From the Archives: Deep in Papua New Guinea, the speakers of Tayap have stopped using their native tongue. In A Death in the Rainforest, an anthropologist recounts his journey over three decades to find out why.
A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick. Algonquin Books, June 2019.
By the mid-1980s, when Kulick first visited the village, Papua New Guinea had gained independence from Australian colonial rule. Gapuners had by then come to desire the knowledge and material goods associated with the “modern” world—a world made more accessible through the rejection of Tayap and the adoption of Tok Pisin, the most widely spoken language in Papua New Guinea.
By stripping fieldwork of its romantic veneer, Kulick sets out to candidly answer the burning yet unspoken question raised by many a finessed ethnography: What is it really like “out there”? Kulick self-identifies as a “white American/European middle-class male professor” writing about “largely moneyless … black villagers who live in a backwater swamp in a faraway Oceanic country.” Gapuners, meanwhile, identify Kulick as the ghost of a dead villager returned to lead his kin down the “‘road’ to change.” The villagers hope Kulick will help them acquire white skin—a deeply desired bodily attribute they associate with power, wealth, and knowledge.
One anecdote that illustrates this point revolves around a visit to the afterworld recounted by Kak , a young male Gapuner. During this event, Kak leaves his body and travels to hell. Along the way, he encounters vast cities, deceased kin with white skin, and mountains of discarded Converse shoes uncannily like those worn by Kulick himself. Eventually, Kak arrives in hell, where Black people sweep toilets while waiting for Jesus.
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