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  • The Time at Darwin's Reef: Poetic Explorations in Anthropology and History
  • Klaus Neumann
The Time at Darwin's Reef: Poetic Explorations in Anthropology and History, by Ivan Brady. Ethnographic Alternatives Book Series 12. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003. ISBN cloth, 0-7591-0335-6; paper, 0-7591-0336-4; xxv + 134 pages, figures, map, appendixes. Cloth, US$75.00; paper, US$32.95.

All good ethnography and all good history are potentially good literature. The Argonauts of the Western Pacific is still in print not simply because its author pioneered fieldwork-based anthropology but because it is immensely readable. Since anthropology's self-reflexive turn, practioners of the discipline have scrutinized the discursive strategies employed by writers like Malinowski. Attention has been drawn to how the reporting of research may reflect the research process in the field.

Such awareness, however, has neither prevented anthropologists from writing literary ethnographies nor detracted from their appreciation. [End Page 507] Texts that are a pleasure to read because of their poetic qualities—in the field of Melanesian anthropology, books such as Michael Young's The Magicians of Manumanua (1984) and Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment (1990) spring to mind—are still more likely to stand the test of time than books that are noteworthy only because of the findings their authors report.

The self-reflexive turn may have prompted anthropologists and historians to be distrustful of ethnographies and histories modeled on the nineteenth-century novel, the travelogue, or the lab report. In the past twenty years or so, an increasing number of anthropologists (and historians, for that matter) have combined a commitment to poetic explorations of and engagements with their subjects with a willingness to experiment with unconventional formats and genres. Ivan Brady is one such author.

I have no hesitation to recommend Brady's poems and short prose pieces in The Time at Darwin's Reef. I was seduced by the lyricism of his language and the rhythm of his writing. While these gems will be appreciated by many a connoisseur of fine literature, some of them have particular appeal for those intrigued by the dynamics of the colonial encounter inthe Pacific and elsewhere. Brady's writing is political without laboring the obvious. He is analytical without having to take recourse to jargon. Some of his poems are deeply unsettling and have the capacity to remain with the reader for a long time.

Brady dedicates his book to Greg Dening ("History's anthropologist") and to Stanley Diamond ("Anthropology's poet"), but his poetry has little in common with the writings of either. Some of his preoccupations reminded me of much earlier exoticist writings, such as those of Victor Segalen. But while Brady's writings lack the lightness of Dening's, they are less personal than Segalen's in the sense that the author does not put himself as much on the line, as it were.

The book's six sections are in themselves fairly coherent. Those looking for a narrative connecting those sections, however, will be disappointed. But all poems and short prose pieces have their place on a map and on a time line. Brady thereby challenges his readers to draw connections between places and dates. He also allows them to imagine autobiographical threads.

While I was much taken by Brady's poetic engagements with history and with other worlds, I was not convinced by the collection as a book. The poems and prose pieces are interspersed with short commentaries. These tell the reader about texts or moments that inspired particular poems. But they also offer interpretative clues. Such clues would be redundant in a book of poetry. Or rather, they would probably be perceived to be unnecessary (if not irritating, because of their didactic tone) by readers who picked up Brady's book mainly out of an interest in his poetry. The commentaries suggest that Brady anticipated an audience interested in anthropology and history, and expecting a more conventional text from a professor of anthropology. In such a reading, Brady offers commentaries on his own creative [End Page 508] texts in order to satisfy expectations that his poetry cannot meet, and in order to make allowances...

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