Imagine an indigenous tribe, untouched by modern civilisation, living on a large island somewhere between Australia and Papua New Guinea. We would never have learned about it had an American magnate living in Sydney not happened to take his new yacht out on a trip of several days. He was a clever mathematician who had dropped out of his doctoral studies and thrown himself into a career in stocks. He surrounded himself, however, with a group of intellectual friends, among them the Czech anthropologist Dr Hrdlička. On one of the wilder nights, as far as both the weather and the alcohol were concerned, they lost their way and in the morning found that they were hundreds of kilometres further than they should have been. But there was an island ahead of them, so they wanted to sail to it, so that their soles could once again taste the hard ground of an island that looked virgin. They knew nothing about the place on whose shores they had just set foot, so to be safe they took supplies of food and cold water. Nor did they forget to take one of the many older semi-automatic rifles that they kept, together with ammunition, in a crate on deck. It had been a gift from one of the clients of that American magnate.
That the weapon ended up on this island was a coincidence, but what it went on to cause was no coincidence. On the island lived a tribe of indigenous people who for thousands of years had been founding their social structures on a clearly divided gender hierarchy. The women look after the children and the preparation of food. The men bring the food, fishing and hunting the local game. But we also find a hierarchy among the men. However ridiculous it may seem to us, in this tribe the dominant position goes to the man who can build the best shooting weapon, one that in every respect resembles what we would call a bow. In this tribe the bow does not serve only for hunting game. During the hunt the other men do find out very quickly which bow is the best, but at the same time the bow is a symbol of potential brute force that a person can use to get rid of intrusive men. Although quarrels and skirmishes take place in the tribe, and sometimes end in death, disagreements are mostly settled by a unique ceremony in which the men challenge one another to shoot at a designated artificial target, thereby testing the accuracy and the precision with which the weapon was built. The ceremony then ends with a real hunt.
Although the ceremony looks peaceful, and it is true that many lives have been saved this way, it does not mean that all disagreements between the men end there. The man who loses suffers public disgrace. It follows him like a bad reputation, often for several years. The local women do have fixed gender roles, but none of them, unless she has to, wants to start a family with, or even be seen on the island in the company of, a man who has lost a duel. It is not a rule, especially if the man is handsome and generally known as a skilful designer of bows who can provide for his family. But the women have very precise requirements as to what kind of man they will want as their partner. After all, they also have to think of the good name of their family. Which the mother and father are well aware of, too, and they protest vehemently if their daughter starts something with a man who has recently been publicly disgraced. All the men, however, can return to ordinary life in society if, in the days and weeks following their defeat, they show that they have built noticeably better bows.
The visitors from the modern world who had strayed here had just had the opportunity to watch one such ceremony. To the sound of the regular rhythm of drums they saw a large group of slim, tanned male and female bodies. Only from the waist down were they covered, by red and yellow skirts of dry grass with shaggy decoration around the waist. Women and men alike had bare chests, adorned with hanging beads made of mussel shells. The men also had black lines in the shape of the letter T painted on their chests. Through the curtain of smoke one could see many coloured fires burning, red and blue.
The men from the modern world watched this colourful, yet majestic spectacle with enthusiasm and amazement. Soon, however, the locals discovered them. They guard their island well, and the white millionaire’s yacht that had arrived at its shores could not escape them. A patrol had been watching the visitors from their first step on the sandy shore.
The indigenous men who patrolled the island quietly took the visitors into one of the huts on the side, so as not to disturb the ceremony in progress. The chief elder, visibly angry, came with his wife to see what was disturbing such an important event of his tribe. He had heard of white men from his ancestors, yet he was surprised to see them with his own eyes. He held back his surprise in front of the others as much as he could, though. He began speaking to them in his own language, which the visitors could not understand. But the anthropologist Hrdlička quickly recognised that it was one of the dialects of the Papuan language Dani, to which he had once devoted himself during his studies.
Very slowly and with many mistakes, Hrdlička tried to explain to the tribal leader who they were and that it had not been their intention to disturb the ceremony. They had just got lost and would like to get back to their boat and leave. At that moment, however, other members of the patrol, straining with all their strength, carried the crate of weapons and ammunition into the hut. The tribal leader asked what it was, and Hrdlička answered that it was for shooting, just like the bows they had seen at the ceremony.
The next morning the visitors were allowed to leave, on condition that they left the tribal leader that crate, which the American magnate had received as a gift from a client.
The weapons got into the hands of only selected men, and even women. The centuries-old tradition of making bows suddenly ceased to have any value. No bow could compete with a firearm, which became the symbol of manhood, and whoever had one became a desirable man in the eyes of the local women.
The men who until then had been at the top of the hierarchy of dominant individuals fell quite a bit lower in the imaginary pyramid overnight. And they did not like it. The men who had no weapons tried to rebel, but they knew they stood no chance against firearms. The whole order of local life changed. Once, craft and technical skill had been the symbol of social success, which according to local custom led naturally to sexual success. Now all the important values were re-evaluated. Many local men began to hate the “white men from the modern world”. They began to blame all conflicts and local problems on their otherness and on the fact that they had brought advanced tools into their lives. Although in time they ran out of ammunition, a lasting change had taken place in the eyes of the local women. The accuracy of a bow in settling a dispute can never match a firearm, and so to regard this value as something by which to choose partners is completely arbitrary and senseless. Especially nowadays, when the women secure food themselves, and so the craft quality of the bow served only to settle disputes between men.
The life of the local Papuan tribe changed. Whatever the many causes may have been, the local men who had lost their position knew who the real culprit was.