Kulick, Don. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2020, 277 pages

“Why does a language die”? This question is at the center of Don Kulick’s ethnography based on his long term fieldwork in a small rainforest village in the famously multilingual nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG). By the mid-1980s when Kulick first arrived in the village of Gapun as a young anthropologist, the children were no longer learning their ancestral language of Tayap as their first language (85). The author’s analysis of the gradual ascendency of Tok Pisin, the new language forged at colonial plantations, and the abandonment of the ancient Tayap language is compelling. Kulick eschews ecological comparisons between disappearing languages and disappearing species, arguing, “By encouraging us to think in terms of ecosystems rather than political systems, comparisons of endangered languages to endangered species obscure the simple realization that language death is anything but a natural phenomenon. It is, on the contrary, a profoundly social phenomenon” (25-26). While written for a wide range of readers, it is a book about “doing” anthropology and its preoccupation with difference, sociality, power, and the effects of social and cultural change wrought over the past century by colonialism, Christianity, and capitalism. This book engages all of these issues and more by drawing on the author’s experience and thinking over thirty years. He captures the complicated states of affection and disaffection, and engagement and estrangement that are an indubitable part of human relations and, of course, fieldwork. The author’s account of his everyday life in Gapun is remarkably personal and unsparing of himself, written with humour and warmth; it is by turns melancholic and laugh-out-loud funny. In his depictions, men, women, youth and children emerge as multidimensional, interestingly imperfect and irrepressibly full of life despite the difficulties of daily life and their longing for “development” and the benefits of modern services and infrastructure that continue to elude them. He presents villagers who contend with the postcolonial state’s failure to provide material improvements in their lives by continuing to provide for themselves through gardening and hunting (116). Kulick’s vivid narrative carries the reader along with him to the village on his four research trips spanning three decades. “Languages die because people stop speaking them” (26). This insight sparks Kulick’s relentless search to understand why and how people stopped speaking their ancient language. He spent time with elders learning the language; with village men in the longhouse where Tayap was no longer spoken; attending the Catholic church where Tayap was never spoken; accompanying people to sago gardens and the forest; spending long days in kitchens with women and their young children; visiting new mothers in maternity huts; typing love letters for young men (in their preferred French script); and hanging out with young people and playing with children. He left no demographic group out of his quest and was fascinated by all kinds of language expression and narratives, including love letters, swearing, lies that mothers tell their toddlers, dreams, rumours, sermons, stories of the past and traditional practices, and the various pitches of conniving politicians. He did a lot of listening, demonstrating that most people respond when given a chance to talk about themselves and to tell their stories. Kulick found that in the village nobody was asking Elders about the old initiation practices that were abandoned before World War II, the tambaran song cycles, or the language (79-80). Nobody else was asking young people why they did not speak Tayap even when they could speak it. The answers provided insight into inter-generational relations, and how Elders failed to enlist young people to maintain their ancestral language and knowledge. The subtitle of the book, …