Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After (review)

Bruce Knauft, Samuel C Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Vernacular Modernities Program at Emory University's Institute for Comparative and International Studies, is a distinguished anthropologist. He completed his PhD at the University of Michigan after research among the Gebusi of the Western Province in Papua New Guinea. This research formed the basis for his important book, Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society (1985). Exchanging the Past isa book about social and cultural change based on six months of research when Knauft revisited the site of his first research some sixteen years later (in1998). The first research was in what was then—and is now to a somewhat lesser extent—a remote part of Papua New Guinea. As Knauft says about his first research, "And if the Gebusi were traditional, so was I. A fledgling researcher, I had bought fully into anthropology's classic lure: to study a people as remote and little contacted as possible" (11). The first research did, as Knauft points out, provide him with an important baseline for his study of social change.

The anthropological approach in this book is different from his earlier analysis of the Gebusi lifeworld. His new arguments were tried out in numerous venues. In the acknowledgments, he thanks his "present and former graduate students; they are my true colleagues at Emory and beyond. They have given me the courage, not just to teach anthropology from the heart but to go back to the field and learn it all over again" (x). We should expect then a very different sort of book from his earlier ethnography, and indeed we get it. The topic is of course different, but so too are the style of presentation and the ways inwhich the author is located in the text. We are given more of his reactions to events and people (see, for instance, the prelude, the beginning of chapter 1, and the afterword). Chapter 5 is particularly interesting in this regard. It begins with a personal recounting of experience and relationship between the author and a dying man. It starts: "A certain depth comes from the eyes of a man who knows his death throes are starting"(119).Then, from page 125 to the end of the chapter, Knauft returns to a style reminiscent of his earlier work, with more structured description and numerical data presented in bar graphs. This stylistic movement occurs elsewhere in the book as well.

The book is organized into nine chapters, a prelude, an afterword, and twenty-four pages of notes. Readers are advised to attend closely to the notes; much about the project is revealed in them. The prelude sets thescene of the new research and theauthor's positioning to place and some people. The short afterword deals with the author's reactions to events and people as well as the research on the day of departure.

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 deal with the "before" and "after" of the title. The practices and beliefs surrounding sorcerers and their executions in the past, the decline in sorcery accusations now, and how the new location of the research site (closer to an administrative center) came about are considered,respectively.In chapter 1, Knauft also presents his perspective for this project. It involves the Gebusi becoming alternatively modern through a mix of the traditional and the modern. For the Gebusi of Gasumi Corners, he writes, "This perspective foregrounds experiences that pulse with ambivalent desires, contradictory goals, and conflicting images" (19).

Chapters 4 through 7 deal with theorganized institutional forms ofmodernity, their personnel, and Gebusi reactions to them. The village in which Knauft worked was called Gasumi by the colonial government, based on its prior name. In 1980 its inhabitants called it Yibihilu, or the...