that look like powder. And then you have a beetle pepper, which is about that size. And you dip the beetle pepper in the ground up seashells and you eat the nut and it turns your mouth crimson so your mouth becomes crimson and you have to spit. It’s like what I imagine. What is that? Chewing tobacco.
34:27
Vanessa Rogers
Chewing tobacco, yeah.
34:27
Don Kulick
You have to spit, right? You don’t swallow, you spit. So there’s a lot of people with very red mouths and very red teeth and there’s a lot of spit, a lot of red spit around. But as soon as you get outside the large city, which is Port Morsby, you basically go into, there’s a couple of other towns in the country, but if you go into the bush, as they say, there’s people living in thatched huts. So the village that I lived in, Gapun, for me to get there takes at best, I can do it these days. Well, when I started going there in the 1980s, it took two days, two and a half days to get there. I’d go on a dirt road for about 5 hours.
35:15
Don Kulick
I’d sleep in a little sort of town on a river and then I’d get a motor canoe the next day and ideally I could get from that place to Gapoon in one day. But it depended on the tide. We had to cut through a creek and if the tide was down, then the canoe couldn’t get through the creek. So we’d sometimes have to sleep on the banks of the creek. But ideally you could get there in two days. And you get there, you go through a mangrove lagoon and then you go through another creek for an hour, and then you walk for an hour into the jungle. And it’s a jungle, it’s the rainforest. In the book, I say these days it’s politically correct for reasons that.
35:56
Don Kulick
I’m not quite sure why to call it a rainforest, but I think that’s a misnomer because a rainforest, it’s like they’re the lungs of the planet. It’s clean, it’s fresh, you have this image of happy butterflies and happy indigenous people. But jungle is like its sharp spikes, it’s alligators, crocodiles, it’s poisonous snakes. And the place where I worked is jungle. It’s definitely jungle. It’s intense, it’s incredibly hot, it’s incredibly humid, there are mosquitoes everywhere, there are crocodiles. And so you’re walking through that for an hour and then you get to this little place in the middle of swamp, which is just sort of, it’s a little sort of around.
36:42
Don Kulick
They’ve cleared the bush, so you have these little basically little huts, little houses that people have built and they’re living in these houses and then they go off into the rainforest during the day and they make their food which is Sego, which is a very complicated food to make, but it turns out to be something like mucus. It’s not nice. And that’s what they eat. And they hunt pigs in the rainforest, they hunt catheters in the rainforest, they hunt possums in the rainforest, and that’s how they live. So it’s kind of the stereotype in some ways of a jungle, because that’s what it is. I mean, their houses are not little tiny huts, they’re larger houses, but they’re all made of bush material, so they’re all made of palm trees and palm thatch and things like that.
37:31
Don Kulick
So it’s very, I don’t know, rustic, I don’t know what the right word is, but they do it themselves. There’s no corrugated iron, which there is in many Papua New guinea villages these days, but in the place where I work, there’s no corrugated iron, there’s no nails. It’s kind of a do it yourself place, but it works well.
37:58
Vanessa Rogers
And is there much trade between other villages?
38:01
Don Kulick
Not really, no. I mean, the villagers wanted to. Since World War II, they’ve grown cash crops, so they started growing rice. At one point they grew peanuts, another point, they grew coffee. Another point, they grew rubber trees. Another point, they grew vanilla, cocoa, all of them. And they’ve all ended badly because this village is so difficult to get to that no buyers come to it and the prices they pay for the stuff is just like nothing. So the villagers all, they grow this with great enthusiasm, thinking that they’re going to get money and then nobody comes to buy it. And the people who eventually do buy it, they underpay them so drastically that they just give. Currently, there’s nothing. The last thing they grew were cocoa, but that was devastated by a parasite in the early two thousand s, I think, and they haven’t.
