Abstract
Ian Saem Majnep, Papua-New Guinea subsistence farmer and zoologist, has done it again. Many, if not most, readers of this journal will be familiar with his previous book with biologist and ethnographer Ralph Bulmer, Birds of My Kalam Country (1977). Now he has brought together a series of working papers issued over the last 20 years into a volume on the mammals of the Kalam land, the Kaironk Valley and its surrounding mountains. Fans of Majnep's and Bulmer's work will not need to be told that the book under review is a superb accomplishment. It is indeed, and it should be required reading for all ethnozoologists.
This book began life as narratives recorded by Majnep with Bulmer and linguist Andrew Pawley. The latter two workers translated and edited the texts, arranging them into a relatively smoothly-flowing English narrative. After Bulmer's sadly early death in 1988, Pawley, with help from specialist Robin Hide, further edited the materials, producing the present book. A further work on plants is promised, and a foretaste of it is given in an appendix herein.
Most of the work is Majnep's narratives; it is definitely his book. Bulmer and Pawley have added a great deal, providing long introductions to the whole and to the parts. Of course, they have identified the mammals in terms of Linnaean taxonomy. They have also provided comparative biological material, linguistic information, and such ethnographic notes as are useful in understanding the whole.
The accounts are species-by-species, and provide natural history, hunting lore, cooking information, and religious and mythic tradition. Thus, we receive a comprehensive sense of how the Kalam people interact with animals. Mammal variety on this isolated island is not large; there are only marsupials, a few rodents, and the introduced dog. (Domestic pigs are not treated.) Majnep tells us what we need to know: where the animals nest, how to catch them, what to do with them (e.g. using the dried tails of small marsupials for earrings), who must ritually avoid them, who must ritually consume them, and where they stand in the cosmos. Most important is the hunting lore; in the protein-short New Guinea mountains, even small rats are prized.
Any book like this is bound to wreak havoc on the usual Euro-American categories of thought and description. Biologists and naturalists in the European tradition are used to separating “science”—cool, factual, unromantic—from magic and religion, and both are usually kept far away from cooking (a mere skill). Moreover, social scientists are used to setting up “science” (in the above narrow sense) against cultural irrationalism (a.k.a. postmodernism), the idea that cultural knowledge is arbitrary, undetermined by facts, and “constructed” from whole cloth, such that every “culture” is a closed world, incomprehensible to someone from a different culture. Anthropologists have long known that such separations are not found in the real world, but we need Majnep and his many colleagues around the world to remind us, and to describe life the way it is really lived.
What really happens, as Majnep shows us clearly, is that people have to make a living by getting food, clothing and shelter from their surroundings. This means they have to interact continually with their environments. This results in local knowledge that is constantly being tested against direct experience and therefore cannot stray far from objective reality. On the other hand, it also involves logical, emotional, and cognitive extensions and heuristics. These inevitably introduce some ideas that follow reasonably enough from experience, but seem counterfactual, even bizarre, to people from another culture. Bulmer famously pioneered the explanation of such ideas in ways that make them make sense to outsiders. He showed why it is reasonable for Kalam to believe that worms croak, cassowaries are not birds, and so on (Bulmer 1967, 1968). He also had to explain to the Kalam why English-speaking scientists classify creatures in ways that seem transparently ridiculous in Kalam-land (e.g., widely separating two nearly identical rats just because one carries its young in a pouch and the other doesn't). This sort of cultural translation is necessary to understanding, but once it is done, cross-cultural communication does occur. It reminds us that folk biologies make sense even when “wrong.” (Not that modern international science is always “right.” I have lived to see the disproof of much of the science I learned in high school.)
Since Bulmer's day, ethnobiologists have brought “religion” more and more into the fold as well, recognizing that most cultures do not separate it from other knowledge, and that most cultures use “religion” as the vehicle for conservation and resource management ideas that may be extremely hard-headed and pragmatic (see e.g. Turner 2005).
Majnep's book deserves comparison with two very thought-provoking recent ethnographies from the same general area: Stuart Kirsch's Reverse Anthropology (2006) and Paige West's Conservation Is Our Government Now (2006). Both present a great deal of highland New Guinea testimony and understanding concerning the doings, for good or ill, of the white outsiders who are increasingly expropriating or managing New Guinea's resources. Kirsch and West show the highlanders to be just as sophisticated, hard-headed, and insightful at dealing with such matters as in dealing with the hunting of marsupials. It is perhaps unsurprising that Majnep and his kin had much to teach biologists about local fauna, but when Kirsch's and West's highland friends are equally good at teaching us about international firms and NGO's, we should and do take notice. The highlanders certainly yield to none in their formidable observational and interpretive skills. We need them to inform our own sciences. That is the “reverse” of which Kirsch speaks, but surely it is neither new nor a “reverse” of some natural order. The line between “social scientist” and “subject” has been blurred since the days of the 19th-century Iroquois ethnologists Arthur Parker and J. N. B. Hewitt. The book under review is simply a particularly fine work in this great tradition.