Conceiving Cultures: Reproducing People and Places on Nuakata, Papua New Guinea (review)

Shelley Mallett's monograph on Nuakatan reproductive beliefs combines ethnographic data with personal introspection about the research process. Mallett suggests other ethnographers assert a scientific neutrality that she claims is not actually felt in the field, and that they dismiss emotional and experiential aspects of research in favor of presenting empirical findings. To counter this trend, Mallett explores the role of her imagination in the fieldwork process, and the role of autobiography in writing ethnography. She opts for making public the processes of introspection and evaluation she went through, refusing to overlook the ways her own assumptions and her experiences, particularly as a woman, contributed to how she gained awareness. The chapters in the ethnography intersperse Mallett's "intersubjective process of coming to knowin the field"(31) with data on topics of pregnancy, birth, and death on Nuakata. She concedes others might label the ethnography "experimental" (x). It is indeed an ambitious enterprise to be both convincing about Nuakata social life and honest about how one comes to make assertions about that life.

The first chapter traces Mallett and her husband's arrival on the island of Nuakata, Massim Province, Papua New Guinea, in 1993. In this chapter we learn of Mallett's romanticism about field research and her trepidation on arriving at her field site. We also learn she stayed for only three days during her initial visit, and then left for two weeks while the community was supposed to build her a house. When Mallett returned to findthe house unbuilt, she lived in anearby church for five weeks while Nuakatans constructed the dwelling. Further, we learn that Mallett had no language training before arriving and remained insecure about conducting an interview in the local language for some time afterward.

Chapters two, three, and five explore the domain of childbirth, while at the same time still privileging Mallett's experiences in the field. Mallett admits to romanticizing traditional forms of childbirth but simultaneously acknowledges the potential benefits of biomedical innovations. She was forced to revise some of her assumptions about field research when she learned that the universalism she heretofore privileged—the shared experience of being a woman—was not necessarily how things were viewed on Nuakata and would not automatically open fieldwork doors. Many of Mallett's introspections involve her coming to terms with theories and theoretical assumptions she brought with her into the field. Her acute intelligence makes her an excellent synthesizer of theory, but attimes she overextends this skill to draw conclusions on the basis of thin evidence. For example, she accompanied a health worker on maternal and child health mobile clinic rounds, observing interactions between the health worker and the patient. On the basis of this one observation, Mallett appears confident in making generalizations along the lines of: "[Moses, the health worker,] attempted to convey to women that as a health worker he considered their bodies, particularly their genitalia, as divisible or partible from themselves, their sex/gender, sexuality, sexual desire. Within the clinic space Moses treated maternal or diseased women's bodies as androgynous and partible—as bodies distinct from selves/persons, distinct from other bodies" (96).

Mallett integrates theory with data most successfully in chapters three and five, where conceptual queries and insights are interspersed with interview results on conception and childbirth. She makes a valuable contribution to the literature here by questioning the inevitable theoretical focus on bodily substances when describing conception in Melanesian societies. Instead, she shows conception theories to be dynamic and syncretic.

In the last chapter, Mallett reports on attending the funeral of a man she did not know; she is wracked with ethical guilt over what she fears was exploitation on her part. Nonetheless, she overcomes these concerns and describes the dynamic formulation of "Nuakatan" beliefs about death. Several concerns arose in this chapter: Why is the informant Wycliffe's way of knowing...