Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place (review)

Society of Others is a well-written and evocative ethnography of the treehouse-dwelling Karowai people of Papua New Guinea. The book's theoretical burden, announced early on, is to push back hard against the Gemeinschaft model that presumes members of small-scale societies enjoy social relationships based on the mutual identification of their members. Durkheim's assertion that a "collective effervescence" underlies primitive religion and social order was the most direct and best-known application of this broad interpretive principle, which has influenced both popular and scholarly accounts of Korowai and other simple societies. Rupert Stasch, by contrast, frames his study around themes of otherness and alienation that he believes are central to Korowai idioms of belonging and kinship, as well as to the Korowai social and economic structure. While this ethnography is well researched (and relies heavily on linguistic analysis), there are few extended accounts of individual informants or of the concrete social contexts they inhabit. Still, the book resonates with compelling depictions of the ambivalence that Korowai apparently feel around themes (like autonomy and dependence) that are usually assumed to be unique to more complex societies. Society of Others takes on classic anthropological topics like the structure of kin relations but breathes new life into them by returning doggedly to the phenomenological grounds of social experience among the Korowai.