Footnotes

VI/’HEN I first came to Papua there was a lot ** of talk among the egg-heads about the “clash of cultures”. What was usually meant was the disruptive and sometimes destroying impact of the intrusive western culture on the indigenous one. And it was widely premised by the anthro pologists that the inevitable result of the impact would be the decline and extinction of the tribes which suffered it.

Whether their desire to preserve the tribes as museum pieces was prompted by genuine com passion or by a desire to have something to study is a matter on which I will not express an

opinion.

Then came a time when we began to talk about the “blending of cultures”. We envisaged a new culture arising in Papua which would unite the best in our western way of life with the best from the old-time Papuan way.

And now voices are being raised telling us that this was just a pipe dream; that the cultures won’t blend; that Papuans and New Guineans can’t have the best of both worlds; and that, in the field of economic development at any rate, they must face up, as the price of progress, to tossing out the old and installing the new in its place.

I find two areas of irony in these develop ments.

First, the very iconoclasm for which the early missionaries have been so bitterly denigrated in the field of religion is now the up-to-the-minute gospel in the field of economics.

Second, while those of us who advocated culture-blending during the decades immediately preceding and following the 1939-45 war found our seed falling on stony ground, with most young Papuans only too eager to toss over the ways of their fathers and become brown Austra lians, now there is among a new generation a rising appreciation of the good features of the old ways and a desire to incorporate them in a new Papua and New Guinea way of life. And the economists choose this moment to tell us that it can’t be done.

A research hound told the recent Waigani Seminar at the University of Papua and New Guinea that he had discovered that many trade store owner/operators in Papua New Guinea were concerned with building up prestige rather than profits. Most participants in the seminar (the expatriate ones, at any rate) seemed to re-