Writing About Korowai of West Papua PDF

䊏 Rupert Stasch
rstasch@ucsd.edu
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Textual Iconicity and the Primitivist

Cosmos: Chronotopes of Desire in
Travel Writing about Korowai of
West Papua
The figure of the primitive circulates globally as a projected other of self-conceivedly modern
people, who through it wrestle with their own historical conditions. But what makes repre-
sentations of the primitive persuasive? This article examines genre, register, and voice
features of a highly repetitive sample of travel narratives about Korowai and Kombai people
of New Guinea published in high-circulation magazines and newspapers. I suggest that the
genre’s effectiveness turns on cultivation of iconicity among three event-worlds: a chronotope
of narrated travel, a chronotope of author-reader relations, and a mythic chronotope of the
civilized and the primitive. In a “hall of mirrors” effect, dense networks of intratextual
iconicity make broad primitivist stereotypy, narrow travel events, and the textual event of
travel writing performance support each other’s believability, vividness, and claims to atten-
tion. [chronotopes, travel writing, iconicity, repetition, temporality, narrative, myth]
T
ravel writing is well known for being formulaic. Paradoxically, while the genre
is defined around adventure, novelty, and foreignness, it turns out to be a
strongly traditional practice of repeating what exists.1 This is even more true of
primitivist writing, or writing about encounters with people represented as culturally
archaic. There is also a large tradition of scholarly analysis of travel writing’s formu-
laic patterns. Following Said (1978), this tradition often focuses on how travel writing
promotes mystificatory stereotypes of cultural others that serve colonial or neo-
colonial cognitive and political ends (e.g., Pratt 1992; Spurr 1993). While this
“debunking” project is an important response to the genre, scholars should also offer
an account of what makes the writing’s mystifications persuasive to producers and
publics. In this article, I suggest that the prominence of repetition and stereotypy in
texts of this genre should be understood as part of a more complex overall play of
iconicity within and across different levels of textual order. Further, I argue that this
proliferation of links of textual iconicity is pivotal to travel writing’s semiotic efficacy.
Korowai and Tourists

My empirical case is writing about Korowai and Kombai people of West Papua,
Indonesia. Across the last twenty years, several dozen stories about visits to these
people have been published in magazines, newspapers, and books. I have followed
these narratives since starting fieldwork with Korowai in 1995. In this essay, I look at
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 21, Issue 1, pp. 1–21, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2011
by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2011.01080.x.
1
2 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
a sample of seven magazine articles, five newspaper stories, one book chapter, and
one blog, all listed here in chronological order, beginning with the abbreviation by
which I cite each item across the rest of this discussion:2
OU Outside 1992 “No Cannibal Jokes Please: Upriver into the Swamps of Irian Jaya and
Back in Time,” by Tim Cahill
NG National Geographic 1996 “Irian Jaya: Indonesia’s Wild Side,” by Thomas O’Neill
NGS National Geographic 1996 “Irian Jaya’s People of the Trees,” by George Steinmetz
RD Reader’s Digest 1996 “The People that Time Forgot,” by Paul Raffaele
IN The Independent 1999 “Indonesia: The Twilight Screaming,” by Stephen Backshall
ST Standard-Times [New Bedford] 1999 “On the Trail of Cannibals: 35 Days in the
Jungles of Irian Jaya,” by Matthew Ertfelda
RR The Rambling Roses 2000, a travel blog by Joan and Lou Rose, containing an entry
titled “Korowai Tree People”
TF Tales of a Female Nomad 2001, a book by Rita Gelman, containing a chapter titled
“Irian Jaya: The Asmat Lands”
NY New Yorker 2005 “Strangers in the Forest,” by Lawrence Osborne
NZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung 2005 “Ferien bei Kannibalen [Holiday with Cannibals],” by
Christopher Zürcher
SM Smithsonian 2006 “Sleeping With Cannibals,” by Paul Raffaele
NGC National Geographic [Croatian edition] 2008 “Život u krošnjama prašume [Life in the
Rainforest Tree-tops],” by Davor Rostuhar
HN Hospodarske noviny [Prague] 2008 “Nedotčeni civilizací [Untouched Civilizations],”
by Daniel Balcar
CS Christian Science Monitor 2008 “Jungle Diary” [4 installments], by Danna Harman
Most magazine articles listed here were also republished in books.3 When the
respective stories were published, Reader’s Digest had a circulation of fifteen million,
National Geographic had nine million, and Smithsonian two million. New Yorker,
Outside, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and The Independent each had circulations in the hun-
dreds of thousands. The Standard-Times of southeastern Massachusetts is the smallest
periodical in my sample, with a circulation of 30,000.
Korowai, meanwhile, number about four thousand persons and live spread out
across five hundred square miles of forest (Stasch 2009). Because of difficulties of
travel to their area and the absence of major extractive resources, strangers from more
than about thirty miles away did not interact with them regularly until 1980, when a
mission established a post at the interethnic margins between Korowai and their
culturally similar Kombai neighbors (van Enk and de Vries 1997).4 Many more
villages have since been formed, often at local initiative. Korowai lives today are
dominated by complex divisions and connections between new “village” practices of
residence and their previously dominant “forest” pattern of great residential disper-
sion and mobility. The Indonesian state is a relatively weak presence, and Christian
institutions have also been slow to take hold. But Korowai have quickly become very
strongly oriented to the cash economy, imported consumer goods, and sociocultural
advancement through children’s Indonesian-language schooling (see Stasch 2007 on
Indonesian bilingualism generally).
In the early 1990s, Korowai began rising to fame in the tourism industry as “Stone
Age” people who lived in spectacular “treehouses” (Stasch 2011). High costs of
airplane and longboat charters have meant that only a few thousand tourists have
visited them, but more than a hundred of these have been professional filmmakers
and journalists, whose work has given Korowai much imaginative prominence in
global popular culture. Conversely, among Korowai, the ethnic category “tourist”
(tulis-anop) is today the largest foreign presence in most persons’ lives, whether in the
form of direct social interactants or as a subject of fascinated hearsay.
Chronotopes of Desire in Travel Writing about Korowai of West Papua 3
Chronotopes as Social Worlds of Desire and Evaluation
In what follows, I argue that the persuasiveness of travel writing about Korowai turns
on iconicity within and across three chronotopes. The term chronotope is from Bakhtin
(1981), but we could also use plainer synonyms like timespace or event-world. A
chronotope is a scale of spatial and temporal horizons within which some events
are understood as meaningfully occurring. It is also a set of understandings about
how space and time are ordered. One point of using the category is to foreground the
primacy of spatial and temporal forms in human activity, including the “intrinsic
connectedness of spatial and temporal relationships” (Bakhtin 1981:84). A related
point of the category is to take seriously the complexity and variability of how spatial
and temporal connections are forged in different cultural processes.
Two of the event-worlds that importantly coexist in travel writing are the narrated
chronotope of travel events and the chronotope of textual performance. All of the Korowai
travelogues are attributed to an author who is identified as the first-person narrator
and experiencer of an event of travel to the Korowai area. The narrated chronotope is the
diegetic sequence of the narrator’s interactions with Korowai, with guides and other
mediators, and with the physical and biological features of the Korowai lands (along
with the narrator’s thoughts and feelings prompted by these interactions). The
chronotope of performance, meanwhile, is the entire communicative relation between
a text’s author and readers. I take this relation to include surrounding social and
material conditions of the writing’s existence, like magazine or newspaper editorial
activities, branding, printing, subscriptions, newsstands, waiting rooms, and so on.
The relation also includes all poetic and pragmatic properties of the text itself as a
gesture of interaction.
This distinction between a narrated chronotope and a chronotope of textual
performance is well known in narratological theory under labels like “narrated time”
(erzählte Zeit) versus “narrating time” (Erzählzeit), or story versus discourse. In linguis-
tic anthropology, parallel distinctions are often drawn between narrated event and
speech event, narrative event, or storytelling event (Jakobson 1971; Bauman 1986;
Wortham 2001). While the category chronotope is usually understood as designating
patterns of spatiotemporal linkage within narrated worlds, Bakhtin (1981:252), in a
retrospectively composed conclusion to his essay on time and space in novels, sug-
gests that chronotopic questions also apply to “the world of the author . . . and the
world of the listeners and readers.” He also suggests that while there is always a
foundational border between the “represented world” and the worlds of author and
reader, this border is permeable: “However immutable the presence of that categori-
cal boundary line between them, they are nevertheless indissolubly tied up with each
other and find themselves in continual mutual interaction” (Bakhtin 1981:254; cf.
Lempert and Perrino 2007:208; Agha 2007). Such interaction is my main concern in
this article.
The third chronotope strongly present in the travel texts is one of a mythic relation
between contrasting primitive and civilized humans. By “mythic,” I mean that the
chronotope is big in spatiotemporal scale, and that it is felt to be profound in signifi-
cance, as an overall construal of human existence. This chronotope could also be aptly
called a metanarrative, ideology, theology, cosmology, or “cosmic point of reference”
(Ochs and Capps 2001:242). As we shall see, travel writers map densely between a
mythic scale and their own travel experience. For primitivist tourists at large (not just
the travel writers), Korowai travel is very much an “enacted trope,” a concrete per-
sonal activity performed in the image of an abstract schema (Adler 1989). Yet it is
often from mass media sources that other travelers acquire their motives and expec-
tations. In this and other ways, all Korowai tourism is preceded by and directed
toward myth-informed linguistic entextualization, as I acknowledge in a small way by
including one blog in the sample. Travel writers’ practices of mapping between myth
and personal experience are an intensive case of patterns of mapping practiced by
tourists at large.
Identifying a relatively unitary spatiotemporal level as a chronotope is only a

heuristic beginning of inquiry into distinctive logics of personhood, morality, and
causation by which events unfold (Morson 1994; Lemon 2009). Following Munn
(1986), I take it that these distinctive spatiotemporal logics of linkage and fracture
are, by definition, social logics made up of intersubjective desire, recognition, and
evaluation. Desire’s centrality to primitivist travel writing is clear with respect to the
chronotope of textual performance. Even more than is true of narration generally
(e.g., Labov and Waletzky 1967), travel writing is language that has to show its own
value. In most instances, editors of a for-profit periodical commissioned a travel
writer to go on a Korowai trip for pay, in order to produce an article.5 The discourse
competes word-for-word with other text for print space and for readers’ attention,
and is meant to please readers enough to lead them to pay cash for continued access
to the publication. This commodity logic is one pressure for the discourse to address
itself to readers as highly desirable, or tellable (Ochs and Capps 2001:37).
Issues of desire and evaluation are also central to the chronotope of narrated travel
events and to the mythic chronotope of civilized and primitive. Before addressing
these patterns, though, I begin my empirical examination of the travelogues with an
introduction to this article’s more basic concern with the play of iconicity between
chronotopic layers.
Iconicities between Narrated Time and Textual Performance Time

The idea that travel writers often create effects in one chronotope by figuring those
effects iconically in another can usefully be approached by considering first the
narrated chronotope and the chronotope of textual performance. One relation
between these spatiotemporal levels is denotational. In most cases, about 90% of the
travelogue consists unambiguously of the narrator’s recounting of his or her travel. As
also occurs in other narrative texts, though, an important force in primitivist travel
writing is the emergence of more-than-denotational relations between narrating and
narrated worlds: ways in which the temporal experience of reading is made to feel
iconically like the temporal experience narrated.
Texts in my sample vary in length from a few hundred words to nine thousand,
and they vary too in episodic content. But there is an identifiable core of the genre’s
narrative arc: (1) physically difficult walking across the Korowai forest landscape and
arrival at treehouses; (2) emotionally and socially intense meetings with Korowai,
such as hostile or edgy encounters with people fearful of whites, close convivial
interaction with persons perceived as fully traditional, and close experience of
domestic intimacy; and (3) the narrator’s reflections on cultural change, often cen-
tered on biographies of specific Korowai. Also often included are episodes of airplane
flight or canoe travel prior to the overland walking. Additionally, narrators commonly
report scenes from the new villages on the edges of the Korowai lands, traits and
statements of the tour guide leading the trip, and backstories and statements of fellow
travelers. Five texts specifically narrate sago processing, a Korowai food provisioning
activity that has also become a standard feature of tourist encounters; the same
number of texts recount episodes of interviewing specific Korowai about their live-
lihoods, social norms, or philosophies; and three texts recount direct inquiries about
cannibalism. Other episode-types occurring in just two or three texts include home-
country medical and logistical preparations for the trips, leave-taking from Korowai,
and retrospection about the trip from elsewhere. In half the texts, narration of travel
events is also briefly interrupted by one or more temporal jumps to report commu-
nications with missionaries or anthropologists (including myself) before or after the
trip. All texts also contain brief passages narrating Korowai or West Papuan history on
a larger time-scale than the author’s own travel, or presenting temporally unbounded
generalizations about Korowai or West Papua. But overall, the texts are dominated
by a pattern of step-by-step correspondence between sequences of travel events,
sequences of geographic locations, and sequences of discourse units in the text itself.
This tendency promotes an experience of reading, in the chronotope of textual per-

formance, as iconically resembling the temporality of the narrated chronotope.
There are many sharper levels at which qualities of iconicity between narrated time
and time of narrating are established (cf. Korte 2008). For example, at least three forms
of iconicity are superimposed in the following conclusion of the Christian Science
Monitor’s multipart series, just after the narrator has wondered whether her Korowai
porter could ever email her: “I know the chances are mighty slim. I give him a tip. He
gives me a pineapple. I think we are both a little sad. And then I get into a canoe and
begin the long trip home” (CS4.16). First, the passage is highly metrical in syntactic
and morphological structure (as well as in structure of denoted actors and acts), such
that the textual form both tells and shows the temporal quality of travel events.6
Second, the passage—like the rest of the article, and like four other texts in the sample
(SM, ST, RD, TF)—is narrated in the historical present, using non-past temporal deixis
to represent events otherwise known to be past. Shifting the deictic origo from
narrating to narrated chronotope in this manner is one way travel writers figuratively
transpose their communicative relation with readers into the time of the travel itself,
and vice versa (Perrino 2007). Third, this article-terminating passage puts into a
relation of mutual iconicity the end of interaction between reader and narrator, in the
textual performance chronotope, and the narrator’s own leave-taking from Korowai,
in the narrated chronotope of travel.
A similar pattern is what I call diurnal iconicity. Travel writing’s hybridity with
diary-keeping is well-exemplified by one article’s title, “Jungle Diary” (CS), and by
the fact that another article is structured as a series of journal entries headed by dates
and locations (ST). Many other travelogues more quietly align text segmentation
with the diurnal structure of travel time. Reader’s Digest’s article is divided into five
segments separated by blank lines, each starting with large type. The article begins,
“Since first light our expedition has been pushing through a swamp . . . ,” and the
final two segments also begin with narration of morning, following segment endings
narrating nightfall. Again textual structure takes on the iconic feel of time units in the
narrated chronotope.
Text beginnings are metapragmatic sites where authors and editors are at pains to
establish quickly the discourse’s core principles. Many authors use beginnings to
make reading iconic of the temporal “now” quality of travel events by opening the
narrator-reader interaction in an in medias res mode. Breaking the texts’ dominant
norm of recounting travel events in the same order they occurred, five articles begin
abruptly by narrating a sudden edgy encounter between traveler and Korowai, and
then backtrack temporally before later catching up again with the opening
(RD101.1-2, SM50.1-4, NGC1, ST1-9;NZ1). Another article begins this way with an
episode from an initial Kombai trip, after which the text narrates in more detail a later
Korowai trip:
I WAS EATING a lunch of tinned biscuits and tea when a shrill cry rose from the far side of
the clearing. I glanced up just as two naked men burst into view and came dashing toward
us, fitting large barbed arrows to their bows. Our porters halted them, bows drawn, just
yards away. Angry words flew, then quieted as my interpreter offered them gifts and
greetings. I soon learned that they were father and son, that we were the first outsiders they
had ever seen, and that they had intended to kill us. This was my introduction to the
tree-dwelling Kombai people of Irian Jaya. (NGS35.1)
Such openings seek to draw readers into an experience of anxiety and fascination, in
the chronotope of author-reader relations, that resembles a claimed core quality of
time’s flow in the narrated travel experience.7
The Mythic Chronotope of Civilized and Primitive

