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Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After
Twenty years ago, the Gebusi of the lowland Papua New Guinea rainforest had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Bruce M. Knauft found then that the killings stemmed from violent scapegoating of suspected sorcerers. But by the time he returned in 1998, homicide rates had plummeted, and Gebusi had largely disavowed vengeance against sorcerers in favor of modern schools, discos, markets, and Christianity.
In this book, Knauft explores the Gebusi's encounter with modern institutions and highlights what their experience tells us more generally about the interaction between local peoples and global forces. As desire for material goods grew among Gebusi, Knauft shows that they became more accepting of and subordinated by Christian churches, community schools,and government officials in their attempt to benefit from them—a process Knauft terms "recessive agency." But the Gebusi also respond actively to modernity, creating new forms of feasting, performance, and music that meld traditional practices with Western ones, all of which Knauft documents in this fascinating study.
In this book, Knauft explores the Gebusi's encounter with modern institutions and highlights what their experience tells us more generally about the interaction between local peoples and global forces. As desire for material goods grew among Gebusi, Knauft shows that they became more accepting of and subordinated by Christian churches, community schools,and government officials in their attempt to benefit from them—a process Knauft terms "recessive agency." But the Gebusi also respond actively to modernity, creating new forms of feasting, performance, and music that meld traditional practices with Western ones, all of which Knauft documents in this fascinating study.
- GenresAnthropology
303 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2002
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May 14, 2013
If it were up to me, I'd get rid of that "sexy sell" first paragraph about homicide rates and revenge killings. That is ancillary to the broader discussion in this ethnography, and I hate how publishing companies try to make anthropology interesting by highlighting something scandalous. But what would the field be in the popular imagination without titles such as, "The Life of Sexual Savages?" As a friend of mine put it, anthropologists and art majors have academic recourse to morally justifying why they look at tons of books with naked people in them ;)
Bruce Knauft has one of the better conceptualizations of how modernity is localized and of how people interpret and approach rapidly changing situations that don't work to their benefit. The point is, capitalism is never truly "global" (by which most people mean lateral and homogenizing, or making the world McDonalds) if you study how people respond to it. You come away with mixed feelings of great respect and sadness for Gebusi, who according to how Knauft presents it, tell themselves stories about modernity and tradition in a way that helps them press on when global capitalism encroaches upon them (but did it?). I first read this ethnography in college for an area anthropology course on Papua New Guinea and Melanesia and happened to find it again when I was unpacking some book boxes. Eleven years later, some of the main arguments strike as terribly obvious, and I wish Knauft was more of a post-Marxist. But he doesn't necessarily need to be: he achieves many of the same points and addresses the same moral and circumstantial quandaries of global capitalism purely by representing his research subjects in a sensitive manner. He obviously cared about the people he worked with and always struck me as an anthropologist who did not falsely represent his own position or feelings about his work.
Bruce Knauft has one of the better conceptualizations of how modernity is localized and of how people interpret and approach rapidly changing situations that don't work to their benefit. The point is, capitalism is never truly "global" (by which most people mean lateral and homogenizing, or making the world McDonalds) if you study how people respond to it. You come away with mixed feelings of great respect and sadness for Gebusi, who according to how Knauft presents it, tell themselves stories about modernity and tradition in a way that helps them press on when global capitalism encroaches upon them (but did it?). I first read this ethnography in college for an area anthropology course on Papua New Guinea and Melanesia and happened to find it again when I was unpacking some book boxes. Eleven years later, some of the main arguments strike as terribly obvious, and I wish Knauft was more of a post-Marxist. But he doesn't necessarily need to be: he achieves many of the same points and addresses the same moral and circumstantial quandaries of global capitalism purely by representing his research subjects in a sensitive manner. He obviously cared about the people he worked with and always struck me as an anthropologist who did not falsely represent his own position or feelings about his work.
Displaying 1 of 1 review