38:57
Don Kulick
So now, as far as I know, they don’t grow anything. Little money comes into the village, almost no money. They trade stuff with other. They’ll trade bunches of bananas, they’ll trade beetle nut, they’ll trade stuff like that, but there’s no real. Not a lot of money comes in.
39:14
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah. And now, how many people in the village speak? What was the language?
39:23
Don Kulick
Well, as I say, when I went there in the mid 1980s, 89 people spoke it. When I went back, I mean, I’ve been back. The last time I was back was 2019, and right now there are probably about 35 to 40 people who speak it relatively well. So it’s dying. And I do predict that within 50 years, it won’t be around anymore.
39:51
Vanessa Rogers
What language are they speaking in place of it?
39:54
Don Kulick
Well, this is the thing. They’re speaking a language called talk Pisian. This is a very interesting language. It’s a language that arose in the mid 18 hundreds. It’s a plantation language. A pigeon language is a language that arises when colonialists take men, always men from different places, that don’t speak the same language, and they put them to work on plantations. So, for example, in the United States, you have Jamaican Creole, which started out the same way. It’s a pigeon language. And these languages are interesting because they’re based grammatically on the languages spoken by the men. But the lexifier language, as to say the language from which many of the words are derived, tends to be a colonial language.
40:40
Don Kulick
So there’s french creoles throughout Africa, for example, and also in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, there’s English based creoles, of which jamaican creole is one, and toppiesin is an English based creole. Because the colonialists in Melanesia were mostly from the UK, from Britain, and from Australia. The Germans were there until World War I. But after World War I, Germany lost all of its colonies, so they were gone. They were out of the picture. But talk pisin, it means actually talk pigeon. Talk pigeon. And it arose in the late 18 hundreds, and men learned it in the village that I work in, Gapoon. Men started learning it in the early part of the 19 hundreds, when several of them went away as plantation laborers. So they went away for three years. And this is a system called blackbirding.
41:44
Don Kulick
Basically, colonialists took these guys away, far away, and they worked for three years, and then they were brought back. It wasn’t enslavement, and the guys really wanted to go. I mean, they lived under terrible conditions, but they had adventures. They had adventures which they really liked. They came back, and they came back with certain kinds of cargo. So they came back with steel axes, which they’d never seen before. They came back with bolts of cloth. They came back with artificially manufactured seashells, which they valued a lot. They didn’t realize they were porcelain shells imported from Germany. They thought that they were the real thing, but that’s what they were paid with, know, european tobacco, which was amazing for them. So they came back with that. But they also came back with this language, Tokpisin.
42:31
Don Kulick
And they started teaching it to other men in the village because they thought, well, you guys should also go away and have these adventures. So they learned it. And Tokpisin is a language that, again, some of the words are very obvious. Talk is talk. Sindh means sit down. Sanap means stand up. Passim is a bit more difficult, but passim means to close. So passimaus shut up. Passim mouse, shut your mouth. Close. But some of the words are so telling of the colonial history. The word for white woman, for example, is one of my favorites. And that word is misses. The best or the most telling is the word for white man. And that word, of course, is masta.
43:21
Vanessa Rogers
Master.
43:23
Don Kulick
And that’s what I was called in the 1980s. People referred to me just because I was a white guy, a white man. So I was Master masta. They don’t say that anymore. They’ve kind of got a sense that it’s like, that’s not really a good word. Now they say white man, but masta. But I mean, the language is a wonderful language, know? I mean, it’s difficult to understand. It’s both difficult to understand for an english speaker, both spoken and written. But it’s based on English. The words are English, as it were English based. But the structure is, if I want to say, for example, I went a long time. I mean, to go is ego. Ego. But if I want to say I went for a very long time, I do this wonderful thing. It’s like, beautiful.
44:16
Vanessa Rogers
Yes.