The types of iconic effects between chronotope of textual performance and chrono-
tope of narrated events sampled above are common in mass-market print journalism
generally, as well as in other areas of language use. Turning now to the mythic
chronotope of civilized and primitive that is also present in the texts, I move toward
patterns that may be somewhat narrower in occurrence.
The mythic chronotope of civilized and primitive is a model of the largest totality
of humans within which authors and readers understand themselves to live; and it is
also a model of relations between different parts of the totality. The model’s shape is
familiar to anthropologists. It is the dominant folk anthropological theory circulating
in metropolitan popular culture today, and it is a direct descendant of social evolu-
tionist frameworks promoted by leading anthropological thinkers of the nineteenth
century, tempered by Romantic ideas that humans archaic in civilizational stage
might nonetheless be superior in worth or virtue. Movies like Avatar or Dances with
Wolves, the modern exhibitionary complex of world’s fairs and museums (Bennett
1988), the full run of National Geographic Magazine, and the many contemporary cable
television shows in step with that magazine’s visual norms are all elements in a
preexisting primitivist cultural formation that saturates travelers’ engagement with
Korowai. I outline now some main features of this myth through its presence in travel
narratives. The mythic chronotope and its parts are a constant background to the
texts, but are also directly named and narrated in them.
The myth has a Manichaean ring in that it posits a cosmos consisting of two
incompatible parts. One, civilization, is the category of which travel writers and their
readers are representatives. Thus the final section of one article is narrated from
Bali under the byline “Post Expedition—11 a.m.—Civilization” (ST), another narrator
closes with an account of “re-insertion into civilization” (NY140.8), and a third
reflects that “while civilization has provided all of the comfort, wealth, culture,
sophistication, and finery of the world I live in, to me it has also robbed us of the
direct knowledge of our intuitions, our true necessities, and our natural selves”
(CS4.11). The other cosmological pole is the category Korowai represent, the primitive.
Narrators speak of “primitive gatherers” (RR28) or “primitive tribes like the
Korowai” (RD102.3). The relation of foundational separateness and antithesis
between the two poles is affirmed in routine descriptions of Korowai as “isolated”
(CS3.3), “secluded” (NGC2), “untouched” (HN), “a tribe that has resisted the influ-
ence of western civilization” (NGC), “people who knew little or nothing of modern
civilization” (NY124.4), or people who “know nothing of the fact that elsewhere there
are cities, factories, and machines” (HN13). Also as a way of defining Korowai by
“isolation,” the civilization pole is termed “the outside world” (OU72.1, 74.6, 196.6;
NG15.6; CS1.2; RR28; NGC2). While civilization focally refers to what intellectuals
might now call global capitalism and mass consumption, another partial synonym is
white, as in pervasive concern with the idea that Korowai “have never laid eyes on a
white person” (SM50.2), “may never have even heard of white people, let alone seen
any” (NY124.4), or are “[p]eople who have never seen metal, clothes, or white skin”
(NZ6; also SM50.2, 58.7 NY130.15, 135.6, 136.17; OU190.4; NGS35.1).
While the myth of civilized and primitive is a chronotope, each of this myth’s parts
are chronotopes themselves, and the myth holds these parts to stand in a relation of
chronotopic incompatibility. The myth is composed of an idea of a foundational order
of succession between two different human temporal conditions: the primitive as
archaicness and stasis, and the civilized as up-to-dateness and ceaseless innovation.
Primitives live as they always have and thus represent the original state of humanity.
Korowai are described as people who “have built their houses in trees for millennia”
(NGC2), whose songs are “a ripple of vowels and tones that must have been thou-
sands of years old” (NY131.4), who are “still living as our ancestors might have tens
of thousands of years ago” (RD102.6), and who supposedly sing to their babies,
“Always remember that you are a Korowai, my son. Never abandon our way of
life” (RD107.5). Descriptions of humans as archaic and unchanging are mirrored
by descriptions of environmental features. Narrators speak of “primeval palms”
(SM52.3), “ancient ferns” (NY131.8), and riverside driftwood that “resembles the
skeleton of a dinosaur” (ST8).
The current epoch is defined by civilization’s displacement and destruction of the

primitive, and by the possibility of chronotope-crossing social involvement between
people of these different temporalities.8 The texts center on an idea that Korowai are
a living anachronism. This is why the unsettled subjectivity of Korowai who meet
whites for the first time is a major point of desire in the travel encounter: such persons
instantiate, in human emotion, just how antithetical the two colliding cosmological
poles are to each other. Here, civilized and primitive are also chronotopes in the
specific sense of being temporal epochs and qualities mapped into geography, and
geographic locations mapped into time: the archaic is a region you can visit, as in the
subtitle “Upriver Into The Swamps Of Irian Jaya, And Back In Time” (OU). Temporal
epochs are also incarnated by objects or persons. About a Korowai group’s hurry to
be rid of white visitors, for example, one narrator comments, “It did not seem like
they had eagerly been awaiting the arrival of the 21st Century” (NZ24).
The anachronism model is also expressed in the prominent motif of Korowai being
the “last” of their kind. They are “among the last people on earth to practice canni-
balism” (SM50.1), “some of the last people in the world to practice cannibalism”
(CS1.3), or one of The Last Tribes on Earth (Raffaele 2003). West Papua is “one of the last
great wilderness areas in the world” (RR4), “one of the earth’s last true frontiers”
(ST9), or “the final frontier in an ever-shrinking world” (IN2). The underside of the
desirability of time-traversing encounters with Korowai is the sadness of their immi-
nent transformation, expressed in elegaic statements like “I had returned to docu-
ment their lives before they were changed forever” (NGS35.2) or “It was a simple, sad
irony: Agus, having encountered civilization in the person of William two years ago,
was now cutting down the forest that had fed him and his people for centuries”
(OU192.16; also SM59.10-11; NG24.4; NGC2, 37; OU74.3; NY131.2).
Framed by this cosmology, the act of visiting Korowai has an aura of profound
significance. Travelers live out in personal experience a human drama of world-
historical proportions. This aura propels mass-media interest in Korowai and makes
travel narratives marketable. Through forms like civilization and the outside world,
travel writers construe Korowai and themselves as incarnating whole mythic types on
a vast spatiotemporal scale. So too the specific course of travel events is structured
as an icon of the primitivist cosmos: a picture of the idea of foundationally different
human types, and of a short-circuiting of the cosmological divide. Travelers’ narra-
tion of their own travel time gains definiteness and value through assimilation to the
mythic chronotope, even as the large-scale myth gains resolution and believability
through the specificity of persons and events narrated in its terms.
Overt Mythography
Alongside myth-implicating forms of language sampled above, authors also more
overtly present themselves as mythographers, or as narrators of a cosmological
drama. For example, some narrators temporarily depart from the narrow chronotope
of Korowai travel to recount the world-historical story of primitive and civilized
directly:
That change—the homogenization of humanity—seems to be the direction of history. The
process has to do with material goods, various comforts and entertainments, and a sudden
apprehension that traditional ways of life amount to drudgery. . . . There is a certain sad
inevitability about it all. . . . Perhaps the development involves mining or petrochemical
exploration, but the result is always the same. Everywhere. The living culture, once
degraded, is entombed within museums. (OU74.5)
Such passages spell out more elaborately the same model compactly indexed in single
descriptors like civilization, last, or isolated.
Even more striking are ways narrators locate their travel intertextually in a larger
tradition of primitivist representation. One narrator, describing her group’s return
from a forest trek, makes explicit a cinematic stance toward her own travel: “We
stumble back into the village of Mabul where we began the journey a week earlier,
feeling like shellshocked soldiers home from war. Heroes, even. I hold hands with the
children who come out to greet me and half expect to see movie credits rolling down
the scene” (CS4.13). Another narrator quotes a fellow traveler asking, “Where are we,
Jurassic Park?” (NY126.7), someone else reports that while “drifting down the Cat-
alina River, violent scenes from movies like ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’
re-create themselves before my eyes” (ST8), and a third describes fireflies as “casting
dramatic flickering shadows over the tangles of the forest canopy, like the bridge
scene in Apocalypse Now” (IN16). In one account, a Korowai man “lets out a Tarzan-
like cry” (TF212.8), while another article borrows its title from the E.R. Burroughs
“lost world” novel and movie The People that Time Forgot (RD; cf. Leahy and Crain
1937). From the same subgenre, Lost Horizon is obliquely referenced in one writer’s
summation that “There can be no doubt that I visited a savage Shangri-La and made
contact with one of the most primitive tribes left on Earth” (ST47).9 Such references
express travelers’ half-awareness of their activities as being the fulfillment of a
narrative impulse.
Narrators’ overtness in locating their voices in a larger tradition of imaginative
encounter between Westerners and primitive others sits alongside silence about
intertextual links with competing Korowai travelogues (cf. Tavares and Brosseau
2006:311–312). This is so despite the fact that authors directly adapt information
or turns of phrase from each other, and the fact that periodicals commission stories
based on the precedent of other articles (e.g., the publication of a story in Reader’s
Digest six months after one appeared in National Geographic). Certain spatiotemporal
levels of a text’s existence are actively suppressed, and this backgrounding of some
historical connections contributes to the clarity of the texts’ foregrounded mythic
level. Overt recognition that the narrator is repeating something other narrators have
done would undermine a story’s iconic match to the mythic model of first contact
with the primitive.
Another characteristic pattern is authors’ attraction to the phrase “the hell of the
south.” The first published appearance of this expression in reference to West Papua’s
southern lowlands may have been in a 1990 guidebook in which the phrase is
attributed to a specific Dutch missionary who was then living and working in the
Korowai area (Müller 1990:46). The expression is subsequently recycled by many
travel writers in my sample, in most cases, probably, from this guidebook or its later
editions, or else from each other. Narrators report that “One missionary . . . calls
Korowai country ‘the hell of the south’” (OU74.12), or that “Dutch missionaries . . .
called it ‘the hell in the south’” (SM51.6; also NG15.6; ST33). For the missionary to
whom it is sourced, this expression’s force was focused on climate, but the phrase has
taken on a quotational life of its own among travel writers, probably because hell is an
overtly mythic spatial figure and links narrators’ travel with “descent into the under-
world” episodes in epic literature (in addition to emphasizing danger and hardship,
motifs that I shall discuss momentarily). One narrator describes a local guide who has
returned from meeting hostile Korowai as looking like “he had returned not across a
river but through Hades [sondern durch den Hades zurückgekehrt]” (NZ31). Another
calls the Korowai lands possibly “the last surviving patch of heaven on Earth”
(NGC32), and another refers to the sky’s “bruised, Wagnerian clouds” (OU77.3).
These figures again map travel events into a larger chronotope of Western literary
culture, making the narrator’s travel greater than itself. One narrator ends a subsec-
tion with a description of flying foxes as “passing across the moon in the final dying
of the light” (OU186.13), a turn of diurnal iconicity linking the travel to an existing
high-literary metaphorization of nightfall as death in the final words of Dylan Tho-
mas’s most famous poem.
Travel events are also regularly figured as occurring in an unreal world or state of
consciousness. One narrator says of felled tree trunks that “Giants have been playing
pick-up sticks on several acres of ‘cleared’ space, and they haven’t picked up,” and
then later that some Korowai “are a picture, a dream, a realization of my fantasies”
(TF212.2, 213.2; also NY140.9). Fireflies form “dense curtains of blinking fairy lights”
(IN7), and a sandbar is “like a hallucination” (ST8).
A particularly important phrase mapping travel events into a mythic chronotope
is “Stone Age.” This alternative designation for primitive is a proper name for both an
epoch of time and a state of humanity. Through statements like “We met and spent
some time with Muntip, who might have stepped out of the Stone Ages” (RR31), “The
jungle again was shaken by a Stone Age roar” (NZ31), “The Stone Age was only a few
more days upriver” (OU186.23), or “I’ve journeyed here to visit the closest thing to
the Stone Age while it is still possible” (RD102.2), narrators again affirm that the
encounter with Korowai is a numinous event of interaction between whole human
types. Texts also feature prominently various other, more commonplace single words
that are obliquely indexical and iconic of a mythic chronotope of primitivist encoun-
ter, such as jungle for “forest,” chief for “old man,” and expedition for “trip.”
Iconicity and Persuasion in the Hall of Mirrors

