women making a variety of distinctive faces. To his amazement,
everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions
meant. Tomkins, he realized, was right.
Not long afterward, Tomkins visited Ekman at his laboratory
in San Francisco. Ekman had tracked down a hundred thousand
feet of film that had been shot by the virologist Carleton
Gajdusek in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of
the footage was of a tribe called the South Fore, who were a
peaceful and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, a
hostile and murderous tribe with a homosexual ritual in which
preadolescent boys were required to serve as courtesans for the
male elders of the tribe. For six months, Ekman and his
collaborator, Wallace Friesen, had been sorting through the
footage, cutting extraneous scenes, focusing just on close-ups of
the faces of the tribesmen in order to compare the facial
expressions of the two groups.
As Ekman set up the projector, Tomkins waited in the back.
He had been told nothing about the tribes involved; all
identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins looked on
intently, peering through his glasses. At the end of the film, he
approached the screen and pointed to the faces of the South
Fore. “These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very