A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea

Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature. The Wall Street Journal If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost) this is an excellent choice. The Washington Post One of Times 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer One of National Geographics Best Travel Books of Summer As a young anthropologist Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language Tayap. He arrived knowing that you cant study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children how they argue how they gossip how they joke. Over the course of thirty years as he returned again and again to document the vanishing language he found himself inexorably drawn into the lives and world of the Gapuners and implicated in their destiny. In A Death in the Rainforest Kulick takes us inside the village as he came to know it revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. And in doing so he also gives us a brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture an illuminating look at the impact of Western culture on the farthest reaches of the globeand ultimately the story of why this anthropologist realized that he had to give up his study of this language and this village.