Our equipment suffered from humidity, forcing us to return every few months to Port Moresby where I had been appointed Research Professor, University of Papua & New Guinea.

The university is one of the finest I know. Competition for student admission is intense & opportunities for research & teaching attract superb faculty. The anthropology faculty is one of the best in the world. All its members engage in research & are much concerned with preparing students to assume leadership of their country.

This is also true of other faculties, for in New Guinea daily life is ethnographic. One political leader entitled his autobiography Ten Thousand Years in a Life-Time, a title applicable to the lives of many students. One instructor had a guesthouse for his students' parents. Using the students as interpreters, he recorded autobiographies of men born & raised in prehistory.

This was an ideal setting for dialogue, permitting me to discuss experiences & interpretations. Added to this, I was regularly interviewed over ABC radio. The resulting broadcasts were followed with interest throughout the Territory, so that almost everywhere we went, people discussed our work with us, often with keen insight & always with experience. I have never before enjoyed such feedback.

I didn't always experience this same feedback with government administrators, some of whom had never been out of Port Moresby. Those who had lived in villages - former missionaries, patrol officers, health officials - were often superbly observant, revealing great understanding of the very phenomena I sought to understand. But I found them reticent, either because they had ceased to find these phenomena remarkable, or because they sensed that their views would not be taken seriously. Certainly there was a widespread notion that observations & opinions in this field should come only from academically trained experts. No other voices were welcome.

In DIES, I met men who knew this land intimately & had observed, with wonder & insight, the effects of electronic media upon its people. Their views were nowhere taken seriously, not even by themselves. What was needed, I was constantly told, was someone like myself, with degrees, who knew how to conduct scientific research. DIES had several such studies on file, full of charts, statistics, jargon & incomprehensible descriptions of methodologies. I found them interesting only for what they revealed about the department. I was left with the impression that policy was an ephemeral thing, far removed from primary experience, made by men who combined strong, unexamined convictions with false notions about the nature of scientific inquiry.

The main effect of this insistence upon "scientific research" was to cut off intelligent feedback from the village level. It's ironic that this should have been done in the name of social science.