Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Philip Snow

Source: The Geographical Journal, Vol. 133, No. 3 (Sep., 1967), pp. 397-398
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of
British Geographers)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1793600 .
Accessed: 10/03/2011 09:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Blackwell Publishing and The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) are
collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Geographical Journal.

http://www.jstor.org
 reviews 397

underlying motive in subjecting themselves to the severe and self-inflicted punish-

ment of rowing a twenty-foot dory across the stormy Western Ocean. Following the
record of the voyage an appendix is given. This contains as assortment of information
including details of equipment and stores with which the boat was equipped.
Charles H. Cotter

TRANCES. By Stewart Wavell, Audrey Butt and Nina Epton. London:

George Allen and Unwin, 1966. 834 x 534 inches, 253 pages, illus. 425
IN SEARCH OF THE PRIMITIVE. By Lewis Cotlow. Boston: Little, Brown
and Co., 1966. 9*2 x 6*2 inches, 454 pages, maps, illus. $8.95
THE MAORIS OF NEW ZEALAND. By Joan Metge. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1967. 3*2X5 inches, 245 pages, plates, tables, figures. 305
THE HIGH VALLEY. By Kenneth E. Read. London: George Allen and Unwin.
1966. 8X2x 5X2 inches, 226 pages, maps, illus. 405
The first two of this quartet range far and wide. Trances studies affinities between
practices in South America, Malaya, East Indies, Japan and North Africa, switching
the three authors chapter by chapter in a triple-movement, a pendulumesque, rather
bewildering method which successfully manages to keep one from being mes-
merized. Hypnotic techniques and permutations of rhythmic movement, sorcery,
visions, seances, firewalking and witchcraft are described in detail, more popularly
by Nina Epton, with anthropological assiduity and in depth on Amazonian Indians by
Dr. Audrey Butt, with literary facility by Stewart Wavell. The examples could have
ranged even further afield to prove affinities: in Oceania, which is not dealt with,
hypnosis nearly always manifests itself in the same basic forms. But what is covered is
sufficiently dextrous to establish this as perhaps the most authoritative symposium
yet produced on the subject.
Mr. Cotlow also sweeps far and deep and certainly succeeds in rooting out the most
primitive of people. He too finds many similarities of custom across a wide field: in
Equatorial Africa, in South America, in New Guinea?and even in the Arctic, where
he ends by surprising us by preferring it to all the parts of the world he has
travelled in over the last 30 years. His work improves both in style and interest as it
progresses though its extensive panorama, some of which has been published before.
It is bursting with action, it is graphic, it is extrovert. It would be too much to expect
reflectiveness. There is much first-hand data on the pygmies, Maumau and the
Masai in Africa, the Jivaros, Bororos and Camayuras of South America. Mr.
Cotlow is predominantly a photographer and perhaps one expects his results to have
been rather better than they are. Certainly one hoped to see pictures of the
Camayuras after he had described this tribe, in danger of extinction, in the superlative,
but there are none. The maps, disdaining latitude, longitude, the Tropics and the
Equator, are less than adequate: it is impossible to follow some of his routes and dis?
coveries, particularly in South America. His chapters on New Guinea and West
Irian contain more pertinent writing than the earlier sections?mosquitoes on the
Sepik River, floating islands, stomach ulcers in the Gahuku tribe, the cargo cult,
these bring out the best in him and are enquired into with vitality. He has an im?
portant, long chapter of fifty pages on the Wahgi Valley, but its location is not shown
on the map. The shortest chapter, on the Arctic, provides paradoxically a warming
contrast. It deals with Ellesmere Island: here he finds for the first time a people free
from racking fears of superstition, sorcery and slaughter, a race of comparatively
congenial customs. The Eskimos were themselves 'all convinced that there is no
place on earth like the vast, cold expanse where they lived and hunted'.
After all the breathless hoppings backwards and forwards over the extremes of the
world's surface it is a relief to turn to two complete studies in comparatively anchored
localities. The Maoris of New Zealand, dealing unsentimentally with a people of
strong, inherent attractiveness, is a satisfying, finite study. One of the Societies of the
World series, it is full of exactly the sort of fact one has to have to understand a
people. Dr. Metge's simple, clear and direct style and the dispassionate presentation
39^ REVIEWS

in well-broken-up sections combine to produce an excellent survey, not least of the

distinct forms of Maori culture, but of its complex relationship with the second
culture the Maoris have to absorb, that of the Pakeha world. Problems examined
include the drift into cities and two less obvious ones, obesity's connection with
disease, and degenerative conditions in the Maoris associated with stress. A keen
look is given to the New Zealand claim that race relations are better than those of any
two races in the world: the conclusion is reached that they are relatively good. A
competent bibliography completes a balanced and absorbing study.
To discard any euphoria built up by Joan Metge's choice and treatment of subject,
one has merely to return again, not a significant distance, from fairest Polynesia to
darkest Melanesia. In stark contrast, The high valley deals, at times sentimentally,
with a people of strong, inherent unattractiveness. This part of New Guinea, like
much of that monumental island, is riddled with the sinister, the ferocious, the
suspicious, the barbaric, to an extent unparalleled in the present world. When the
end of this harrowing account is reached Mr. Cotlow's disposition to prefer the
Eskimo philosophy is wholly credible. Professor Read's is, however, a refulgent,
sensitive record of a highly introspective anthropologist, containing passages of in?
spired writing and brilliant scene- and personality-fixing that, despite their charm,
have to work hard to endow his localities and characters with a veneer of appeal for
most of us. Philip Snow

EXPLORERS' STORIES

The task of selecting five explorers' short stories from the wealth of material available
is an exacting one, but in explorers remember (Jarrolds, 1967, 25s) the editor, Odette
Tchernine, has shown great ability. The result is an attractive small book that takes
the reader from Patagonia with Shipton, to a lost valley in Assam and on through
Persia back to the Amazon. The last story leaves the reader in the Caribbean. There
is nothing remarkable in the stories themselves except that the armchair explorer is
drawn to these small expeditions personally. Here are expeditions, with only two or
three members, the sort you or I could lead. Herein lies the book's success, the
reader becomes involved in all the stories as his adventures, a tribute to the writers'
skill and the editorial ability to keep the book flowing.
Another compendium is best stories of the south seas edited by Philip Snow
(Faber and Faber, 1967, 21s). Once again the editor had a vast choice of material from
which he has selected nine stories. The authors chosen range from Thor Heyerdahl to
Robert Louis Stevenson. The subjects are well chosen and combine fiction with fact
to present a picture of the South Sea Islands. It might have been better to introduce
one or two of the stories as it takes the reader a page or two to decide which century he
is in. However the editor keeps the book moving and the reader passes naturally from
one story to the next. J. L. Dumbrell

UNDERWATER EXPLORATION
Ten years ago there was a great need for popular, well illustrated books aimed at
attracting the school- and university-leaver into oceanography, but today the band-
waggon is well and truly launched?the stately royal barge floating down the Thames
with its discreet orchestra playing Handel has been replaced by the floating jazz-band
alive with jive and all things new. Now the time has come to be more selective; the
broad panorama of oceanography has been established and the time is ripe for popular
books which show the excitement of individual disciplines. The quartet of books
under review illustrates this point. Seabrook Hull is a professional author, once
editor of Undersea Technology and now of Ocean Science News and Geomarine Tech?
nology. His concern in writing the bountiful sea (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1966, 355)
has been to show the range of modern oceanography and this he does with an in-
formation-packed text and scores of excellently reproduced photographs. But the