In his book, anthropologist Stuart Kirsch immerses us in the worlds of Yonggom enchanted landscapes, exchange rituals, male initiation rites, and sorcery. The sensibilities these practices engender reveal how the Yonggom materialize, give meaning to, and make sense of the human and nonhuman worlds around them. With intimate care, Reverse Anthropology renders visible the embodied possibilities available beyond a modernist ethos and points to the constraints of non-modernist forms of being and knowing.

The Yonggom live in the central lowland rain forest of New Guinea along the lower Ok Tedi and Fly rivers near the border with West Papua, Indonesia. Location matters, since the region has been the site of mining interest and political instability in recent decades. In 1984, Broken Hills Proprietary, Ltd. (BHP, now BHP Billiton), one of Australia's largest mining concerns, began extracting gold from the Ok Tedi mine upriver from the Yonggom. This gold and copper mine has had devastating consequences: sediment from the tailings and waste rock have caused the Ok Tedi and Fly rivers to flood, drowning two thousand square miles of forests and gardens and killing river life. Kirsch seeks to understand how the Yonggom's grasp of reality as constituted through and constitutive of relations helped them interpret and respond to these challenges.

Based on two years of fieldwork and extensive visits between 1986 and 2005, Reverse Anthropology is, at the core, a story of ontological emergences and anguishes. It is an exegesis of Yonggom thought processes, forms of engaged construction, and practiced analytics. Drawing on the rich ethnography of Melanesia, Reverse Anthropology demonstrates how systems of engagement and exchange serve as a form of social analysis. We learn, for example, about enchanted realms in which the manipulation of magic objects (komon komon) transform one's appearance in the eyes of another; once appearing to have assumed the form of a certain animal, one becomes endowed with that animal's powers. Similarly, we learn how exchange is crucial to the making of humans. Whether enacted through pig feasts, bridewealth, or mortuary rituals, exchange is about establishing and confirming relations among encumbered persons, relations that ensure obligations, responsibilities, and commitments (rather than accumulation, proprietary claims, or commodities). A consummate exchange materializes the participants' humanness by enacting and widening their recognition and entanglements. Unrequited reciprocity—forms of failed exchange where one party disavows the norms of social transaction—dehumanizes the party that is excluded or slighted in the expected exchange.

Of significance in both examples is that one's capacities in the world are contingent on one's relations with others and that the ability to have others see one differently endows one with powers and opens the possibility to engage with the world differently. Although not consistently drawn out in the text, these and other understandings informed Yonggom capacity to embark in the early 1990s on an international campaign against the Ok Tedi mine that culminated in a lawsuit in the Australian courts.

First, the capacity to be seen as “indigenous peoples” precisely at the moment when indigenous concerns were flooding the international stage (in 1992 Rigoberta Mechu received the Noble Peace prize, 1993 was the UN Year of Indigenous Peoples, and 1994–2002 was the UN Decade of Indigenous Peoples) endowed the Yonggom with enhanced powers. Second, understanding the mining operation as an extreme act of failed exchange empowered the Yonggom to make clear the social relationships and responsibilities the mine had to the people downriver. They transformed the dehumanizing anger provoked by the mine's unrequited reciprocity into a mobilizing force. Underscoring how exchange relations make visible and enable capacities, Yonggom tracked the transactions of capital, commodities, and legal arguments that sustained the corporation across continents and institutions. Third, as the mine attempted to limit its liability for the consequences of its operations to material impacts, the Yonggom insight that the mine was suspended in a universe of moral relations—of debt, obligation, and responsibility—only gained force. Pollution was not purely a geochemical phenomenon, but more broadly a social relation. This argument was key in persuading the Australian court to hear the case. And fourth, although often labeled as excessive compensation claims, Yonggom demands act as a critique of economic rationality that echoes the logic of cargo cults. On the one hand, extravagant demands assert that there is no price for what is lost. On the other, they represent the symbolic use—in the face of devastation—of European wealth to offer redemption, to dare to have hope against hope that their future along the river might be made viable.

The skillful rendering of these insights makes Reverse Anthropology a must read for philosophers and social scientists concerned with alternative ontologies, indigenous peoples, human-nonhuman relations, the environment, and extractive industries.