To the anthropology of that. Extensive fieldwork in papua new guinea. Think you to the bookstore for organizing. Thank you very much carl hoffman for coming to converse with me and for the fantastic blurb. I thought i would read it for about seven minutes just to give you a sense of what the book is like. It will have questions and comments from you. Im going to read from the first chapter of the book entitled the air we breathe. The book is about a group of people who are giving up their language. In their language is an old ancient language that starts to be given up in the 1980s. I have gone back over the course of 30 years. The book is partly a memoir of my life in the village and partly an understanding or description of how a language actually dies. All you have to do is fill in this form. He was sitting on the floor of the mens house. A large open area structure on stilts. The wannabe corrupt politician a seat in the provincial parliament but he always lost to someone else who came to the area right before the election and promised to get people more money than the victor proceeded to engorge his own bank account from the access he gained by winning the election to government and money earmarked for development and was never heard from again. The wannabes ambition was to be a politician like that and he was convinced that one day he would succeed in the meantime the buttered up at the corrupt conversations and he set his sights on more local forms of expropriation. He testified two years. It was always blamed on someone else. A corrupt politician lied. Someone stole the money. A sorcerer bewitched it and made it disappear. Sitting in the mens house scratching his back against the corner post. He knew how to sweettalk the villagers. The Late Afternoon sun was hot. It also turns your mouth scarlet red. They just listened as the man who they called big belly behind his back. The 20 or so village men. They grouped themselves in half circle clusters. Occasionally leading forward to bend over at the waist and eject a blood colored spittle through the cracks. Women sat spread out on the porches of houses within hearing distance. I am here to make awareness on this. Using a new word and awareness. They constantly let it know. Very few villages had ever visited. A threeday course on Something Else new. When they told the villagers that have become a big three the countries he said were running out of air. They covered every inch of ground there. There were no more trees and trees reminded everyone make error without trees there would be no air. They were finding it increasingly difficult to breathe. When they leaned forward over his crossed legs. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A crimson stain across his chin. Gesturing towards the rain forest that surrounded everybody. It is a full of trees. Weave in overflow of air. Perceiving this abundance. They have sent they took pity in a cut a deal. A government approved company would transport massive gas tanks into the rain forest and pump them full of air. The air they contained will be bottled and sold in stores. This he explained was carbon trade. There you get air on how much you can pay. If you dont do a lot of money. You cant get a lot of air. The reason why any of this was a concern to villagers who the villagers who lived in a backwater swamp was because the rain forest that was a primary land. This was an opportunity that they kept repeating. They would earn the mounds of money. He is is sure to be a substantial amount. It would need to cut down a lot of trees and gas tanks after all were big and needed space. And they would be prohibited from hunting game. But they would not need to hunt or grow fruit anymore. It would build them houses made of corrugated iron and cement in trade stores. All of the villagers needed to do was sign that form that they have unfolded. And laid out on the floor. 100 from the income of the carbon trade deal will go to specific carbon trade limited. It was owned in three other men from the village. Those small details were not mentioned at any point during the meeting. He just exhorted the villagers to sign if they wanted to change. And how they wanted to change. If there is a single topic besides sorcery that occupies the conversations and their minds it is change they desperately want to change the villagers dont just want to change they want to change into Something Else. They want to change i gradually discovered from black people into white people. Thank you. My name is carl hoffman. The minute i read it i saw that there was Something Special here and that it was a special unusual book and it has a humor in a gentleness and a grace to it but also an unflinching honesty that work comes from only can come from someone who spent a long time in a place. I think that is the biggest thing that hit me. Places like the tiny villages where i had spent a lot of time. I went in ultimately and spent month and this one village and it felt like forever. Youre talking a little bit about taking back that. Tell us a little bit about the language and why this one place has one language. I have already done linguistics. It was attractive to me and interesting. Theres about 8 Million People in the country but theres approximately 800 languages. Those are different languages not different by varieties. Most of them are undocumented and many of them which is about 300 of them are spoken by groups of 500 people or less. I always thought was thought that appealed to me. There is a lot of studies about languages. At the same time languages have died throughout history. And i thought now with the changes that have occurred since the beginning of the 19 hundreds. Something must be happening to all of