In his 1985 monograph Good Company and Violence (University of California Press), Bruce Knauft reconciled the seemingly paradoxical conjunction among Gebusi, a lowland Papua New Guinean people, of an ethos of exuberant friendliness and an exceptionally high level of homicide resulting from the revenge killing of sorcerers. Admittedly, that excellent study foregrounded the exotic. Elsewhere, based on the same field experience, Knauft reported ways in which Gebusi expressed desire for different, primarily imagined, experiences. He wrote of an innovative genre of séance that “engaged a new set of tensions that seethed beyond the Gebusi horizon: the proliferation of trade goods, the development of wage labor, and their conflict with Gebusi notions of kinship and exchange” (Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology, Routledge, 1996:209–110).

In 1998, 16 years after leaving the field, Knauft returned to Gebusi. In the book under review he describes his encounter with people for whom what had once been imagined had assumed a semblance of reality. One-fifth of the total of 615 Gebusi people now lived within half-an-hour’s walk from a small government station at Nomad. Comfortably positioned on their own land, they had easy access to the institutions of church and state as well as to people from six neighboring language groups who also lived near Nomad. Here, were Christian missions, trade stores, a local market, competitive sports, a community school, a health clinic, officers of the law, and expressions of Papua New Guinean nationalism in the form of Independence Day celebrations. In the context of these institutions and opportunities, Gebusi became, in Knauft’s words, “locally modern” (p. 237).

But what did “locally modern” entail? Changes had transpired in all facets of Gebusi lives. All-night séances at which sorcerers were identified no longer occurred. The rate of homicide had plummeted. Ritual homosexuality had been abandoned. Women had assumed a more public role in church, at the market, and in their greater freedom with respect to marriage arrangements. Activities had become more regularized, with set times for markets, church services, school, and even feasts and “parties.” Accompanying these changes, people were less exuberant than they had been. In church, in school, at the market, and in their encounters with the law, they appeared nonassertive, as willing subordinates to the more powerful, as passively waiting for a future that was unlikely to ever materialize. As “local actors in marginal circumstances” (p. 245), Gebusi had willingly exchanged their past for an uncertain future. This is Knauft’s central and oft-repeated theoretical position. The Gebusi response to their changed circumstances was neither entrepreneurial nor subversive. Rather, it was characterized by an “active passivity” that Knauft labels “recessive agency” (p. 40).

The ways in which people respond to altered circumstances are diverse, contextual, and historically constrained. The underlying processes are neither well understood nor well theorized. Knauft’s position is that the choices people make—even to be passive—are central to those processes. But in three areas I am uncomfortable with his account.

Knauft has remarkably little to say of the four-fifths of Gebusi people who have chosen not to live near Nomad and who do not, on a daily basis, encounter the modern institutions represented there. If these people have not succumbed to passivity, then Knauft’s account of Gebusi is partial and does not address the possibility that in different locations the same people adopt very different public faces.

Even for those who live near Nomad, and despite some caveats, Knauft may have overstated his case. He provides a scatter of vignettes that tell of individuals who have been far from passive. Perhaps most tellingly, the public skits performed at Independence Day celebrations are interpreted by Knauft as self-mocking, as disparaging past ways that have been put aside. Alternatively, they might be understood as deeply ironic, and irony, of course, can provide a forceful critique of the present.

Knauft writes engagingly of the police, pastors, and schoolteachers at Nomad. At one level, their activities provide contexts for expressions of “recessive agency” by Gebusi. At another level, these men and their families are themselves exceptionally isolated from mainstream Papua New Guinea: living in “a context devoid of economic development and with no roads to elsewhere” (p.139), they are beholden, for their livelihoods, to what are surely caricatures of truly modern institutions. The scale is different, but these people, too, might be understood as willing subordinates to the more powerful, as passively waiting for a future that seems unlikely to ever materialize. What Knauft reads as particular to Gebusi may be an instance of a more general pattern.