Danilyn Rutherford's Living in the Stone Age is an enthralling and important book. “Enthralling” because of the fascinating set of characters qua adventurers, administrative officials, and Papuans as they engage one another in the unchartered terrain of East New Guinea from the 1930s to the 1950s. “Important” because this engagement, as described by Rutherford, enables her to argue with persuasive cogency that we ethnographers need to radically rethink our traditional approaches to our own engagements with the people whose lives we strive to share and represent in our writings.

Using the opposition between foreign “guests” and indigenous “hosts,” as she calls them, to characterize the nature of the encounter between Papuans and Europeans, Rutherford reveals the psychology that played out in shaping the attitudes that determined how guests and hosts behaved towards each other and demonstrates how the Papuans made use of their guests’ proximity to further their own ends.

The “fantasy” in the book's subtitle refers to the illusory image Europeans once held—and perhaps still do in certain quarters—of the people of New Guinea trapped in a time warp and being a sort of a contemporary Stone Age people. As the Dutch came to terms with reality, this fantasy evaporated and to a degree the tensions between guests and hosts incited by the illusion abated. Today, however, the Indonesian government continues to nourish and promote the illusion for its political ends. “The same fantasy,” Rutherford remarks, “that justified continued Dutch colonization has perpetuated the suffering the territory's inhabitants have endured” (p. 9).

Among the book's leading characters are the Dutch colonial officers Jan Victor de Bruijn, who served as district officer in the Wissel Lakes region, and Jan van Eechoud, a police commissioner entrusted with the responsibility of founding an administrative post at Enarotali in the Central Highlands before the Second World War; the amateur anthropologist B. J. Bijlmer; and the missionary priest Pastor Herman Tillemans. These colonial figures are counterpointed by indigenous figures, one prominent individual being Audi, a chief in the Kapauku (or “Me”) ethnolinguistic group, who provided a substantial helping hand to the guests as they traipsed their way through the uninviting land.

Whereas de Bruijn chose to see only the hospitable side to the assistance he received from his hosts, other guests were not blind to the fact that this hospitality was not altruistic. Ambitious locals knew a good thing when they saw it coming in the form of steel axes, cowrie shells, “pretty” beads, and other “contact goods” with which guests repaid help they received in scaling steep mountainsides, fording watercourses, and taking equipment into the wilderness. Audi “straddled the boundary between guest and host and even as he made sure he got his cut from the hospitality his people offered he [made] his village into a foreign land” (p. 46). Soalekigi, de Bruijn's “best friend,” cast himself as an affiliate of his foreign guests so as to share in the power they appeared to command, and not least was the Kapuaku Weakabo, “long a feature among Papuan fixers” (p. 49).

Rutherford makes use of David Hume's notion of “sympathy” as a tool of analysis in seeking to unveil what Dutch officials were really experiencing when they claimed to empathize with Papuans and declare they knew what feelings their hosts had towards them. She points out that, at the same time as professing sympathy with their hosts, Dutch officials were uncomfortable with the contiguity such proximity implied. It was all very well being familiar with the natives so long as one believed they were “from a lost era in the distant Neolithic past.… The threat of proximity and the dream of the Stone Age went hand in hand” (p. 64).

Rutherford detects this merging of contiguity and disjunction in the feelings experienced by ethnographers today and adds anthropologists to the list of guests accommodated by indigenous peoples. The concluding sections of Living in the Stone Age derive a good deal of their inspiration from the reflections on fieldwork in the influential anthology Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, which argued for fresh approaches to how we think about “doing ethnography.”Footnote ¹ In the scholarly sphere, Rutherford argues, this means engaging with our cognate disciplines more than we are wont to do, and in the human sphere she suggests we should “take responsibility for the worlds we build up” (p. 164) and discard the notion Michel-Rolph Trouillot refers to as “the savage slot.”

Living in the Stone Age is an original contribution to European colonial history and anthropological theory and is more than likely to provide a provocative stimulant for fresh ideas in the practice of ethnography.