The hunt for authenticity

Abstract

Living neither as Stone Age men nor as colonised subjects, the Ankave‐Anga (Papua New Guinea) are sufficiently isolated for journalists to have seen them as a ‘lost tribe’, even though their ‘contact’ with the outside world dated from the 1950s. Nonetheless, decades of interactions with the state, church and market have not deeply altered their society. Australian archives and accounts of life ‘before the white man came’, even though they refute journalistic dreams of authenticity, paradoxically portray places and times that history can hardly explain. Although an approach based on the historical anthropology of Oceania would surely help us analyse the Ankave's adaptation and creativity in dealing with the agents of modernity, ‘conventional’ anthropology seems to be the best prepared to talk about the Ankave of our times and about their most ordinary practices, the practices to which most of them devote most of their time.