The previous sections have given some initial empirical illustrations of how primi-
tivist travel writing is organized around links of cross-chronotopic figuration. I have
sketched how authors cultivate iconicity between the time of narrated events and the
time of author-reader relations, and how they cultivate iconicity between the narrated
chronotope and a mythic chronotope of civilized and primitive. These iconic links are
also forces of persuasion. Authors use their narrated travel experience to make the
primitivist cosmos believable and vice versa, they use textual features of the author-
reader relation to make narrated travel captivating, and so on. In the rest of this article,
I document the density and extensiveness of a kind of “hall of mirrors” effect in this
genre’s textuality. Each repeated element acts as an iconic likeness of all the others,
such that the overall textual network adds up to one persuasive picture. In this section
I survey a few more of the most repeated elements in the chronotope of narrated
travel events, and I suggest ways these elements support each other’s compellingness
and the compellingness of the primitivist cosmology at large.
Alongside time-focused terminology such as “last tribes,” a related cluster of
linguistic forms centers on the dangerousness, crudeness, and transgressiveness of
the visited world, and on the traveler’s qualities of forbearance in relation to those
attributes. This Rider Haggardesque emphasis dovetails with the genre’s domination
by male writers (even as women are half of international visitors to the Korowai area).
One traveler meets Korowai who are “brandishing bows and arrows,” sees “that their
arrows are barbed,” later notes that a man “carries a bow and barbed arrows,” and
then is approached by “two Korowai armed with bows and arrows” (SM50.3, 50.4,
53.3). The texts are peppered with references to environmental dangers, fighting
between Korowai, and risks taken by the travelers. Travelers are visiting “potentially
dangerous Korowai tribes” (RR29; also ST12; NY131.2; NG22.7). In a village, they
come upon “a man-sized cage” in which they expect to find “a tribal enemy or lost
tourist,” though it turns out to contain a bird (ST20). Travelers survive the “threat of
crocodiles” (NY140.1), their porters spot “a deadly taipan snake” (NY131.8), and they
discover on their own skin “a thin trickle of blood—leeches!” (ST18). One narrator
reports that, falling asleep at night, “for the first time, I felt a surge of ecstasy. I revelled
in my survival in the face of the jungle’s innumerable dangers” (NY132.2). Texts
present travelers’ fear as something readers can participate in, and present the travel’s
dangerousness as a measure of its value. “To witness people still living as our
ancestors might have tens of thousands of years ago makes the risk bearable”
(RD102.6). The traveler is often directly characterized as “intrepid” (e.g., byline to
SM). A guide has an “unflinching gaze and rock-hard jaw” (SM51.3), or “resembles
an American backwoodsman of centuries past” (NY124.3). Narrators are on “a quest”
(SM50.1) and go “deep into” wherever they are going (NY124.3; NGC; CS4.8; OU72.1;
RD7). Virtually all texts refer to malaria, as in the statement that “an insidious form of
malaria rages in the Papuan jungles” (NZ9). These accounts of environmental dangers
help create a general atmosphere of threat surrounding and mirroring the core dan-
gerousness of the human primitive. An expression like “back into time and deep into
the malarial heart of the swamp” (OU72.1) offers the “malarial swamp” as a sinister
geographic figure reciprocally iconic with the idea of archaic humans.
New Guinea at large is described as a place of extremes, often in ways that do not
bear on Korowai, but that support a sense of the visited land as a mythic other space
beyond normal life. It is “the second largest island in the world” (RR3, CS1.2), home
to “the world’s most imposing pigeon” (NY131.5), “the world’s largest copper and
gold mine” (SM51.2), and “800 species of spiders, 30,000 kinds of beetles and who
knows how many sorts of mosquitoes” (CS2.2). Travelers visit “the world’s largest
swampland” (OU2) and experience “easily the most memorable, challenging trip of
our lives” (RR2; also SM51.3, 52.4; CS1.6, 1.8; ST10). The place and its people are
unknown and wild: “Where the heck IS Irian Jaya?” (RR3; also CS1.1). A guide
“specializes in treks through the wildest zones of Papua” (NY124.3), and clients come
“in the hope of meeting the wildest kind of people still to be found on the planet”
(NZ18). They later find that the visited people’s “wild sweetness had rubbed off on
us” (NY139.3). The figure of a blank map is also consistently repeated, here activated
around a specific published aeronautical chart last updated in 1971 and lacking
terrain information for certain parts of West Papua: “Maps of the region still show
some sections as wide as 300 km without any relief data at all” (RR4), “Decent
maps . . . show areas the size of London without any relief data” (IN1), and “Papua is
second to the Amazon region as the whitest space on the globe” (NZ9).
Texts are thick also with references to gooey substances. Travelers’ bodies are
subjected to “waist-deep mud” (SM52.4), “a toxic mixture of sweat, insect repellent,
and black mud smelling of fermenting beer” (NY129.15), and air that “drips with
humidity” (SM52.3). One traveler thinks to himself, “As soon as we get through this
shit, we’ll be on the trail,” but “about an hour later it occurred to me that this shit was
the trail” (OU188.16). Fortunately, “Despite the heat and humidity, the five-hour hike
was strangely wonderful” (RR30), and “There was, in our grisly slog through the
forest, a shimmering animal joy” (NY139.3). Forbearance of disgusting hardships is
again a measure of the travel’s value. Authors regularly mention eating beetle larvae,
often termed “maggots” for extra force (SM59.6; TF210.6; OU188.3; RD107.6). Land-
forms and time units, too, are serpentine, gooey, or indefinite. Rivers are “spidery” or
“snaking” (SM51.6, 51.7), and “meander drunkenly in great loops and horseshoes”
(OU75.1). As the traveler walks across Korowai land, “hour melts into hour” and “the
day passes in a blur” (SM52.4, 54.13).
Environmental elements are often described as morally sinister or full of death, but
equally often as beautiful and full of life. A fellow traveler “stares at the ground in
front of him, dark and muddy like the bottom of a grave” (NZ2), flying foxes provide
“a macabre aerial show” (ST27), thunder is “ominous” (OU77.3), water is “evil-
smelling” (RD100.1), a stream is “sinisterly beautiful” (NY139.12), and the Korowai
area is “the most beautiful forest I have ever seen” (NGC32) or “the most beautiful
place I’ve ever seen” (NY136.9). “Streaks of colour in the forest told of fabulous birds”
(IN4), “wild pigs roam free” (CS2.2), and an egret is “impossibly white against the
blue of the sky and the green of the sago” (OU186.31). Like Korowai themselves, the
environment is sublimely out of this world, evoking simultaneous horror and desire.
Humans are frequently described as animalistic, as a mass, or as stone-like. One
narrator sees “a throng of naked men,” is approached by “a wiry young Korowai,”
and encounters a man who “growls” warnings against entering his land (SM50.3,
51.5, 57.2; also OU72.6; RD102.7). “Disconcertingly, they kept sniffing us” (NY131.3).
Porters “yelp” when chasing animals (CS4.6). One narrator recounts a standoff with
a threatening man:
He was the Stone Age, the absolute wild. Here was what Mike had paid 12,000 U.S. dollars
for. Muscles like a statue, black with a little white paint. A hat that looks like a visor covering
half his face, perhaps made of feathers. A bow and arrows. One arrow drawn. Everything
raced before me. But the most frightening thing of all: There was no anger, no aggression.
Only absolute determination. The determination of a force of nature. The determination of a
rock, plunging into a canyon. (NZ35)
Humans are also described as visually sinister, unreliable, or outside normal emo-
tional ranges. Kombai men “stared obsessively at a candle,” had a “sly jollity” or
“sultry charisma,” watched the narrator “with grave earnestness,” and never smiled
at a camera (NY131.16, 140.14, 139.5, 129.15). Even expatriate pilots are “of dubious
character” (RR26). One journalist identifies a specific Korowai man as “the most
notorious [witch] killer . . . His eyes are empty of expression, his lips are drawn in a
grimace and he walks as soundlessly as a shadow” (SM53.3). While this man’s actual
name is pronounced , in the magazine it is written as “Kilikili,” a rendering to
which the writer was likely drawn by its resemblance to kill.
Texts foreground darkness as an attribute of both humans and the environment,
referring to a man’s “dark eyes” (RD103.1; SM52.7), “the dark and distant forest”
(TF212.8), “a dark, tea-colored river” (NY130.11), and the darkening of travelers’ own
faces with stubble (NY131.2). Texts also pervasively narrate non-linguistic vocaliza-
tions. Birds “screech,” cicadas make a “piercing whine” or “siren scream,” and even
the twilight “screams” (OU77.5; ST28; RR27; ST1; SM54.13, 52.3; IN). As for Korowai,
their “screams erupt from around the bend” (SM50.3), “their cries seemed a little
hysterical” (NY132.6), one of them issues “a sort of command” in the form of “a
grunting hiss” (OU75.6), and from the forest they emit “a polyphonic roar” (NZ25) or
“yodeled war cries” (RD101.1).
Each of these patterns exemplifies the “numbing repetition” (Pratt 1992:2) charac-
teristic of the travel writing genre. What is notable, though, is not only the repetition
of single formulae, but also how the elements enter into an iconic network of mutual
support. Everywhere a reader turns, the different elements mirror and confirm each
other, and mirror and confirm an overall mythic idea of dramatic encounter between
civilized white people and primitive black people. This iconic mirroring does not just
pre-exist elements’ reciprocal juxtaposition in texts and history; there is no prima facie
resemblance between extremity, darkness, pastness, gooeyness, and nonlinguistic
vocalization, for example. Rather, textual juxtaposition and repetition are themselves
ways in which resemblances thicken into felt reality.
Part of the “hall of mirrors” system is that the myth of primitive and civilized is
signified not only denotationally, but through lexical register choices and other
indexical paths. I noted earlier some nouns emblematic of a primitivist cosmos;
also prominent are verbs of violent motion. In New Guinea, airplanes do not land,
but “thump,” “jackhammer,” or “skid” (SM51.8, ST11, NG19.3). Trees are “decapi-
tated” and raindrops “spear” (SM57.9, 52.3). Korowai themselves “hack,” “lash,”
“pummel,” “smash,” and “clutch” objects around them (SM50.1, 58.1, 59.3; NY136.17,
139.11; RD102.16;NGS35.1). In contrast to plainer alternatives, these verbs support an
iconic atmosphere of crude, abrupt, and impetuous actions that transfers sideways
to the idea of human primitivity. Affected by the primitive world, travelers
themselves “shinny,” “clamber,” “hoist,” “slog,” and “slosh” (ST39; OU188.24; CS3.2;
NGS35.2; TF212.4; RD104.9).
The “hall of mirrors” idea also offers a best initial context for understanding the
most prominent formula of all, cannibalism, which is relentlessly foregrounded
in such titles as “No Cannibal Jokes, Please,” “On the Trail of Cannibals: 35 Days in
the Jungles of Irian Jaya,” “Holiday with Cannibals,” “I Set Out In Search Of Papua’s
Cannibals,” “Cannibals, Hunters, and Home,” “Sleeping With Cannibals,” A 21st
Century Discovery of Cannibals, Among Cannibals, and Among the Cannibals (OU; ST;
NZ; CS1; CS4; SM; Anstice 2004; Gloy 2010; Raffaele 2008). Cannibalism’s prominence
in titles reflects authors’ and editors’ perception that this motif, more powerfully than
any other, distills the overall desirability of a primitivist narrative into a single
compact icon. Within text bodies, references to cannibalism are also steadily repeated:
“I want to encounter a people who are said to still practice cannibalism” (SM52.4),
“I’m told he is from the village of Haul—a Korowai Batu, a cannibal” (ST36), and so
forth. The idea of cannibalism densely draws together in one figure most other
formulae so far discussed: violence, danger, what is crude, gooey, or grotesque, what
is wild and unknown, what is disappearing and of another time, what is dark, and
what the white and civilized finds so horrifying and other and yet so absorbingly
wishes to know. Significantly, titles often foreground not just cannibalism as such, but
the dreadful and wondrous possibility of travelers’ intimacy with cannibals: sleeping
with them, holidaying with them, or keeping a thirty-five day diary about them.
A related formula is departure from the restricted chronotope of a narrator’s own
travel to recount Michael Rockefeller’s 1961 death in a boating mishap in the Asmat
region 120 miles southwest of Korowai (SM50.5; IN11; TF211.10; RR39; OU72.12;
NG11.8). Usually the narrator speculates Rockefeller might have been a victim of
cannibalism, as in one author’s assertion that “The most famous victim of the man-
eater [der Menschenfresser] was Michael Rockefeller in the sixties, a descendant of the
Rockefeller dynasty in whose honor an exhibition hall at the Metropolitan Museum in
New York is today named” (NZ9). This formula is attractive for its poetic inversion of
the cosmological tenet that civilization is superior to the primitive and is overrunning
it. The Rockefellers—particularly Michael’s father Nelson, then governor of New
York—are prime figures of capitalist accumulation and states’ power to rule people
and land. In Michael’s death, New Guinea eats capitalism instead of capitalism eating
New Guinea. The appeal of this reversal is something narrators and readers flirt
with throughout the primitivist textual drama of danger and otherworldly human
wildness. Mentioning Rockefeller mirrors and strengthens a text’s total network of
primitivist figures.
Artful Speech as an Icon of Desirable White Subjectivity amid

