| Description |
1 online resource (xii, 274 pages) |
| 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 -- Postcript: After the end |
| Summary |
"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, 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 globe--and, ultimately, the story of why this anthropologist realized that he had to give up his study of this language and this village."-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Ethnology -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun
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Language and culture -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun
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Linguistic change -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun
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Social change -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun
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Taiap language.
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SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural & Social.
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SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Discrimination & Race Relations.
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SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Minority Studies.
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Ethnology
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Language and culture
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Linguistic change
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Social change
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Taiap language
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Papua New Guinea -- Gapun
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781616209476 |
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161620947X |
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