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.

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