Cosmological Incongruity
Coordinated with the method of instilling feelings of the truth of the primitivist
cosmos by reflecting that cosmos on all surfaces, another main textual pattern is to
offer the traveler’s subjectivity as an appealing focus of identification. The narrator’s
voice toward a reader, in the chronotope of textual performance, itself becomes an
iconic picture of the primitivist cosmos and the pleasures of contact between its
antithetic poles. The traveler’s desirability is emphasized by many textual patterns
already discussed, such as portrayal of the travel as dangerous or Korowai as disap-
pearing. Besides being narrated, though, the traveler’s appealing subjectivity is
figured through its performance in the shape of an artful linguistic voice.
Authors make heavy use of similes. Among these, there is a striking pattern of
saying, in effect, that “their culture is like our nature” and “their nature is like our
culture.” Statements identifying Korowai people with nature include those saying
that a treehouse is “like the nest of a giant bird” (SM51.7; also NG19.1), that a
woman’s nose ornaments protrude “like insect feelers” (NG22.6), that Kombai move
through the forest “like fish darting through coral,” and that a garden clearing looks
“like the site of a meteor strike” (NY130.3, 130.5). Converse statements identifying
Korowai nature with cultural artifacts in authors’ home worlds include those saying
that flying foxes’ wings sound “like flags whipping violently in the wind” (ST27), that
a spider-web stretches “between two slender trees like a bed sheet” (ST38), or that a
bird’s crest is “like a stiff doily” and that eating the animal “would be like chomping
down on the Mona Lisa” (OU186.11). Rattan “tower[s] up out of a mass of greenery
like an antenna” (OU186.27), and cicadas are “like chainsaws” (TF212.7) or “like an
ethereal police siren” (IN7). These similes pose the nature/culture divide as a model
for the cosmological gulf of civilized and primitive. Aligning Korowai culture with
nature predictably continues European figuring of cultural others as animalistic infe-
riors, while the reverse pattern backhandedly celebrates the Korowai world as won-
drous and rich in natural features. But more basic about the similes is how they
instantiate a quality of artful verbal mediation of the incongruity of civilized and
primitive. Travelers cross the cosmological divide into a topsy-turvy world, but then
they offer their own narrative artistry as a channel through which readers can plumb
the depths of this otherness and even feel what it is to be primitive.
More symmetric figures, again thematizing unexpected conjunctions of otherness
and sameness, include those asserting that rattan is “the local equivalent of duct tape”
(OU186.27) or that a porter “is a veritable human GPS system” (CS2.4). Other map-
pings carry sinister or scornful subtexts, or underline the primitive’s foundational
difference beneath all analogies: a man eats an insect “like a piece of candy”
(OU194.2), and animal jawbones “clinked in the wind like porch chimes” (NG9.3).
The incongruities of closeness between primitive and civilized are also thematized
when travelers describe themselves (under pressures of the primitive environment)
as being “like shellshocked soldiers” (CS4.13), “like men on parole” (ST13), “like a
man on a tightrope” (NY132.7; also 129.15, SM52.4), “like children” (OU188.1), or like
other deviant personages. Domain-jumping similes suggest that the meaning of
narrators’ experiences are not only local but typological and allegorical. The similes
are themselves another reflective surface in the hall of mirrors, offering an iconic
picture of the mythic chronotope, here in the form of a performative feature in the
chronotope of author-reader relations. The iconicity between these levels centers
on the textual persona of a perceptive traveler-narrator, whose humorous use of
language for portraying incongruous crossings and convergences of civilized and
primitive is itself a focus of reader admiration.
A humorously incongruity-navigating voice is also exemplified by one narrator’s
extended simile that foregrounds home-world racial schemas as a latent framework
of primitivist travel: “I thought the [Kombai man] with the dog-tooth necklace looked
like the comedian Eddie Murphy. Mike agreed with me. Eddie Murphy naked in the
jungle! We could not stop laughing” (NZ21). Later, the narrator refers twice more
to the Kombai man as Eddie without quotes, inviting readers to enter the narrated
chronotope of this speech convention. Similar merging of black/white and primitive/
civilized schemas surfaces in another narrator’s suggestion that a Korowai man had
gone to tell his relatives “Yo, we got honkies, hide the heads” (OU188.14). Narrators’
jocular character in entering into closeness with sinister or onerous aspects of the
primitive world is thematized in descriptions of themselves as engaging in “a friendly
afternoon chat about cannibalism” (CS4.9), hoping to “take a nice little stroll through
the swamp” (OU188.12), or suffering “a Stone Age shakedown” (SM57.2).
Authors’ frequent use of overt lexical twists on normal semantics overlaps with the
consistently “purple” quality of the writing, as in this excerpt:
The river was flowing down to the distant sea at about three or four miles an hour, but it
looked sluggish, weighted down with brown silt, and its surface was a viscous brown mirror
reflecting the overhanging greenery and the operatic sky. Yellow leaves, like flowers, floated
among the reflected clouds. A swirling mass of neon-blue butterflies swept across our bow
in a psychedelic haze. (OU77.4)
Besides being linked to travel writing, purple stylistics is stereotypically associated