these little tiny languages. As i went to australia and mitt met a linguist who had spent a couple of years paddling a canoe around the northern part of papa new guinea and the way he did that is that he would arrive somewhere and he would say what language do you speak . Is often to say the word for no my language would be now. Your say no that way. And then you are speaking two different languages. What is the word for woman, or son. At the basis of that. It was another village that was more accessible. We speak a language that is very small. And nobody else speaks. He realized this was really weird. But he never went there. What are you good at this place i dont know anything about the language or the people. Thats how i ended up going to this particular place. I decided i liked it. Its a miserable environment. Were talking about that in a minute. I stayed for 15 months. No child under ten was speaking it. And no one is going anywhere. Its not like theyre all immigrating and going somewhere. They might know a thousand years. The endangered condor. But that is actually not true you say. Want to talk about that a little bit. Linguist are writing a lot of books these days. There are some many linguist say that 90 of the worlds languages are doomed in the next hundred years. There is a lot of books lamenting that loss. And they like to compare linguistic diversity. There is a lot of talk about how if that condor is dying people would react. People would try to save it. Why dont we do the same thing with languages. I appreciate the fact that they engage in these issues and anyone that doesnt get it. As you say what they tend to lose track of is the fact that languages are spoken by people. Why is that disappearing. Talk about christianity and loss of traditional culture. In that the rich, violent culture. Headhunting, that all changed in world war ii and then you get can you talk about that a little bit. Everything that people in the village aspire to and believe have been broken. You went to church every day. Every sunday at first it was sort of a and didnt take you long for you to understand how important that was and in your efforts to understand what was happening with the language. I was raised catholic. I found myself going to church every sunday in this village is this what ive come for. But i realized after a while that the religious component in their lives was absolutely crucial to understanding why they were letting their language disappear why they were not teaching their children any longer. It is like jamaican creole when you ship a lot of men often to a plantation and they dont speak the same language a language is born it arises. And that language which means bird talk. It is the most widely spoken language and papa new guinea. That is one of the reasons that the language is dying is because it is a language of the mission. It was very easy to convert them. They genuinely want the things they see the white people have and they think to themselves quite reasonably in my view how is it that these people who appeared out of nowhere have all of the stuff that airplanes, outward motors. Their money and close and weapons. How is it that they have that. And people concluded that they have stronger connections to the spiritual world. To go in as a missionary and if you convert to christianity you will get the glory of god they translate that. You will get all of the stuff that white people have. It wasnt a struggle. After a few months going to the services i began to understand that the way that people see themselves in order to other ways of living and dead bolt spiritual. One of the reasons is that mission is a shouldnt. And this is of the wanting to become white part. When people die they turn white. And they go to rome. Which is where the pope lives together with god in his wife mary and they would ask me questions. Have you ever been to rome. That meant that i was there. I was in the realm of god in the pope and the virgin mary. I arrived in the village. Someone just pops down. And a couple of the labor recruiters. And a few missionaries who would go and leave very quickly. Not many people. And suddenly he appears out of nowhere. I want to stay here and write a book about your language what is the real reason that you are here. They asked discussed it among themselves. I was returned. They told me that very early on. How would you respond. We know who you are. And i was a dead villager. One of them was i did not know what it meant. What do they expect from you. I knew i would fall short. I was very scared later on. Do they think i can die. If someone shoots me or stabs me. While they do it just out of a perverse sense of what will happen. And did affect my relationships with the villager villagers in any bad way. They were wonderful. They thought that through the out the entire 30 years. I have a chapter in the book as you know which is a description of one of the most and broke broke my heart. I villager who i had worked with in the 1980s when i started going back and i left papa new guinea for about 15 years. Then i started going back in the mid 2000s. And this man died in 2009. He was a great man. He died of malaria. Everybody in the village is murdered. Nobody just dies. He died. That was very sad. And two months later in his 19 month old son my door at night. Theyre not coming just to visit. They want something. He sat down and he said when are you going back. Everybody knew that when i arrive i say and get it stay for this amount of time and im leaving. Can you take a letter right around that time. They have discovered a concept of a penpal. He wants me to take a letter. Who do you want me to take the letter to. To my father who died. That was in a tense moment. I