44:17
Don Kulick
Isn’t that great? I’ve been going or I went for a very long time. That sort of thing in the language, it makes it just such a. It’s a beautiful, wonderful language. It’s very sing songy. I mean, one of the things that I mention in the book is how mothers socialize their children. And the villagers, they lie a lot, and they say they lie continually. But one of the things that they do, which I noticed very quickly, is that a baby starts. Imagine one of your babies. When they’re babies, they cry. If you’re in a place like Gapwin, the way you shut that child up is you stuff a breast in the child’s mouth. That usually kind of gets it to shut up for a while. But after a while, of course, children can’t be shut up that way. So they start to fuss.
45:11
Don Kulick
And so what a mother will do with a fussing baby is it’ll put the child. So that the kid is looking out. Put the kid. So the kid is looking out. And the mother will say, point in the distance and say, you look at pig. Pikia. You look at pig Mia peak. You look at pig. Yeah, Pikia. And they’re drawing their child’s attention to a pig. So they’re saying, look at the pig. Look at the pig. Look at the pig. But there’s no pig there. There’s no pig. I thought to myself, what is going on here with these mothers? And this is one of the things that, this is one of a very. A kid, it’s like a three month old baby is being taught that what people say is not true.
45:55
Don Kulick
And that’s one of the first things that a child learns, is that you cannot trust what anyone says. You have to pay attention yourself. And I thought that was just a wonderful different way. Mothers never say, it’s like, oh, look, what does the pig say? The pig says, oink. Or what color is the pig? Those questions are never asked. Never asked. So again, that sort of sing song quality of Tokpisin is used to soothe. It’s used to soothe children. So there’s that. But there’s also different. They do lots of things with this language, and one of them is, well, they do it in their native language as well. But the lying, I thought, was just amazing.
46:39
Vanessa Rogers
That is so incredibly different from our culture because we assign morality to lying. But it seems that there is absolutely no negative feelings towards lying or truth telling.
46:54
Don Kulick
Well, I mean, people don’t like it when people lie to them. But, see, what we assume, what we tend to assume is that when people are telling us something, they’re telling us the truth. That’s the default assumption among know most. Exactly. Exactly. Or if you are listening to Donald Trump, who you know is lying, everything he says. But again, our default. And that’s, I think, one of the reasons why Trump’s words are so strange for so many people, because we know he’s lying, that he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s lying. So there’s that. So that’s one of the things that makes it difficult for many people to understand what’s going we, because we assume that people are going at least to try to be truthful for most of the time in Gapun, people assume that people are lying.
47:48
Don Kulick
So the default assumption is what you’re telling me is not the truth. So what I have to do is I have to get beyond your words. I don’t believe what you’re saying. So I have to observe. So when I say, because this is a society where people know everything about everybody, I mean, when I was there in the 1980s, there were like 130 people in the village. Every time I went to the toilet, somebody would say to me, you go, Wei, where are you going? I’d say, I’m going to the toilet. And when I’d say, you go toilet, you were at the toilet. And it’s like, so they knew everything. Everything. But of course, people don’t want. There’s ways of, I could say, I’m going to the toilet, but then I could go out and have an affair with somebody.
48:36
Don Kulick
I could go into the jungle and have an affair with somebody. And so people know that. They know that. And so what they depend on is not what people say, but what their own eyes, what they hear and what they see. That’s what they depend on. And that is a different way of relating to language than we relate to it. It’s a very different way of doing it. And one of the things that I was fascinated by is, how does that become socialized? How do children become aware that people lie? And of course, I saw it from the earliest kinds of interactions with mothers. They lied to their babies. So children grow up being lied to by everybody, and they come to understand sooner or later, they understand that.
49:20
Don Kulick
When a mother says, you look at Pikya pikia, look at the pig, there’s no pig there. And they get that, and then they understand that. Okay, well, what my mother is telling me is basically a lot of lies. What is the real situation? I have to see it myself. And this becomes very handy for people when children have to rely on their own eyes and their ears, because children in this village can go anywhere. They go everywhere. Children can go into any. They can go into your house, they can go into my house, they can go into anyone’s house. Nobody pays attention to kids. But then when the kids come back home, the parents ask them, so, did that person kill a pig who was in that person’s house? Children are the basis.