with pre-20th century English literature, with restaurant menus and wine connois-
seurship, and with genre fiction (see e.g., Pullum 2004 and related web postings),
among other discourse genres uninfluenced by modernist prescriptivists like Orwell
or Strunk and White. Overadjectivalized writing is often a focus of ridicule by reading
publics today, as testified by the infamy of the “dark and stormy night” opening of
an otherwise forgotten novel (Bulwer-Lytton 1874[1830]:13). Yet a correlative of this
metalinguistic sensitivity to overuse of attributive modifiers is that purpleness also
strongly indexes participation in a tradition. In Brazilian Adventure, Peter Fleming
(brother to Ian) reports how he and a companion parodically enacted purple and
danger-fabricating ways of speaking about tropical travel:
If Indians approached us, we referred to them as the Oncoming Savages. We never said, “was
that a shot?” but always, “was that the well-known bark of a Mauser?” All insects of a
harmless nature and ridiculous appearance we pointed out to each other as creatures “whose
slightest glance spelt Death.” Any bird larger than a thrush we credited with the ability to
“break a man’s arm with a single blow of its powerful wing.” We spoke of water always as
the “Precious Fluid.” We referred to ourselves, not as eating meals, but as doing “Ample
Justice to a Frugal Repast.” (Fleming 1933:130)
In a similar but straight-faced way, purple register qualities in Korowai travelogues

function to index mythography as such, linking the writing intertextually to a “pan-
chronic” (Silverstein 2005:13) heritage of preceding imaginative works of exotic
encounter. A small case in point is the collocation “cathedral gloom” in one text’s
second sentence: “Above us arches a canopy so dense that it casts a cathedral gloom
across the soggy earthen floor” (RD100.1). The same expression occurs in the influ-
ential castaway romance The Blue Lagoon (Stacpoole 1908:206), and “a cathedral-like
gloom” occurs in a core primitivist tableau in Melville’s Typee (1846:100), when the
narrator enters a shaded outdoor sacrificial temple. The joining of cathedral’s sublime
and sacred religiosity with gloom’s emotional and moral negative is a compact icon
of the travelogues’ larger central principle of white ambivalence about a primeval
timespace. But also through semi-conscious associations of an intertextual series
(Hill 2005), purple expressions like “cathedral gloom” are enregistered as signifying
Melville, Gothic, or past literature of primitive encounter.
The strongest function of purple qualities is probably to offer an iconic picture
of a mythic chronotope of civilized/primitive disparity, doing so via the voice of a
semiotically skilled narrator to whom a reader can relate emotionally in the chrono-
tope of their communicative relation. Like incongruity-highlighting similes, an excess
of adjectives not only describes but also resembles a sublime thicket of moral and
sensory impressions exceeding boundaries of home-country normalcy.
The Pageant of Evaluations: Whiteness as a World-Historical

