This is a true account of the author's search for - and discovery of - a "lost tribe" in Papua New Guinea. The author relates his tale of how he journeyed through jungle and up mountain to visit the Liawep tribe, who had had their first contact with the outside world only one year before,in the form of a missionary. He then describes how he was greeted with a mixture of disdain and disapproval by the villagers and by downright hostility from the missionary. The book is a mixture of reportage, history and travel writing recording one man's extraordinary journey to, and time inside, an unknown village. The author's tale reaches a climax when he describes how lightning struck the village, killing a family, and he was held responsible.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
In an account redolent of early colonial adventure epics, reeking of tangible fear and foreboding, a Briton ventures into the jungle of Papua New Guinea; armed with naive curiosity, he encounters more trouble than he could have imagined. Until 1993, when a young tribesman emerged from the jungle seeking medical help, the Liawep were virtually unknown to any but unfortunate neighboring tribes who felt the brunt of their savagery. A year later, the author, circumventing official restrictions, slithers through remote rainforests, traversing swollen rivers over rickety bridges built of vines and logs. It's an arduous trek for which he finds himself physically unprepared but which he undertakes in order to be among the first to encounter this ``lost tribe.'' Accompanied by native guides, Marriott eventually reaches the Liawep's village. At first, he receives a chilly reception from the only other outsider, a raging Christian missionary named Herod, and is generally avoided by the suspicious Liawep. But over a period of weeks, he penetrates this society to a minimal extent, and what he finds is atavistically scary. He meets an older warrior who admits to cannibalism, and the tribesmen affirm that their fearful reputation is well-earned: Prior to contact with the outside, they killed off the surrounding peoples, and they are often overtly threatening to Marriott. Even the butchering of pigs is performed with gruesome savagery, a process described in chilling, graphic detail. With the advent of the rainy season, Marriott and his companions worry about crossing the rivers on their return journey. Before they can start out, a fearsome lightning storm inundates the village, bringing death to five of the Liawep. Fearing that they will be blamed for the tragedy by the superstitious warriors--a fear soon borne out--Marriott and his guides barely escape with their lives after a forced jungle march. Honest and without self-aggrandizement, and even witty in the early going, Marriott's debut is one of the best books of its kind in recent memory. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"A stunning cast of characters, as beautifully observed as the jungle scenery in Marriott's spellbinding account... Travel writing raised to the level of high adventure."-John Bert
"A gripping account ... reads like a suspense novel; it is also a sobering indictment of colonialism and its lingering legacy of cultural annihilation."-Outside Magazine
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"A gripping account ... reads like a suspense novel; it is also a sobering indictment of colonialism and its lingering legacy of cultural annihilation."-Outside Magazine
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
46 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
DEFENDING INDIGENOUS PEOPLE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Lost Tribe: A Harrowing Passage into New Guinea's Heart of Darkness (Hardcover)
Liawep is not a lost tribe. I am an anthropologist and I have been studying the "Lost Tribe" over the last three years and I am still carrying out my anthropological fieldwork among them. Every year I spend a couple of months with the so-called "Liawep" in Papua New Guinea. Liawep is not their real name but it is the name of one of their hamlets, the place where they were cutting the bush to build an airstrip when the events described in the book took place. Unfortunately I was not in Liawep during the "harrowing passage" of the book's author. Nevertheless, my Liawep informants counted me in detailed terms the story of his arrival and the tragical consequences of his blitz. During my latest visit to the Liawep, after this book was published in UK, I brought a copy of the book with me and I translated it to them, sentence by sentence. The Liawep people were disgusted by that book and they denied almost the totality of the events in which several of them were described by their own names. I was asked by Liawep leaders to diffuse in our western global society what is, according to them, the real version of the events whose tragical conclusion was the death of five people, four children and a woman. That is the job I am working at now with the aim of defending the intellectual property of this tribal people and preventing their exploitation. For the uninformed reader of "The Lost Tribe" it may be interesting to know that the book contains three kind of faults : 1) SCIENTIFIC FAULT : The Liawep are not a lost tribe. The Liawep are "lost" according to this book but not according to other papua new guineans or to the anthropologists working in the area. In the early seventies, the Liawep used to have regular contacts with Australian officers patrolling the area. At that time they were using steel axes and bushknifes and going in and out the nearest Governmental Stations. In the early eighties, Liawep women were married with men from neighbour villages working in the nearest mining towns. In this book the Liawep culture is misrepresented in terms of stereotyped "primitives" practices. Maybe the author has misunderstood or simply invented stories such as the Liawep elder who used to talk about his past as a cannibal. A certain kind of journalism often tends to exploit the well-known clichés on indigenous people such as cannibalism, savagery and others of this kind. This is a classical problem concerning human and social sciences. Let's imagine a comparison with "hard" disciplines like astronomy. No one would announce to the media that he had discovered a new planet without having serious competence and scientific training. As long as tribal people are concerned, a "lost tribe" is discovered every year by non specialists. 2) LEGAL FAULT : The book's author, as he himself write in his book, has illegally entered the region of Papua New Guinea where the Liawep have settled. The author had just a limited National Government Tourist Visa. Whoever likes to go for research purposes in that area, needs a Provincial Government Visa and is requested to make a series of medical examinations (thorax screen, HIV test, etc.) in order to avoid dangerous intrusion provoking the spreading of typical western diseases. That Visa was denied to the author by the Provincial Authority (the real names of Governmental Officers are quoted in the book). Nonetheless, he decided to enter the Liawep area as a clandestine, breaking the laws of an independent country. The author aimed at going in that restricted area looking for a tribe which he supposed to be lost and make his journalist scoop. In addittion to that, he wrote in his book about his illegal action in terms of proud heroism. A form of contemporary ideological neo-colonialism. 