Neighborhood you grow up in there is always that kid who is kind of a wild kid, who will do anything and in my neighborhood that was teddy hannibal. One day we were sitting out there on the roof feeling very daring and he is like what is up . Next thing you knew, his head popped out the window and he started climbing out, never asked permission just started climbing out and as he did so he goes have you ever jumped off the roof . Are you kidding . I dont even like to get close, almost fell off. I dont even like to get close to the edge of the roof. Go like that, you want to get really close to use to get on my hands and knees and crawl out so teddy animals that have you ever climbed off, jumped off the roof as he is climbing out the window and as he says that he starts walking to the edge and keeps walking and walked right off the edge of the roof and we all went running over teddy had double was gone and next thing you know his head pops out the window again and this time he didnt even pause. He just runs and led off roofs and did at five times in a row. Teddy hannibal coming back and forth and my mom was sitting in the living room and shut all seesaw was the neighborhood bully violating the laws of physics kept coming through, but didnt go down and my mom came running out horrified, you guys jumping off the roof . We werent jumping off the roof just teddy hannibal was and she got mad at us and made us promise to get off the roof or not jump, a promise never to jump off the roof which we did and soon after that Katie Hannibal went home. My friends did too but my problem was teddy hannibal was younger than i was and i had to jump off the roof. I couldnt leave it at that. Katie hannibal left everybody went home and i was standing on the edge of the roof. I wont go into the long details of it, but the story is that i did jump off the roof and lived to tell the tale and might mother did find out about it. It is the metaphor for everything we do in my life and my professional life. When people ask me when they hear i went around the world 50,000 miles around the world to the worlds most dangerous buses, boats, trains and planes i took a bus across afghanistan or in the middle of a war or went to live with very remote people for head hunters and former cannibals in the southwest coast of new guinea they always say but werent you scared . My answer is always what is there to be scared of . But that is a lot. The reality is i am petrified all the time. I am scared all the time. The thing is i am not scared of bodily injury. I wasnt really that day on the roof of a wasnt really worried i was going to jump off the roof and die and break my leg. Wasnt that high. There was grass below and teddy hannibal have obviously done a bunch of times with no ill effects at all. I think what i am scared of really is the total commitment necessary for doing what i do, getting under the skin of a place and the situation and for me in order to do what i have to do, i have to subsume myself absolutely and completely and i have to give Everything Else up and i have to make these places or situations, the whole entire center of my universe and that is hard to do ended feels scary. You can to jump off the roof half way you have to just jump surrender completely and that is always frightening to me, the best example of this is my book savage harvest about the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, i dont know how many of you know the story, in 1961 michael was the son of nelson, nelson was the governor of new york at the time, michael graduated from harvard and went to new guinea to work on the film and heard about the asmac people who worked in the southwest coast of what is now indonesia and papua in new guinea and they were magnificent carvers and very complex people and his father created what was then called the museum of primitive art which was opened in 1957 and michael was named a trustee at the age of 19 and he had been brought up in the world of art like most American Kids are brought up in the world of jumping off roofs, of baseball. He heard about at and the quick reconnaissance mission. In 1961 and he liked what he saw, and went back in the fall. Crossing of the mouth of the river, dutch colleague, and long story short he swam and violated the first rule of yachting and he swam for shore with two and the gasoline can strapped to his waist and disappeared forever and there was the huge search and rescue, Nelson Rockefeller and michaels sister mary flew to new guinea, spend a few weeks not actually in asmac but 150 miles away, there was no place for them to be no place for them to stay and no sign of them and after that, when home after two weeks, after three the dutch canceled the search and rescue operation and that was it. Not long after that the first rumors began to surface that michael had made it to shore and been killed and even consumed by some local as mats from one particular village but those were just one of many, one of many crazy rumors that existed for 50 years and when i started poking ground it was a story that haunted me for years decades really hands i started looking around and i started off ultimately what i did was hire a researcher in the netherlands because the was a former dutch colony who started looking in the archives of the Colonial Government and the catholic church, and started finding hundreds of pages of documents that had never been seen before. This incredible story, the basics, the amazing complicated story but the essence of is there had been, they were, they practiced head hunting and cannibalism and constant interim village warfare in two villages had gotten into a struggle about a battle of 124 men who had sat out one day in 1957 only 12 made it home alive. The dutch were trying to pacify the azmat. A good way to pacify people is to come into the village with a lot of heavy weaponry. A Dutch ColonialPatrol Officer had arrived in the of village with a bunch of armed Soldiers Police men and everybody had panicked and he was frightened of the azmat, he was a classic colonial. He writes in his report and memoirs that he wanted to teach them a message and show the power of the dutch government and opened fire and killed five people and in the hole cosmology of the azmat, the azmat lived in a world of reciprocity, balancing the world, balanced with death and the most important fundamental