When radio hits oral, nonliterate peoples, it intensifies excitability.Villagers who once had no knowledge of what was happening in some distant capital, now receive that news daily in a form which makes it appear both urgent & relevant. But they cannot reply. Therefore they become at once more excited & more frustrated because nobody seems to be listening to them.

In 1969, the army was called out twice in one month, both times to deal with potential riots in communities where radio was part of daily life.

In Kieta, Bougainville, the immediate cause of unrest was the expropriation of land for a mining town. In Rabaul, New Britain, militant indigenes objected to expatriates serving in the legislature, though several had been democratically elected to do so. What followed was reported in detail by press & radio, including the international press. In fact, media coverage was so "hot," we refrained from filming either incident for fear the appearance of large cameras might increase the problem.

To government administrators, the response of the Kieta landowners was "unreasonable" & the position of the Rabaul militants was "irrational." If one accepted the complaints at face value, "unreasonable" & "irrational" were not unfair judgments. For the complaints, even if wholly true, didn't justify this sort of response. But this doesn't mean there weren't deeper causes.

Physicians speak of "referred pain," by which they mean pain felt as an area other than its source: e.g., a disorder of the kidney felt as pain in the arm.

I think the people of Kieta & Rabaul were making the only noises they knew to express the uncertainty inflicted on them by an alien culture & alien media. Since they had no anthropological vocabulary suitable to this misery, they used the vocabulary of the tribe & screamed nonsense about returning to tribal sovereignty because they recognized that their tribal life was doomed & with it all they treasured from the past.