Free The Ragged Edge of the World by Eugene Linden Page B

unselfconsciously he wove these Christian and animistic elements together. It seemed as though Teddy felt no contradiction or conflict in integrating these two wildly different belief systems. I’m not sure which belief system will win out on Manam Island in the end, but at least in 1990 the spirits seemed to be holding their own.
    From Manam we headed toward the Sepik River. As we made our stately way toward its mouth, I discussed further with Barter the uneasy bargain that tourism represents. Barter makes no apologies, pointing out that the number one priority of almost every village in New Guinea is to attract more tourism. At that point he was bringing about 7,000 tourists a year up the Sepik, and in a typical twelve-day itinerary, they would spend about 40,000 kina on artifacts.
    As we entered the mouth of the river, I noticed that we had slowed to a crawl—and also that arrayed along either side of the boats were natives in dugout canoes. What I was witnessing was a variant of a scam I also encountered in Africa.
    As Barter explained it, natives would position the boats so that they would be swamped if the Sepik Explorer came through at any speed. The grift was to then claim compensation, something that was all the rage then in New Guinea. Indeed, trumped-up claims against expatriates and the government for compensation probably ranked as a major source of income for those villages in contact with outsiders. Barter slowed his boats way down, but even so, natives who had spent their entire lives handling dugouts suddenly became all thumbs and would tip over, setting the stage for ludicrously large claims for compensation. If someone actually died, potential claims reached Lotto-like proportions. Barter told me of one enterprising headman who had precariously positioned his aged grandmother in a canoe, apparently with the hope he might make the mother of all compensation claims and rid himself of an expensive liability at the same time.
    Barter had had it with this scam, and met with headmen from the surrounding villages and threatened to take his boats off the river unless they got this extortion racket under control. He also said that Michael Somare, then the prime minister, had backed him on this, suggesting that pulling Barter’s boats was probably the only way to make the villagers desist.
    While Barter gets irritated with nuisance compensation suits, he has built his life in New Guinea and asserts that he is sensitive to the vulnerabilities of native cultures. For instance, he notes that he won’t visit certain villages unless his tourists are willing to spend an entire day there, because to do otherwise would be taken as an insult by their hosts.
    He is also a bemused student of the deep resilience of New Guinean culture. He notes that the same natives who carve shields and masks for tourists will also produce works for sacred houses that they would never sell, or even show to tourists. Moreover, they adapt. Carvers noticed that tourists prefer flat to rounded storyboards, so they started making them flat. Others reduced the size of carvings so that they could fit in luggage. Christian imagery may be included on shields ostensibly decorated for ancestor worship. During World War II, Trobriand Islanders started incorporating pornographic images in response to the taste of GIs, a practice that has continued in different parts of Papua New Guinea to this day.
    Conversations with Peter Barter turned out to be the most interesting part of the trip up the Sepik. While his boats are quite comfortable, traveling on a tourist boat, no matter how sensitive its operators are to the local indigenous people, invariably sets up a wall between you and the culture you’ve come to see. Encounters with the natives in such circumstances feel like staged affairs, and it’s naïve to expect that the locals you meet in these circumstances will look past your wallet. I greatly enjoyed meeting Peter Barter, but I