The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  His curiosity, however, is soon gratified. Before two days are over, he knows everybody’s name and everybody’s business; distinguishes at first sight between a Cook’s tourist and an independent traveller; and has discovered that nine-tenths of those whom he is likely to meet up the river are English or American. The rest will be mostly German, with a sprinkling of Belgian and French. So far en bloc; but the details are more heterogeneous still. Here are invalids in search of health; artists in search of subjects; sportsmen keen upon crocodiles; statesmen out for a holiday; special correspondents alert for gossip; collectors on the scent of papyri and mummies; men of science with only scientific ends in view; and the usual surplus of idlers who travel for the mere love of travel, or the satisfaction of a purposeless curiosity. (A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, 1877)

  Edwards perfectly describes the aimlessness and airiness of the imperial tourist, for whom the world was not so much an oyster as a delightful wrong turning. “For in simple truth,” she admits, “we had drifted hither by accident, with no excuse of health, or business, or any serious object whatever; and had just taken refuge in Egypt as one might turn aside into the Burlington Arcade or the Passage des Panoramas—to get out of the rain.”

  Edwards’s book gives us Oriental scenes that are always “charming” and “picturesque.” But it is also built around a series of archaeological encounters evoked in incredible detail. Many tourists shared her avid antiquarian interests, yet despite the Victorian seriousness with which they tracked down ancient steles, the pleasure of this kind of travel was also insular and social. The British liked to refind each other during set “seasons” on the Nile and in set hotels. The season in Cairo was from November to spring.

  Tourism’s motley crowd were the vanguard of an eventual colonial conquest, for in the case of that unhappy land it could be said that tourists occidentalized an Eastern country only a few years before the gunships moved in. It was for this reason that nationalist crowds burned down Shepheard’s Hotel in 1952. They saw the connection clearly enough.

  From the beginning, the same connection was at work with the 1869 Suez Canal, which was placed under British guardianship by the Convention of Constantinople in 1888. Egypt was never a formal colony and the canal was a “neutral zone,” but even before the British had bought out the canal’s Egyptian shares in 1875, it was critical for the opening up of India and Southeast Asia as tourist destinations. With a shipping lane now cutting quickly through to India, the Grand Tour could be extended considerably. The crowds on the Shepheard’s Hotel verandah could now disperse economically across the rest of the Empire.

  As the new tourist route flourished, the London-to-Sydney run (taking in places like Aden, Calcutta, Singapore, Bangkok, and Bali) became fashionable. But, as Amelia Edwards shows, a “tourist” was not necessarily a single type. He or she could be a con man, a scholar, an amateur watercolorist, a criminal on the lam, a coxcomb, a minor poet, a honeymooner, or, more improbable, an anthropologist.

  There is something about this route, which later became known as the Asian Highway to the hippies of the’60s, that is suggestive, attractive, even though today it is never pursued in a boat. If there is one travelers’ axis that explains the whole evolution of modern tourism, it is this one. However, I didn’t particularly want to write a social history of tour groups. The Asian Highway was desirable for the purposes of my escape because it had been followed by so many seeking the same thing—a route to some kind of “end of the world.”

  But this world’s end was not Australia, which was after all Anglo-Saxon and familiar. It was first Bali and Indonesia and then, when those had worn thin a little, the huge island of Papua New Guinea. The journey had distinct phases. You set off from Southampton or New York; you passed through the familiar landscapes of the Grand Tour, namely the classical Mediterranean; then you arrived in Egypt. You passed through the Suez Canal to Aden, then—as if leaving classical civilization behind—you passed into “the East.” First the Gulf, then the Indian Ocean. Many tours stopped in Bombay and Calcutta before reaching Penang in Malaysia and Bangkok. From there, the routes shot southward into yet more exotic spheres—the Dutch East Indies.

  The Dutch Indies stretched from Jakarta to the western half of New Guinea, and in the beginning of the twentieth century as tourism was opening it up, a smattering of anthropologists traveled these same boats to arrive at places that were supposedly “unknown.”

