I’m very pleased and excited to welcome Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington as our first guest bloggers on Savage Minds.

Deborah is the G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College and Fred is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Together they are a husband and wife team with a distinguished career in anthropology. Their ethnographic focus is Papua New Guinea, a country where for many years they have done research in locations such as the Sepik and New Britain. Their long history of excellence in scholarship was recognized recently when they were invited to give the super-prestiguous Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures in 2002. I’m sure there are more accolades to heap, but the point is just that for those of us who work in Melanesia Fred and Deborah are considered pillars of the scholarly community with a knack for clear and accessible writing, and many of their essays have become fixtures on syllabi far and wide.

In addition to solo efforts, they have produced five books together: Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology: An Analysis of Culturally Constructed Gender Interests in Papua New Guinea (Cambridge University Press); Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in a World System (a favorite of mine, also published by Cambridge); Articulating Change in the “Last Unknown” (Westview); Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of Difference (Cambridge); and, most recently, Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture, and History (University of Chicago Press).

Their latest book, Yali’s Question, is a published version of the Morgan lectures, and reflects two recent interests of theirs. First, it is an ethnography of the Ramu Sugar plantation and refining plant, an exemplar of Papua New Guinea’s nationalized, tariff-protected sugar industry. Second, as the title implies, the volume is a response to Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The two projects are linked by more than just a common location in Papua New Guinea. In it, Fred and Deborah try in the book to understand complex historical events like the creation of Ramu as the result of the intersection of the projects of personal and institutional actors who live lives which, while influenced by environmental and geographical considersations, are motived by and lived through structures of cultural signifigance.

Here on Savage Minds Deborah and Fred will (I think) focus on their response to Diamond, providing us some insights from the argument of their book as well as some ethnographic background on Papua New Guinea, ‘cargo cults’, and Yali more generally. I’m sure they’ll continue SM’s tradition of public anthropology and constructive dialogue in fine form, and I hope you’ll join me and the rest of the Savage Mind collective in greeting them and making them feel welcome. Deborah and Fred — welcome aboard!