Customer Reviews

Man in Essence: Folk Tales and Photographs from Irian Jaya

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This book was published in the honour of Larry Hillhouse, who spent 18 months in West Papua. After he had died of cancer, his parents published some of his photos and the tales he collected in this book.
Unfortunately they have done so knowing nothing about Papua.
The result is a collection of potentially interesting tales that are not accompanied by any note on which region or ethnic group they come from. This is a pity, as they seem to come from varied regions, judging from those few that contain place names.
Ditto the photos and drawings that are used as illustration: no information on what they show or where they were taken. It is obvious though that many were NOT taken where the tale in question was collected - highland photos accompany coastal stories.
Even the translation is suspect. Basic Indonesian kinship terms (like adik = younger brother, or kakek = grandfather, but used as grandmother here!) appear as capitalized personal names in the English text!
All in all, the tales might be interesting if you just want to read them for their own sake (maybe for children?).
But if you are seriously interested in the fascinating oral traditions of West Papua, you'd be much better off buying the following book, containing a more extensive collection of folk-tales/myths from the Lani people and accompanied by great background info: Vernacular Christianity Among the Mulia Dani by Douglas James Hayward.