themes in azmat culture is the idea of balance. Any debt required balancing death and the azmat were unable to reciprocate the deaths of the people murdered because there was no other village, no tribe down the river is that they could go and attack. Two priests who had been live in in azmat who spoke local language, they were close to the people, close to the villages first heard a couple weeks after mys disappearance heard rumors that the village had encountered michael he had swum to shore one morning just as 50 men work taking a break where the river enters the ocean and they encountered michael and killed him and they have eaten him in reciprocity for max duprees killing and had done extensive investigations and so much so that they named names and named to head michaels head and certain body parts, femur and tibia, and file those reports to the dutch government and the government suppressed those reports and is even more complicated and amazing than that. I had all these documents and i had this pretty clerestory but to understand what really happens to michael, why the azmat had killed him, why this was so important and was this something the dutch imagine, that the priests imagine or did it really happen . I had to go to azmat. Azmat is a hard place. Even today it is 10,000 square miles of swamp, absolutely no rocks, the 0 hills, there is one micelles tower, one grass airstrip in 10,000 square miles no roads, no cars and you cant go on line for instance and see lists of hotels in the main town, but this was two years ago to click on anything none of those links work. So i arrived there and took me all little bit of time to find a translator, somebody who spoke english and a guy with a boat. Everywhere you go, you go on both ends to dont tell from what i was doing, i said i was a journalist from america interested in azmat culture. Kpzi. Qgrays raid. First 5 you is this america and to the moon here all the villagers killed him and every azmat knows this. My father told me this. The village was close kayak and that is when i confess that i was really here for searching for what happened to Michael Rockefeller. It is a long complex story and that is why the book is 90,000 words but i made two trips and at the end of the second trip this is all during my first journey to there, i couldnt get anyone to talk to me at all. Nobody would come, they wouldnt even come and sit with us. I got this back story about things but there was a lot that i was missing but we to months had passed, and i lost 10 or 15 pounds and was running out of money and my visa was running out and it was time to go home and i did and i had all this archival data and Archival Research and i had what somewhat limited the amount of stuff azmat had told me so i started writing my book and a couple months in to what i just stopped one day and put my pin down, closed my eyes laptop is what you would say and realized i didnt have any idea what i was doing, what i was talking about and i had the longest i had spent had been four days at a stretch and i had violated a cardinal sin of journalism in that i was parachuted into a place and expected too much from people. I wasnt even asking if winded fire started . I was asking people about a murder and cannibalism, some things that they understood was transgress of and had that huge impact on the village and its history and i really didnt understand the azmat at all and i didnt understand azmat culture and i had been there with his entourage and my translator had an assistant and my boat captain had an assistant and the cook had an assistant and i had flown a translator to translate my translator. I didnt know every question i asked, the question i asked was the question the azmat heard and i didnt know what their answers werent in every respect i sort of failed to jump off the roof. I tried to kind of hate off the roof. What i needed to do, i should tell you as i left azmat after my last visit, you wave to people when you are leaving and they waved back. I have this incredible photograph of me waving to these guys on the bait and this is what they are doing. I didnt have much room for with them and reporters everything and i decided i needed to go back and i needed to go back in a very different way and i needed to go back followed. I needed to speak the language. I needed to not have to depend on translators. I needed to live there. I needed to stay there long her and i needed to do it in a complete be profoundly different way and i was afraid to do it. I was afraid because it is a hard place to be but i found at teacher, i of indonesia. Account azmat would have been impossible to learn. At my home in washington d. C. Every other day for a couple hours we started getting together and seven months after i left i returned. As soon as i hit indonesians they started i was texting of the boat guy and he didnt speak english and one day i get this text back that says carl hoffman speaks indonesian. Honestly my indonesian was pretty bad and pretty limited at that time but it was true. I could never communicate before and it made all the difference. Suddenly i was making arrangements and willem met me at the crazy ship when we arrived and i am talking to him and everybody, it is one thing to go to a place and leave and it is completely different to go there again to return some place. It makes all the difference in the world. Not that many tourists go there and the ones who do very few come back. I came back and everybody walking down the street people were waving at me and they recognize me. My hotel recognized me. Seven months later and this time i could speak to them and understand them and i didnt really have a plan for what i was going to do. I just wanted to go there and live there and stay with somebody. I needed to stay with an elder someone who had some power and who knew the history. Willem said to me kokai is. He was an elder i had met before. He was kind of a brusque powerful guy who with his hair sticking out and all these fetters sticking out of it and he said kokai is there and i will bring him to your hotel. I got up early the next morning at dawn, there are no streets there, it is just a sort of moldy boardwalk swamp. I am walking along and this man passes me and does a double take and i do a double take it is kokai. Seven months later this guy from the village recognized me what you doing here . I said what you doing and theyre, i could understand him. I am here to see my son. A bunch of kids from different lives and this is a place, they are catholics but have three why this so i said i want to come but can i live with you . And he goes live with me . I said yes why not. Long story, willem and high and kokai, kokai had no money to get back to his village. I had the money so i said i would pay for the trip back so he went back to the village. We climbed down, and i had a satellite phone. I said to willem i will call you when i want you to pick me up. Of you dont hear from me in a month come get me. Of place i was incredibly intimidated by, every time i had been there i felt i couldnt pierce it at all and the people were really everywhere i have been in the world people were incredibly gracious and incredibly friendly and this was a place where i didnt feel that. I was trying to investigate their deepest darkest secrets so i was pretty nervous about it all end not to mention it is difficult. There is no plumbing or electricity or store. It is mud and rain and trees, you smoke a lot. Willem climbed in his boat and he was gone and i was there by myself but it was completely different in every way all because suddenly all the old men in the village came and sat down in kokais room and patted me on the shoulder, and patted me on the shoulder and that is what it was like for a month, i just sat there, theres not much to do. I didnt ask questions like a reporter. All i did was wake up and smoke a cigarette and drink my coffee with kokai in the mornings and build a new mens house, incredible 120 foot structures, no nails, no blueprints, and building that as a time of great feasting and celebration and i just sat there and gradually ease they could come on and sit down in the long house and they were drumming and singing and sometimes they would from ends in 24 hours a day. Amazing, beautiful sort of frances almost i had no connection to the outside world that all. Only after three weeks to ice the asking questions but the questions i was asking were very different than the questions i had asked before. It wasnt what happened to Michael Rockefeller, did you kill him, which part did you eat . It was like trying to find you dont investigate a black hole by looking at the black hole, you can see anything. You have to look around the black holes july asked who were the men who had been killed by max dupree . Who were in the . What word their positions in the village . It turned out the mans house is a thing but its also a client essentially five clans in the village and ahead of those clients the word leader, the sport spiritual leaders in the most important person in the village. There were five leaders and he killed four out of five. The most important man in the whole village and then i wanted to note who the men who were named in the preiss reports who had killed michael who allegedly killed michael and had taken you now the most important body parts and those men were related to the men killed by blood and had taken over their positions in the mens houses. Those men carried a sacred obligation. In a way this idea of sacredness is not something that is easily understood to us and here in the western world now but for the asmat especially in those days this was something incredibly powerful. And they carried this obligation to reciprocate michaels death. And there were other questions and other things like that that i asked them that they told me and stories and songs. It was really ultimately even though there was all this evidence, even before i started that michael had been killed it was my experience living in the village and staying with them and really getting to know that asmat as a people and the culture that convinced me that michael had been killed and the father was listed as one of the people present at michaels death. And many of the other men who i was hanging out with. And you know there are some other things to one story in particular that i wont tell you because its in the book and you have to read the book but those two experiences of going to asmat or 180 degrees difference and once again it reaffirmed to me the importance that even though its really really scary sometimes that you have to dive in really deeply and as a writer thats the most important thing of all. Sometimes i have to give up myself in order to really understand the rest of the world. So thank you very much. [applause] i am happy to take any questions you have. I think theres a process. You are supposed to go up and talk into the mic, sorry. You use the term reciprocity. [inaudible] its a good question. Partly yes but michael, not michael the five deaths were part of a larger 17 deaths that had taken place over a few years and he was one of them, yeah. Unfortunately in a venue like this that asmat cosmology is really complicated and i wish i could explain more here. I just dont have the time but the short answer to your question is yes. I had a question they understood eventually you were there writing a book. What was their understanding . I and assume they have the storytelling tradition. Did they have books there and you think they understand the physical object . Is a good question. The question was what did the asmat understand of my being there . I was writing a book there and do they have books and do they have the storytelling tradition . On the one hand im not sure i can answer your question. The asmat are amazing storytellers. They live in a world where everything is live because there is no electricity so if you want to hear a song you have to sing a song and if you want to hear music you have to play music. If you want to hear a story you have to tell a story so everybody is an amazing storyteller. They are incredibly graphic and you can see the canoe going down the river. They talk about war and getting heads chopped off. I told him always i was honest. Im a journalist and im writing this book and everything but i dont know how much they really understood at that. Every village has a school and people are literate to a certain degree and some people are completely, there are asmat to complete college but the asmat are funny. They never have been in a place where people dont ask. They will say do you have a family. They didnt really asked me many questions and the subject, nobody really asked me in detail in the subject