IN THE JUNGLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 811, 11 February 1955, Page 13

IN THE JUNGLE

RETURN TO LAUGHTER, by Elenore Smith Bowen; Victor Gollancz, English price 16/-. FOUND this book rewarding and absorbing. Miss Bowen is an anthropologist whose work takes her to a native homestead in an African jungle. With no word of the language, and the nearest European ‘hundreds of miles away, she learns as she goes. So do we, because this is not just an official ethnological treatise. It is a fascinating and at times intensely moving record of human experience. The first chapters are lighthearted enough, but the story deepens and broadens as the author’s own problem resolves itself. The trained mind of the field worker, objectively noting and dispassionately classifying the customs and belief of a savage tribe, struggles to dissociate itself from the complexities of the cultured and compassionate human being -struggles and fails. Perceptions become dulled, judgments biased by the impact of affection, loneliness and fear, so that the commentator, in spite of herself, becomes involved in the action. She weeps with a sense of personal luss as she holds the hand of the gentle Amara dying in childbirth. Amid the horror of a smallpox epidemic she is_ helpless, in the face of superstition and | the threat of death, to carry out the edicts of her own code. She tells with a certain blazing honesty of her torment | of heart and mind when she leaves a sick man to die on his own. I have nothing but praise for this book-praise and a kind of wide-eyed wonder from the stay-at-home who admires, without any hope of emulating, the courage and singlemindedness of purpose which made the journey and the book possible.

Isobel