A zoolgist turns in antropologist
A field journal full of cultural adventures and discovers.
It’s hard to find modern and progressive Author, as Tim Flannery, writing an extended and engaging book on indigenous people firmly anchored on millenarian cultural traditions. He describes his multiple adventure during his research campaign in remote and unknown places of Papua, both Indonesian and Independent.
As first the title is fascinating: “throwim way leg” is the English translation of the pidgin sentence “Toromwe lek” which it means “to go on a journey”, precisely the start of Flannery’s adventure.
However, the linguistic sentence assumes an abstract meaning very strong, because for Papuans is more than move the leg, it means to freed by an inner brake, with a decisive and risky action as it is moving into a jungle path.
THROWIM WAY LEG – an adventure
Author TIM FLANNERY
1st ed. 1998 The Text Publishing Company – Melbourne – Australia 326 p. ISBN1876485191
His prose is a journalistic style, with a syntatic rigidity as an Academic journal. The book is a series of episodes, of different life adventures in field research and travels, sometimes like an Indiana Jones screenplay.
Actually, the real value of the book is the content which fascinates the reader and lets him forget the dry writing style. The climax raises running through the lines for the end of the adventure and to pass immediately to a new story: he makes the reader more and more curious for new realistic descriptions and anecdotes.
This “journal” comes after the Author published other eight books, which became an ecologist bestseller. This sensitivity is deeply present also in this book when he describes the behaviors and the lifestyle of indigenous people. In the Jungle is necessary be able to adapt to the environment and liaise with local tribes to pass from village to village.
This necessary relations deepen to achieve friendships and the author opens the way to cultural and social anthropology. Which first is a ground noise, then line by line overwhelms the mere narrations for scientific considerations.
In the end it does not seem to read one of the main zoologist expert of South Pacific, but a diary of an anthropologist by chance. He faces cultural and temporal barrier through tough experience, a powerful nature and infinite new paths which make both the author and the reader completely marveled.
Tim Flannery – 1956
Australian zoologist, paleontologist and explorer.