I just finished reading Michael French Smith’s Village on the Edge with one of my classes this semester and I must say that I highly recommend it to everyone who is looking for an introductory level ethnography which deals with Papua New Guinea.

Set in East Sepik province on the island of Kairuru, Smith’s ethnography is ostensibly one about ‘social change’ — the book is organized around Smith’s two separate trips to Kairuru in 1975 and 1998. But the topic of the book is really much broader than this — Village on the Edge is really more a story of the changes that occurred in Smith’s life as well as the lives of the people on Kairuru that he met. In many ways, the book is about loosing the innocence of youth. The ‘social change’ that Kairuru experiences, after all, is Papua New Guinea’s fall from grace after independence and the effect that inflation, law and order problems, and crumbling government services have had on village life. Smith had his own fall from innocence as well — the book documents his own failure to find an academic position, his career in as a consultant, and his own quixotic relationship with a village he cannot really claim to ‘study’ as an academic anthropologist.

One of the things that I like so much about Smith’s book is that it places ‘the village’ in the wider context of Papua New Guinea as a nation. Village on the Edge paints an excellent and detailed picture of Papua New Guinea’s growing pains at the national and macroeconomic level and helps demonstrate how these inform village life. Surprisingly, it’s very rare to find an ethnography that demonstrates this sort of basic competence in explaining what is going on in the country as a whole — too often Melanesianists encounter ‘pathologies of modernity’ (or ‘alternate modernities’) or ‘law and order problems’ but never seem to explain how exactly things got to be the way they were. Thus the vicissitudes of the World Bank’s policies in Papua New Guinea are portrayed with an even hand rather than simply labeling the bank as unconditionally evil and assuming that this is an acceptable ssubstitutefor an ethnography of it and its effects.

Equally, Smith avoids the anthropologist’s urge to defend ‘his people’ from all comers just as he resists Australian policy elites’ tendency to assume the problem with PNG is that it has reverted to (a presumably savage) type. In fact Smith’s book very much has the flavor of Sean Dorney’s excellent book on Papua New Guinea — one gets the sense that Smith has spent hours talking with non-experts and has a very clear sense of the Ten Topics About Papua New Guinea That Everyone Should Know About. As a result we have a well-balanced account of what might be called ‘the cargo cult mentality’ and why ‘the cargo cult mentality’ is a lousy term to describe it. We have a fair and balanced portrait of Christianity. We learn why people in Kairuru speak of, but do not really have ‘clans’, that land rights are both customary and ambiguous, and we learn about the ambivalence that people feel about their village entering the cash economy. Indeed, Smith’s ability to highlight that fact that ‘development’ is something that different people in the village feel differently about, and that no one is sure exactly what they’ll develop into.

Smith’s prose style has benefited from a career of writing reports for nnon-academics It is clear — indeed, utterly transparent. This is a book you could give to freshman in an introductory class, or even very promising high school students. There are personal anecdotes which hold the readers interest and strike me as very true even though they are, at times, potentially embarrassing: his description of his relief at checking into an air-conditioned hotel room or of getting knocked out by chewing one betel nut too many reveal a side of fieldwork that many are uncomfortable revealing about themselves. At the same time the book never lapses into narcissism. Neither does it attempt to become a memoir — it really is an ethnography and readers will not find the novelistic, self-consciously literary prose of (say) Guests of the Sheik here.

In fact Smith’s clear explication of ideas may even beguile readers into a false sense of security. The picture that Smith paints of contemporary Papua New Guinea is in fact quite complex, and those who read quickly or shallowly might not notice it sitting there at the bottom of the ethnography. For that reason I suspect it could be paired with other higher-level pieces to make it suitable for a more advanced class. The book could also serve as a great quick brush-up for non-Melanesianists who want to get up to speed on the area without slogging through tons of Strathernian text.

In conclusion, Smith’s book is well-written, accessible, and just very very true to the concerns of Papua New Guineans today. It paints a great picture of what is happening in the country today, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants their students to read more about social change, or who want to learn what Papua New Guinea is like outside of old (and outdated) chestnuts like ‘First Contact’ and ‘Ongka’s Big Moka.’