| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
xii, 274 pages ; 22 cm |
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text txt rdacontent |
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unmediated n rdamedia |
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volume nc rdacarrier |
| Contents |
The air we breathe -- A village in the swamp -- First catch your teacher -- Moses's plan -- The burden of giving -- Dining in Gapun -- "I'm getting out of here" -- Over the rainbow -- The poetics of swearing -- Matters of the liver -- Young people's Tayap -- Living dangerously -- Who killed Monei? -- Luke writes a letter -- Going to hell -- What actually dies when a language dies? -- The end. |
| Summary |
One of Time's 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer "A profoundly human story about a seemingly exotic and strange place that really isn't so strange at all." -Carl Hoffman, author of The Last Wild Men of Borneo 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 can't 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, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely, and he found himself inexorably drawn into their world, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick wanted to tell the story of Gapuners-one that went beyond the particulars and uses of their language-that took full stock of their vanishing culture. This book 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. But A Death in the Rainforest is also an illuminating look at the impact of white society on the farthest reaches of the globe-and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. An engaging, deeply perceptive, and brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, A Death in the Rainforest takes readers into a world that endures in the face of massive changes, one that is on the verge of disappearing forever. |
| Subject |
Ethnology -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun.
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Language and culture -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun.
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Taiap language.
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Linguistic change -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun.
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Social change -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun.
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| ISBN |
9781616209049 (hardcover : alk. paper) $26.95 |
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1616209046 (hardcover : alk. paper) $26.95 |
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