Some years ago, Oliver LaFarge published a short story about an ethnologist who, as a young man, financed his studies among American Indians by collecting their treasures for museums. Over the years, his love of subject deepened to the point of identity, and toward the end of his life, he devoted much cunning to removing these pieces from museum storage & sending them back to their heirs. His actions came to light after his death when the Indian heirs again offered these pieces for sale.

The story is true. I knew him well. The dilemma he faced, anthropologists are only beginning to acknowledge. The truth is, though native informants may have liked anthropologists personally, they often distrusted their motives. Some suspected profits from books; others noted it was a paid job.

But what disturbed most was the feeling that when their dances & tales were filmed, taped & written down, they were stolen from them as surely as their lands & furs were taken away. When they saw their sacred treasures under glass, heard their songs on radio, watched their dances on TV, they not only objected to errors they spotted, they felt robbed. None of this had anything to do with them. They felt used. And they were.

The world's largest collection of primitive art was put together by a man of great wealth & acquisitiveness who personally inked catalogue numbers on every specimen he bought, then stored these treasures in an inaccessible warehouse. The moment he catalogued a piece, it became his.

Anthropology, as an offspring of colonialism, reflects what Levi-Strauss calls "a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as object." The search for self- knowledge, which Montaigne linked to the annihilation of prejudice, has never been a dominant theme in 20th century anthropology. Not really. The trend has been toward the manipulation of peoples in the very course of studying them.

I don't refer to the close link between British anthropologists & the Colonial Office, or to American anthropologists working on CIA counterinsurgency projects. That was mere Winnie-the-Pooh.

I refer to the anthropologist's role as translator. Humane translation preserves & presents. Paul Radin insisted that the only acceptable ethnology was the life history, self-told by members of indigenous society. But those who undertook such efforts found themselves far removed from the mainstream of anthropology.

Even the concept of relativism has become, in the words of Stanley Diamond, "a perspective congenial in an imperial civilization convinced of its power. Every primitive or archaic culture is conceived as a human possibility that can be 'tasted'; it is, after all, harmless. We, at our leisure, convert the experience of other cultures into a kind of sport, just as Thorstein Veblen's modern hunter mimics, and trivializes, what was once a way of life. Relativism is the bad faith of the conqueror, who has become secure enough to travel anywhere."

Clothing themselves in liberal platitudes & employing what they called "scientific methodologies," anthropologists translated other cultures into unreadable jargon & statistics, almost none of it translatable back into life energy. They erased cultures with irrelevancy & dullness. A few ended up talking to each other in a language known only to themselves, about subjects having no existence outside their closed circle. Little wonder informants felt shut out.

This was not true of a handful of reports published around the turn of the century. Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology contained detailed, matter-of-fact, accurate descriptions of Zuni ceremonies, Hopi pottery designs, etc. These are used today as reference works by the Zuni & Hopi in their efforts to keep alive their heritage.

Almost nothing published in the last fifty years could serve that end. These later reports aren't repositories of knowledge; they're graves. No retrieval from them is possible.

Between 1946 & 1965, a typical research project began with a government grant & the assembly of an interdisciplinary team. Ideally, this included a psychologist, economist, etc., that is, representatives of categories meaningful to our culture, though alien to the culture studied. Generally no one was invited to participate who had shown prior interest in the subject, say someone who had learned the language of the subject group. The thought of including someone from the subject group itself never occurred.

If it was American Indians, reservations were taken as geographical locales, though for many Indians, social drinking-dancing clubs, which cut across Reservation lines & centered in cities, were primary. Time categories were based on government budgets, not indigenous calendars.

Every category came from the dominant culture. The indigenous culture wasn't preserved & presented: it was swallowed.

By the time administrators, missionaries, social workers & anthropologists got through with indigenous peoples, most were eager to forget their pasts. When "Dead Birds," a superb film on tribal warfare in New Guinea, was shown at the Administrative College, Boroko, one student angrily turned off the projector: "What right does anyone have to record what we choose to forget?" His statement was applauded.

The dilemma I faced in New Guinea was this: I had been asked to find more effective uses for electronic media, yet I viewed these media with distrust. I had been employed by government administrators who, however well-intentioned, sought to use these media for human control. They viewed media as neutral tools & they viewed themselves as men who could be trusted to use them humanely. I saw the problem otherwise.

I think media are so powerful they swallow cultures. I think of them as invisible environments which surround & destroy old environments. Sensitivity to problems of culture conflict & conquest becomes meaningless here, for media play no favorites: they conquer all cultures. One may pretend that media preserve & present the old by recording it on film & tape, but that is mere distraction, a sleight-of-hand possible when people keep their eyes focused on content.

I felt like an environmentalist hired to discover more effective uses of DDT. There seemed no way to reach those who needed this information most. Even students at the University of Papua and New Guinea, though often sophisticated about the uses of media for political ends, still naively thought that when their images & words appeared within the media, this gave them public identity & power. They failed to grasp that this merely acknowledged their existence within these new environments; it is no way guaranteed them creative roles there. What was everywhere needed was the sort of media sophistication which comes only with detachment, dislocation, study. Such sophistication is not easily achieved.

I therefore decided that both the written report & film I produced would be addressed to no particular audience. Like the cry, "Fire!" I hoped they would receive the widest possible circulation & not just be heard by arsonists. This meant shunning "scholarly" publications, which have long since become a means of information control; it also meant avoiding conventional formats, another means of neutralizing information. Hence the format of this book.