Anthropologist (Anthro): The human-model lies in the human-Hatfield and human-McCoy warfare. The model reminds me of two human-tribal conflicts separated by about a year, the October clash between Israelis and Hamas of 2023 and the fighting between the human-Kulumata and human-Kuboma people on Kiriwina Island in October 2022. *
2023 College Student (23CS): Model? Human-model? Hu-…
Anthro: Sorry, I was speaking English as though I was translating Kiriwina into our language.
23CS: Kir…
Anthro: Sorry, again. I should have known that a college student today might never have heard of Kiriwina. It’s an island in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.
23CS: Is that in South America?
Anthro: No, western Pacific. It’s part of the Trobriand Islands.
23CS: Geography isn’t a strength of mine. But I’m curious. Why did you prefix “human” when you started this topic?
Anthro: I’m taking my cue from something I read in Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language. Bodmer quotes Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish-British anthropologist who worked in the Trobriands. Malinowski, writing about translating Kiriwinian or Kilivila into English, wrote:
Let us transpose this peculiarity of Kiriwinian into English, following the native prototype very closely, and imagine no adjective, no numeral, no demonstrative, may be used without a particle denoting the nature of the object referred to. All names of human beings would take the prefix ‘human.’ Instead of saying ‘one soldier’ we would have to say ‘human-one soldier walks in the street.’ Instead of ‘how many passengers were in the accident?’ ‘How human-many passengers were in the accident?’ Answer, ‘human-seventeen.’ Or again, in reply to ‘Are the Smiths human-nice people?’ We should say, ‘No, they are human-dull!’ Again, nouns denoting persons belonging to the female sex would be numbered, pointed at, and qualified with the aid of the prefix ‘female’. (206)**
23CS: Well, that’s strange. My composition professor would call that either redundant or wordy.
Anthro: That’s another conversation in light of all this gender stuff. Maybe, the Kiriwinians would say ‘human-trans-female-‘ whatever. Anyway, I bring this up to make another point.
23CS: What’s that?
Anthro: That the human-people living on Kiriwina ascribe human-tribal affiliations to human-one-another. And in October, 2022, two of those tribes, human-Kulumata and human-Kuboma fought human one-another over a football game. The initial human-death, for want of a better word in tropical Kiriwina, snowballed to human-32 deaths and human-15 missing. Ironically, all this human-death occurred on a place called “the island of love,” so known for its rather uninhibited sexual practices that begin as early as seven or eight years old. So, on an island of only human-12,000 female-male-people, all closely human-related genetically, conflict occurs, human-deadly conflict.
23CS: This is like listening to Pig Latin.
Anthro: Okay, I’ll drop the Kiriwina mode of expression. In plain English, I’ll say that regardless of place we humans can’t get along for long. And our ability to maintain peaceful relationships declines rapidly as we mix more diverse groups. But why should we expect differently? If the closely genetically related Palestinians and Israelis have fought an almost constant war, should we expect some different kind of relationship among countries? Look at Putin’s war on Ukraine; it’s Slav against Slav for the most part. It’s people with a common genetic background killing one another.
23CS: Yeah, but with regard to this year’s Hamas-Israeli war, we have to think about external forces at work and how all this modern contention began with a UN fiat creation of Israel. And we have to think of the role western nations have played in their gluttonous need for more and more oil.
Anthro: Apparently, if the Kulumata and Kubota could kill one another on the island of love, those outside forces at work in the current Israeli-Palestinian struggle really only exacerbate an already volatile relationship among these Middle East “tribes.”
23CS: So, what are you saying? That nobody can get along? The blame falls on every shoulder? There are no righteous sides to pick? But look at the plight of the Palestinians. Aren’t they oppressed?
Anthro: By whom? Israelis? The West that provides them with money that Hamas has used to construct tunnels and build and acquire weapons? Or are the Palestinians subject to demeaned lives because of Hamas? Aren’t they members of the same tribe?
23CS: Certainly, you can see that right now the Israelis are bombing Palestinians.
Anthro: That’s a simplification. Hamas has fired weapons at Israelis from within Palestinian neighborhoods. What that essentially means is that Hamas, claiming to be Palestinians by birth have no qualms about perpetrating actions that would lead to retaliatory strikes by Israelis and to the deaths of the very people—that is, the same tribal people—that Hamas says it fights for. It doesn’t matter to members of Hamas that their own will be killed. And those Palestinians living in Gaza have no refugium, no place to find peace as they live within a brutal governing tribe. But there’s another point I want to make, and it’s related to my use of what Malinowski said about translating the islanders’ native tongue into English.
23CS: What’s that?
Anthro: We can’t get past de-humanizing humans. It wouldn’t make a difference if we prefix “human” to every mention of someone. The fighting, even in-fighting, continues. Closely related neighbors dehumanize one another even on a small island of love where 12,000 people are genetically very close. We can see New Yorkers today who are ripping down posters of hostages held by Hamas or of dead Israelis. They don’t see the “human” in the picture and wouldn’t see it even if it had a title like “Human-hostage taken by brutal terrorists.” And your generation—of course not all of you—can’t see that their efforts to involve themselves from a distance of personal safety only exacerbate the conflict, spreading it beyond the Middle East to our own country, dehumanizing one group in favor of another who savagely dehumanized by killing 1,400 or so Israelis and treating their bodies as objects in a manner reminiscent of past savage actions by “human-people” throughout the world from ancient to modern times: Not just Nazis, for example, but brutal Mexican cartels turning Mexicans against Mexicans. I can’t list the examples so numerous they are. Man’s inhumanity to man, as the…
23CS: Okay, I think I get the point.
*https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/25/more-than-30-dead-in-tribal-fighting-on-papua-new-guineas-kiriwina-island
**Bodmer, Frederick, 1944 (original). Lancelot Hogben ED. The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. 1985 paperback.
2023 College Student (23CS): Model? Human-model? Hu-…
Anthro: Sorry, I was speaking English as though I was translating Kiriwina into our language.
23CS: Kir…
Anthro: Sorry, again. I should have known that a college student today might never have heard of Kiriwina. It’s an island in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.
23CS: Is that in South America?
Anthro: No, western Pacific. It’s part of the Trobriand Islands.
23CS: Geography isn’t a strength of mine. But I’m curious. Why did you prefix “human” when you started this topic?
Anthro: I’m taking my cue from something I read in Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language. Bodmer quotes Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish-British anthropologist who worked in the Trobriands. Malinowski, writing about translating Kiriwinian or Kilivila into English, wrote:
Let us transpose this peculiarity of Kiriwinian into English, following the native prototype very closely, and imagine no adjective, no numeral, no demonstrative, may be used without a particle denoting the nature of the object referred to. All names of human beings would take the prefix ‘human.’ Instead of saying ‘one soldier’ we would have to say ‘human-one soldier walks in the street.’ Instead of ‘how many passengers were in the accident?’ ‘How human-many passengers were in the accident?’ Answer, ‘human-seventeen.’ Or again, in reply to ‘Are the Smiths human-nice people?’ We should say, ‘No, they are human-dull!’ Again, nouns denoting persons belonging to the female sex would be numbered, pointed at, and qualified with the aid of the prefix ‘female’. (206)**
23CS: Well, that’s strange. My composition professor would call that either redundant or wordy.
Anthro: That’s another conversation in light of all this gender stuff. Maybe, the Kiriwinians would say ‘human-trans-female-‘ whatever. Anyway, I bring this up to make another point.
23CS: What’s that?
Anthro: That the human-people living on Kiriwina ascribe human-tribal affiliations to human-one-another. And in October, 2022, two of those tribes, human-Kulumata and human-Kuboma fought human one-another over a football game. The initial human-death, for want of a better word in tropical Kiriwina, snowballed to human-32 deaths and human-15 missing. Ironically, all this human-death occurred on a place called “the island of love,” so known for its rather uninhibited sexual practices that begin as early as seven or eight years old. So, on an island of only human-12,000 female-male-people, all closely human-related genetically, conflict occurs, human-deadly conflict.
23CS: This is like listening to Pig Latin.
Anthro: Okay, I’ll drop the Kiriwina mode of expression. In plain English, I’ll say that regardless of place we humans can’t get along for long. And our ability to maintain peaceful relationships declines rapidly as we mix more diverse groups. But why should we expect differently? If the closely genetically related Palestinians and Israelis have fought an almost constant war, should we expect some different kind of relationship among countries? Look at Putin’s war on Ukraine; it’s Slav against Slav for the most part. It’s people with a common genetic background killing one another.
23CS: Yeah, but with regard to this year’s Hamas-Israeli war, we have to think about external forces at work and how all this modern contention began with a UN fiat creation of Israel. And we have to think of the role western nations have played in their gluttonous need for more and more oil.
Anthro: Apparently, if the Kulumata and Kubota could kill one another on the island of love, those outside forces at work in the current Israeli-Palestinian struggle really only exacerbate an already volatile relationship among these Middle East “tribes.”
23CS: So, what are you saying? That nobody can get along? The blame falls on every shoulder? There are no righteous sides to pick? But look at the plight of the Palestinians. Aren’t they oppressed?
Anthro: By whom? Israelis? The West that provides them with money that Hamas has used to construct tunnels and build and acquire weapons? Or are the Palestinians subject to demeaned lives because of Hamas? Aren’t they members of the same tribe?
23CS: Certainly, you can see that right now the Israelis are bombing Palestinians.
Anthro: That’s a simplification. Hamas has fired weapons at Israelis from within Palestinian neighborhoods. What that essentially means is that Hamas, claiming to be Palestinians by birth have no qualms about perpetrating actions that would lead to retaliatory strikes by Israelis and to the deaths of the very people—that is, the same tribal people—that Hamas says it fights for. It doesn’t matter to members of Hamas that their own will be killed. And those Palestinians living in Gaza have no refugium, no place to find peace as they live within a brutal governing tribe. But there’s another point I want to make, and it’s related to my use of what Malinowski said about translating the islanders’ native tongue into English.
23CS: What’s that?
Anthro: We can’t get past de-humanizing humans. It wouldn’t make a difference if we prefix “human” to every mention of someone. The fighting, even in-fighting, continues. Closely related neighbors dehumanize one another even on a small island of love where 12,000 people are genetically very close. We can see New Yorkers today who are ripping down posters of hostages held by Hamas or of dead Israelis. They don’t see the “human” in the picture and wouldn’t see it even if it had a title like “Human-hostage taken by brutal terrorists.” And your generation—of course not all of you—can’t see that their efforts to involve themselves from a distance of personal safety only exacerbate the conflict, spreading it beyond the Middle East to our own country, dehumanizing one group in favor of another who savagely dehumanized by killing 1,400 or so Israelis and treating their bodies as objects in a manner reminiscent of past savage actions by “human-people” throughout the world from ancient to modern times: Not just Nazis, for example, but brutal Mexican cartels turning Mexicans against Mexicans. I can’t list the examples so numerous they are. Man’s inhumanity to man, as the…
23CS: Okay, I think I get the point.
*https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/25/more-than-30-dead-in-tribal-fighting-on-papua-new-guineas-kiriwina-island
**Bodmer, Frederick, 1944 (original). Lancelot Hogben ED. The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. 1985 paperback.
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