Danilyn Rutherford's Living in the Stone Age is an enthralling and important book. “Enthralling” because of the fascinating set of characters qua adventurers, administrative officials, and Papuans as they engage one another in the unchartered terrain of East New Guinea from the 1930s to the 1950s. “Important” because this engagement, as described by Rutherford, enables her to argue with persuasive cogency that we ethnographers need to radically rethink our traditional approaches to our own engagements with the people whose lives we strive to share and represent in our writings.
Using the opposition between foreign “guests” and indigenous “hosts,” as she calls them, to characterize the nature of the encounter between Papuans and Europeans, Rutherford reveals the psychology that played out in shaping the attitudes that determined how guests and hosts behaved towards each other and demonstrates how the Papuans made use of their guests’ proximity to further their own ends....
