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[The Sabbath of the Fireflies: Sorcery, Shamanism and the Cannibal Imaginary in New Guinea]/le Sabbat des Lucioles: Sorcellerie, chamanisme et imaginaire cannibale en Nouvelle-Guinee.

Article Excerpt
Le Sabbat des Lucioles: Sorcellerie, chamanisme et imaginaire cannibale en Nouvelle-Guinee. [The Sabbath of the Fireflies: Sorcery, Shamanism and the Cannibal Imaginary in New Guinea].

By Pierre Lemonnier.

Paris: Editions Stock, 2006.

Pp: 410.

Price: 20.99[euro]

Published in the series 'Un Ordre d'Idees' this outstanding contribution to the anthropology of Papua-New Guinea occupied the author for over ten years in the thinking and writing, not to mention the years of fieldwork sustaining its brimming originality. It has the hallmarks of a complex sensibility well beyond the usual practices of empirical reportage with cursory theoretical gestures which marks so much contemporary ethnography. The author, his mental states, his hopes and dreams, and the reality of his situation, working among one of the most remote subgroups of the Anga peoples, constitutes as much a part of the story as do the people he brings to life, and in particular the amazing cast of characters far too richly drawn to be called 'informants', most especially Nguye Toradze, shaman, generous swindler and thief, eater of cats, to whom the book is dedicated.

Equally significant is the fact that the author was accompanied at various times by his wife, Pascale Bonnemere, herself an outstanding anthropologist who has published widely on the Angave-Ange, and their daughters Camille and Clara. It was a great pleasure to have recently met all members of their family in Aix-en-Provence, and to be reminded again of what a profound impact traditional 'fieldwork' can have. Having also experienced life with young children in very remote Papua-New Guinea I felt fully the significance of the early introductory section, where the family is landed by a Summer Institute of Linguistics helicopter on a tiny airstrip at a site previously occupied by an earlier field expedition only to find the entire area deserted and their habitations destroyed after two and a half years of absence. No tables, shelves, not even the little beds of the...