The Bamboo Fire: Field Work with the New Guinea Wape

This engagingly written, autobiographical book follows anthropologist William E. Mitchell on a 1970 expedition to a remote area of Papua New Guinea, from his home base as a college teacher in rural Vermont. To make it more interesting, Mitchell is accompanied by his wife, Joyce, and two small children Ned and Elizabeth (four and three). As part of his two year stay in New Guinea, Mitchell plans to spend a year each with two different societies, to be selected when he gets there, though he has a general region un mind, the Toricelli Mountain range high above the fetid malarial swamps of the "fabled Sepik River". We are taken through the process, from the inital grant application, the thrill of acceptance (revealed indiredctly through an odd conversation about the number of cameras he was requesting), the preparations and considerations involved in travelling as a family, arrival in New Guinea and initial exploration of the area looking for just the right village to settle into for a year. Mitchell chooses the village of Taute among the Wape people, an aggressively egalitarian and normally pacific culture to whom healing ceremonies (a specialty of Mitchell's) are a central focus. The majority of the book covers the move to Taute, getting a house built, and settling into a routine of research -- not so much the research itself (don't worry, this isn't a heavy anthro monograph!), but the adventures and tribulations of trying at once to be close enough to the Wape to gain their cooperation and trust, yet distant enough not to be blinded from the forest by the trees, and to change as little as possible the dynamics of the culture he is observing. Throughout, Mitchell gives both his own Western viewpoint and that of the Wape, and describes the sometimes tense, sometimes humorous disjuncture between the two. The writing is refreshingly casual and direct, though careful and precise. In describing how he came to realize that by appointing one or two full time (and hence more highly paid) helpers he was violating one of the basic precepts of his hosts: "If there were a windfall, whether it was a wild pig or a domesticated anthropologist, he should be cut up equally for all. ... Well, I was just not going around in enough equal pieces!" Do try to find a copy of this with the dust jacket, which has a marvelous color photo (by Mitchell) of a group of children with a towering masked figure. There is an inset 30 page "photo essay" of serviceable black and white photos, primarily scenes of life in Taute and surrounding villages, from children playing (including Ned and Elizabeth) to some of the ceremonies he observed, including many of the people named in the text.