Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2019. xii, 274 pp. (Tables.) US$26.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-61620-904-9.
Set in Gapun, a remote village in lowland Papua New Guinea, A Death in the Rainforest is written to be accessible to a broad, rather than a disciplinary, audience, and is simultaneously an ethnography of language and social change and a personal account of fieldwork.
The Gapun speak an isolate. Their vernacular is unrelated to other Lower Sepik languages. In pre-contact times, the Gapun people, all 200 of them, retreated to the relative shelter of a mountain top location, which they then left after colonial administrators ended warfare in the region. Apart from the detailed attention he gives to processing and cooking sago flour, author Don Kulick manages to portray the Gapun people in the century following their resettlement into Lower Sepik modernity in as unflattering and unsympathetic terms as afforded the subjects of any ethnography ever written.
Kulick disparages and derides nearly everything about the Gapun people. Their childrearing practices he allows are exceptionally generous but are essentially based on an extended form of lying. Their diet of sago pudding, he reviles as vomitous. Their relentlessly critical attitudes about one another, he blames for younger people’s reticense to speak their vernacular in public because of the derision they fear from elders. Their attempts to rebuild their village in 2007, which began in a drunken frenzy, he faults as making daily life worse. He exoticizes their understanding and treatment of illness and death. He denounces Papua New Guinea, and its corrupt, fat politicians for failing to provide basic services. He found their Catholicism boring. And their view that he, Kulick, was but a reincarnated ghost of a deceased baby who returned as a white man, is merely a fantasy. And on and on.
The main topic of previous work, the demise of the Gapun vernacular and the rise of Tokpisin as a creole, Kulick weaves in and out of the experiential or subjective side of the book’s narrative. Although it lacks photos for some reason, the book consists of vivid fieldwork scenes—of language learning with individual informants as well as in unstructured settings listening to families eating breakfast, hanging out in maternity huts with new mothers so as to observe language use, daily gift exchange (which he hated), obscene outbursts by angry women, and his despondency at language loss.
A series of unfortunate events began to unfold that redefined Kulick’s fieldwork and clarify a central question in the book’s narrative: What was his moral standing in Gapun society? After Kulick returned to Gapun in 1991, the villagers constructed a new house for him, for which they staged an all-night consecration rite where a traditional dance was performed (that Kulick disliked). He attended the event for several hours but overwhelmed by its tedium retired to his mosquito net. Later that night, thieves, armed with a homemade weapon, burst into his house, and drove him out of his mosquito net, demanding money. In the chaos that ensued, a Gapun villager was shot and subsequently died. Amid ensuing allegations of complicity with the thieves arose within Gapun, and Kulick, riddled with guilt about his role in bringing about the death, decided that Papua New Guinea had become far too dangerous for him. He left the country, not to return for 15 years. But in 2005, he did go back to Gapun, where he learned that the attack had been motivated by rumours that he was carrying a significant amount of cash. Was this violence his fault, he worries? Did his very presence damage village society?
Then, a few years later, Kulick returned again, and the victim’s kin started demanding he pay compensation to them for the death, and Kulick himself came to suspect that they had guided the thieves into Gapun, whose location was otherwise impossible to get to without insider knowledge. Fearing another attack, Kulick chartered a helicopter and left the village, misleading the Gapun that the American government was pulling its citizens out of the country. Then, in 2014, having returned for more fieldwork, neighbouring village men invaded Gapun, shot and killed pigs and burned down a house. And again, Kulick fled, having decided that he was through with Papua New Guinea, his “obligation” to the Gapun people to write up a grammar of their language having been fulfilled.
The book ends in moral equivocation. Kulick blames modernity for having “crushed the life out of everything that people in Gapun … ever believed or accomplished” (249). Modernity “exploited, deceived, lied to, humiliated, cheated [them] … and [they were] robbed [by] … practically every outside person, entity, or organization” (250), and left speechless in their ancestral tongue, although the people remain “proud and irascible” (252). In a postscript, Kulick then declares the Gapun people to be our moral equals. Like everyone, they talk idly, laugh and love, and complain about neighbours. But most importantly, he concludes that this remote case study illustrates that there are no more untouched savages, no undiscovered tribes left in the world. Rather, we are morally “linked together” (270) and should thus desist from destroying people like the Gapun, while wondering what happened to them and why. Hidden away in an appendix, Kulick dedicates the book to an image of innocence: a rambunctious four-year-old boy whom he befriended and who befriended him during his final fieldwork.
A Death in the Rainforest is a deeply ambiguous book, to say the least, which does not perhaps accomplish what its author meant it to do. But it is an intriguing book that does nonetheless succeed, not to portray collective tragedy, but rather to portray a peoples’ determination to refashion themselves as part of a modernity that wants nothing, or at least very little, to do with them. Moreover, it also offers a singular portrayal of the moral challenges a steadfast fieldworker faced over the years, moral challenges of which he was not apparently fully aware, much less was able to manage, if, indeed, it was even possible to do so.
David Lipset
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis