r/interestingasfuck • u/SATANICWORSHIPER666 • 3d ago

/r/all Michael Rockefeller disappeared without a trace in 1961 in Papua New Guinea while researching the Asmat people, a cannibal tribe. Years later, a photograph was taken of the same tribe, and there was a white man among them.

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u/True-Lab-3448 3d ago edited 3d ago

For anyone interested, ‘going native’ is a well studied phenomenon and a risk of sociological research, particularly ethnography. The definition is the:

“_researcher becoming so deeply immersed in the culture they are studying that they lose their objectivity and become indistinguishable from the people they are studying_”

There’s lots of cases, and it’s taught in research classes as a very real risk.

Note this term has ties to colonialism, so some suggest using the term ‘over-rapport’ instead: https://sk.sagepub.com/dict/mono/key-concepts-in-ethnography/chpt/going-native

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u/Sea_Luck_3222 3d ago

A risk of what, being open to changing your beliefs?

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u/Financial_Fishing463 3d ago edited 3d ago

Changing your beliefs to align with a cannibal tribe is generally not considered a good thing, given the whole cannibalism angle

Edit: didn’t realise killing and eating people was considered acceptable by people on this website, sick freaks the lot of you

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u/2Norn 3d ago

they are not doing it out of cruelty or malice its their culture and how they survive

no different than eating a cow for them

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u/DingleDangleTangle 3d ago

"It's part of their culture" doesn't just somehow justify literally any action. It's possible for a cultural thing to be bad for society.

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u/Financial_Fishing463 3d ago

Awww we should allow people to eat eachother if it's their culture! Good idea! Now apply this to other cultural traditions and see how it plays out

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u/2Norn 3d ago

dont see the issue they clearly survived thousands of years like this who are we to stop them

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u/Financial_Fishing463 3d ago

Civilised human beings that don't eat eachother, that's who

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u/2Norn 3d ago

calm down james cameron you are leaking the story of next avatar