50:14
Don Kulick
They’re the ones that know everything in the village because they’ve been taught to observe, they’ve been taught to listen, they’ve been taught to look out, and that is put to use. And children, of course, understand that. So they sometimes won’t say, it’s like, I’m not going to tell you. Of course you have to tell me, did they kill a pig? It’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know. You know? You know? And then they give me a beetle nut, give me a chocolate bar kind of thing, and I’ll tell you. It’s like, all right, here. What is it? What do you know? So kids have a huge amount of power because they learn that they always have to be aware, and that, of course, continues through life.
50:50
Don Kulick
So people are always, you can tell me something but I’m not going to believe it because I’m going to try to figure out, is it true or is it not?
51:00
Vanessa Rogers
So were you able to incorporate? I mean, did you attempt to do the lying like they do in their culture, or was it difficult for you to even incorporate?
51:10
Don Kulick
No, I couldn’t lie. I just couldn’t bring myself to because I didn’t know what the consequences would be. Right. If I lie and I’m caught in that lie, I didn’t know what would happen to me, but I understood that everything I said, for example, they wanted to get behind it. I would tell them stuff about white people, and they never really believed it. They didn’t believe it unless it corresponded with what they already knew. For example, I would say, well, all white people. White people generally have to work to get money. They didn’t believe that. They thought, we get money, we would receive money. White people all don’t get driven around everywhere we want to go. They didn’t believe that. They just couldn’t imagine that. But then I told them about subways.
52:07
Don Kulick
I said that we have these trains, these big cars that go under the ground, and they’re like, yes, we know. We know. Because they’d heard rumors that is how, when Papua New Guineans die, they get to Rome. They go under the ground, they take a subway, and they get to Rome, and that’s how they go to heaven. So heaven is in Rome. So they have this incredible Italy. Yeah, Rome, Italy. And they would ask me, say, have you ever been to Rome? And this is before I understood what they thought Rome was. And it’s like, have you? Yeah, I’ve been to knew, you know, we know. So they have know sad ideas that they’ve gleaned from different kinds of sources. They’ve gleaned them from rumors and from what people say, and they have an understanding of what they think white society is.
53:00
Don Kulick
And so when I told them things that they’d already like, the whole subway thing, they’d already understood that there’s subways underground, there’s cars under the ground. They take us to Rome. They’re like, yeah, we already know that. We know that. But then when I told them things that they didn’t really believe, like that white people aren’t driven. When I would walk, literally, when I would walk, like, what, a hundred meters, they would say, I was like, are you tired? Are your legs tired? It’s like, why would my legs be tired? I’m like, walking like a block. It’s like, oh, you guys don’t ever walk.
53:39
Vanessa Rogers
We’re just carried everywhere.
53:42
Don Kulick
Driven. I’d have a car that would drive me and they were really concerned. It’s like, well, aren’t you tired? It’s like, no, what should I be? It’s like, well, we’re not driving you. So, yeah, there was that sort of thing.
53:58
Vanessa Rogers
Okay, sorry. I have another question with the lying. In a society where the default is lying, how is justice enacted? Because if you can’t believe your witnesses or is there even a form of criminal justice? If someone commits a crime of sorts, what happens?
54:22
Don Kulick
That’s a difficult question because traditionally there was social control. So traditionally, if you were to commit a crime, like, say you stole something from somebody and you denied it, again, this is where everybody’s eyes and ears come into it. So people would say, we think that you stole this papaya. And then someone would have seen something, someone would have heard something. They’d piece like, well, you know, Don did go into that part of the rainforest earlier that day. What was he doing there and what did he eat later? I heard. Or they have a great concept, a yow witness. They have an eyewitness. An eyewitness and a yow witness. An ear witness. So if you heard something, you can say that you. So again, everybody knows what everybody else is doing.
