Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN

This book aims to present an anthology of Trobriand Islands narratives organized according to native Trobriand classifications. Gunter Senft builds here, as he himself notes, on a suggestion by Bronislaw Malinowski that the ‘goal [of the ethnographer] is…to grasp the native’s point of view…’ (ix).

S uses the first chapter to examine genre as a concept and places his own work within the ‘ethnography of speaking’ paradigm, and in the second chapter he considers the way that the Trobrianders classify narratives. The following chapter defines what S calls ‘the two “paramount” varieties’ of Trobriand narrative: ‘biga bwena’, ‘good speech’, and ‘biga gaga’, ‘bad speech’, which ‘refers primarily to swear words, obscene speech, and the verbal breaking of taboos’ (17). Most of the chapter is given over to a description of the latter category of speech.

Each chapter that follows is concerned with a specific Trobriand genre. The fourth chapter looks at songs that are associated with the dead and with the harvest; the fifth chapter describes Trobriand magical speech and formulae; and the sixth gives examples of Christian texts and church songs. The seventh chapter addresses greeting and parting formulae, and the eighth offers examples of ‘heavy speech/true speech’, which is the form of speech used for litigation and for narrating myths. In the ninth chapter S provides examples of ‘joking or lying speech’, and in the tenth he gives examples of forms of speech the Trobrianders do not clearly classify in a specific speech genre, which are used to tell stories, make personal speeches or admonish people, or make requests of people. The eleventh and final chapter offers some further remarks about the Trobriand typology of speech forms. Several appendices supplement the material in the chapters. The first is a list of Trobriand terms for speech genres, the second offers ‘an illustrative example of mother-child interaction’, and the third contains a brief outline of Kilivila grammar.

The texts are given with interlinear translations and in most cases with the Kilivila parsed. S sometimes provides summaries of stories or other speech forms following the transcription/interlinear translation, though these are not always necessary. Occasionally, supplementary information is lacking where a reader may need it: for example, S often notes that a text uses archaic forms, but he does not discuss what those forms are or what their meaning is in the context of Trobriand speech. The analysis and classification is thus, at times, in need of expansion.

Despite its minor problems, S’s book is a good beginning towards an anthology intent on describing Trobriand speech genres from an indigenous perspective.