A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea [2019] – ★★★
Don Kulick is a linguistic anthropologist who went to one of the most remote places in Papua New Guinea to study a language spoken by around fifty people, and this is his account of this experience. Gapun is a small, remote, and swampy village surrounded by dense vegetation and lacking any modern comforts. Kulick is on a mission to understand how one unique and complex language – Tayap – is slowly dying in this place. The book is a quick and stimulating read, but is also a non-fiction work that is hard to categorise. Perched between ethnographic work with a shaky thesis and a travel-anecdote diary, it never knows what it wants to be and, ultimately, comes across as quite superficial.
Kulick starts his story enthusiastically, in the vein of The Innocent Anthropologist, emphasising his cluelessness as he steps into Gapun, a village he describes as “a hodgepodge of about twenty small houses arranged seemingly at random in the middle of a narrow clearing”, with the houses “assembled out of bush material such as bamboo poles, vines, bark, and sago-palm leaves” [Algonquin Books, 2019: 23]. Such accounts are always fun to read, and Kulick uses some self-deprecating humour to ease us into his new environment as he also introduces Gapun’s eccentric inhabitants, including the elder Raya who is to become his teacher of Tayap.
Kulick came to Gapun to investigate “how does a language die? Where does language death start? How is it sustained? Does it have to involve a conscious decision on anyone’s behalf?” Thirty pages on, he answers these questions, making the rest of the book a rather strange exploration of unrelated topics, including a burglary and efforts to modernise the village. Kulick writes that a language dies because people stop speaking it, and the reason for Tayap dying was that young mothers consciously or subconsciously started to prefer using Tok Pisin when talking to their children and discouraged the use of Tayap. Tok Pisin is an English-based creole language spoken by four million people in Papua New Guinea. In contrast to Tok Pisin, which is the language of the church and “modernity”, Tayap is considered “archaic”, and full of “infantile stubbornness” and “irrationality”.
Some of the most interesting things in the book are those past which the author hurries without lingering, and it would have been better if he focused on them more. For example, Kulick writes how variations in the language among native people are due to their desire to differentiate themselves from others, since they share so many common attributes, including dress, religion and the origin story. The theory behind the development of a language as unusual as Tayap, in a place where other languages are so dissimilar to it, is that “people wanted to be different from their neighbours, and the way they made themselves different was to diverge linguistically” [Algonquin Books, 2019: 154].
Another curious fact emerges some chapters later when Kulick observes how ownership and property rights are well established in Gapun, unlike in other places. This strong sense of ownership also means that villagers do not really “share” a language, and each villager is happy to have his own “version of Tayap”. That also lessens the trauma when the community loses Tayap because each individual is only concerned with not losing “their” Tayap. Kulick stops there, but, then, a million questions arise. Language is a method used to communicate with others. There must necessarily be those “others” sharing one’s view of the language in order for your own language not to die (unless one is fine talking to oneself their whole life, disregarding the language mistakes and incomprehensibility of others). What could the villagers’ response be to that? And, might not, then, the villagers regard their language as some “property right” to be passed to their children? There is also a whole chapter on swearing in Kulick’s book. Apparently, women in Gapun swear more than men because men are perceived as more “reasonable” and “calm”. In the book, Kulick mourns the dying of the obscene Tayap language because it is “impressively lyrical”.
As for community insights, in his interviews, Kulick laments how no one ever asks him about the Gapun children and he always wants to talk about them: “Children in Gapun are exuberantly independent. By the time they are four years old, children can light a fire, shimmy up a betel palm, and whack open a coconut with a machete. Young girls can fish from a stream, cook simple food, use a grass knife, chop firewood with a small ax, and be trusted to look after their younger siblings…Kids joke, scold, threaten, and swear like tiny adults” [Algonquin Books, 2019: 120].
The last two chapters of the book are what it should have been all about all along – how Tayap is dying and why it matters (languages are valuable because, for example, they express our identity). There are currently 7,170 languages in use around the world, and 3,226 endangered languages, which accounts for about 44% of all spoken languages (Ethnologue). My ancestors also come from a region in Russia with an endangered language – the Adyghe language, which is classified as “endangered.” Tayap is, of course, an extreme example of an endangered language, and, thus, in need of even greater protection. Kulick’s book certainly brings this language from obscurity into the spotlight, but what other conclusions can be drawn from the research? Kulick hardly bothers to dig further or propose solutions (such as, perhaps, resources allocated or education promoted to combat prejudice (Tayap is regarded as “backward” by the Gapun villagers)). He simply concludes that the death of a language is a complex phenomenon, implicating capitalism and colonialism along the way.
🦎What is “superficial” for one reader may simply be “fun” and “accessible” for another, but this passionate and well-written account is still too unfocused to be significant. Spanning field trips between 1985 to 2007, it contains scattered thoughts on linguistic idiosyncrasies (pages on the villagers trying to come up with the word for “rainbow”), village politics, cultural misunderstandings, child-rearing practices, and “exotic” food (paragraphs and paragraphs on sago). It lacks rigour to amount to a breathtaking ethnographic work, and is too negative and distracted to be a truly good travelogue about another culture.
This review was written as part of the Non-Fiction November reading challenge (Week 2) hosted by Frances at volatilerune.blog. This week’s topic is journeys – “choosing a book that reflects a journey for its author/protagonist or for the reader or both. This can be a physical journey, an emotional, psychological or spiritual journey or a combination of these. Any nonfiction title that leaves it’s author/protagonist and/or reader in a different place at the end from the start point is good for this challenge.“