cant say no. I cant take it. They are refusing to take this letter to my father who is also dead. Im back in i can see his father. I ended up saying i will do my best. I realize that they really think. They think they all go there. They think they will die first and then go to rome. I think we think of places in remote villages as been so far away and that they are almost untouchable. The understandable indecipherable places of others. In fact as your book so beautifully shows. Except in certain beliefs either that you are dead or sorcery which i want to talk about more also they come across as very human. That was my own experience in villages. In fact we share many more things than differences in a lot of ways. As a mailman you were also enlisted for other things and maybe talk about that a little bit. I thought that was really beautiful. Just getting into the soul of love and desire which is what is like for all of us. There is a chapter on love letters. There was a school two hours away from there. There was a generation of young men and women who went to school. They learned nothing. They learned how to be dissatisfied with their lives. The language of instruction was english. Nobody in the village ever hears or understands this language. They didnt know it. But they wrote nonsense things on the board. But some of the kids learned literacy skills and they transferred those literally literary schools. I thought the love letters were just wonderful kind of heartbreaking but also. I thought they were great. My big dilemma was how i get access to these love letters. They are written by young men and women i thought how am i can actually get these people to show me their love letters. But then i hit upon an ingenious idea. I went to a conference in australia. I bought a printer i powered the printer and i said to the young men i have the power to turn your hand written letters into these beautiful they were just mesmerized. I will print anything you want me to print but the condition is that i get to keep the original letter and i can use in my work. Sure. I printed out these letters and they would deliver it this is one other of the ways where people could get there. They basically meet one another. I really like you do you like me. Not everyone can write. The few young men that could write have this genre of love letters. This is one of the things i hope comes through in the book that youre pointing to now. They are living in a backwater swamp. Theyve a very different in kooky belief but theyre not that different. They love, they fight they swear. They do all of the things that we do. I think its a banal thing to say. When i want to do in the book is to show how that works out it was one of the things i wondered as an anthropology student. And i found that out. Its not that different. We talk about that. Someone shot me with an arrow a sorcerer shot me with an arrow. Theyre talking about the same kind of things ultimately. I think those are very important to convey to block this idea that people who live there at the same time they are very different. There is a lot of different beliefs. Its not that different. If you are a catholic how do you get to heaven. You die. They located geographically. Perhaps in a different place. Lets talk about two things that are interrelated i think though not always the violence and sorcery. I had traveled all over the world in traditionally i was living in Columbia Heights during the height of the crack epidemic. People say how could you live there. Normally you kind of the those things as exaggerations and hyperbole and thats how i found most of the world. It is the only place ive ever felt that in a way that hyperbole that p g was in places at times times quite dangerous. Its really the only place there that i felt that lingering simmering potential violence. That ultimately have a pretty profound effect on your work. Maybe talk about that please. This is a cultural difference. Its a very volatile people. I saw how this was socialized. There is dogs in the village and they are ski be rigid animals. They have come up with their houses and they lay down. A child will be taught not to pet the dog but to hit the dog. And violence is always the heartbeat away. I have seen mothers do things with their little babies and their kids will cry our reach out for something and ill get everything and then suddenly for some unknowable reason. The mother well suddenly hit the child. Its a very volatile society where people dont know how people are going to react. In traditionally it was also a very warfield were filled society. All of the villagers in clans were at war with each other. Youd be ambushed and killed. Its all reciprocal rate. You do to go make sure that it was balance balance and reciprocal. They have very interesting but very weird to be honest things. For example if they have all custom. If you stole my wife i would kill one of my relatives i would kill one of my nieces because you stole my wife. The logic behind was that you would kill one of your relatives. Its a very i cant kill one of your nieces. There is that sort of thing. The violence was always there. What happened after world war i when australia and took over the Colonial Administration it is one of those countries that germany colonized. They lost everything. They stopped the warfare. And in the literature that is referred to as they pacified the people. What it meant was that they disarmed to the people in prison vented them from killing people. The war put a stop to all of that. Until about the late 1980s there was a parentheses peace throughout the country there was a tribal warfare but you cannot do it legitimately. Now you can. The state has receded and so the state is