Jane Fajans

The Baining people of Papua New Guinea are most interesting for the fact that there is almost nothing interesting about them. They have no social structure apart from the family group. All of their activity is centred around their daily work, gardening, and the exchange of food. They do not play games or sports, nor do they engage in or encourage play in their children. They don't seem to have any indigenous religious traditions. And with the exception of their dance - which they dismiss as just "play" and do not give philosophical or symbolic meaning - they have almost nothing in the way of ritual and art. What myth and art they do possess has no explicitly stated meaning to them and they perform it without conscious interpretation.

As individuals they seem almost as devoid of personality as their culture is. They do not philosophise or gossip, they talk only about mundane tasks and gardening. They rarely speculate about the motives and personalities of others. And even when asked to talk about themselves, they say almost nothing about themselves as individuals with personalities, but instead relate their life-histories in terms of seeming banalities like who fed them as a child and which vegetables they grew with their spouse when they got older.

Because of the formlessness of their culture, the Baining have been considered "unstudiable". Anthropologists also describe the "Baining Problem", which is the question of how they have maintained their particular way of doing things in the absence of both explicit values and the cultural forms with which to transmit them through time. In this book, the author describes the Baining way of life, and by carefully observing them she uncovers the meanings and values that underlie even their most mundane activities. The task is made difficult by the fact that the Baining themselves do not seem to really reflect upon what they do and why. However, the author shows that hidden within their lives is a deep and robust value-system that informs everything that they do: the preeminent importance of social reciprocity and the transformative power of work to convert natural products into the currency of social transaction and the means to perpetuate it. The author does a very good job of explaining these values and showing how they relate to the Baining's activities. Once these underlying values are uncovered, the reasons behind even some of the stranger things that they do fall into place.

As a casual reader, a book like this is most valuable when it can bring me out of my current life and let me glimpse what it is like to think and behave in a completely different way. The chapter on adoption is a particularly good example of that. For me, it was like a puzzle: why are the Baining ashamed of their biological children, and why do they consider their adopted children truer children than those they have given birth to? The idea was almost offensive to me. However, through the authors' explanation of their values, by coming to appreciate the central importance they place on social ties constructed through the work of reciprocity, it became clear why they might consider natural bonds an affront to their value system and thus somewhat embarrassing. The author has obviously done an excellent job if someone like me can come to understand and sympathise with something like that.

With the exception of a theory-heavy first and last chapters, the book is easy for a non-expert to read and understand and the text is engaging. The first chapter contains something of a synthesis of the Baining Problem and the meanings behind the Baining way of doing things, however it is almost impossible to understand what the author is saying without first having read the book. Therefore I'd recommend the reader start skimming the first chapter once past the history of the study of the Baining, and then return to it again at the conclusion of the book. The final chapter ("Anarchy as Structured Antistructure") is also a bit heavier going, but by this point the reader is familiar with the terms she uses and the concrete examples of their meaning in the context of Baining activities, so most of it can be understood by a non-anthropologist.

One quibble I have is that the book is sometimes repetitive. This might partly be a consequence of the nature of the topic - everything in a culture is related to everything else, so some returning to previously covered material is inevitable - however there were times when the return to previous material was very lengthy. Perhaps the chapters were written to be stand-alone?

There were also some aspects that were not covered in the book that I would like to have learnt more about. For example, the author never mentions joke-telling or humour. Does this mean that the Baining don't tell jokes? My impression is that it must not play a big role in their life, but a lot can be gleaned from the kinds of things a people find humorous, so it would have been nice to have known for sure. Also, it's mentioned in-passing that the Baining have been Christianised and attend church, however nothing is really said about how they relate their new religion to their peculiar way of doing things. I suppose it means that Christianity has not had much of an effect on their way of thinking, but if true that in itself is interesting. However, some interesting topics that are included in the book include a few descriptions of mental illness and how the Baining interpret that (including what might be some culture-bound syndromes), the Baining concept of bush spirits or "aios", divination practices during mortuary rituals, and their experiences during the war. The Baining's life-stories as related in their own words are also very interesting and are worth re-reading once the book has been finished.

The final few chapters on their dances are the best chapters for bringing together the hidden values and meanings in the culture, by relating them to the taboos and rituals associated with preparing for a dance. These dances serve no explicit purpose and have no conscious interpretation for the Baining; they are not part of an initiation or any other ceremony, they can be performed whenever the mood strikes, and they don't have a magical purpose. However, through the lens of the values and beliefs the author has uncovered (e.g. their concept of work as transformation of material from natural to social to entropic waste), some possible interpretations can be discovered.… (altro)