<strong>  Strange island: Pacific tribesmen come to study Britain</strong>

Guy Adams, <a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2932252.ece" target="_blank">The Independent</a>  8 September 07

<em>For centuries, anthropologists have travelled overseas to live among ‘strange’ tribes and observe their ‘colourful’ ways. But rarely has it been tried the other way round. So what happened when a group of South Pacific islanders spent a month in Britain to study our own odd little lives?</em>

One bright morning in St James's Park and a stream of tourists approaches Buckingham Palace, where trumpets will shortly herald the Changing of the Guard. In the middle of the crowd walk five very short, very odd-looking men. They carry camcorders, gesticulate wildly, and talk in a language no one can understand. In the heart of picture-postcard London, this bizarre group stands out like a sore thumb.

Further investigation reveals that a film crew is tracking the party, at a    discreet distance. Something is going on. In fact, the cameras are bearing    witness to a historic event: the odd-looking group, whose skin is dark and    whose smiles are wide, and who all measure around five feet tall, are on the    verge of completing an extraordinary social experiment.

In March this year, a British TV company invited a small tribe called the    Kastam, from the tiny South Pacific island of Tanna, to send a delegation to    England, a country none of its people had ever visited before. They spent a    month living here, learning our customs, and making a film about the way the    strange and alien inhabitants of a modern western democracy live. The five    men walking up the Mall are this delegation. We are witnessing the final    chapter of their incredible journey.

<!--more--> The film, in the form of a three-part documentary called Meet the Natives,    appears on Channel 4 later this month. It will mark a scientific first: for    generations, western anthropologists have travelled to faraway lands to live    among native tribes and document their way of life. But, until now,    anthropology has always been a one-way street; alien cultures have never " gone native" over here. The project was an experiment in what one might    call reverse anthropology.

A very strange experiment it was too. The five men, whose names are Yapa,    Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi, come from a small hillside village on Tanna, which    is the southern tip of the archipelago that makes up the island nation of    Vanuatu. At home, they live in mud huts, wear nothing but penis sheaths made    from grass, and while away days conforming to a sort of tropical cliché:    tending crops, looking after pigs and sitting contentedly in the shade of    the banyan tree.

The hurly-burly of central London, where I was invited to follow the group    for a day, couldn't be more different. For men who had grown up in a place    where the only form of currency is pigs, and innovations such as    electricity, television and the internal combustion engine never caught on,    the land of skyscrapers and unbridled capitalism isn't just another country.    It might as well be another planet.

In a strange way, however, Yapa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi were ideally    equipped to study our frenetic society: as the ultimate outsiders, their    take on everything from household

gadgets to domestic relations and workplace convention promised to be as    quaintly amusing as it was unique. Only very few peoples on the face of our    globalised planet could pull off an anthropological study of the UK, and the    Kastam were one of them.

There was, however, to be a twist; a faintly extraordinary one, too. Kastam    religion has it that England and Tanna were once the same nation. They    believe that our islands emerged, like twins, from a volcano at the time of    creation. Some time afterwards, England drifted away to the far side of the    globe. But today, the tribe reckon, the Brits remain their lost brothers.    When the delegation arrived in the UK, and met its people, they were    treating them as long-lost brothers.

Stranger still, for viewers of the documentary, is the fact that (for    reasons that will be fully explained later) the Kastam worship a very famous    inhabitant of England, who once visited their island on board a very smart    yacht. That man is Prince Philip. Incredibly, the Kastam believe that the    husband of our Queen is the Son of God.

All of which explains why Yappa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi are jabbering so    wildly, and walking so excitedly up the Mall towards Buckingham Palace on a    sun-dappled morning. They are experiencing a moment of religious revelation.    The building before them, which they call "the big house", is home    to a man who they have spent their entire lives worshipping. Prince Philip,    they reckon, is God made flesh.

