The Dilemma of Intellectual Opposition. A Comparative Analysis of the Struggle for Humanity and Aesthetics in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann

We knew at once that our lives would be very different for years to come, as a result of the news. Yet even the impact of Pearl Harbor and of the resulting war on American society was minor, compared to the impact of a first-contact patrol on New Guinea highlanders. On that day, their world changed forever. The patrols revolutionized the highlanders' material culture by bringing steel axes and matches, whose superiority over stone axes and fire drills was immediately obvious. The missionaries and government administrators who followed the patrols suppressed ingrained cultural practices like cannibalism, polygyny, homosexuality, and war. Other practices were discarded spontaneously by tribespeople themselves, in favour of new practices that they saw. But there was also a more profoundly unsettling revolution, in the highlanders' view of what comprised the universe. They and their neighbours were no longer the sole humans, with the sole way of life. A book by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, entitled First Contact, poignantly relates that moment in the eastern highlands, as recalled in their old age by New Guineans and whites who met there as young adults or children in the 1930s ...»