136 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [ 79,19771

Response to Richard Scaglion

WILLIAM E. MITCHELL Uniuersity of Vermont

When Richard Scaglion sent me a copy of his comments about Father Aufenanger’s book, The Passing Scene in North-East New- Guinea, I wrote to him, in part, as follows: What can I say? Although I can sympathize with most of your comments on the book, I don’t know that they really add a great deal t o what I already have said. Sometimes when a foreign anthropologist is collecting and organizing data from a very different anthro- pological tradition from one’s own- especially if it is a very old-fashioned tradi- tion that has been discussed extensively and raises n o new and interesting theoretical p r o b l e m s 1 think the best course for a reviewer is simply to describe as accurately as possible in the space allotted the nature of the book. That was what I tried to d o here. I t would have been so easy, as I am sure you can appreciate, to have blasted the book, but t o my mind that would only be exercising a kind of anthropological parochialism. Aufenanger was trained in Vienna a very long time ago (I think this also accounts for his special thing with the Sun) but the fact that he had anthropological training, and lived in New Guinea longer than a bagful of us anthropologists, does give him a more or less trained eye t o record his data. But the limitation of his data that we can all appreciate is that he was wandering through the area primarily collecting artifacts and picking up bits and pieces of information,

very unevenly as I emphasize, and using Melanesian Pidgin as his only language. And one must also remember that all survey ethnography is slippery stuff, but my feeling in reading the book is that Aufenanger has done as well as most.

Submitted 9 September 1976 Accepted 4 October 1976

Misleading Advertising

RICHARD PRICE Johns Hopkins University

I am writing to dissociate myself formally from the wording of an advertisement for my latest book that appeared in the A A (78:760, 1976), in which the publisher’s ad writer proclaimed that the Suriname ma- roons possess an “isolated way of life, untouched by modern progress. . .[making] them of unique interest t o anthropologists.” I hope it is evident that neither I nor, to my knowledge, any other of the anthropologists who have worked with these people in recent times view them as primitive isolates, frozen in time. I find it ironic that the book in question (The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bi bliograph ical Introduction, 1976) was conceived in part as an extended argument against that very view, and that it consistently attempts to approach events in the Guianas from the hemispheric perspec- tive of widespread resistance set forth in my 1973 volume, Maroon Societies.