Yali's Question

Sugar, Culture, and History

Cloth $75.00 ISBN: 9780226217451 Published December 2004

Paper $30.00 ISBN: 9780226217468 Published December 2004

Yali's Question is the story of a remarkable physical and social creation—Ramu Sugar Limited (RSL), a sugar plantation created in a remote part of Papua New Guinea. As an embodiment of imported industrial production, RSL's smoke-belching, steam-shrieking factory and vast fields of carefully tended sugar cane contrast sharply with the surrounding grassland. RSL not only dominates the landscape, but also shapes those culturally diverse thousands who left their homes to work there.

To understand the creation of such a startling place, Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz explore the perspectives of the diverse participants that had a hand in its creation. In examining these views, they also consider those of Yali, a local Papua New Guinean political leader. Significantly, Yali features not only in the story of RSL, but also in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning world history Guns, Germs, and Steel—a history probed through its contrast with RSL's. The authors' disagreement with Diamond stems, not from the generality of his focus and the specificity of theirs, but from a difference in view about how history is made—and from an insistence that those with power be held accountable for affecting history.

Review Quotes
Contents

"The authors of Yali's Question describe vividly how one of the world's oldest industries came to be reborn in one of its newest nations. Papua New Guinea's first sugar plantation exemplifies the ways in which the country has been creating itself, as well as many of the difficulties it faces. Global sugar history has long been associated with slavery, imported labor, and the destruction of cultural origins. But in Papua New Guinea, making sugar became part of becoming Papua New Guinean. Because people wanted the locally grown and processed sugar to stand for their country, they worried about its quality and quantity-and to make the infant industry truly national, its labor was drawn from local communities across the nation. The objective, beyond producing sugar, was to help build a coherent Papua New Guinea. As Errington and Gewertz show us in their engaging story, the enterprise mostly succeeded."

"The anthropological study of Papua New Guinea is usually associated with village studies of kinship--based societies. Yali's Question takes us from the magic of Western goods to the systemic yet concrete ethnographic issues of the world system. Not merely a study of a village, it is no less than a richly detailed historical anthropology of the Ramu Valley sugar plantation-one that brought together a very specific transnational capitalist strategy with a migrant population from different societies within Papua New Guinea to work in the new enterprise. Errington and Gewertz's work represents an extraordinary and powerful example of life in a real world in creation, in which global forces, transnational managers, and capital meet and articulate with the populations of Papua New Guinea in a local dynamic that cannot be reduced to notions of globalization."

"[The book] is richly written and full of thick descriptions of people, places, and processes. It is also rich in terms of its theoretical contribution. Errington and Gewertz interweave a cogent and convincing argument about how to write and read history with their ethnography of [Ramu Sugar Limited], its workers, agents, adn owners, and ground it all within the history aof development in [Papua New Guinea]."—Paise West, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"Yali's afterlife finds him in good literary circles. Booker PLC washed some of his plantation profits to establish the Booker Prize. . . . Diamond's book won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Now, Errington and Gewertz, who appreciate and answer Yali with anthropological seriousness, are also in this sweet company."—Lamont Lindstrom, Anthopological Forum

"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."

Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On Avoiding a History of the Self-Evident and the Self-Interested
1. What Do They (Should They) Want?
2. Factories in Fact and Fancy
3. The Peopling of a Place and the Placing of People
4. Clansman, Family Man, and Family-of-Man Man at RSL
5. The Life of Expatriates: Setting the Standards
6. Replacing Expatriates with Papua New Guineans
7. On Landowners, Outgrowers—and Just a Little Respect
8. On the Road, Mari Style
9. Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water
Conclusion: On Listening
Notes
References
Index

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Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology | General Anthropology

Asian Studies: Southeast Asia and Australia

Economics and Business: Economics--Development, Growth, Planning

Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography

History: Asian History

Sociology: Social History

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