  Before anthropology became a dry academic career zone, its pioneers were among the most serious and poetic of travelers. Margaret Mead’s Letters from the Field and Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques are classics of travel writing, even though Lévi-Strauss begins his book with the imperious declaration, “I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.” When I was traveling, so to speak, professionally, both Mead and Lévi-Strauss were constant companions in countless lonely hotel rooms. But they always gave me a bad conscience. So this was what real travel had been like in 1925, or 1935, or even in the 1940s. Both writers emanate a fierce sense of loneliness as they wander, and of adversity. They give the impression—which may be false—that they had reached the edge of the West’s infrastructure and simply stepped outside it. They are winding narratives of personal discovery.

  I identify easily with the twenty-four-year-old Margaret Mead setting off for Samoa in 1925 from Philadelphia, as related in the Letters:

  I had the courage of almost complete ignorance. I had read everything that had been written about the Pacific Island peoples who had become known to the Western world through Captain Cook’s voyages, and I was deeply interested in the processes of change. But I myself had never been abroad or on a ship, had never spoken a foreign language or stayed in a hotel by myself. In fact, I had never spent a day in my life alone.

  “Whereas the tourist,” Paul Bowles wrote, “generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.” It’s a great definition—but you could also say that it defines the difference between a tourist and an anthropologist. Thus, although I am not especially interested in anthropology, I began to find myself drawn to places that anthropology still held as in some way “outside.”

  In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss describes his desire to find what he calls a “Lost World.” Having completed some fieldwork among the Bororo people in Central Brazil, he begins to cast about for a more dangerous, radical journey and to find more uncontacted tribes. The anthropologist, indeed, must always be susceptible to this treacherous romance—that of a region, a people, lying beyond the so-called known world. In Brazil, Lévi-Strauss thought he might have found this magical promise in a remote region of the northwest plateau that had been incompletely explored by General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon in 1907. The report of the Rondon Commission, as it was called, was the only information available on this wild land stretching between Cuiabá and the Rio Madeira, though a quixotic telegraph line had been run through it in anticipation of its becoming Brazil’s next El Dorado—for it was reputed to be rich in diamonds. The boom never happened. By the time Lévi-Strauss got there, it was an eerie, abandoned place marked only by the poles and a track next to them known as the Rondon Line. On either side lay mysterious forests where a people called the Nambikwara lived:

  Anyone living on the Rondon Line might well believe he was on the moon. Imagine an area as big as France, three quarters of it unexplored, frequented only by small groups of native nomads who are among the most primitive to be found anywhere in the world, and traversed, from one end to the other, by a telegraph line.

  What drew Lévi-Strauss to the Nambikwara, the heart of his book? Was it because before them “the observer is taken back to what he might easily, but wrongly, consider to be the infancy of the human species”? More likely, insofar as I can reconstruct it, it is a traveler’s emotion, the craving for
a mythic place beyond known time and history. The Rondon Line was straight out of a García Márquez novel, with its fantastical dialect composed of forty words fused from Portuguese and Nambikwara, its telegraph operators sometimes discovered buried waist-deep by the Nambikwara and riddled with arrows, their Morse keys placed on their heads. I have no idea what professional anthropologists think of Lévi-Strauss today or whether any of his work concerning the Rondon Line holds up after half a century. What interests me is the unconscious emotion that carried him there.

  The history of anthropology suggested another place similar to the Rondon Line. In 1935, Margaret Mead set off from New York with her glamorous British husband, the scientist Gregory Bateson, on a tour of East Asia organized by the Dutch KPM shipping line. They had met on New Guinea while doing fieldwork and now were traveling on the glitzy KPM Dutch steamship line, which had pioneered organized tours into the Indies, especially Bali—it was KPM that commissioned the island’s first tourist brochures.

  In Bali, Mead found a Dutch colony with a Hindu caste system, a secretive culture unknown to the outside world that she could study as a pioneer. It was part of a swath of Asian Islands used as case histories in her work: Samoa in 1925, the Admiralty Islands in 1928, Papua New Guinea in 1931-32, Bali in 1936-38, and Papua New Guinea again in 1938.

