Professor Elkin's Criticism

Of Indentured Labour

Letter to the Editor BEHAVE yourself, Professor, or we’ll tell on you!

You see. Professor, we people of New Guinea did not take anthropologists too seriously, and did not really think that anybody else did, so we merely smiled when we saw them “at work” in their “fields of discovery,” and did not bother to deny their assertions —that is, when we had a chance to read about them.

But now the anthropologists are enter ing into politics—a most touchy subject for New Guinea people just now. As the time the anthropologists spent in New Guinea does not entitle them to write with authority on the subjects they write on, without studying the complex political situation, they would be well advised to keep quiet.

We have had about enough from the imaginations of anthropologists generally in their study of the New Guinea native, without the Professor “imagining” what forms of government we intend to have in the future.

Anthropologists should keep to their reading of heads, and other forms of scientific guessing, such as their particu lar study permits them to know some thing about, and not interfere in the politics of a country in which they do not intend living anyhow.

Brisbane.

I am, etc.,

Tuag.