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Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island, Papua New Guinea, by Susanne Kuehling. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. isbn 978-0-8248-2731-1; xiv + 329 pages, maps, diagrams, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. us$44.00.
Susanne Kuehling is a German ethnographer who completed her training in Australia. She undertook eighteen months of fi eldwork on the anthropologically renowned island of Dobu in the D'Entrecasteaux Islands in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. Her new book reassesses the ethnographic record left by Reo Fortune (1932) and later analyzed by Ruth Benedict (1934). Kuehling in turn offers an alternative analysis of Dobu social life, based on the multitude of named gift exchanges that Islanders identify in the course of their social interactions.
Kuehling's reassessment of the Dobu ethnography is of itself an extremely valuable enterprise. She is rightly concerned to correct Fortune's and Benedict's stereotypical treatments of Dobu people, as pathologically paranoid and homicidal, based as these analyses were on brief fi eldwork and little or no grasp of the vernacular. Kuehling makes much of the depth of her ethnographic involvement, her knowledge of the local language, and the more detailed, sensitive data that this has allowed her to collect. Her work therefore takes its place with Annette Weiner's reanalysis of Bronislaw Malinowski's Trobriand Islands as a recapture of old fi eld sites from great anthropologists. However, Kuehling goes further than Weiner in describing the process of...