  Mead’s work culminated in Papua New Guinea, where she found all the material she needed to overturn what she perceived as the patriarchy, racism, and puritanism of her native America. In 1932 she studied three peoples in northern New Guinea called the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli. It was her classic study of these three Papuan peoples in Sex and Character that laid the foundation of today’s “gender studies” by seemingly proving that the roles of men and women could fluctuate wildly even within a relatively tiny geographic area. (Among the Arapesh, for example, women were aggressive and dominant while the men were passive.) But it also turned Papua New Guinea into the anthropological lab of the twentieth century.

  Papua was the end point of the Asian Highway. Few actually went there, however. Unlike Bali, it didn’t have intricate Hindu temples or comfortable gardens; it had no city comparable to Bangkok or Singapore. It was dangerous, difficult, but for Mead it incarnated a primitivity that was going to reveal everything about civilization. And meanwhile Papua had been discovered as a place unlike any other: a window into the human past, an island sealed off from the world, or even out of it.

  It was Mead’s chapters on Papua that charmed me most. She had stayed in a village on the Sepik River, where shamans conducted crocodile hunts and the children were painted with rose-tinted mud from head to foot. A picture of innocence seemingly out of time. One wonders what inner desire drew her there. It would not be far-fetched to say that it was the same desire that drives the manic traveler. The thirst for otherness, for evidence that we are not universal or even normal. That was precisely what Mead wanted to find.

  For by a weird loop, the primitivity of Papua lyrically rendered by Margaret Mead—an immensely popular and influential figure in the United States—must surely have entered the subconscious of a baby boomer generation bent in the 1960s on swarming across the planet in buses, planes, and boats, seeking an antidote to the West. The spiritual East, the innocent savage: they are ancient conceits, as we shall see. But their current vogue has a great deal to do with both tourism and Margaret Mead.

  Yet unlike all the other stops on that once fabled Asian Highway, Papua has stayed wild. Almost nobody experiences it. There are few “attractions”; the malaria is encephalitic. Civil war rages in the rain forests. Rumors of head-hunting and cannibalism can be more easily dismissed by the intellect than by the heart. And so, perhaps inevitably, I began to think of Papua.

  New Guinea is the world’s second largest island, about twice the size of California. With the innocent racism of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese named it papua to denote the “fuzzy hair” of its indigenous inhabitants, who likewise reminded later arriving Spaniards of the Africans of Guinea. It is artificially divided into two countries. The eastern portion is officially named Papua New Guinea, independent from Australian rule since 1975, while the western half—a Dutch colony after 1828—has been ruled by Indonesia with an iron hand since 1969 under the bogus name of Irian Jaya (it is actually an acronym), now amended to Papua, though West Papua is sometimes used for descriptive purposes.

  The differences between the two Papuas are striking. PNG, as it’s known, is anglophone, with a pidgin language called Tok Pisin (the pope, for example, is gaily translated as “Jesus Number One Man”). It’s also considerably more developed, with a greater invasion of Ph.D.-chasing anthropologists drawn by fragile once-neolithic cultures. Isolated by a dragging war of independence against Indonesia, Bahasaspeaking West Papua is a very different matter. Police permits are needed for travel into the interior, where violence occasionally flares up and suspicion of foreign visitors is acute. Apart from the coastal capital of Jayapura and the world’s largest gold mine near Freeport, there is little in the way of infrastructure.

  The southern rain forests are among the wildest places on New Guinea, devoid of roads or towns, unvisited even by Indonesians, rife with rumors and legends. It was here that twenty-three-year-old Michael Rockefeller, scouring the coast for Asmat art in 1961, was reputedly killed and eaten by cannibals—a probably bogus tale that Conrad would have relished. The missionary Alfons van Nunen, who worked in Papua for fifty years, once wrote of cannibalism that “this practice has been extinct for years.” But then, as Conrad also wrote, “people love the abomination.”