55:17
Don Kulick
And if you do commit a massive crime, there’s different ways of dealing with it. There’s partly. The people would call you out on it. You’d have to give a pig in return. So people will say you did it. You can deny that you did it, but people will say you did it. And so therefore you have to pay this person with a pig. And there’s also sorcery, because everybody in the village dies through sorcery. There’s no natural deaths largely throughout Papua New Guinea. People who are ardent Christians, they try not to believe in sorcery, but certainly in the village that I worked, everybody dies through sorcery, so everybody is murdered. And the reason people are murdered is because somebody did something. So if I stole your papaya, you might get angry at that.
56:10
Don Kulick
And that anger inside you will send some sort of a signal to a sorcerer who may kill not me, but maybe my mother or maybe my daughter. So again, sorcery is this form of social control as well, because if you’re always afraid that something, you’re going to do something and not you might not die, but one of your matrilineal relatives will die. So your daughter or your cousin or your mother or your aunt, they might die because of what you’ve done. So that’s a kind of something that people do sometimes consider. Actually, not often, but they know it can happen. They know it can happen.
56:51
Vanessa Rogers
Wow. But is anyone accused of being a sorcerer in the village, or is it always external?
56:57
Don Kulick
It’s always external. In this village, it’s always external. This varies throughout Papua New guinea, but in the area where I worked, it’s always another village. It’s a neighboring village where all of the sorcerers live. And all of the sorcerers are the sorcerers that live there are the ones that kill everybody in Gapu, and you could be a 78 year old person who really isn’t looking too good. But when you die, somebody has killed you, because why did you die just then? Why did you die then?
57:29
Vanessa Rogers
So is blame assigned to a particular person who might have done something?
57:33
Don Kulick
Absolutely. If you die and people will ask, I mean, they used to ask the body, they don’t do that anymore. But when I was in the 1980s, they would actually carry the corpse on a beer around the village, and it would be like a Ouija board. The corpse would be. People would say, well, did this person do it? And the corpse would carry the people carrying the corpse. It would bear them in a direction and it would bump up against, for example, your house. And if it bumped up against your house, the corpse was saying that you had something to do with the death, so you would then have to pay the relatives of the dead person something.
58:13
Don Kulick
You’d have to pay them a pig or several pigs, but you would be declared guilty and you would have to do it no matter what you said. No matter what you said, I didn’t have it, because you can also do these things without really knowing that you’re doing them. So I can be angry at you and I don’t do anything about that anger, but just the fact that I’m angry can cause a sorcerer to. The antennae are up and the sorcerer will sense my anger and will punish you, but I am the source of that. So I would be accused of being angry at you. And because my anger caused illness or death, I’m responsible. I’m responsible.
58:54
Vanessa Rogers
And so these social controls worked pretty well in keeping people in line.
58:58
Don Kulick
Used to. They used to because people were afraid of old people. Until the 1980s, people were quite afraid of old people because old men especially had power. They weren’t sorcerers themselves, but they had songs that they could sing, like secret chants that they could do to actually punish people, and people were afraid of them. But all of the old men died in the 1990s. So there’s no more social control in the village. It’s actually very sad. There’s no social control. They still continue to do what they want, but there’s a lot more violence. There’s a lot more just bad things that are happening now that didn’t happen until the, I’d say the early 1990s.
59:44
Vanessa Rogers
And what do you think that. Why did that change? How did that transition occurred? Was it western influence?
59:53
Don Kulick
Well, largely. When I was there in the 1980s in the village, kids went to school in a village that was 2 hours away, but they went to school and the school was useless. It was pointless. It was taught in English, which is a language nobody knew. I mean, imagine it’s like, what’s the best way to not teach kids anything? Teach them in a language they don’t understand. Teachers didn’t even speak English, so it was a complete waste of everybody’s time. But they learned basic literacy skills in school, which they put use for various things to write letters, to mail order catalogs, to try to get stuff, and to write love letters to one another.
