The Bamboo Fire: Field Work with the New Guinea Wape

By William E. Mitchell

Book Overview

Anthropology is primarily done in the field, unlike the laboratory oriented experimental sciences. Experimental sciences make their observations in constructed settings that permit variables influencing the outcome of the experiment to be known and controlled. In contrast, anthropology's object of inquiry, like the science of ethology is life experience in its natural setting. To understand how people organize their lives both in thought and in action, one must settle among them for a very long time.

The Wape of Papua New Guinea inhabit a mountainous rain forest and live in sedentary villages. They are slash and burn horticulturalists. marriage is by bride wealth and polygyny is permitted but rare. Male status is egalitarian and, although the society is hierarchical in terms of sex and age differences, both women and the young enjoy higher status than in many other New Guinea societies. While most Wape are nominal Christians, traditional religious beliefs and practices are of major importance.

This book concentrates on describing the field work process by giving the reader a feeling of the reflexive nature of this experience. It demonstrate not only how the anthropologist proceeds in her or his work, but describes the social and psychological context in which that work evolves and how anthropologists respond to it both within oneself and in communication with others. While it is a book about the Wape people it is also a book about how one anthropologist tried to understand them. It integrates the subjective and objective into a common research method. Related to the book, the author has published a film, Magical Curing, and a CD, The Living Dead and Dying: Music of the New Guinea Wape.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1412842557
• ISBN13: 9781412842556
• Release Date: March 2012
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 303 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Educational and Engaging, a Good Read

This engagingly written, autobiographical book follows anthropologist William E. Mitchell on a 1970 expedition to a remote area of Papua New Guinea, from his home base as a college teacher in rural Vermont. To make it more interesting, Mitchell is accompanied by his wife, Joyce, and two small children Ned and Elizabeth (four and three). As part of his two year stay in New Guinea, Mitchell plans to spend a year each with two different societies, to be selected when he gets there, though he has a general region un mind, the Toricelli Mountain range high above the fetid malarial swamps of the "fabled Sepik River". We are taken through the process, from the inital grant application, the thrill of acceptance (revealed indiredctly through an odd conversation about the number of cameras he was requesting), the preparations and considerations involved in travelling as a family, arrival in New Guinea and initial exploration of the area looking for just the right village to settle into for a year. Mitchell chooses the village of Taute among the Wape people, an aggressively egalitarian and normally pacific culture to whom healing ceremonies (a specialty of Mitchell's) are a central focus. The majority of the book covers the move to Taute, getting a house built, and settling into a routine of research -- not so much the research itself (don't worry, this isn't a heavy anthro monograph!), but the adventures and tribulations of trying at once to be close enough to the Wape to gain their cooperation and trust, yet distant enough not to be blinded from the forest by the trees, and to change as little as possible the dynamics of the culture he is observing. Throughout, Mitchell gives both his own Western viewpoint and that of the Wape, and describes the sometimes tense, sometimes humorous disjuncture between the two. The writing is refreshingly casual and direct, though careful and precise. In describing how he came to realize that by appointing one or two full time (and hence more highly paid) helpers he was violating one of the basic precepts of his hosts: "If there were a windfall, whether it was a wild pig or a domesticated anthropologist, he should be cut up equally for all. ... Well, I was just not going around in enough equal pieces!" Do try to find a copy of this with the dust jacket, which has a marvelous color photo (by Mitchell) of a group of children with a towering masked figure. There is an inset 30 page "photo essay" of serviceable black and white photos, primarily scenes of life in Taute and surrounding villages, from children playing (including Ned and Elizabeth) to some of the ceremonies he observed, including many of the people named in the text.