Don KulickCritiques

This is an easy read about the likeable members of a tribe in Papua, New Guinea. First of all, I have to give the author props for having the gumption to head into the darkest of rainforests (the only way to reach the village of Gapun is to traverse rivers and thick forests for hours) multiple times.

At first, the author’s statement that all Papuans not-so-secretly want to be white people was a bit off-putting. As I read further, I understood what he meant – they wanted to be successful, not necessarily turning their back on their race.

I also marveled at the author’s dedication to learning, then transcribing Tayap, the difficult language of Gapun. There are gender-related endings to words, which confused him in the beginning, but then he was able to create a large body of work describing the grammar and vocabulary of the Gapuners. Their language is slowly being replaced by one called Tok Pisin, which is a pidgin version of English. The lamentable reason for this loss of language is that the younger generations don’t wish to learn to speak Tayap – they feel that is for old people and choose to speak Tok Pisin instead. Once the elders of the tribe pass away, so will Tayap, preserved only in the author’s memory and his comprehensive body of work. That seems poignant to me; working so hard to preserve something that is vanishing before your very eyes. The fact that this language was confined to less than 500 humans at the time of writing is mind -boggling. Another poignant thought is that while these villagers were sharing their language with the author, they were also sharing the memories of their lives. As Kulick puts it: “Today, those recordings are all that remains of their stories, songs, and explanations”.

The author relates stories of his time in Gapun, complete with self-deprecating humor and details that will make you cringe (imagine eating grubs or maggots?) or make you smile ( an intrepid youngster dubs himself the “security” guarding the author and subsequently stays by his side zealously).

DEATH OF A LANGUAGE is a wonderfully written book that will make you think about many things -the loss of this language, the circle of life, and the strength of this anthropologist who devoted so much of his life to these villagers.

Interesting.

I found the information well written and interesting, although parts of it were not enjoyable. I'm glad I read it and learned how people in that part of the world live and what they believe (& why). I can say I would not have done what he did, partaking of disease-ridden water & the foods they offered.

Moving account of a linguist’s many trips to a tribe in remote Papua New Guinea and his search to understand why their unique language was dying out. In the end I found it to be incredibly sad, the villagers’ hard often brutalised lives and their attempts to achieve positive change in their lives which usually made things worse. However, perhaps I should also be inspired by Don Kulick’s exhortation to learn from the villagers and their culture.

The author set out to document a dying language that had never been documented. He learns the pidgin English of Papua New Guinea and with that as a verbal Rosetta Stone he goes to a remote village where the last two hundred people (or much less since the young do not care to learn or even pass on the language to their progeny) speak their own unique language. He interviews the most elderly - they have already forgotten their word for rainbow- and desperately tries to capture the vocabulary, grammar, idioms, etc for posterity before its too late. All the while he tries-and succeeds- to hold his nose and avoid passing judgement on the abject ignorance and gullibility of his subjects’, e. g., the natives think white people are the spirits of dead natives and have arrived in New Guinea via an extension of the New York subway. He gets in quite a few zingers consistently through the course of the book without offending anyone. At the end he recounts a letter given to him to take back home to a person he knows he cannot find; its essentially a wish list from a child to Santa Claus. But after repeatedly lambasting the villagers for succumbing to con artists the author does so himself. This is one of those books that is a snapshot of a culture that will soon be lost.

Fascinating, and very approachable story of Kulick's anthropological studies of a remote village in Papua New Guinea. The first half focuses on his work to document their unique, and probably soon to be extinct, language. The second half focuses more on recounting stories that are culturally significant, funny, or tell us interesting practical aspects of his stays in the village. Kulick is very grounded. He doesn't aim for inspiration, or to call out a tragedy. Yet his writing is solid, and the book is compulsively readable. I read it all at once; I could not put it down.

> I was surprised that a word for something as striking and lovely as a rainbow could somehow slip away from village memory … Old villagers' squabbles over the rainbow helped me to see how their inability to agree on proper Tayap was a feature of village life that was contributing to the language's demise. … In Gapun, nothing is communal, nothing is equally owned and shared by everyone. Everything—every area of land, every sago palm, every coconut palm, every mango tree, every pot, plate, ax, machete, discarded spear shaft, broken kerosene lamp, and every anything else one can think of—is owned by someone. This includes people's names and the right to bestow them, as well as knowledge of myths, songs, and curing chants. … In their own view, villagers don't "share" a language. Instead, each speaker owns his or her own version of the language. The older those speakers become, the more they regard their version as the proper one and everyone else's as a "lie." And so speakers are predisposed to not regard the loss of Tayap as particularly traumatic.

> Sadly, though, she and those other women are the last generation of Tayap speakers who will have the competence to be able to tell their husbands: "Stuff your sago into the opening of your friend's prick and get a thread and sew it up so he can carry it down to his village in his balls!" After them, all that will be left is "shitty ass" and "hole."

> When I lived in Gapun, I had spent a great deal of time explaining to the villagers that not all white people in the world know one another. They assumed they did. No, I would say, the countries are a lot bigger than Gapun and the surrounding villages. There are a lot of white people and we can't all know one another. It's impossible. Bill Foley was the first white person who came into Gapun since I had left fourteen years previously. The first question the villagers asked him was whether he knew me. "Sure I do," he answered cheerfully.