The five reverse anthropologists are engaged in nothing less splendid than    fulfilling a religious prophecy: that the Son of God will one day meet with    them and agree to return to live with his brothers in the South Pacific. The    men believe, to adapt a song from the football terraces they have visited    (to study sporting culture) only days earlier, that the Duke of Edinburgh is    finally about to be coming home. Watching a group of Kastam come to terms    with our customs is both instructive and very, very funny. Many of the    things you'd expect to leave them flummoxed duly do: at meal-times, for    example, the group struggle to cope with sitting at table, and using plates,    knives and forks (they are used to dining with their hands, cross-leggeed on    the floor). In one early scene, when they attend a dinner party, Yapa tucks    into the contents of the butter dish, with some gusto. He is either too    polite, or too confused, to stop until the entire slab is finished.

In another, the group attends a rural pub on a Friday evening, which they    describe as the white man's version of the "nakamal", or village    meeting place. They are perturbed by how noisy it is. JJ remarks that the    white man's fire-water (Adnams bitter) makes everyone behave in a strangely    boisterous manner. Yet although the Kastam are uncomfortable with    drunkenness, they turn out to be extremely handy at another English pub    tradition: darts.

Over its three episodes, Meet the Natives billets the group with the three    great English tribes: the middle-class, upper-class and working-class. They    spend a week on a Norfolk pig farm, a week on a Manchester housing estate    (where they sample the twin delights of bingo and KFC), and a week at    Chillingham Castle in Northumberland, seat of Sir Humphry Wakefield, Bt.

"I didn't want to stereotype the UK," says Will Anderson, the    series producer, "but at the same time we had four weeks to give them a    sense of the enormous diversity of England, and decided this was the best    way to show them a snapshot of what was here.

"Before the group visited, we spent a lot of time talking to them.    They had a lot of questions about food and farming and pigs, so we obviously    wanted to show that. They also wanted to see a city, which was something    they'd never experienced before, so we went for Manchester. Obviously,    trying to meet Prince Philip was another priority, so we decided to give    them experience of people who lived in some way like him."

Most surprising is what Yapa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi find either    enjoyable, or shocking. In the Norfolk countryside, they were deeply upset    by the practice of artificially inseminating pigs ("a crazy thing ...    undignified ... goes against nature"), but delighted by ferreting for    rabbits, which they considered a sort of land-based fishing.

In Manchester they were staggered by the phenomenon of homelessness (in    Tanna, your family provides a home, come what may), but felt relatively at    home in a nightclub, since ritual dancing is an important part of their    culture. In London, where they spent a week in a penthouse flat in    Docklands, they learnt to love Marlboro Lights and fish and chips, but were    left cold by the hustle and bustle of city living.

The Kastam are also strangers to the sexual revolution, finding it hard to    comprehend how a man and a woman can be equal partners in a f marriage. They    are staggered at the amount of time Britons spend cleaning and washing up,    which is regarded as a waste of time and effort.

The most extraordinary aspect of their visit, though, revolved around Prince    Philip. On the day I met the group outside Buckingham Palace, we set off on    a whistle-stop tour of London's tourist attractions, including Madame    Tussauds. Here, statues of Tom Cruise and other Hollywood stars provoked not    a flicker of recognition. Graham Norton's waxwork left them cold. The world    of modern celebrity was clearly alien.

Until, that is, we entered a room housing life-size replicas of our current    Royal Family. Yapa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi became animated to the point of    frenzy. They rushed up to the waxwork Prince Philip, and hugged it. They    held his hand, and looked deep into his marble eyes. It was an extraordinary    moment. During the hour that the group spent admiring this one model, I    learnt a little about the events that led to our Duke of Edinburgh becoming    a God in the South Pacific.

The story runs something like this: at the start of the last century,    English missionaries visited Tanna in an effort to convert them to    Christianity. This angered the Kastam God, who sent his eldest son over to    the UK to try to stop them. On Tanna, this son was a spirit, but in England    they believe that this spirit has taken on the form of a man. When the Royal    yacht Britannia visited their island in the 1970s, they decided that this    man was Prince Philip. Shortly afterwards, the tribe sent the Duke of    Edinburgh a club, by way of a gift. Several months later, Buckingham Palace    returned the favour, posting them a framed picture of a smiling Prince    Philip holding the club. In such gestures are legends born. Today, that    photograph is a religious icon, their equivalent of an altar at a church.

As a result, Meet the Natives boasts an intriguing sub-plot: the group is    anxious to meet with the man they believe to be the Son of God, and ask him    to return home. Much of the series revolves around the question of whether    they will be granted an audience with Prince Philip. Without revealing what    does happen, it all reaches a show-stopping denouement at Windsor Castle.    Fascinating and hilarious as this exercise turned out to be, it will not be    without its detractors. Within the anthropological community, there are many    who now believe that the exercise threatened to corrupt a unique tribal    culture. Still more believed that attempting to introduce the visitors to    Prince Philip was fraught with danger: in one slip of his tongue, he would    after all be capable of shaking their entire religion to its foundations –    and the Duke is not, let's face it, a man renowned for tact.

The creators of Meet the Natives are evangelical about the project, though. " There is indeed a view that they are human beings who shouldn't be corrupted    by outside influences," says Anderson. "That was one of the things    I was most worried about when we started making the programme. But having    watched them settle back into their community, I would say that it's    definitely not altered anything. They were delighted to have visited    England, and said that it was a fascinating place, but it wasn't somewhere    for them. They prefer life under the banyan tree. So if anything, Kastam    culture is stronger than ever."

British culture, meanwhile, can also learn a thing or two from watching Meet    the Natives. The visitors from a village in the hills of Tanna are also able    to educate us in some of the things we may have got wrong. They are, for    example, amazed at the fact we spend most of our lives working; they are    also staggered by a current political hot potato – the apparent breakdown of    family life in sections of our society.

In one of the most instructive episodes of the show, they spent half an hour    on London Bridge during rush hour, attempting to film pedestrians and engage    commuters in a conversation, with predictably unsuccessful results. This    they thought was "crazy". A rejection of the most important things    in life, which they believe to be: "love, happiness, peace and respect" .

"One of the problems of our modern world is that for too long we've    regarded these cultures as a sort of exotic creature, thinking how primitive    they are," says the Sydney-based anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who acted    as a consultant to the project. "But I've spent 18 years living with    them, and there's a lot we can learn. They are much more open-minded, and    interested in the big questions. In the West, we are obsessed by little    things. Our culture is all about how: to travel faster, to live longer, and    make more money. Smart cultures are more about why. They are more    reflective. That's what they can teach us."

And that, really, is what science should be all about. It should inform us    about ourselves, for we have much to learn from so-called primitive    societies. In their strange journey towards Buckingham Palace, and the    adulation with which they revere Prince Philip in all his forms, Yapa, Joel,    JJ, Posen and Albi have actually given us a glimpse of what we lost.

<strong>Everything you want to know about Vanuatu (but were too afraid to ask)</strong>

Population: 209,000
Capital: Port Vila
GDP per capita: $3,346
Timezone: GMT +11
Motto: "Long God yumi stanap" (In God We    Stand)

*The first island in the Vanuatu group discovered by Europeans was Espiritu    Santo in 1606 by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Fernandez De Quiros

*Vanuatu means "land eternal". It became independent from France    and the UK on 30 July 1980

*It is an archipelago of more than 80 islands, 65 of which are populated.    Most are mountainous, of volcanic origin and have a tropical or sub-tropical    climate. The economy is based on subsistence agriculture, which provides a    living for two-thirds of the population

*There is no income tax, no capital-gains tax and no inheritance tax

*In 2006, the New Economics Foundation and Friends of the Earth rated    Vanuatu as the happiest place to live of all the world's 178 nations using    the Happy Planet Index, which reflects the average years of happy life    produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of    planetary resources consumed

*Last week, Vanuatu cruised to a 15-0 victory over American Samoa at the    13th South Pacific Football games

*The arrival of US forces during the Second World War saw the emergence of a    belief in a mythical messianic figure named John Frum. It was the basis for    another indigenous cult to rival the one surrounding Prince Philip. Today,    John Frum is both a religion and a political party with a member in    Parliament

<em>'Meet the Natives' begins on Channel 4, at 9pm on 27 September</em>