Early Life
After attending The Buckley School in New York, Rockefeller graduated from Harvard University cum laude in 1960, served for six months as a private in the U.S. Army, then went on an expedition for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology which studied the Dani tribe of western Netherlands New Guinea. The expedition produced Dead Birds, an ethnographic documentary film produced by Robert Gardner, and for which Rockefeller was the sound recordist. Rockefeller and a friend briefly left the expedition to study the Asmat tribe of southern Netherlands New Guinea. After returning home with the Peabody expedition, Rockefeller returned to New Guinea to study the Asmat and collect Asmat art.
"It's the desire to do something adventurous," he explained, "at a time when frontiers, in the real sense of the word, are disappearing."
Michael Rockefeller spent his time in Netherlands New Guinea actively engaged with the culture and the art while capturing ethnographic data. In one of his letters home, he wrote:
"I am having a thoroughly exhausting but most exciting time here…The Asmat is like a huge puzzle with the variations in ceremony and art style forming the pieces. My trips are enabling me to comprehend (if only in a superficial, rudimentary manner) the nature of this puzzle…"
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