Superiority Complex
A final layer of textual features I will introduce is what I term the “pageant of
evaluations.” Narrators are intensely concerned with what is good or bad about
themselves, about Korowai, and about the travel encounter. The concept of civilization
(or covertly, whiteness) central to primitivist cosmology can be understood loosely as
a world-historical superiority complex. Global primitivism today is an evaluative
framework in which one part of humanity is understood to embody historical supe-
riority over the other, but a superiority qualified by inklings of doubt or regret. In
primitivist travel, the archaic pole of humanity is the object of a highly reflexive
evaluative inquiry that resembles the contradictory structure of nostalgia as a longing
for what one’s very nature defines as having been lost (Rosaldo 1989; Frow 1991;
Pollock 1994:64). In primitivist travelogues, white superiority to cultural and racial
others is steadily measured, questioned, and affirmed. The full pageant is too varied
to review here. Rather, I sketch just a few textual patterns that overtly portray a
narrator’s subjective trajectory of desire and evaluation in the crucible of the Korowai
encounter. These are sites where narrated events and the narrator-reader relation
are each again iconic of the cosmos of primitive and civilized: here, iconic of that
cosmos’s permanent evaluative ambivalences and contradictions.
Emphasis on travelers’ intrepidness in the face of danger, and on narrators’
incongruity-navigating linguistic skills, is squarely part of this pageant of evaluations
in that it seeks to elicit readers’ desire for the narrator’s chasm-bridging actions. In
texts’ focus on both danger and incongruity, proximity to the primitive is posed as
valuable. Events of special closeness across the mythic chasm are often highlighted.
One writer recounts: “Boas . . . hugs me in gratitude, and tears trickle down his
cheeks,” and “Seeing me shivering, Boas pulls my body against his for warmth. As I
drift off, deeply fatigued, I have the strangest thought: this is the first time I’ve ever
slept with a cannibal” (SM57.6). A female narrator’s Korowai interlude ends with this
scene: “As we sit, legs outstretched and touching, white and dark side by side, I hum
a quiet lullaby. She hums with me. And then I put my arm around her and she puts
hers around me. The little boy sits between my legs and we sing in the dark. I wish
I could stay. If I ever come back to Irian Jaya this is where I will live” (TF215.6; also
RR35; NY136.3).
Travelogues also contain frequent passages intertextual with ethnography or
natural history, as in the statement “As with the highland tribes, the Korowai hunt
with bow and arrow, each arrowhead designed differently depending on the quarry”
(ST41). Where episodes of emotional closeness emphasize a partial merging of sub-
jectivity across the cosmological divide, documentary passages often emphasize
ongoing separateness of knower and known. (The value accorded this voice of docu-
mentation often leads to inaccurate overreaching.) But this is still a conjunctive sepa-
rateness, in which knowledge too is a channel of contact across the gulf of primitive
otherworldliness. Primitivist travelogues’ intertextuality with ethnography is con-
ventional enough that one author, writing for Outside magazine, both performs and
mocks it. Again pursuing a humorous footing to make cultural incongruities vivid
(and to foreground ambiguity about who is greater and who lesser), this narrator
ridicules his own impulse to write in his notebook while Korowai are content to sit in
“self-contained neolithic composure.” What he inscribes is a formal outline of para-
ethnographic generalizations, with entries like “A. Inappropriate comments / 1. Eat
me” or “D. Appropriate behavior / 1. Sitting in a hunkering squat” (OU192.18).10
Overlapping with some authors’ tendency toward footings of light self-mockery,
narrators frequently recount their own humiliation in the Korowai physical and social
environment, in sobering reversal of the evaluative hierarchy of civilized and primi-
tive dominantly framing the encounter. One narrator reports that “Yanbu stopped
frequently to let me catch up, a faint look of pity on his face” and, later, that “Frus-
tration began to well up in me, for in nature the ‘civilized’ man quickly becomes a
helpless child, dependent upon people we have been conditioned to think of as
helpless children” (NY129.15, 130.3; also CS2.5; OU188.17, 192.3). Narrators also
celebrate white descent into Kurtzian conditions of mental and physical abjectness
under pressure of the primitive environment. “We were also beginning to fray,
mentally as well as physically,” reports one narrator, who also later quotes a
co-traveler as imagining that he would “go mad” living where Korowai do (NY139.2,
136.6). Other narrators state that a fellow traveler’s “hobbled gait and vacuous stare
remind me of a shackled prisoner on death row” (ST17), or that “After the gruesome
tales, the war chief offers me his treehouse to rest. I scale the pole and curl up on the
lattice floor, exhausted by the leap across an impossibly wide culture gap” (RD107.1).
Narrators are also regularly concerned with Korowai evaluations of them
(cf. Rutherford 2009:2). “ ‘After we leave, what will they say about us?’ I asked my
companions. ‘What do they think about us? That’s one thing we will never know, and
it’s the thing I’d most like to know’ ” (NY140.2). Of an early encounter, one traveler
notes, “Mr. Korowai is not too interested in us, either.” But then, “By the third night,
we are staying with a family . . . who seems as excited by our otherness as we are by
theirs” (CS2.8, 3.4; also NGS37.3;OU192.3, 192.5). More generally, narrators express
evaluative concern with Korowai people’s happiness or other interior emotional states
and are puzzled by their apparent lack of expressiveness about them. One remarks:
“There are said to be twenty different local expressions for sago, while nice feelings,
love, and a pleasant state of mind generally are known by the single Korowai word
‘bagus’ [actually Indonesian -RS]. For the entire period, I did not see a single hint of
intimacy by which indigenous men and women would express mutual affection”
(HN11).11 Outside’s narrator includes under the ethnographic heading “Appropriate
behavior” the entry “7. Smiling dreamily for no particular reason” (OU192.19; also
NY136.14).
Across these patterns of travelers expressing judgments of desire and evaluation
toward themselves and toward Korowai, authors put the travel chronotope into a
relation of dense iconicity with the mythic chronotope’s internal ambivalences. The
ceaseless train of small evaluative stances, questions, and anxieties in narrated events
and in the narrator’s performative voice are a concrete picture of the myth-level
structure in which civilization is by definition superior to its archaic predecessor and
civilization’s representatives feel doubt about this superiority claim. The pageant of
evaluations surrounding narrators’ travel is convincing and attractive because of how
it rings true in relation to an assumed larger cosmological predicament, even as the
cosmological model is made vivid through the specific travel story. By way of this
textual staging of volatile and ambivalent relations of value between cosmic poles,
readers too may step into narrators’ position of instantiating civilization.
Following the elegy tradition, narrators express great evaluative concern with
cultural change. The texts often end with a meditation on this topic, implying that
anxieties about change are a kind of ultimate moral of the story, summing up the
whole primitivist cosmos and its feeling. The pattern depends for its force on iconicity
between Korowai people’s imminent leaving-behind of primitivity in the narrated
chronotope and the reader’s leaving-behind of the textual dreamworld of the primi-
tivist tale in the chronotope of textual performance. Here is one of several examples:
Should the outside world let the Korowai keep their way of life with all its cruelty, or should
we shun the temptation to quarantine the tribe from the 21st century, keeping them bottled
up as anthropological curiosities?
These are futile questions because the Korowai’s fate has already been decided. Soon,
bulldozers will tear down their trees. They will be dragged out of the Stone Age and into the
next millennium whether they like it or not. (RD107.11; also NY140.11; SM59.14; NG24.4)
Two further examples superimpose this pattern into a relation of diurnal iconicity.
Each text presents a long meditation on imminent change and loss amid narration of
a nightfall transition, and then closes with narration of a romantic scene of domestic
contentment nested into a subsequent diurnal transition into sleep or dawn. Here is
Outside’s ending, following the change meditation:
Soon the stars faded, and the eastern sky brightened with the ghostly light of false dawn. A
mist came up off the forest floor, a riotous floral scent rising with it. The mist seemed the stuff
of time itself, and time smelled of orchids.
As the first hints of yellow and pink touched the sky, I saw Samu and Gehi in silhouette:
two men, squatting by their fire, waiting for the dawn. (OU196.10-11; also NGC38)12
This technique cultivates an experience of iconic resemblance between text ending,

