“People are strange, when you're a stranger,” go the lyrics to the Doors' song, and people are strange when you're not. That's the refrain in Rupert Stasch's book, Society of Others. In it, Stasch examines how the Korowai, a population of roughly three thousand, who reside in the lowland rainforest of south-central West Papua (the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea) understand their social relations. Strangers there are not outsiders—the traders, occasional missionaries, and tourists who make it to this remote region—at least not exclusively, but are, more importantly, the familiars around them. For the Korowai, strangeness, and its synonyms, otherness and alterity, describes the dominant mode of day-to-day engagement, and the quality pervades their understanding of who they and others are. For them, in both senses, strangeness is a relative term.

This is not the alienation that Jim Morrison sang about, however. Rather, strangeness as Korowai experience it, and as Stasch presents it, refers to an incongruity, a juxtaposition of difference and sameness, “connection-and-disconnection” (73), distance and proximity that hews more closely to Freud's discussion of the “uncanny” (87). In its various forms, otherness' influence on relations comes “tinged” and “saturated” (266), understood as part of “system” (105), and even, if rhetorically excessive, as a “science” (174). Most importantly, otherness expresses a “connective” quality (36); it is the divide across which relations are made and lived.

Stasch's point of departure is linguistic theory. The Korowai, he says, “approach persons as signs” (21); as such, Society of Others is an extended meditation on the use and context of the signs that constitute their social relations and social understanding. These fall into categories of speech—for example, naming practices, such as the use of joking names—as well as actions: perhaps the most meaningful of which are the myriad forms of giving, the occasions upon which gifts are made, including death payments, and the associated relationship claims. Even by sharing space (or not) Korowai denote and experience their ties: from the practice of in-law avoidance to the scattering of houses across the landscape, which signifies the fundamental “unreliable[ness]” of others (40).

Stasch mines these representations for what they reveal about the Korowai's “sensibilities”: how they reflexively think about and monitor their social world. And he succeeds admirably in conveying the way the quality of otherness permeates their encounters as well as their sense of being. Korowai birth is reincarnation, and while individuals themselves do not know by whom they are reincarnated (271), others apparently do. Identity is thus divided and qualified. At the other end of life, death not only reinforces their suspicions of others—given that all deaths are believed to be caused by male witches who live among them (149)—the deceased are a continuing malevolent presence among the living, offering their living kinsmen and women poison-laced food.

The book will be of interest to Melanesianists, and it will appeal to scholars of the linguistically-oriented Chicago school more generally. The Korowai offer rich material and Stasch's analysis is rigorous. Society of Others is certainly erudite. To his credit, he presents complicated material in a fairly non-technical way. Of course, every theoretical perspective, by highlighting certain things necessarily pushes others into the background, and the book suffers at times under the weight of analysis, as when falling down is referred to as a “transgressive bodily event,” (83) and the Korowai, described as “metonymic extrusions of social dyads” (76), are barely visible as agents and actors.

For example, in an extended discussion of death and mourning, set up nicely as “a disruptive undoing of attachment, a kind of reverse courtship” (212), there is little about how loss actually affects people. Anger as a response is barely mentioned (246), grief not at all. Instead of intense feelings, the separation that lies at the root of mourning is said to be “intensively signif[ied]” (227) by “charged” (241) objects associated with the deceased. In relation to the dead, who are temporally and spatially separated, mourners occupy a “lacerated present” (226). Semiotics is a powerful analytical tool, as Stasch shows. But what can be said about a less sophisticated tool, the hammer—that everything looks like nails to them—applies here in analogous fashion. The tradeoff of apprehending everything and everyone as signs is overshadowing the way the sign makers and interpreters themselves experience and enact the truly fascinating routines of Korowai life. In that respect, some of the high-end theorizing in Society of Others just seems beside the point.