the classic failed state. There is no police people. I dont want to say go back. There is a violence that is omni present there. How does that affect your work. I was attacked in the village. A man was shot. It was horrible. And most of the anthropologist who were doing work there. They left at the end of the 19th 1980s. I thought im in the middle of nowhere. Where you protected by the village. People came into the village with guns. They fled. They work in a stand up and protect me. I would not have wanted me to. They ran away. A villager was shot and killed. A lot of anthropologists were working in the country. They left for that reason. It is still violent. I was there in march just recently its not easy. Talk a little bit about being in the village. My time in the villages i find incredibly fascinating but difficult and every day can be very hard. At first very slowly. Theres nothing to do. In our traditional ways. Sanitation is different and ultimately i think most of all the sins of the lack of solitude. Privacy and personal space. And maybe just you are in and out for a long. Of time talk about that. There is no privacy. But i thought that it was the busiest and most active place ive ever been. Constant, breaking news. That one is having an affair with that one. That one is sick because that is continual. Its nonstop breaking news. On a skull small scale. They are not ever bored either they dont have television they were talking about what theyre doing that was intense. I never been in the situation where there was so involved constantly i would start to send that. Its only ten ever close the door to my house. I just needed to have time by myself to write and thats why i knew people at my house wanted something. I would write up the events of the day i was never caught up. I was predicting that. I was in predicting the continual happenings in the village. At the most it was 200 people. Most of whom were kids. The sound of the village is the sound of children at play. And the kids they are very independent. At the age i bought a lot of stuff for the village. Thats one of the reasons why they tolerated my presence. And one of the things i made sure i have. One of the first things that happened every single time she would give it to her baby. The kids sometimes they cut themselves sometimes they get hurt but they learn how to handle these things at an incredibly young age. The same length as her body. They can open a coconut. They could do it when they were for. They could do everything. Imagine a 4yearold child doing that. They do get hurt. Parents dont hide things from kids. They treat them just as they treat adults. They are these little cheeky wonderful kids. That was the joy of my existence there. Talk to me about the key to success in a lot of ways is overstating youre welcome. Talk about that. You can imagine you want to invite this person home. What they want to do is not be an invited guest. Thats what we dont want to do. In order to convey that. You cant just say to people just ignore me. If you overstay your welcome which means that when you know that people want you to leave. You resist that. You kind of just stay. Its really painful for everybody. I knew. The perfectly sensible right thing to do right now would be to go. Theyre just gonna regard me as something around them. They dont have to perform. They dont have to entertain me. Theyll had to do any of that. You out where youre welcome. Some people just get ground down and except you. Accept you. And thats when things get interesting. I find the same as a reporter. After a day or two the notes stop. Im not taking so many notes but im really getting as ten times better. Its going much deeper. The most interesting things i have ever gained. Thats when you really get the interesting points. When you hear people talking to other people about things thats what this person would want to know. But when theyre talking to their friends and you overhear them its like there on a bus. That is a really important part of doing this work. Talk a little bit about Cultural Appropriation and you as a white western man in the question of whether you have a right to be telling their stories and going into their lives at all. There is a movement. If you dont belong yourself to a particular group then you have no right to speak for them. And that impacts them dramatically. That is our profession. And the reason we do it is not too oppress anybody because difference in riches if we only spoke to the people like ourselves the world would not be a very nice place. And wants to extend engagement by talking to people who are very unlike us. I like talking to people who are different than me. I can do that all the time. To actually have an excuse and a reason to talk to people who are very different than me. It is a blessing. I dont like that sentiment that you should only talk about your own group. If we stopped talking to in writing about other people i think it will be a much worse place. That might be an okay thing. Maybe their language would die like a tree falling in the forest. Maybe that wouldnt matter but i think it might. That is the reason for this book. Its a very valuable discipline. Are there any questions. A really interesting talk. I think you so much for what you do. Is there an village given the initial reading that you gave. Is there a lingering dissatisfaction with the current life given what is around them and given what you said. Does that speak a dissatisfaction with who they are. One of the things that they say to learn in school is that they would be dissatisfied. They would get these old mildew books donated. My cant we have it. There is a dissatisfaction with their lives. And thats why when they say sign this