end of author-reader interaction, narrated diurnal atmospheric transition, and cos-
mological superseding of the primitive by the civilized. The cross-chronotopic resem-
blances are partly wrought in the medium of emotion, desire, and evaluative hope
or fear. The iconicity centers on the felt poignancy of social time in moments of
transition.
Conclusion
Text endings are thus a crisp instance of the broader and more varied pattern I have
explored in this article. My main proposal has been that it is useful to distinguish a
plurality of coexisting chronotopic layers in travel-writing texts (as in other discourse
forms) because doing so allows us then to scrutinize texts’ makeup as elaborate
orchestrations of links of cross-chronotopic iconicity. For example, Korowai travel-
ogues are crafted to offer readers a persuasive, pleasurable experience of a reaffirmed
primitivist cosmos, not only through what is denoted, but through forms of language
use promoting a reading encounter (in the chronotope of textual performance) that
feels like that imagined primitivist cosmos.
The point of the three-chronotope schema used here has been to provide an
armature around which I could organize a survey of a portion of the iconic effects
central to primitivist travelogues. In this way, the overwhelming repetitiousness of
travel writing can begin to be taken seriously as a systematic, function-fulfilling
feature of the texts and also begin to be sorted out into distinct but coordinated
patterns. One point of the “hall of mirrors” image, as a model of this textual system,
is that it can help us appreciate how a plenitude of distinct kinds of reflective surfaces
might itself foster greater textual persuasiveness rather than dissipating a text’s force.
Within the chronotope of narrated travel, a huge number of distinct features of
Korowai people and of the narrator’s travel experience are presented. But this expan-
siveness can be a textual asset if readers experience the disparate features as iconically
coherent. Similarly, the relations of iconicity I traced between different chronotopes
(such as between narrated atmospheric transitions and performative transitions
in text structure, or between a simile’s effects in the performance chronotope and
Manichaean civilized/primitive antipathy in the mythic chronotope) are themselves
diverse and highly susceptible to innovation. What I have sampled here is less the
stable limits on how writers and publishers align these different chronotopes with
each other than the way in which proliferation of different kinds of cross-chronotopic
iconicities can crystallize an overall quality of persuasiveness, such that any one
element in the textual process is made more believable by the repetitions surrounding
it at other textual levels.
The account offered here has also proposed seeing desire and evaluation as integral
to the makeup of chronotopes and to cross-chronotopic iconicities. In other words,
experiences of resemblance are desire-instilled and desire-instilling. Of course, a
travelogue’s different chronotopic levels involve a multitude of different social rela-
tions, so “desire” might be very differently constituted across them. The commodity
logic of a specific consumer’s relation to the print marketplace is one thing, the
desirability or undesirability of specific Korowai met on a trip (or of specific traveler
attributes also exposed on a trip) is another, and the overall cosmological quandary of
the relative desirability of civilized and primitive is another still. Yet making the
interaction of these disparate desire-saturated social relations a core analytic focus
seems crucial to understanding the nature of the texts and the nature of the social
contract of desire and persuasion that is the primitivist travel-writing genre itself. One
main point toward which my account has gravitated is the close link in this genre
between play of cross-chronotopic iconicities and the persona of the narrator-traveler.
Qualities of desirability in a narrator’s performative voice seem to be a particularly
important figurative channel, in the chronotope of textual performance, through
which readers experience narrated events as vivid and desirable. It is also through
this voice’s desirability that readers’ commitment to the tenets of primitivist cosmol-
ogy is deepened, even as desire for this cosmology supports the attractiveness of the
narrating persona.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This essay exists thanks to an invitation from linguistic anthropology
graduate students at the University of Arizona to speak at their 2009 Sandrizona conference.
I am grateful to participants in that event and the UCSD linguistic anthropology workshop
for their comments. For queries, advice, and support, I also thank Paul Manning, Miyako Inoue,
and the JLA reviewers, as well as Aomar Boum, Natasa Garic, Paul Garrett, Courtney
Handman, Joe Hankins, John Haviland, Laura Hendrickson, Jane Hill, James Hoesterey, Alaina
Lemon, Anne Lorimer, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Alan Rumsey,
Danilyn Rutherford, Bambi Schieffelin, Ryan Schram, Ashley Stinnett, Maisa Taha, Paige West,
Kit Woolard, and many other persons. I was not able to address adequately here many of the
excellent points raised by these colleagues.
1. See for example Holland and Huggan (1998:5), Ballard (2009:221), Wainaina’s trenchant
satire (2005), and Gulliver’s protest that “we were already over-stocked with Books of Travels”
(Swift 2002[1726]:123). See also Lévi-Strauss’s conflicted revulsion toward travel writing as
being dominated by “desire to impress,” and his revulsion toward slide lecturers who, “instead
of doing their plagiarizing at home,” have “supposedly sanctified it by covering some twenty
thousand miles” (1974[1955]:17–18).
2. I cite CS by installment number (1–4) followed by paragraph. All other newspaper articles
are cited just by paragraph. Magazine articles are cited by page followed by paragraph, except
NGC which is cited by paragraph alone. The blog RR is cited by paragraph. The book TF is cited
by page and paragraph. For the magazine and newspaper articles, further publication details
are as follows: OU 17(10), Oct, pp. 70–7, 186–96; NG 189(2), Feb, pp. 2–33; NGS 189(2), Feb, pp.
34–43; RD 149(892), Aug, pp. 100–7; IN Aug 28; ST Jan 17; NY 81(9), Apr 18, pp. 124–40; NZ Sep
25; SM 37(6), Sep, pp. 48–60; NGC 6(10), Oct; HN Oct 31; CS Dec 17 and Dec 24 of 2008 and Jan
7 and 14 of 2009, each of the four installments appearing on pp. 13–14 of the issue (in a weekly
“Environment” section). The book TF was published by Crown Publishers of New York, and
the passage I draw on is on pp. 212–215. The blog RR is at ramblingroses.net/zirianjaya.htm
(accessed May 10, 2010).
3. Tim Cahill, asked how he makes a living from travel writing, put it this way: “I try to write
very good magazine stories. The stories, if I do them right, can then be collected in a hardcover
anthology. Then it goes to paper. In effect, I get paid three times for some stories” (George
2009:117). Cahill’s Korowai travelogue (OU) was reprinted as “Among the Karowai: A Stone
Age Idyll” in his 1997 collection Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered and also
that year in the multi-author anthology The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years. NY was expanded
in Osborne’s 2006 book The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the
Airport Mall and also reprinted in the April/May 2007 issue of DestinAsian Magazine (Jakarta).
RD was expanded in Raffaele’s 2003 book The Last Tribes on Earth. SM was expanded in
Raffaele’s 2008 book Among the Cannibals. NGC formed the basis for parts of Rostuhar’s 2009
book Džungla. HN narrates a trip also reported on at greater length in Balcar’s 2008 book Papua:
s fotoaparátem ke stromovým lidem [Papua: Camera to the Tree People]. An abridgment of CS
was published in the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz on 6 August 2009 under the title “So, Do You Really
Eat Humans?” Numerous other books containing Korowai or Kombai chapters have been
produced as spin-offs from television shows.
4. Although two travelogues I examine discuss Kombai rather than Korowai, for simplicity,
I will usually just write “Korowai” in this article.
5. Non-professional writings can also have career-trajectory effects. Matthew Ertfelda,
amateur author of a Korowai story in his hometown newspaper (ST), later participated in
Survivor: The Amazon, from which he gained a $100,000 prize and much media exposure. His
earlier publication likely influenced his casting. The link between Korowai and Survivor in one
man’s biography is typical of the connectivities of contemporary primitivism as a global
cultural and media formation.
6. Another common pattern is use of short sentences or parataxis at paragraph endings to
narrate moments of temporal blockage or social and mental change of direction. For example,
one narrator (OU190.4-5) ends a paragraph about negotiations over sleeping in a Korowai
house with the fragment “Which complicated matters.” Another narrator (TF213.7-9) ends a
paragraph reporting her conflicted internal deliberations about whether to try climbing into a
treehouse with the mental declaration, “No, thank you.”
7. Two other texts begin abruptly in medias res with narrators puzzling reflexively over their
own rationales for the primitivist travel (CS1.1; OU72.1).
8. Fabian (1983) is the canonical critical account of anthropology itself as promoting a
“time-machine” model of Western scholars who live in one time and non-Western research
subjects who live in another.
9. He likely recycled this designation from writings about Papua’s Baliem Valley, which he
also visited. The Baliem has been figured as “Shangri La” in international media since 1944,
when the label was promoted by journalists covering U.S. soldiers’ sightseeing flights over the
valley.
10. An extended, non-parodic passage on vegetation types from the same article (by Tim
Cahill) was excerpted in a how-to guide for aspiring travel writers as an example of an excellent
reader-transporting compilation of “details of perception and description” (George 2009:
46–47).
11. In August 2010, two female reality-television personalities published a series of articles
about a Korowai trip on Croatia’s most popular domestic website; one installment’s title was
“People to Whom the Concept of Love is Unknown” (Meler and Hohnjec 2010). The article text
states, “There is no word for kiss or love.” Concerning love in Korowai kinship, see numerous
passages listed under the index entry “love, longing, care” in Stasch (2009:310).
12. This closing’s principle is remarkably similar to that of the “virtual resolution” of a
conflict between pastoral countryside and a technological or governmental “counterforce”
discerned by Leo Marx in the dusk-narrating close of Virgil’s first Eclogue and in a parallel text
by Hawthorne:
[Virgil’s] poem offers no hint of a “way out”. . . . Yet this twilight mood, a blend of sadness
and repose, succeeds aesthetically. . . . this consolatory prospect figuratively joins what had
been apart. At the end of the Sleepy Hollow notes, similarly, the train moves off and a sad
tranquility comes over Hawthorne. Although he manages to regain some of his earlier sense
of peace, the encroaching forces of history have compelled him to recognize its evanescence.
(Marx 1964:30–31)
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䊏 Rupert Stasch

Textual Iconicity and the Primitivist

Korowai and Tourists

Chronotopes as Social Worlds of Desire and Evaluation

Identifying a relatively unitary spatiotemporal level as a chronotope is only a

Iconicities between Narrated Time and Textual Performance Time

This tendency promotes an experience of reading, in the chronotope of textual per-

The Mythic Chronotope of Civilized and Primitive

The current epoch is deﬁned by civilization’s displacement and destruction of the

Iconicity and Persuasion in the Hall of Mirrors

Artful Speech as an Icon of Desirable White Subjectivity amid

Besides being linked to travel writing, purple stylistics is stereotypically associated

In a similar but straight-faced way, purple register qualities in Korowai travelogues

The Pageant of Evaluations: Whiteness as a World-Historical

This technique cultivates an experience of iconic resemblance between text ending,

Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in

Department of Anthropology UCSD, MC-0532

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