Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After - Softcover

Bruce M. Knauft is the Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. He is the author of four previous books, most recently Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology and From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology. His edited volume Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies is currently in press.

Even without much economic development or physical coercion, people in out-of-the-way places develop their own ways of being or becoming modern. How and why does this occur? What new forms of inequality does it produce? Twenty years ago, the Gebusi of the lowland Papua New Guinea rainforest had virulent sorcery beliefs, an elaborate spiritual cosmology, and one of the highest homicide rates in the world. But by 1998, the Gebusi spirit world was largely defunct, vengeance was largely disavowed, and community members were willing subordinates in schools, markets, and Christian churches run by nationals from other parts of the country.

In this book, Bruce Knauft details Gebusi engagement with modern institutions and shows what their experience tells us about the process of becoming subaltern subjects in a contemporary frame of cultural and political reference. In the process, he reveals dynamics of "recessive agency" and analyzes their relation to new forms of exchange, spiritual expression, and public cultural performance. Powerfully written and ethnographically nuanced, Exchanging the Past combines trenchant theoretical analysis with a dramatic story of social and cultural change.