ABSTRACT
Introduction In his article ‘The Economics of Develop-man in the Pacific,’ Sahlins (1992) reminds ethnographers of those field experiences we sometimes feel are best left behind, forgotten, and ignored. He points in particular to those self-deprecating statements people sometimes make about themselves (in contrast to what they perceive to be positive attributes of the ‘whiteman’) which indicate the experience of cultural humiliation that Sahlins tell us people overwhelmed by the power of Western global capitalist expansion apparently undergo. In this paper I recount and rethink one such statement – ‘We are all “les” (lazy, lame, weary) men’ – made to me by a group of Rawa speakers of northeast Papua New Guinea, who have thus seemingly traversed through ‘that culturalw desert’ of humiliation that Sahlins argues lies on the road toward modernism.
