Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xi, 229 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3686.
In A Faraway, Familiar Place Michael French Smith writes of his return in 2008 and 2011 to Kragur village in Papua New Guinea, the scene of his two earlier books. He first lived and worked there in 1975-1976 as a graduate student in anthropology, as related in Hard Times on Kairiru Island. He recounted his brief return trips of 1981, 1995 and 1998 in Village on the Edge. The trilogy follows the timeline of a memoir. With self-deprecating good humor, Smith shares his struggles with homesickness in the field, employment in the corporate and bureaucratic world of Washington, DC, and the bodily insults of malaria, dengue and aging.
The anthropologist’s memoir is secondary to the narrative of events in village life, ethnographic detail and anthropological insights. During his 2008 visit, elections for the national parliament and the local government council were in progress. Because political arguments were in the air, they take a large place in this book, just as concerns about the meaning of economic development did in the earlier ones. Smith’s understanding of matters political, economic, social and cultural is always informed by his reading in anthropological theory, but scholarly references are never foregrounded. Because all of the fieldwork was done after Papua New Guinea attained independence in 1975, Smith never really grapples with the heritage of Australian colonialism, which is perhaps a weakness of the book.
Smith allows the concerns of villagers to shape his fieldwork, leading him to spend much of his time in 2008 working with groups of clan representatives on their clan histories. This came to be the straksa (“structure”) project, from which he produced digital genealogical charts that he took back to the village in 2011. Kragur interest in this project was stimulated by their expectation that they might have to deal with multinational mining firms seeking to exploit the gold that had been discovered on the island.
Smith’s work has never sought to picture the exotic side of Kragur life, always making it clear how fully the villagers’ identity is shaped by their adherence to Catholicism and their efforts to reconcile Christian ethics with the individualism demanded by modernity. The present book talks about the continued Pentecostal/charismatic influence within their practice of Catholicism. In 2008 a controversy arose over whether to invite an outside speaker who claimed to be able to root out sorcerers. This led to more open discussions of magic than Smith had previously encountered, as a man showed him his mother’s mandible, which he had kept for use in divination.
Smith’s jacket photo of villagers producing sago starch took me back five decades to my own first fieldwork in East Sepik Province. I remember women impatiently telling me, “scratch that on your banana leaf,” after I asked the same question more than once as we walked through the forest to the swamp where their sago palms grew. Though their language had not yet been written, it did not take these villagers long to learn that my memories were scribbled in my notebooks. In time, the knowledge I had acquired by connecting the genealogies of many people impressed even the elders, and I returned to my desk to find someone had practiced penciling circles and triangles on a scrap of paper I had left out. Literacy would not arrive for another generation in my distant part of the Sepik.
On Kairiru Island, just off the north coast at the provincial capital of Wewak, literacy and formal education had arrived much earlier, along with the Catholic mission fathers. The few Kragur villagers who have gone on to higher education have joined Papua New Guinea’s salaried urban elite. Still Kragur remains even now a “village on the edge,” with few prospects for economic development. A small businessman operates a tourist guesthouse in another village on the island, but unreliable transportation and communication with urban centres makes this as difficult as other prospects for development.
Unlike anthropologists who write for a handful of other academics or travel writers who pander to readers’ taste for savage life, Smith writes with the anticipation that the Papua New Guineans he knows will read his books, and he discovers that they do. The honest, clear and conversational style that Smith has honed makes reading him a pleasure for students and scholars alike. This book is a good read for anyone who wants to see what life is like in rural Melanesian villages that have little access to cash but hold adequate access to land and clean water to meet their needs.
Patricia K. Townsend
State University of New York, Buffalo, USA
pp. 913-914