A review of the book

Title: “A Death in the Rainforest” by Don Kulick

Set in Gapun, a remote village in lowland Papua New Guinea, A Death in the Rainforest is
written to be accessible to a broad, rather than a disciplinary audience. It is simultaneously
an ethnography of language and social change and a personal account of fieldwork.
The Gapun speak as an isolate. Their vernacular is unrelated to other Lower Sepik languages.
In pre-contact times, the Gapun people, all 200 of them, retreated to a mountain top
location, which they left after colonial administrators ended warfare in the region. Apart
from the detailed attention he gives to processing and cooking sago flour, author Don Kulick
portrays the Gapun people in the century following their resettlement into Lower Sepik
modernity in as unflattering and unsympathetic terms as afforded the subjects of any
ethnography ever written.
Kulick ridicules and mocks the Gapun people. Their child-rearing practices are exceptionally
generous but based on a sophisticated form of lying. Their sago pudding diet, he denounces,
is unhealthy. Their constant critical attitudes about one another, he blames for young
people’s unwillingness to speak their vernacular in public because of the mockery they fear
from elders.
The book ends with a moral ambiguity. Kulick blames modernity for crushing everything
people in Gapun … ever believed or accomplished” (249). Modernity “exploited, deceived,
lied to, humiliated, cheated [them] … and [they were] robbed [by] … practically every
outside person, entity, or organization” (250), and left them speechless in their ancestral
tongue, although the people remain “proud and irascible” (252).
A Death in the Rainforest is a deeply ambiguous book, to say the least, which does not
accomplish what its author meant it to do. But it is an intriguing book that succeeds not to
portray collective tragedy, but rather to portray a people's determination to refashion
themselves as part of a modernity that wants nothing, or at least very small, to do with
them. Moreover, it also offers an insightful portrayal of the moral challenges a steadfast
fieldworker faced over the years. These challenges were moral challenges of which he was
not apparently fully aware, much less could manage. This was to ensure it was possible to do
so.