01:00:33
Don Kulick
So they put it to use not exactly in the way that perhaps it was intended, but one of the things they learned in school was that their lives weren’t worth anything because they had these old australian textbooks which showed Australia, they showed cities, they showed towns, they showed airplanes, they showed the sort of things that you see in primary school textbooks. And the villages are like, wait a minute, that exists somewhere, but not here. So what are we doing? What are we doing? We should have access to that. And we’re living in our village, we’re self supporting, we hunt our pigs, we grow our crops, but we don’t have all of that.
01:01:17
Don Kulick
And so it really instilled a sense of inferiority, I think, in a lot of Papua New Guineans, especially the ones that couldn’t go any further, this village, they were going to go in. No one in the village has ever. I think two people in the entire history of the village have gone to grade ten and no one’s gone any further than that. There’s that. And when all of the old people died, the social control kind of disappeared. So there’s a big generation of young men who are dissatisfied with their lives in the village, but they don’t have anything else, so they don’t have anything else. And alcohol was introduced into the village in the early two thousand s. And that has been devastating because people get really drunk and they get really violent and they kill each other. So there’s all of those things.
01:02:10
Don Kulick
And Papua New guinea is a country where there is no police force to speak of, certainly not out in places where these people live. There’s no health care, there’s no education, and yet that would be okay if people were. They were happy. They didn’t want it, but they do want it. They want it and they want to get it. They want to obtain it. So there’s a huge amount of crime in the country as a whole, and people are dissatisfied because they thought they were going to get all this stuff and they didn’t get it and they’re.
01:02:47
Vanessa Rogers
Not going to get it.
01:02:48
Don Kulick
As I can tell. They’re angry. They’re angry?
01:02:52
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah, rightfully so. Seems so. Tell us about what drove you to want to write this book. Because originally you wrote a book that was more academic and more for the academic setting, but this book that you wrote is more for the general public, is that right?
01:03:14
Don Kulick
Exactly. It is. I wanted to write a book that explained what anthropologist does. So it’s kind of a memoir, it’s a reflection on my 30 years working in Papua New guinea, but it’s also a kind of a, you know, so what do you do as anthropologist? How do you turn up somewhere and people say, you can stay? What does that mean? What do you eat? What kind of responsibilities do you have? How do you work? What do you actually do? So a lot of it is a description of that process, but it’s also a description of, again, how a language dies, how this language Tayap is disappearing. What is the process behind that? How do you think of a language? What happens when a language dies? But most of all, I think it’s a kind of a modest call to awareness.
01:04:12
Don Kulick
I won’t say responsibility or accountability because I think those words are too grand. But it’s like these are people living on the periphery of most people’s knowledge, and what do they think? What do they say? What do they have for breakfast? What kind of jokes do they tell? What do they think is funny? What kind of arguments do they have with each other? What do they talk about day to day? And I think that’s valuable and it’s interesting and it’s kind of fun knowledge for people to have, because why should they? Why should people know what these people think? But I think that, again, it’s good to know. It’s good to know. And what one does with that knowledge is up to everyone.
01:05:01
Don Kulick
But I think that the world is a better place when we know about people far away from ourselves and we think about them that they occupy a moment of our thought. I think it’s better than we don’t know anything about them and we don’t care about them. So hopefully my book will let people know that there are people in the world that they previously knew nothing about that are actually kind of fun. They’re interesting, they’re funny, they’re irrascible, they’re there and they serve a thought.
01:05:45
Vanessa Rogers
Well, I feel like we could just keep talking forever, but it looks like we run out of time. So do you have any last imparting thoughts that maybe we didn’t touch on?
