research, research, research
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
I’ve been doing some background reading to get some background info on my upcoming trip (I’m going here to join this ship for a couple of months), or at least I’ve been trying, but reading material on West Papua and Indonesia in general seems to be limited. I’ve found a couple of middle-weight general histories which didn’t really take my fancy, and I’ve been more keen to find personal accounts, travelogues, that kind of thing. And while the shelves are groaning with books on China, India, Provence, Patagonia, even Kurdistan (plus jokey books about fridges and backpackers), but very little on the East Indies.
One I did find was Sabine Kuegler’s Child Of The Jungle who has clearly had the most amazing life growing up amidst the Fayu tribe. Her life unravels when she moves to Europe and the extreme culture shock leads to depression and suicide attempts – all great personal stuff, but despite the potential here it was a book I struggled to finish it. The bulk of the book deals with her time in the jungle with her family and the Fayu people (her dad was on an anthropological mission to document their language), and while there’s a few interesting snippets about the social dynamics of the warring clans, it all feels a bit empty. I’m hoping for more from George Monbiot’s Poisoned Arrows which I’ve just tracked down. At least the print size is smaller and there are more pages.
In the St Ives branch of Oxfam, I also found an old, handsome Time Life volume on New Guinea. The author worked at museums in Australia and Papua New Guinea, and clearly came from the empire building school of academia. Nature is there to be mastered and tamed, it seems, although it was written in the early 70s. The man behind the counter, when he heard why I was buying the book, said, “Well, I hope you don’t get eaten by the natives.” I told him it was extremely unlikely.
