JARED Diamond is not a man to spoil a good story for the sake of the truth.
Some years ago I reviewed the chapter on Australia in his highly acclaimed book ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive’. I found it full of factual errors that played to popular myth while denigrating Australian primary industries.
Today I received a copy of his article ‘Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours’ published by The New Yorker in April 2008, which Professor Diamond claims tells the true story of Daniel Wemp and the battles he led in the New Guinea Highlands. Along with this article I also received research by Rhonda Roland Shearer exposing it as a hoax.
Rather than the true story of clan warfare that resulted in the death of 30 men and the theft of over 300 pigs, the story may well represent nothing more than the contrived ramblings of an aging Professor inspired by a yarn from a man who fancied himself as a hero once responsible for the marshalling of hundreds of warriors and the provision of some sex on the side.
Fact checking, not by the publisher, but by Ms Shearer has shown that Mr Wemp exists but never led any battles, rather he has been gainfully employed as a driver for the environmental NGO WWF. Another key character in Professor Diamond’s story, Henep Isum Mandingo is not a veteran of battles now confined to a wheel chair as claimed by Professor Diamond, but rather an able-bodied man who once worked as the Court Peace Officer in his village.
So upset are Mr Wemp and Mr Mandingo with the Professor's false claims, that they are suing Jared Diamond and Advance Publications (The New Yorker magazine) for US$10 million. The papers were filed in the Supreme Court of The State of New York on Monday.
I wish them luck.
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Notes and Links
For more details see:
Jared Diamond's Factual Collapse, 2009, by Rhonda Roland Shearer, director of Art Science Research Laboratory, www.asrlab.org , a not-for-profit, co-founded by Stephen Jay Gould. http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-149.php
The photograph, via Ms Shearer, shows Henep Isum, far right, who the Professor claims has spinal paralased and is restricted to a wheelchair.
Australia's Environment Undergoing Renewal, Not Collapse
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT, VOLUME 16 No. 3&4 2005
http://www.ipa.org.au/publications/643/australia%27s-environment-undergoing-renewal-not-collapse/pg/2
More Tall Tales from Jared Diamond
According to Wikipedia:
Jared Mason Diamond (born 10 September 1937) is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeographer, lecturer, and nonfiction author. Diamond works as a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998), which also won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, as well as for Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). He received the National Medal of Science in 1999.
Diamond's books rely on fields as diverse as molecular biology, linguistics, physiology, and archeology, as well as knowledge about typewriter design and feudal Japan. Because of his broad expertise and the large number of articles credited to him, Mark Ridley has suggested jokingly that Jared Diamond is not a single person, but instead "is really a committee."
The other side of the history is not very well represented here. From Science magazine's article, "‘Vengeance’ Bites Back
At Jared Diamond"
Remnick nevertheless defends the magazine’s efforts to verify Diamond’s story. He says that this particular fact checker “is one of the best I have ever had the privilege of working with.” And he adds that “we had Jared Diamond’s meticulous, detailed notes from the 2006 interview with Daniel Wemp, … and we consulted with people with expertise in the Southern Highlands, who confirmed that Daniel Wemp’s description of the revenge battle was consistent with known practice.”
Remnick also insists that in the August 2008 conversation between Wemp and the fact checker—which was tape recorded by mutual consent—Wemp raised only relatively minor factual objections to Diamond’s account and asserted that the stories were basically true. In Diamond’s view, the case is really about scientists coming under fire for popular writing.
Whether or not Diamond got the facts of Wemp’s case right, it is true that the tribes of PNG do practice revenge warfare, says Wiessner, who has studied war in PNG’s Enga Province, just north of the region where Wemp and Mandingo live. In Enga, more than 300 tribal wars have taken the lives of nearly 4000 people since 1991. That’s one reason Wiessner, who
is active in local efforts to bring peace to PNG clans, is worried about the outcome of the case if it results in a large monetary award: She fears that the money could eventually go to buy weapons that would make the wars even more deadly. “When these wars first started, they were fought with bows and arrows, but now they have M-16s,” she says.
The article also states that it's the ettiquete in anthropology to not use real names of people, not even tribes, so it lends credibility that it's not just a dishonest hoax, at least not from Diamond's dishonesty -- since it would be way easier to make up also ficticious names for people and tribes and never bother with anything ever being "exposed". If he's guilty of something, is mainly from assuming that Wemp were not a complete liar, which we don't know.
The problem originates in both Diamond and Mead hearding what they wanted to hear, without checking the validity of the findings. Research Bias. Publish such stuff and it is the author's academic credibility on the line. With defamation, their assets too.
One wonders who was Diamond's authority on Australian Farmers.
"While PNG tribesman Daniel Wemp admitted telling stories to Diamond and others, a friend of his said that it's common practice: "When foreigners come to our culture, we tell stories as entertainment. Daniel's stories were not serious narrative, and Daniel had no idea he was being interviewed for publication." From http://www.pcwatch.blogspot.com. 26th April.
Australians (including aboriginals) tell yarns too. Much of the entertainment is in seeing if the listener, especially if an outsider, is conned. The picture of giggling teenage girls telling tall stories to Margaret Mead, who swallowed them whole, is irresistable.
Poor old Jared is in serious need of a penis gourd.
According to The Australian at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25382849-7582,00.html
Diamond is the kind of pathetic bogan who would actually front up to accept an award with the term "genius" in it. A serious recognition craving with an overburden of narcissism.
Love the pigeon, Geoff.
jeremy C they were based at what is now the Munda Airfield, Roviana.
Janama,
There is just the very, very faint possibility your father and my father came across each other if your parents were still in the Islands in the 1930's. My father used to speak of a methodist missionary, but I thought that was on Christmas Island.
As I recall, Diamond's first ecological glitterings were stories about the distribution of pigeons in New Guinea forests that seemed too good to be true. At the time, I was a bit of a pigeon myself and swallowed the stories whole, in spite of the criticisms of many ecologists. A good story goes a long way, as Flannery found out many years ago.
i wish I could remember all the pidgin spoken in my house when I was a small child.
I do remember in Pidgin an aeroplane is a "motor car come jesus christ"
My father and mother established a Missionary Hospital in the Solomon Islands in 1927 for the Methodist Church.