Savage Harvest Quotes

“Contemporary anthropologists long ago abandoned the idea that there is some steady, linear march from primitive to civilized and now discount the very notion that modern, technically advanced cultures are any more “civilized” than ones like the Asmat, with all its complexities.”
― Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

“Could the “killing” of Michael have been a nativistic story that a few men had promulgated to increase their status and power in a rapidly changing world?”
― Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

“the spokesman of the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that he could not understand why an aircraft carrier was needed for that purpose. ‘We understand what a father feels at the loss of his son . . . ; from a human perspective we understand how everyone is prepared to help in the search. We do not understand why that would require an aircraft carrier.”
― Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

“Those who began swarming into the exotic world, however, were not just acquiring inanimate objects, but walking into something else entirely: a potentially dangerous world of spirits who could make them sick or even kill them, of secrets and meanings whose language they didn’t speak, whose symbols they didn’t understand, and where life and death, literally, hung in the balance.”
― Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

“As the postmaster, he’d send letters home postmarked with odd dates, like September 35, 1960.”
― Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

“But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment—”
― Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

“Van Kessel was an unusual man. He had a huge heart. He was deeply pious, but that faith was built on the idea that men are good, that the world and life are beautiful and full of wonder, that God is a warm, loving presence who tolerates our human eccentricities and imperfections. He believed unequivocally in heaven.”
― Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art