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While researching Jared Diamond’s new book, one thing I found startled me. Guns, Germs, and Steel starts when Diamond happening on man named Yali, who had “never been outside New Guinea,” on the beach. Yali’s question—why do whites have so much?—is what launches the book. 1/ 
It’s easy, seeing some of the images Diamond includes of New Guineans (his first one is below) and reading his talk of “modern ‘Stone Age’ peoples,” to assume Yali to be a random lowlander, innocent of the ways of the wider world. 2/
Actually, Yali was famous. The scholar Peter Lawrence remarked (years before Diamond met Yali) that Yali was always winning the hearts of Europeans as that “exceptional native” who was “well spoken” and “scrupulously clean” without “ever being impertinent.” 3/
Europeans loved Yali because he knew their ways. He’d worked in a hotel, he’d served on the colonial police force, he’d been in an intelligence unit in the Australian army, he’d spent time on a U.S. submarine. He was a war hero. 4/
But he’d also become disillusioned with colonial rule and had played an ambivalent but leading role in an insurgent cargo cult movement and had spent nearly 6 years in prison, on the discomfiting charge of “inciting rape.” 5/
Yali appears in a BUNCH of books about Papua New Guinea that were published before Diamond met him. He’s got an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. 6/
adb.anu.edu.au/biography/yali…
adb.anu.edu.au/biography/yali…
To me, this illustrates the limits of Diamond’s worldview. It’s all nations in isolation. Meeting Yali, one of the most interesting figures in the country, he presents him as a random native. Yali the anti-imperialist just doesn’t fit. 7/
I talk about not only Yali, but how this pertain's to Diamond's larger project in Guns, Germs, and Steel and his latest book, Upheaval, in my review for @newrepublic.
newrepublic.com/article/154142…
newrepublic.com/article/154142…
A classic study of cargo cults, about half of which is specifically about Yali and his movement, is Peter Lawrence's Road Belong Cargo. It came out 8 years before Diamond met Yali, 30 before Guns, Germs, and Steel. I hope Diamond read it, but I see no mention of it in GGS.
Update: @Grahambrose has alerted to to ANOTHER example! One of Diamond's photos is of an unnamed "Aboriginal Tasmanian woman." Oh, but she has a name, Truganini, and a painful history. There were songs and ships named for her, all before Diamond's book. And plays and novels.
And @gatheredremains says that the unnamed Khoisan woman Diamond depicts is also a known quantity:
