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Yali's Question: Sugar, Culture, and History, by Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz. Foreword by Anthony T Carter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. isbn cloth, 978-0-226-21745-1; paper, 978-0-226-21746-8; xiv + 319 pages, maps, tables, illustrations, bibliography, index. Cloth, US $67.50, paper, US $27.50.
Significant and fascinating books have been published from the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series, including several that demonstrate how Melanesia has been a driving force for theorization in anthropology. Here is another. The significance of this publication relates to the interlocutors toward whom the authors direct their narrative, and their method of engagement with those interlocutors. Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington frame their exploration of rsl (Ramu Sugar Limited-a large sugar factory development in a rural part of Papua New Guinea) as a response to a popular contribution to the understanding of human history and culture, that is, to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). Diamond's thesis is that groups with geographical advantages developed certain technologies with which they were able to dominate others. Why they chose to do so is taken as self-evident. The lectures from which Yali's Question is developed bore the subtitle "On Avoiding a History of the Self-Evident and the Self- Interested," and that moral-sounding enterprise structures the book. Thus Diamond and those who are content with his explanation of the unequal distribution of wealth and power in today's world are the first of the authors' interlocutors. The second are Papua New Guineans who, like Yali in the book's title, also seek an answer to the vexing question of why white people have so many powerful material goods. A third set of readers is clearly envisioned, and those are students of history, anthropology, and politics who are called on in the text to avoid subscribing to a history that is "intellectually and politically flawed" (6) because it ignores "the ways in which various people understand the...