  New Guineans speak more than a thousand languages, a sixth of those spoken on earth. With a population of only two million, West Papuans speak 251 of them. Many are virtually unknown to ethnography. Papua’s fauna is similarly profuse, perhaps the richest plant life on earth. More than 120 genera of its flowering plants are found nowhere else, and there are 2,770 species of orchid alone, but there are no monkeys and no large predators apart from the giant saltwater crocodile. There are bizarre tree-climbing kangaroos, the world’s largest butterflies and pigeons, and 800 species of spider.

  Before a civil war erupted in the 1990s, a few visitors made their way into the Central Highlands and especially the town of Wamena. But then tourists began to be kidnapped. From out of those same forests a shadowy “liberation army” emerged, headed by warriors with Shakespearean names like Titus and Goliath. The OPM (the Free Papua Movement) declared a desperate guerrilla war on the Islamic superstate that had appropriated them through a UN mandate to which Papuans themselves had never agreed. Its leader, Moses Werror, led them into jungle battles with mobile militia units of the Indonesian military called Brimobs—forgotten savagery far from the court of world opinion.

  The Brimobs sometimes swept down from the skies in helicopters, torched a few tree houses, slaughtered everyone in sight, and left as suddenly as they had arrived. In the forests near the border with PNG there were known mass graves of people who had been killed simply for a thing called “flag raising”—that is, illegally raising the Papuan independence flag, the Morning Star. It was this undercurrent of secretive violence that had eventually destroyed Papua’s tourist trade and emptied the two or three hotels in the tribal capital of Wamena.

  And yet Papua has become the ultimate destination for a new breed of traveler, what could be called the “anthropological tourist.” Small firms have popped up to cater to their very particular needs, with names like Hidden Cultures and Primitive Destinations International. The slogan aimed at wealthy Americans and Europeans is often “Back to the Stone Age!” (Zurück in die Steinzeit!) Anthropological tourists are a sophisticated variant of the ecotourist. They are not anthropologists by any means, but they share the anthropologist’s ethos: subtle, invisible contact with fragile and remote peoples, extreme sensitivity, a light touch.

  Primitive peoples can even be concocted by tourism ministers. In 1971, a Stone Age group called the Tasaday were supposedly d
iscovered in the Philippines’ South Cotabato province. Wearing only leaves, they appeared to be living in caves and using only stone tools—or so a Marcos minister named Manda Elizalde claimed. A hopeful American media descended at once. In 1972, National Geographic, in a classic noble savage story on the Tasaday, showed a naked boy climbing a vine with the Rousseauistic caption, “In naked innocence, a Tasaday boy toys with a bright bloom plucked from the wilds of a primeval Eden.”

  But anthropologists quickly claimed the story was a hoax. The Tasaday, they said, had simply been persuaded by Elizalde to go into the forest and put on a few leaves. The area was promptly cordoned off by the government, but in 1986 after Marcos’s fall, the Tasaday were found wearing Levi’s and living comfortably in houses. Had they ever been neolithic?

  Papua is different, but only certain parts. Along the southern Asmat coast, deep inside the Yanimura and Sepik rivers, in the high inland valleys of Wamena, a Papua of flattened images ekes out a living as a spectacle. The Dani people of Wamena perform pig-killing ceremonies in their compounds, knowing that a rare visitor wants them to look wild: like the pulsating tusk-laden natives inhabiting the island of Bali Hai in that 1949 LSD-like piece of camp, South Pacific. With its psychedelic color moods and sex-war songs, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical provides the closest thing to a mass-produced image of the Papuan male savage; although the film is supposedly set in Polynesia (and the actresses look Balinese), the men seem to have been lifted by an art director from a National Geographic issue devoted to the Dani—and indeed the first National Geographic piece on Papua had appeared in 1941. With its hazes of rose and lime, its angelic singing, and its absurd mountain constantly changing color, Bali Hai was a no less strange glimpse into a musty compartment of the Western imagination.