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Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Prim...

Carl Hoffman

Start date: August 1, 2019

Finish date: August 31, 2019

Discussion: Nonfiction Group Read

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Nonfiction Group Read

August - Savage Harvest
By Lauren · 46 posts · 30 views

last updated Aug 29, 2019 04:52AM

Nonfiction Nominations for August 2019
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last updated Jul 15, 2019 08:41PM

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Jul 26, 2019 Christopher rated it liked it

Shelves: american, audiobooks, 21st-century, non-fiction

I like books about unsolved and unsolvable mysteries. There aren't enough unknowns left in this world anymore. You can pull out your phone and figure out almost anything at any time. But you'll never know for sure what happened to Michael Rockefeller.

He was the great-grandson of that Rockefeller, the robber baron, and he travelled around the world, buying up "primitive" art from artisans in tribal societies. Much of the art he collected is now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New Y ...more

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Aug 09, 2019 El rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: wanderlust, library-borrow, cultural-studies-and-other, 21st-centurylit, true-crime

We've heard about the Rockefeller family, primarily Nelson Rockefeller, US Vice President aside President Gerald Ford. But before he made vice presidency, his fifth child, Michael, disappeared. In 1961, 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller traveled to the Asmat region of southwest New Guinea on a collecting expedition for primitive art. He left his travel-partner when their boat capsized, with plans to swim to shore and send back help for his friend. That was the last his friend, or anyone, saw Micha We've heard about the Rockefeller family, primarily Nelson Rockefeller, US Vice President aside President Gerald Ford. But before he made vice presidency, his fifth child, Michael, disappeared. In 1961, 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller traveled to the Asmat region of southwest New Guinea on a collecting expedition for primitive art. He left his travel-partner when their boat capsized, with plans to swim to shore and send back help for his friend. That was the last his friend, or anyone, saw Michael.

What happened to Michael? Three years after his disappearance, he was legally declared dead, but the truth is that there was never any proof. Even though extensive searches were made (hello, this was the Rockefeller family, they spared no expense), Michael's body was never found. Theories abounded - perhaps, during his 12 mile swim to shore, Michael drowned from exhaustion or exposure, was eaten by a crocodile or a shark. No, um, pieces were ever found.

The author of this book, who brought this topic to so many of us who were all like "Michael Rockefeller? Never heard of him," used this platform as a way to try to figure things out. One of the other prevailing theories was that Michael had made it to shore, and the Asmats - a native tribe of warriors known somewhat for their violence and, well, yeah, cannibalistic culture - killed and et him up. Hoffman thought writing a book about Michael's disappearance was a good idea, and through the process of his research, visit the Asmat region and talk with the locals, to see what they knew about Michael's disappearance and to get tips on seasoning a dead body. (Kidding on that last bit.)

I found the disappearance of Michael the most interesting because, again, I was unfamiliar with this bit of history. It appears, however, that this is a thing others know, and I have just been under the proverbial rock again.

The story had grown, had become mythical. There had been an off-Boradway play about him, a novel, and a popular rock song, even a three-part television series in the 1980s hosted by Leonard Nimoy.
(p16)

Wait, what? Really?

I am always intrigued by disappearances. A part of me likes to think maybe he wanted to get away from the Rockefeller name and start a new life elsewhere, and maybe he and Amelia Earhart hooked up at some point. Maybe the remaining Asmat, some of whom remember Michael, have protected Michael all these years. Instead, however, they admitted to killing him. Still, their admission wasn't the most convincing, as detailed by Hoffman. There are still too many lingering questions.

Maybe he was just too young, not yet mature enough to understand why he was there, incapable of personalizing his experience rather than simply intellectualizing it. If we had him with us today, if he'd lived, maybe he would have been able to articulate what he was seeking, what had driven him. There had to have been a reason. To seek anonymity, to escape the safety of his family, to make the world understand a culture so different from his own - any of these would surely have been beautiful and understandable.
(p146)

Hoffman made a heroic attempt at answering some of those questions, but very little more is found out by the end of the book than we know in the beginning, so if you're one of those readers who is frustrated by ambiguity, you might want to pick up a different book. Hoffman's own experiences with the Asmats left a lot to be desired - it felt, all too often, like the white man coming to piss on a different culture, so he's probably lucky they didn't eat him too (if they did, in fact, actually eat Michael). Hoffman did, at least, recognize his whiteness in this other culture, at least to a certain degree, so that's something.

We were leaving not just a place but a consciousness - one in which the "I" was different for the Asmat than for me. It was the group, tribe, family, tied together in ways difficult to grasp. For me, an American, "I" is the biggest most important unit. For us, freedom means everything. The right to do as we please, unbound by clan or village or parents - to move two thousand miles at will, to make a call home or send an email or say hi via Skype. We can reinvent ourselves, change churches or religions, divorce, remarry, decide to celebrate Christmas or Kwanzaa or both. But these men in Otsjanep are bound to each other. To their village and its surrounding jungle, to the river and the sea. Most will never see anything else, know anything else. And I kept wondering if I was as guilty as Michael, also filled with a Western conceit that I could just walk into a place and not only get it but also dominate it. Could I make the Asmat spill their secrets? Would they ever? Should they?
(p150)

Still, I appreciate the effort, I dug the photos throughout the book (though I do have a knee-jerk reaction to white men who go to other cultures and then make money off of them - I'm sure the tribe saw no part of that). Hoffman jumps between speculation about what may have happened when Michael made it ashore and Hoffman's own experiences in the village in 2012. I could have done entirely without most of Hoffman's own experiences - unless it dealt directly with the Rockefeller case which, I'm sorry to say, wasn't all that Hoffman wrote about.

In any case, I found the story fascinating, for the very fact that very little has been figured out after all of these years. What the book really did was make me want to travel and be the little archaeological anthropologist I probably was always meant to be.

It is a truism that you can't really understand a place, can't grasp it, until you arrive there. You can picture it, or imagine it, but it's an abstraction.
(p175)

...more

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