New York: William Morrow [an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers], 2014. 322 pp. (B&W photos, maps.) US$26.99, cloth. ISBN 978-0-06-211615-4.
A gripping blend of fiction and meticulous journalism, this book is the latest attempt to solve the “mystery” surrounding the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller. Hoffman weaves an intriguing tale of revenge, murder, cannibalism, and conspiracy, interspersed with some insightful observations about the colonial and historical contexts in which the young Rockefeller disappeared.
In November 1961, the son of one of the most powerful families in the United States vanished while attempting to swim ashore in remote western New Guinea after his disabled catamaran became waterlogged. Speculation concerning the young Rockefeller’s fate has given rise to several scenarios, despite the official declaration that he drowned while attempting to swim to shore. However, the possibility that he was met by Asmat “cannibals” and dispatched in a way that horrifies, yet intrigues, Western sensibilities remains the popular conclusion. There seems to be an unrelenting penchant for factoring cannibalism into Rockefeller’s demise and the opening chapters in this book leave no doubt as to the author’s position on this.
Savage Harvest begins with the scene unfolding on Michael’s last day. Full of youthful confidence, he strips to his underpants and slips into the warm, muddied waters of the Arafura Sea off the Casuarina Coast, and into Asmat country. With two emptied petrol cans attached for flotation, he swims towards a horizon that dimly marks the estuarine swamps inhabited by the Asmat, renowned headhunters. These opening chapters are purely fictional. There is no way we can know what Michael’s thoughts were during his long swim to shore, no way of knowing that he even made it to shore, let alone that he was speared, beheaded, ritually dismembered, and eaten by Asmat warriors. It is puzzling that a work of non-fiction should open with such a speculative dramatization, delivering a forgone conclusion to what has never been established in fact. Nevertheless, the author proceeds to unravel the circumstances that lead him to the inevitable conclusion that Michael Rockefeller was killed and eaten by “a pre-Stone Age culture just fifty years ago” (234; how they can be a “pre-stone age culture” is another issue!).
Despite the obvious sensationalism encountered throughout, what follows is a careful and seemingly meticulous disentangling of the available documents and interviews. Hoffman gives an interesting background account of what may have motivated the young Rockefeller’s journey to New Guinea, weaving together facts gleaned from examined documents and his own interpretations of the material. Reading between the lines, Hoffman constructs intentions and motivations from Rockefeller’s conversations with school friends, exposure to New York high society, the opening of the Museum of Primitive Art in 1957 and, what is assumed, Rockefeller’s desire to fulfil a destiny embedded in his DNA. The narrative takes its reader with Michael Rockefeller and his first encounters with the “primitive” peoples of Dutch New Guinea. The author sets up a compelling case for Asmat revenge on a white man by recalling a 1957 incident wherein Dutch military and local police kill several village men. Hoffman explores what is known about Asmat culture and their worldview, requiring human heads to avenge deceased ancestors. The political backdrop of an emerging new Indonesia, finally free from the yoke of Dutch colonialism, and their dual claims over the more remote western half of New Guinea provide a compelling argument as to the reasons for Asmat taking the life of Rockefeller and for Dutch secrecy surrounding rumours of Rockefeller’s more distasteful fate.
Throughout the unfolding narrative Hoffman moves back and forth between the events leading up to and immediately after Rockefeller’s disappearance and his own journey to the Asmat in search of the “truth.” Hoffman divulges his own need to connect in some strange way with his humanity and what he sees as a personal melding between himself and the assumed motivation of Rockefeller to “discover” himself in the “wilds” of New Guinea. It is a personal journey of discovery tied into reconstructing the ghost of Rockefeller.
Curiously, Hoffman develops the notion that he is predestined to set Rockefeller’s spirit free, that he alone has the tenacity to avenge the stricken Rockefeller and free his soul, enabling it to move to the Asmat afterworld of Safan: “The more I knew about Asmat, the more I couldn’t stop imagining Michael in the Asmat cosmos: that he was like one of those men whose spirits his people had not done enough to push on to Safan… . All the speculation continued because his family had failed to fully seek closure and no one else had managed to gather the essential information” (347).
While there is much to commend the author, particularly the investigative journalism he conducts with a research assistant in Holland, there is much to complain about. For example, to assume that one is able to achieve a “deeper understanding” (349) of a people and their culture by living with them for only a month is ludicrous. Furthermore, there is an underlying reification of “primitivism,” a romanticizing of the exotic, notwithstanding attempts to “understand” the Asmat in a contemporary world. Despite overtly distancing himself from the warping effects of ethnocentrism, Hoffman can’t help but reinforce the “otherness” of Asmat while simultaneously finding elements of our shared humanity, elevating the “wonder” that is Asmat culture while at the same time recoiling from the horrors of their cannibalistic practices. Although the book is about the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller and the author’s conviction that it was Asmat cannibals who were responsible, there is an uneasy obsession with this aspect of Asmat culture. Hoffman tries to put this into its cultural context, explaining its rationality from an Asmat perspective. However, the reader is relentlessly reminded of this part of Asmat life. The practice’s horrifying appeal to civilized, Western sentiments pervades the book so that one is left with the feeling that the Asmat continue to hunt for heads and consume their victims!
Depicting the Asmat as living in a “drowned Eden” (84) is juxtaposed with Hoffman’s search for the truth of what occurred in November 1961. There is a tension between the Asmat, as a primitive reflection of us, and a civilizing culture’s worldview that eschews that most heinous behaviour: head hunting and cannibalism. It is the remote Asmat who deliver a most unnatural death for the son of one of the world’s richest dynasties.
Shirley Campbell
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
pp. 211-213