Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.79 (666 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0826220517 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 296 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-02-27 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"This engaging memoir is peppered with figurative language and realistic conflicts neatly interwovenThe author does an excellent job of peeling back the layers of how insiders and outsiders might simultaneously realize the tension and intentions that lie between them."--5 Stars *****--Kaavonia Hinton, Foreword ReviewsBook of the Week at Longitude Books: "Gail Pool looks back with humor and insight on the year she and her husband spent among the Baining--a remote tribe located in Papua New GuineaFor years afterward, the couple considered their venture a failure, its peculiar tensions resonating throughout their married life until, decades later, they
going back to New Guinea after all Sheila Grinell At age 22, would you have gone to live in the jungle in New Guinea to help your anthropologist husband study an “uncooperative” tribe? Gail Pool did, and a year of sleeping on a mat, eating taro, and waiting for life to unfold challenged her thinking, her career, and her marriage for the next forty years. In this intense, wry memoir, Pool traces her “story of a lifetime” until, at age 62, it finally makes sense to her. It made sense to me, too. This is a wonderfu. Honest, engaging, revealing janet Pool's memoir of 16 months with the Baining of New Guinea is refreshingly honest and deeply personal. A highly successful editor and writer, she focuses squarely on what she perceives as her failures as an observer and partner during the expedition and in the years following. Paradoxically the result is a compelling and beautifully written description of the simplicity and nobility of Baining culture and her slow but compelling awakening to its meaning and power in her life.. "A really terrific book. I found it compulsively readable — at" according to B.H. Kriss. A really terrific book. I found it compulsively readable — at once funny and literate, honest and insightful. Having studied anthropology, I anticipated a chance to glimpse another culture, one rarely studied and poorly understood. I was rewarded with that, but so much more. This is the story of a marriage, of a relationship transformed by living among the Baining people of Papua New Guinea. It’s rare to read a book that feels so authentic. The author doesn’t pull her
He was a graduate student in anthropology; she was an aspiring writer. Pool put her journals away. As they warded off gargantuan insects, slogged through seemingly endless mud, and turned on each other in fatigue and frustration, they struggled to somehow connect with their enigmatic hosts, the Baining—a people who showed no desire to be studied.Sixteen months later they returned home. Her husband abandoned the study of anthropology.Decades later, Pool returned to her journals and found in her jumbled notes the understanding that had eluded her twenty-three–year-old self. Finally, she and her husband returned to New Guinea for a shorter visit and a warm reunion with the tribe that challenged them on so many levels and, Pool now realized, made their journey and lives deeper and richer.. But all their research could not prepare them for the reality of life in the jungle. They prepared, as academics do, by reading, practicing with language tapes, consulting with the nearest thing to experts, and then, excited and optimistic, off they went. Despite months of trying, they had not been able to make sense of the Baining’s culture. In the late sixties, Gail Pool and her husband set off for an adventure in New Guinea. Worse yet, their lives no longer seemed to make sense