3) ETHIC FAULT : The book refers to an explosion during a nocturnal storm killing a woman and four children. The author did not knows their name. I knew them. The woman was called Wypam, two of the children, boys, were called Laup and Pula and the other two, girls, Nafawam and Yawari, all between one and ten years old. The book talks about a lightning which hit the house. The Liawep did not agree with this version. Liawep are forest people and they know very well the natural phenomena like lightning and how try to avoid them. They say that the white man was sleeping in the Mr Herod's house, the local Lutheran missionary ("so much for a lost tribe!" as someone wrote). According to the Liawep version, the white man moved, during the nightly storm, a part of his cargo faraway: from the pastor's house to another Liawep house, under the floor as those houses are traditionally built on pillars, elevated from the ground. This happened few minutes before the accident. The writer and his guides run away the same night, just after the explosion took place, scared by local people's reactions to the accident. They reached the nearest airstrip, a half a day walk from there. Among the terrified Liawep there was a shocked man (which is one of my friends and informants by the name of Fioluana, the Wypam's husband) who had lost three of his children and his wife in the explosion. He together with others pursued the white man until the airstrip where they contacted the local leaders and explained the situation to them. Following the Liawep version, the white man was guilty of the accident. In western terms this may be translated in a symbolic guilt, a sort of sympatethic responsibility, not a real one. Nevertheless the matter has to be seen in terms of local customs and laws. The Liawep intended to ask a compensation for the accident the white man had provoked. In Papua New Guinea payback to compensate accusations of sorcery or murder consists in goods or money. This is a common rule in the whole of Melanesia. According to the Liawep, the white man promised them to look for the nearest bank in town and he would send them money as a compensation as soon as possible. The Liawep allowed him to leave. As far as I know, the writer has never sent further payback to Liawep in any form. Once in town, the white man did not advice the competent local authority about the accident. He did not deem that there were in Liawep seriously wounded people who were still urging medical assistance. One of the children survived few days and then died. One wonders whether the writer was he scared because of his clandestine condition in that area of Papua New Guinea. Or maybe he intended to start as soon as possible with the writing of his great book to let the world know of his heroic travel in the "heart of darkness"? "The Lost Tribe" has been published without asking the permission to the Liawep people. After all, the book was conceived and published thanks to the Liawep. Or rather, because of the exploitation of the false information describing the Liawep as a lost tribe. Noboby, neither the author nor the editors have never thought, for example, of devolving a part of the book's profit to the Liawep. This would have provided a service of medical patrol in their own area or assisted the Liawep with food and water supplies during the dry season. I would like to warn the innocent reader of this book by stating that the book is not of an innocent kind. While this book is being promoted on the net, in Liawep people are dying of pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoea and other typical tropical deseases. They did not have enough medicines and medical assistance which costed the price of few copies of this book. Of course, health and nutritional problems of Papua New Guinea are not the fault of this kind of books. However, this sort of books, articles or movies, exploit a false image of indigenous people. This fake sensational portray has become more and more common all over the world, because it is rentable stuff. Except for the indigenous actors.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
You need more than two weeks to find a lost tribe.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Lost Tribe: A Harrowing Passage into New Guinea's Heart of Darkness (Paperback)
The Lost Tribe is an account of a journalists short (2 week) trip into one of Papua New Guinea's more remote areas. The book is descriptively well written, but is also full of inaccuracies caused by the authors lack of knowlege of local languages and of modern Papua New Guinea. The people he descibes may well be highly isolated but as with most of PNG, their names are included in the common role. Had he given imself more time he could have obatined proper maps which reveal the location of the village and the fictitious volcano he descibes. He could also have learnt Pidgin properly which would have been useful in getting himeself out of the situation that arose. What the author doesn't know is that after his departure from Wanakepa those villagers were forced to pay huge compensation for what happened. They would like the author to bare some of the cost. I'm sure this could be arranged through MAF whoom he can contact through the internet.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Uninformed tripe,
By
This review is from: Lost Tribe (Paperback)
From the very start of the book, this author has gone out of his way to slam the missionaries working in Papua New Guinea. In doing so, he has thrown out some "facts", startling mostly in their complete inaccuracy. For the record, the Summer Institute of Linguistics does NOT forbid all books but the Bible; there are no books. The whole point is that they are working to create a written language where one did not previously exist. There ARE no written texts in the languages with which SIL work.
Given that I spent 8 years in Papua New Guinea growing up, reading this book is painful. The author's interpretations of cultural mores are naive at best, intolerably patronising at worst. When one of his contacts balks at the prospect of getting into a PMV (not a "minivan", Mr Marriott) on payday Friday, the tone of the narrative is ever-so-slightly scathing, as if he can't believe this person is afraid of a few noble savages. As a former resident, I can assure you that payday Friday was the day each fortnight when violence and drunkenness were endemic, and no Westerner or female of any persuasion would voluntarily put themselves in any sort of vulnerable position on that night. There is a clear overtone of life being viewed and interpreted through a certain ?cultural? ?moral? ?anti-religious? filter; while the events the author describes may well have actually happened, his interpretation of their meaning leaves much to be desired. I am slightly horrified to see that the author has written several other "my true tales of adventure" type of books set in Nicaragua and other places, and I can only imagine what sorts of nonsense those contain.
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