A Formidable People The Chimbus!

What a valuable book Paula Brown las written with The Chimbu, but low many will read it? I mean resi lents of New Guinea, both black and vhite. There are those who say there is a sort of contest between the Tolai md the Chimbu for control of New Suinea.

The proponents of this theory night find much they did not realise n Dr Brown’s book, and, read in con unction with the Epsteins whom she quotes, might make an interesting comparison between the Tolais’ con cern with the past and the Chimbus’ attachment to the present. To say that Dr Brown’s work is useful is the best compliment I can pay, for I think he work of anthropologists now should be of practical use. I think Dr Brown’s work is useful, and I lope use is made of it.

What a formidable people the Chimbu are. Paula Brown should enow since she has been finding out about them for 15 years. For in stance, what other people are there vho “did not readily compartmen :alise their activities as ‘before’ and now’, or ‘old Chimbu’ and ‘white man’s’; rather they lived in the recognising that the only constant is change.” A unique people? [ think so, and therefore a people to oe reckoned with.

Dr Brown has covered what seems :o me to be every aspect of the life md living of the Chimbu people. Of course, such a work must contain some of the jargon of science, but Fhe Chimbu is much more readable ban many such books. I need hardly say it deals with the people who are ■eally Chimbu and not those from Dther parts of the Highlands dubbed Chimbu by ignorant coastal people.

To many, the Chimbu will emerge

from the book a people very different from what imagination has made them. The chapter on their pre history is fascinating. It is a pity there is not a Paula Brown for every ethnic group in New Guinea for this is a book which might be read with ad vantage by those about to take over the government of Papua New Guinea.

The white administrators have been badly informed about most of the in digenous people of New Guinea, but then so have the indigenous people about their fellow New Guineans.

Peter Livingston. (THE CHIMBU. By Paula Brown.

Schenkman Publishing Co Inc, Cambridge, Mass. USA. Distributed by General Learn ing Press, Morristown, New Jersey).