Review: A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick

A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea [2019] – ★★★ Don Kulick is a linguistic anthropologist who went to one of the most remote places in Papua New Guinea to study a language spoken by around fifty people, and this is his account of this experience. Gapun is a small, remote, and swampy village surrounded by dense vegetation and lacking any modern comforts. Kulick is on a mission to understand how one unique and complex language – Tayap – is slowly dying in this place. The book is a quick and stimulating read, but is also a non-fiction work that is hard to categorise. Perched between ethnographic work with a shaky thesis and a travel-anecdote diary, it never knows what it wants to be and, ultimately, comes across as quite superficial. Kulick starts his story enthusiastically, in the vein of The Innocent Anthropologist, emphasising his cluelessness as he steps into Gapun, a village he describes as “a hodgepodge of about twenty small houses arranged seemingly at random in the middle of a narrow clearing”, with the houses “assembled out of bush material such as bamboo poles, vines, bark, and sago-palm leaves” [Algonquin Books, 20...