When the group they're with petitioned the government for land to build their centre, the PNG government decided to use the expats as a buffer between two rival tribes in the Ayura valley. As a result, the organisation has to be extremely careful not to give the appearance of favouring one tribe over the other, or there will be bloodshed.

More than once, my mother has had to patch up (or try to patch up) some young man from one or the other of the tribes that got into a (usually machete) fight with someone from the other tribe. The airstrip outside of town has to check the cargo on the planes to make sure no one from Moresby is shipping up guns inside the supplies. Etc and so forth. While the average New Guinea national is probably just trying to get by, the cultural values by which they live allow them to be far more violent (particularly in seeking to redress perceived wrongs) than the typical westerner.

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being from the Pacific, the PNG highlanders are storied indeed for their payback violence. there's a possibility that the tribesman here could be influenced by someone else to take this action to sue, i mean the guy could be lying to the follow up researchers out of embarassment of being conceived as uncivilized when actual events like Diamond describes have actually occurred in the past. A colleague of mine told me of a time he ran a project office in the highlands with a handful of local staff. Due to some of the staff being of different tribal backgrounds, when a killing happened, the staff from the 2 tribes involved could not come to work for weeks on end for fear of being payback victims of the other's tribe. He lost a few good staffers to violence like this, a lady staffer steps off the bus, a man from the revenging tribe walks up and chops her to bits in front of onlookers. next week, the chopper is done in as well. and it goes on and on. so part of what Diamonds background on the violence involved is in fact true. you have to understand that the people there (and other Pacific folk too in general) won't just open up and tell you everything about their culture to just any ol' white man that comes along. it takes time to get the trust that delivers the information that someone like Diamond with all his years of work there in PNG has worked hard to earn. He's probably being hard done by now with his many critics of his books and so-called simplistic approach to anthropology (why does it have to be complicated in the first place?). I'm as upset as any islander when we're portrayed as simple hula shaking, coconut drinking smiley brown people, much as any others that are stereotyped, but in this case, I think the larger mass of western folk that know of Diamond yet little of our culture, will be politically correct and make him guilty without fully appreciating the entire story only few like Diamond have the privilege to know.

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This is something I've said for years, meaning it as a compliment, in that journalists can tell a story effectively and anthropologists cannot. Now it seems it applies in the bad way as well...

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This is just the (disturbingly popular) residue of Thomas Hobbes' influence on Western culture. It's just easier to believe that mankind is inherently violent than it is change a violent lifestyle. It's like the alcoholic who blames his genetics or his upbringing for making him that way, then goes on drinking without taking any responsibility for his actions.

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