Left Flank

Dr. Gewertz still bristles as she recalls picking up «Guns, Germs, and Steel» and seeing that it had been framed around what was called «Yali's question.»

Yali was a political leader and a member of a «cargo cult» that sprung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing strips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets, islanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food, weapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that had been airdropped to troops fighting Japan.

One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, «Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?»

Thus began Dr. Diamond's tale about the combination of geographical factors that led to Europeans' colonizing Papua New Guinea rather than Papua New Guineans' colonizing Europe.

«We think he gets Yali's question wrong,» Dr. Gewertz said. «Yali was not asking about nifty Western stuff.»

With more of the cargo their European visitors so clearly coveted, the islanders would have been able to trade with them as equals. Instead, they were subjugated.

What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had never treated them like fellow human beings. The responsibility and struggle of anthropology, Dr. Gewertz said, is to see the world through others' eyes.

George Johnson recounts how he encountered "a clash of world views", and one foreign to his own: anthropologists in Arizona. His bhTV interlocutor, John Horgan, is dead on, too: the anthropologists' criticisms of Diamonds' two books ARE contradictory. They are not interested in Johnson's simple universal patterns, but in "exceptions". Talk about a weird world!

The first salvo of my response to the anthropologists is on the bhTV forum.