nities. They were called meenoo (a word composed of me, meaning men, and noo from the verb nai, to eat). The witch doctor maintained that all of them, after having killed their victims, let them be buried by their relatives, and only then, the following night, would approach the grave, typically having changed into a dog or a hawk, and feast on the corpse. He insisted that this witch would do the same that night. So now I was back “among cannibals.” Because this information might contain a seed of truth, I decided to put the claim to a test. After nightfall I snuck out of my hut and went to the grave in the swamps to witness the cannibal’s work. In order to avoid being betrayed by my tracks in the mud and charged, myself, with cannibalism, I went barefoot into the cold night. Hidden in tall reeds near the grave, I watched throughout the night. The moon was full, the reeds rustled softly in the light breeze, and patches of fog drifted by. I felt like I was watching a Boris Karloff movie. Instead of a walking mummy, however, I expected to see a local woman. The night went by and nothing happened; only a few giant bats and owls flew over my head, and the weird shrieks of animals broke the monotony of an otherwise silent night. Instead of a cannibal, all I caught was a cold. Next morning Kaadootajbii, his eyes wide with excitement, reported important news to me: “The cannibal woman indeed came to the grave, but this time instead of a dog, she changed into an ogre. Her track in the mud showed feet almost twice as large as those of an adult Kapauku.” So if anyone comes upon a report from the highlands of New Guinea of a Big Foot sighting, the reader should know his true identity. As it turned out, the Kapauku were not cannibals after all, and all the accusations and wild accounts were actually the result of a belief in witchcraft. I wrote the summary of my findings to the district officer, Den Haan, who promptly released the above-mentioned “cannibal-witch” from jail.
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Collecting Although neither my father nor my mother were collectors of anything, since my childhood I was a compulsive collector. As a four-year-old, I collected toy soldiers with different uniforms supplied by my parents and relatives at Christmas time. Once they discovered my interest in collecting, they started to supply me with troops of different nations. At the age of seven, my interest shifted to more sophisticated matters — to butterflies. I caught these with nets and pinned them down in old cigar boxes. In doing so I learned their specific names and tried to link them with what I thought were corresponding caterpillars. Two years later, I started to collect stamps. This activity taught me geography and developed an interest in foreign countries. I learned not only the names of the various states and their location on the world map in my old atlas, but also the names of the large rivers and mountains ranges that crossed their territories. It was then only logical that I should become focused on various rocks and especially semi-precious stones. Indeed my grandfather, a jeweller and watchmaker, enlarged my mineral collection with scraps of raw emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, augmented with better-looking agates, topazes, quartz, crystals, and amethysts. This interest in collecting has continued with me until the present and my cellar is filled with raw minerals, agates, geodes, and many uncut interesting stones. In biology class at my Czech college, I had to collect and dry plants in order to create a crude herbarium. My marriage brought another collector’s item to my inventory. My wife is a painter and sculptor and when she became a professor of Art History, I also became interested in human products — artifacts. While at Yale University, where I studied anthropology, I augmented my scholarship by working in the Peabody Museum. Since I suffer from inertia (I hate to move and change, having stayed at Yale since 1952) I continued my work in the museum after my teaching appointment ( 99 )
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and, in due course, became curator and later director of the anthropological collection. I love “primitive art” and dislike modern. The name “primitive” assigned to tribal art seems to me to be an anomaly. I find nothing “primitive” in the sophisticated sculpture of New Guinea natives, while I find plenty that is in our modern artistic products, some of which appear unbelievably crude. But my attempt to collect pieces of tribal art hit an “iceberg” in the form of my professor and superior in the museum, Professor Cornelius Osgood (then head of the anthropology section at the Peabody Museum). “Leo,” he told me, “since now you are a curator of Anthropology, you cannot collect objects which you are supposed to curate. You may not compete with the museum. Otherwise what will happen is that you will retain the best pieces, and the museum will have to be satisfied with the inferior leftovers. And that would be most unethical.” Given my background in law, I clearly saw his point — a vested interest. So out of necessity, I turned my attention to our Western products, of course not to the “modern art” but to the gorgeous Meissen porcelain of Germany. That certainly was no competition to my collecting activity for the museum. The only tribal art objects that I have kept were given to me as presents by my tribal friends and adoptive “relatives,” objects which certainly will end up in the Yale Peabody Museum after my soul joins those of my Kapauku friends in New Guinea’s tropical forests. Since the Kapauku have no sculpture or painting, my collections for the Peabody Museum consist mainly of utilitarian objects, weapons, dress and body ornaments, a crude herbarium, animal bones, preserved reptiles and amphibians, soil samples, and even human blood (not to be traded to vampires!). In addition to working with informants and being a participant in the native society, an anthropologist must collect material objects in order to fully comprehend the culture. In describing and analyzing the gathering of material objects it is necessary to include the species of plants the people use as food sources and in the manufacture of other goods. Since in New Guinea many of the plants, insects, and amphibians people use are often scientifically unknown and therefore unidentified, the researcher should create a small herbarium and ( 100 )
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