01:06:00
Don Kulick
No, I think we’ve pretty much covered a lot. But as I say, I did write the book for people who don’t know anything about anthropology, but maybe have heard about anthropologists and wonder, what are these people? What do they do? And also maybe Papua New guinea, because Papua New guinea has a reputation in places like the United States as being the last exotic them. And the Amazon, it’s like, ooh. And this book is, I don’t want it to be exoticizing. I don’t want you to read the book and think, oh, these people are just totally weird. I mean, they’re very different. They’re very different from you or I or most readers, but they’re lovely and they’re wonderful. They have their own ways of doing things which I think are great. They’re wonderful ways.
01:06:55
Don Kulick
I hope anyone who reads a book gets that point well, and.
01:07:00
Vanessa Rogers
I hope that people do end up picking up your book, because as I was telling before we started the interview, it’s incredibly engaging and it’s easy to read. It doesn’t read like a textbook, so I really encourage people to pick it up. It’s a fun read. I haven’t read the whole thing, but what I did read was very engaging and I wanted to continue it. And I agree with what you were saying. In general, I think that seeing the world through other people’s eyes is so invaluable in that when we’re raised in one culture, we think that is just how life is.
01:07:41
Vanessa Rogers
But when you see cultures from a completely different perspective, then you understand that so much of what you are and who you are has been ingrained in you from other people and your own culture, and that if you were born somewhere else, you could be living an entirely different life, have entirely different morals, have entirely different viewpoints, and having that knowledge helps to take you out of yourself and maybe in breeds more empathy.
01:08:16
Don Kulick
That’s very well said. That’s the point of anthropology. I mean, anthropology began as a way of telling westerners that western life is not the end of. It’s not the end of development. We haven’t gotten. People are different, and that difference is valuable, and that difference is important. And it’s great. It’s wonderful that people are very different. And so to understand that difference puts our own lives in a perspective. We get out of our little bubbles, we get out of our little silos, and we understand. Wow. That’s another way of thinking about it. I might not agree with it. I might not really want to do it myself, but I get it. I get it. And that, I think, is the point of anthropology. And I think that’s an incredibly valuable thing to offer people those other perspectives for exactly the reasons you’re talking about.
01:09:13
Vanessa Rogers
And I think for me in particular, from my own travels, one of the things that I have gotten for myself is when you raised in one culture and then you are confronted with a completely different culture, it’s hard to stop yourself from passing judgment immediately. And so finding yourself in these different cultures time and time again helps you to train your brain not to be so judgmental of other ways of being. That’s one thing that I find very helpful. No.
01:09:52
Don Kulick
And as I say, I hope that when people read the book, I wrote the book with what I hope will be appreciated as a fair amount of humor, because I think that one way of approaching other cultures is to actually be. It’s like, wow, this is really funny. It’s really fun. And I think that allows one to approach difference with an open and generous mind rather than a closed mind. So I hope that people, when they read the book, will appreciate that. I actually spend a lot of time trying to make it light. It’s not a book where I lecture people. I don’t lecture. I observe and I observe things that I’ve myself found quite remarkable, fun, amusing and moving. So that was the spirit in which I wrote it.
01:10:48
Vanessa Rogers
Well, we very much appreciate you coming on our show.
01:10:51
Don Kulick
Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.
01:10:54
Vanessa Rogers
And thank you, folksy folks, for joining us on this Papua New guinea journey through a multilingual journey. And so we would love to hear your thoughts. All of our show notes today will be on our website, www.fabricofoclow.com, and I’ll include the links to his book and you’ll be able to find his book to purchase. And we also want to hear from you and hear your thoughts about have you had experience with entirely different cultures? What do you feel is valuable about learning different languages or different ways of looking at the world. So we encourage you to join our Facebook page Facebook group where we continue that conversation. Or you can just comment down below. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can find us on all the social medias. Well, most of them, we’re on Instagram, Facebook, sometimes on.
01:11:55
Vanessa Rogers
So definitely try and find us there so that you can keep up with where the community is having these conversations. And we encourage you, like I said before, to subscribe so that you are notified every week when our new podcast drops. And until next time, keep the folk alive. All right, better.