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Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz, Yali's Question: Sugar, Culture, and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 319 pp.
Why do some peoples have great wealth and power while others have precious little? This, in general terms, is the question Yali, a famous leader in Papua New Guinea, asked biologist Jared Diamond, whose answer became the thesis of his popularly celebrated but anthropologically criticized book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond 1997). Those who dominate the world, Diamond argued, have had relatively greater access to resources, technologies, and disease resistance through accidents of geography and history. This allowed them advantages over others that eventuated in the patterns of inequality that we see today.
In Papua New Guinea, white Europeans arrived with the aid of the material leg-up that was their chance inheritance and, rather than just sharing their wealth and status equally with the black people they met there, they established hierarchical relationships characteristic of the empire-building and capitalism that they espoused. They built local economies based on wage labor, markets, and competition, through which they hoped not only to enrich themselves, but also to develop the country and better the lot of the Melanesians. The behavior produced by the colonists' ideals proved shocking to many native Melanesian peoples, guided by their egalitarian and spiritual worldviews, which naturalized their status and inherent rights to the wealth appearing in their territories. They found the actions of the whites selfish and insulting, and this incongruous and insufferable situation inspired not only Yali's question, but also numerous cargoistic movements, cults, and mindsets that in their turn shocked the white invaders and immigrants-and fascinated ethnographers of Melanesia.
Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz's book Yali's Question rebuts Diamond's grand theory of how inequalities have been generated-not only between what are more accurately described as pink and brown peoples meeting in 20th century Papua New Guinea, but worldwide over the past 13,000 years. They offer an alternative answer that takes as its beginning point precisely these different cultural assumptions that led Europeans and Melanesians to come into contact and sometimes conflict. The authors do so in the manner of ethnographers, by describing in great detail a group of people converging at a particular place and time, who they have gotten to know...