The Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting and Identity Among the Huaulu of the Moluccas

Rating:
Summary: A Definitive Account of Taboo
Review: Taboo is a subject that has been around in anthropology for a long long time. How can we make sense of the rules we find in almost all cultures about who one can marry and who one cannot, what one can eat and what one cannot, who one can have sex with and who one cannot? And how can we explain the fact that all of these disparate prohibitions seem intuitively to fall under a single idea - that of 'taboo'?

Forest of Taboos presents an answer to this question. By synthesizing the diverse literature on taboo (symbolic, Freudian, etc.) he creates a view of taboo which emphasizes the embodied nature of human being. "a subject symbolically constituted," he writes, "but necessarily located in the body, must be haunted by the fear of its disintegration through the body, since it constantly experiences the body's resistance to the subject's symbolic ordering of itself. The embodied subject's fear of disintegration through the body and by the body is the ultimate basis for the notion of pollution". Along the way he explains Jewish food prohibitions, love (a "controlled form of fear" according to Valeri), and pets (he doesn't like them). All of this is delivered in a powerful, eloquent, and very dense prose where personal reverie mixes with humanistic philosophy and the dense technical materials of anthropology. Although compelling and beautiful, it is not for the faint of heart.

Valeri's argument is convincing, and is backed up on several fronts. A massive literature review deals with the history of past thought on taboo. A detailed analysis of taboo amongst te Hualu, the group with which Valeri did his fieldwork, adds ethnographic bite to his theoretical argument. Finally, a meditation on the relationship of 'theory' to ethnography ties together these elements to create a book in which the habits of a particular group of people shed light on the general conditions in which all human beings live there lives. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Rather Scholarly
Review: While this book is no doubt well-written on the specific topic it is devoted to, for the non-specialist most of it will be of limited interest.
However, it DOES contain interesting ethnographic notes on Seram in general and the Huaulu in particular.
With relatively little published on the ethnography of this island recently, I would still say this book is a worthy purchase for those interested in the great "Nusa Ina" (Mother Island) of Central Maluku.