Description
Book SynopsisRutherford explains how and why the idea of New Guinea as a stone age leftover came to be so common in discourse about the country, and why it has persisted even as other similarly racially imperialist language has fallen away.
Trade Review"Living in the Stone Age is a deeply thoughtful and refreshingly programmatic book about the experience of empire and its fantasies and sympathies. Rutherford offers a subtle, close-up sense of the everyday experience, imperial fantasies, and agonistic assertions of sovereignty during the Dutch colony's closing decades. Extremely well crafted and written in an accessible, engaging style, this book makes for a fascinating and essential read for anyone interested in sovereignty, colonialism, anthropology, or Southeast Asian studies."--Patricia Spyer, The Graduate Institute, Geneva "In this eloquent book, Rutherford brings big questions and big historical contexts to a neglected archive of early interactions in western New Guinea at the end of the Dutch Empire. Living in the Stone Age conveys complex arguments through lively, conversational, and succinct writing. This book is a major contribution to West Papuan studies, and to understanding the enduring, pernicious historical constraints that the category 'Stone Age' imposes on any people associated with it."--Rupert Stasch, University of Cambridge