paper they dont dismiss it out of hand. They have a several month long conversation about this. Even though i told them. There is a lot of money here. We want the money. They would do it the second in a heartbeat. I think that is the legacy of christianity colonialism. And they do it. And they get nothing. Of course that is cannot produce dissatisfaction. Thats one of the reasons why it is so violent. A whole generation of young men who dont believe anymore that christ will return and give everything. Which is what their fathers and grandfathers believed. Thats one of the reasons for the violence. Do you think that change is inevitable in the death of languages in some ways my last book was one of the main characters. They try to tried to stop time. And wanted to preserve their way of life. He wasnt very successful. You can predict the future who knows. Im fairly certain that they will not be around in a hundred years. You could also imagine revivalist movements. And people that are going to revive their traditional culture. It can happen. But again what does it mean. It matters to the people. I think one of the things that the 20th century did his it divested the people of any dreams. Everything that they have previously striven for and everything they wanted it to rubbish. Its satanic, its stupid. What one might hope. Not that they would rediscover their past if my choice is to go into a rain forest and can be ambushed and killed or go into the rain forest. The old man i spoke to in the 1980s. Its better today were fine were not getting killed all the time. I do think that when western culture it just takes things away from people and doesnt give them anything back i think thats bad. And that is one of the messages with the book. Thank you for your talk. Not talking about language. Dot the same way. I just got a big talk. With peoples agency. Im just wondering why do you think the quantifying and endangered species rhetoric remains is so persistent even among people who study language and maybe should know better and among the media. How can we move past that. In your writing or in your teaching how we get past that. I think it the reason why they like to talk to species diversity. Is because we are taught that the diversity is valuable. We should engage in that biosphere. I think its an easy sell. Its one of the reasons why its so compelling. That is their bread and butter. They like languages. I agree. I think we really had to find other metaphors. In and other ways of thinking about it my own suggestion would be to think of them not as ecosystems but as political systems or systems that change throughout the course of time. Think of the evolution of language not in terms of species. In the evolution of governments. Is it a different metaphor that would allow us to engage with the speakers of languages. I think we need to do this. My are the speakers of languages not passing on their languages. That is the interesting question. They are wonderful and fabulous creations. They ultimately dont matter because the things that matter are the people it seems to me. This is going to be our last question. Did you speak the language or learn the language when you were there. I just published a 500 page grammar of it. I know its in its structure because there was so much switching between the language i never learned to speak it. Unlike the children i understand it but i dont speak it. I communicated them in this language. Its based on english. I think the word for white woman and the word for white man its laden with a lot of colonial talk. That is how i communicated with them. Is the culture of patriarchy. Names and land are inherited. You get the name from your father. It doesnt mean that the women rule. They are the ones that pass on the land to their children. My father does not had any rights to my land. But my maternal uncle does. It is a different system. Christianity really kind of mixes things up in a very neat and not a very nice way. In the 1980s when i was there and men what would fight with their wives. The whites brothers were at her back in a second. Now because the missionaries are saying that according to the bible the wife should obey the husband this is causing problems for the women. Thank you everybody please buy a book. I think there are some of my books for sale think you all for coming. Lets sign some books. Book tv recently spoke to Steve Scalise of louisiana. A pretty powerful weapon obviously. The 762 caliber bullet that hit me. When i saw the size of the bullet later they said how am i a life. It really does make you wonder. A lot of miracles that day and that was one that i detail in the book. Whatever your faith is. I am a strong faith. It helped me get through it. I chronicle some very specific things to happen on the ball field that even if you dont have the same kind of faith you might say see the first one or two is a coincidence. Clearly there was a larger presence on the ball field. The conversation usually did not stay until the end of practice. He usually leaves closer to seven a little before seven. That morning he found that his meeting was canceled. So he decided to stay for a little extra batting practice he was in the batting cage done the first base sign line. Brad was out at the line of fire. He could see everything that was happening. And then the skills took over and he knew as soon as the shooter went down he have to come and check on me to see what have happened. Most days he would not had been there because his schedule would have taken him somewhere else. One of the many miracles. His book is called back in the game. You can watch the rest of the interview by visiting our website. 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