A death in the rainforest : how a language and a way of life came to an end in Papua New Guinea / by Don Kulick.

• The air we breathe -- A village in the swamp -- First catch your teacher -- Moses's plan -- The burden of giving -- Dining in Gapun -- "I'm getting out of here" -- Over the rainbow -- The poetics of swearing -- Matters of the liver -- Young people's Tayap -- Living dangerously -- Who killed Monei? -- Luke writes a letter -- Going to hell -- What actually dies when a language dies? -- The end.

• "Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature." --The Wall Street Journal "If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost), this is an excellent choice." --The Washington Post One of Time's 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer * One of National Geographic's Best Travel Books of Summer As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can't study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, as he returned again and again to document the vanishing language, he found himself inexorably drawn into the lives and world of the Gapuners, and implicated in their destiny. In A Death in the Rainforest, Kulick takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. And in doing so, he also gives us a brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, an illuminating look at the impact of Western culture on the farthest reaches of the globe--and, ultimately, the story of why this anthropologist realized that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. 

Ämnesord

Socialantropologi  (sao)

Papuaspråk  (sao)

Språkförändringar  (sao)

Minoritetsspråk  (sao)

Antropologisk lingvistik  (sao)

Taiap language.  (LCSH)

Ethnology  -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun. (LCSH)

Language and culture  -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun. (LCSH)

Linguistic change  -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun. (LCSH)

Social change  -- Papua New Guinea -- Gapun. (LCSH)

Ethnology.  (fast)

Language and culture.  (fast)

Linguistic change.  (fast)

Social change.  (fast)

Linguistic change  (LCSH)

Anthropological linguistics  (LCSH)

Linguistic minorities  (LCSH)

Ethnology  (LCSH)

Papuan languages  (LCSH)

Papua Nya Guinea  (sao)

Indexterm och SAB-rubrik

Mrda Etnografi, socialantropologi och etnologi: Papua Nya Guinea

Fxra Papuanska

Fxra Papuanska

Klassifikation

GN671.N5 (LCC)

305.8009957/5 (DDC)

Mrda (kssb/8)

Fxra.00 (kssb/8)

Fxra:oa (kssb/8)