On the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea, 1961
The Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea was a large-scale anthropological expedition carried out by American anthropologists and artists in 1961. It was a three-year undertaking that was largely funded by private donations, including the Rockefeller family, with the support of the Dutch colonial government, and took place among the Hubula (also well-known as the Dani) of the Baliem Valley in Netherlands New Guinea from April to August 1961, two years before the territory was transferred from the Netherlands to Indonesia.
The Harvard Peabody Expedition is exemplary not only because it was influential in shaping the direction of American anthropology, but also because to a large extent it shaped the American understanding of Papuans and American foreign policy toward the region until today – through their influence on American academics and American publics. This is due to two factors. First, while using a mode of scientific knowledge production that was popular in the first half of the 20th century, the Harvard Peabody Expedition embarked on a new direction of anthropological research in the 1960s through the intensive use of audiovisual technology. As a result, the Harvard Peabody Expedition became one of the most well documented studies of a single area in the world and its influence reached a wider audience, outside the confines of academia.
The expedition produced Robert Gardner’s feature-length film DEAD BIRDS (1964), Peter Matthiessen’s nonfiction book “Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea” (1962), two doctoral dissertations by Karl G. Heider and Jan Broekhuijse, and two books of photographs, “Gardens of War” (1968) edited by Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider, and Michael Rockefeller’s “New Guinea Photographs, 1961” (2006), as well as an archive of 37 hours of Michael Rockefeller’s audio recordings of the Hubula world.
Secondly, the controversial disappearance of Michael Clark Rockefeller (1938–1961) in New Guinea, three months after this expedition took place. Michael Rockefeller was the youngest child of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller family. The young Rockefeller joined the expedition as a sound recordist and still photographer. After the Baliem Valley, he went to study and gather artifacts from the Asmat in the southern part of New Guinea where he disappeared in 1961. His disappearance has been subject to many popular accounts (Machlin 2001, Hoffman 2014, and Morgan 2014), embedded in anthropological myths about fieldwork, and countless accounts about Papuan cannibalism. Was he, as one story has it, killed and eaten by the Asmat?
Both the Harvard Peabody Expedition and the disappearance of the young Rockefeller took place when the territory was entangled in a monumental political dispute that would determine the fate and history of New Guinea. An international negotiation on the political status of New Guinea had taken place since 1949. In 1962, the United States underwrote the New York agreement, in which the Dutch were forced to transfer the Netherlands New Guinea to the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA). UNTEA transferred its administrative functions to Indonesia on 1 May 1963 as part of the larger wave of postwar decolonization occurring across the crumbling European empires of this period. As part of the agreement, the Indonesian government conducted the Act of Free Choice in 1969, in which all Papuan adults would be given the chance to cast their vote and decide their political future; as a part of Indonesia, or as an independent state. But instead of holding a free and fair referendum, the Indonesian government handpicked approximately 1,025 tribal leaders, in violation of the requirements set out in the agreement and intimidated them to vote for Indonesia (Lagerberg 1979, Osbourne 1985, Drooglever 2009, Kirksey 2012). Despite its controversial process, international communities recognized the status of the region as part of Indonesia. Since then on, the indigenous Papuans have been fighting against what they perceive as an Indonesian occupation of their territory.
The Beginnings of EXPEDITION CONTENT
The Rockefeller family recently donated the archive of Michael Rockefeller’s audio recordings in West Papua to the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which have since been digitized at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music. Presumably intended mainly to be of use in the making of what became Robert Gardner’s film DEAD BIRDS, which constituted a landmark work of ethnographic cinema, the recordings represent an astonishing variety of aspects of Hubula culture, including quotidian activities, ceremonies, warfare, and music and other performances of historical and aesthetic importance. The materials themselves consist of 123 tapes, or about 37 hours of recordings made by Michael Rockefeller from April to August 1961. EXPEDITION CONTENT is created as part of a larger project to revisit the archives, which will be returned to the Hubula people of West Papua.
Bibliography
Broekhuijse, Jan. 1967. De Wiligiman-Dani: een cultureel-anthropologische studie over religie en oorlogvoering in de Baliem-vallei. Diss. Utrecht. Tilburg: Gianotten.
Bubriski, Kevin, Michael Rockefeller and Robert Gardner. 2006. Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.
Drooglever, Pieter. 2009. An Act of Free Choice: Decolonisation and the Right to Self-Determination in West Papua. London: Oneworld Publications.
Gardner, Robert. 1964. Dead Birds. Film. Cambridge, MA: Documentary Educational Resources.
Gardner, Robert and Karl G. Heider. Introd. by Margaret Mead. 1968. Gardens of war: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age. New York: Random House.
Heider, Karl G. 1970. The Dugum Dani: A Papuan culture in the highlands of West New Guinea. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co.
Heider, Karl G. 1979. Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful warriors. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Heston, Fraser C. 2011. The Search for Michael Rockefeller. Directed by Fraser C. Heston. Film.
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Morgan, Mary Rockefeller. 2014. When Grief Calls Forth the Healing: A Memoir of Losing A Twin. New York: Open Road Media.
Osborne, Robin. 1985. Indonesia’s Secret War: The Guerilla Struggle in Irian Jaya. Boston: Allen & Unwin.
Rockefeller, Michael Clark and Adrian A. Gerbrands (ed.). 1967. The Asmat of New Guinea: The Journal of Michael Clark Rockefeller (The Michael C. Rockefeller Expeditions 1961). New York: Museum of Primitive Art.
Rutherford, Danilyn. 2003. Raiding the Land of the Foreigners. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Rutherford, Danilyn. 2012. Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