> As far as I was ever able to tell from the way villagers talk about the world, they all—and I really do mean all of them, including the ones who have been to school and who have seen maps and maybe even globes—imagine the world to be arranged in a kind of mystic arc, starting from under the ground of Papua New Guinea, the last country, progressively curving upwards towards Belgium, which borders on Heaven, and ending in Rome, the country where the Pope lives with Jesus and his mother, Mary, and her husband, God.

> The attack by rascals that left Kawri dead resulted in me abandoning my research in Papua New Guinea and not returning for almost fifteen years. The rumors that I would be robbed of everything I had at the end of my second long-term stay in 2009 led me to enlist a helicopter to pluck me out of the village like a raisin from a bun.

> The villagers' caregiving practices gave me pause at first: the blithe handing over of butcher knives to grasping babies; the continual ordering to fetch this, do that; the violent threats. Over time, though, I came to see that the style of caregiving practiced by Gapun mothers resulted in exceptionally capable and competent young children.

> The only people in the village I have ever observed beating a child—that is, holding the child by an arm and hitting him or her repeatedly with a straw broom, a stick, or, in one particularly egregious case, a bicycle chain that the child's father had acquired somewhere—were all men like Rafael who strongly identified as good Catholics, and who also spent a few years attending the primary school that used to exist in the neighboring village of Wongan. In my darkest moments, I sometimes think that the only practical knowledge that Christianity and Western education has given the villagers of Gapun is proficiency in how to beat their children.

A non-traditional telling of a very traditional anthropological experience. For multiple many-month stints since the 1980s, Don Kulick hiked and canoed his way deep into the Papua New Guinean swamp to live among villagers whose endangered language tipped over to unrecoverable. He explains the trajectory of and reasons for the language's death, which are rooted deeply in the local culture, and he provides colorful descriptions of that culture, entirely lacking the usual studied neutrality of anthropology.

Highly entertaining and itself potentially of anthropological interest, this book is a captivating account of people and beliefs in contact with an outside world that has left them behind, of which Kulick himself is a privileged representative. Some of the most interesting cultural accounts to me are those of the villagers' attitude toward children -- the surly first words that villagers hear in their babies' babbling, the highly capable children who handle knives from the moment they can grasp, the association of both children and the village's native language Tayap with animalistic urges compared to the association of maturity and the regional pidgin with reason, and so on.

Fascinating material, engagingly written. We don't have that many more "uncontacted" regions left, much less regions that have had an anthropologist embedded to watch an entire generation grow up and raise children of its own. This book is likely to stand as one of the only and the last non-academic accounts of a substantial cultural shift toward regional (and eventually worldwide?) monocultures.½

As a young man, anthropologist, Don Kulick traveled to a small, very remote village in Papau New Guinea. He went to find the reason that their main language, Tayap was dying. Why it wasn't being used nor taught by the elders in the village. He would return several times over the years, some trips would last year's....He grew to like and respect many of those in this village, they even built a house for him. Of course, these villagers had few things, were rather poor and had some strange beliefs. When he first came to the village they thought he was a reincarnated, passed on member of their tribe.

I enjoyed learning about this culture, the way they lived, celebrated, their past history and their new beliefs, which heralded from the few white men who had previously visited. The writing is clear, concise and there is humor and sadness as there always is in lives lived. The way they raise their children, and that I found fascinating. We learn everything about these people and there culture. The effects of colonization and their hopes for the future. They have what to me is a strange system, but for them it has worked for a very long time. It is a hard way of life in a hard climate and few live to what we consider an old age.

It also taught me one thing, that I wont soon forget. In many cultures, such as this it is an insult not to eat what is prepared for one. I, though they say never say never, don't think I would have been able to eat what was presented to Kulick. In fact, some of the humor was on this subject, as he tries to get rid of food he can't eat in a way that won't offend. So, if I ever travel to a foreign country I am going to find out their food choices before my trip.

He does find out why their language is dying and so much more. An interesting and enjoyable read.

ARC from Netgalley.

Ok. Skimmed most of the essays after the first.

As much as this book tries to show many different sides of fat, it suffers from the conflation of fat (the substance) to fat (the body type). This conflation may be ubiquitous in our culture, but that doesn't stop it from being probably wrong, and a more skeptical attitude towards this particular presupposition would have greatly improved the book.

Fat isn't a book to gobble up all at once. It's the kind of book you ought to read slowly, giving your brain time to savor and digest the new ideas. As its title suggests, the book is a collection of essays examining what "fat" means around the world. It investigates not only different geographic areas but also different subcultures, like gay fat fetishists and the pornography of extreme obesity. In so doing, it dissects where our culture's fat fears originate from as well as the hypocrisy behind them. Much more than a feel-good treatise on body acceptance, the book examines the issue of size from angles you likely haven't considered before, like the hypocrisy of a culture that idolizes over-consumption of just about everything...except food. Most fascinating is a chapter devoted to pishtacos, Bolivian vampires that suck the fat from the bodies of unsuspecting victims. Not only is the analysis intriguing, most of it is written in an engaging, readable way. The ideas do get a little repetitive after awhile which is why it's not a good choice for your main reading book. In spite of the repetition, I was glad to have finished the whole thing; each piece contributed a new idea, or made me see an old one in a new light.½