[Mihalic] getting it right can really matter!

[Lise M. Dobrin]

Reading through some unpublished manuscript materials by the 
anthropologist Reo Fortune, I've run across a sobering story about 
the consequences of improperly understood Tok Pisin:

On p.233 of the original edition of Margaret Mead's The Mountain 
Arapesh I, An Importing Culture, there is a photograph of a Bukiyip 
("Plains Arapesh") man. According to Fortune, this man later "met 
with a violent end owing to an Australian military patrols' poor 
knowledge of pidgin English. They asked him in pidgin 'you no help 
him Japanese,' and he, vouching for his loyalty and affirming the 
negative, answered 'yes,' and was shot without futher interrogation."

So getting it right can really matter!
Lise
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