Secret Places: My Life in New York and New Guinea

by Tobias Schneebaum, David Bergman (Contributor)

In the swamps of Asmat in West New Guinea, Tobias Schneebaum—traveler, writer, painter, explorer—finds the way of life that suits him best. Secret Places reels readers into a world of storytellers and sorcerers, cannibals and carvers, a place where Schneebaum discovers his soulmates and his own soul.

Looking back at a life of wild adventure, Schneebaum seeks in Secret Places to intertwine the varied strands of his experience, pondering the parallel universes of his experience as a gay Jewish New Yorker and his years among the Asmat. The result illuminates both worlds—as when he juxtaposes the Asmat celebration of the spirits of the dead with a New York City plagued by AIDS and its own sad spirits.

168 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Tobias Schneebaum was an American artist, anthropologist, and AIDS activist. He is best known for his experiences living, and traveling among the Harakmbut people of Peru, and the Asmat people of Papua, Western New Guinea, Indonesia then known as Irian Jaya.He was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side and grew up in Brooklyn. In 1939 he graduated from the Stuyvesant High School, moving on to the City College of New York, graduating in 1943 after having majored in mathematics and art. During World War II he served as a radar repairman in the U.S. Army.
Travels

In 1947, after briefly studying painting with Rufino Tamayo at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Schneebaum went to live and paint in Mexico for three years, living among the Lakadone tribe. In 1955 he won a Fulbright fellowship to travel and paint in Peru. After hitch-hiking from New York to Peru, he lived with the Harakmbut people for seven months, where he slept with his male subjects and claimed to have joined the tribe in cannibalism on one occasion.

Until 1970 he was the designer at Tiber Press, then in 1973 he embarked on his third overseas trip, to Irian Jaya in South East Asia, living with the Asmat people on the south-western coast. He helped establish the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress. Schneebaum would return there in 1995 to revisit a former lover, named Aipit. He recounted his journey into the jungles of Peru in the 1961 memoir Keep the River on Your Right. In 1999, he revisited both Irian Jaya and Peru for a documentary film, also titled Keep the River on Your Right.

Schneebaum spent the final years of his life in Westbeth Artists Community, an artists' commune in Greenwich Village, New York City, also home to Merce Cunningham and Diane Arbus, and died in 2005 in Great Neck, New York. He bequeathed his renowned Asmat shield collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and his personal papers are preserved within the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Asmat bewitches me. I often feel possessed there, but what it is that possesses me is unclear. The forest churns up my insides when I am in the midst of immense trees in soggy soil, vines, and plant life that exude odors of decay. The forest continually draws me into conjuring up dreams of living naked, hunting wild boar and cassowary, bids and possum, and spending days in blinds awaiting whatever animal would come, killing it, skinning it, roasting it, eating it."

Tobias Schneebaum is known for his time with cannibals in various locations, but I feel like I should have read his other two books before reading this one - Keep the River on Your Right and Where the Spirits Dwell: An Odyssey in the Jungle of New Guinea. I have Where the Spirits Dwell in the New Guinea reading queue. In this book, Schneebaum is reflecting on his time with the Asmat of West Papua, New Guinea as well as his life in New York. Yes, those Asmat, the same people group visited by Michael Rockefeller and filmed/recorded by scholars in the 1960s.

I have to admit to a certain element of discomfort in reading this book. Schneebaum is often described as an anthropologist but he crosses many lines that I'm not sure an anthropologist should cross. I don't have a problem with sexuality, but I was uncomfortable in reading about his experiences with some of the Asmat. I just couldn't help but try to see it from their perspective. He definitely portrays it as them accepting him, as seeing him as part of them, but could that ever really happen? My skepticism has more to do with the power dynamic - he was also bringing in money and money-equivalents (tobacco, etc) to trade for art. I keep trying to ask myself if I think it was appropriate.

It also made me question the stories he tells across the board. The Asmat are hard to know, because so much of their culture has been shown to be highly misunderstood and therefore repressed by other controlling agencies - missionaries, the Indonesian government, etc. Some of what he says about what happens during rituals, and behind closed doors, well they would just be hard to verify since nobody else has ever claimed to get this close. It's too bad that Greg Morgenson (Three Cups of Tea) has ruined me for believing anyone's published experience forever, but I always do go into it with a certain degree of skepticism.

Aside from my ethical qualms, it really is a fascinating book and offers insight into Schneebaum's seemingly dichotomous life between New York and New Guinea. He is clearly seeking for something his western upbringing could not afford, and what he finds, what soothes his soul in New Guinea, is clearly a significant and emotional experience for him. I believe that no matter how the rest of the facts shake out.

"Throughout my life, I have been searching for a way to connect to other human beings and find that among people like the Asmat, who live in a world of spirits, I can lose my insecurities and be content."

There is a lot of information here that is fascinating about the Asmat concept of time, of death, of relationships, and of art. Also clear is how demands for art changes it, how a diminishing (or hiding) of cannibal practices change the role of men and the satisfaction of warfare.

ETA: According to a 2001 Village Voice article, "Schneebaum insists that he's not an anthropologist; his sexual encounters with indigenous people pose no ethical quandaries for him. He's more troubled by the fact that the first person to touch a remote culture alters it irrevocably. "We all know," he says, "that it takes just one person to change a whole society."

Okay but that doesn't fix it for me.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tobias comes at this book with a spirit of awareness/awakeness and recompiles all his experiences among the Asmat people and the Catholic missions as a fully realized life's work.
This book takes some time to detail Asmat traditions that Tobias hasn't written about before. Some of this writing pleasantly connected the dots from earlier books and passages.
There is also a fantastic treat of getting several direct journal entries near the last fifty pages. These are such a joy to read that it brings me back to the beautiful storytelling in his masterpiece, KTROYR.
If you are a fan of Tobias's writing from his Asmat travels then this will not disappoint.

[David]

It took me a long time to learn to read as a regular part of my life. Tobias Schneebaum was one of the keys to learning to enjoy reading. Fascinating work.