Book Review: The Meaning of Whitemen: race and modernity in the Orokaiva cultural world

Abstract

In this vivid and theoretically important ethnography, Ira Bashkow explores the legacy of white racial privilege and power from the perspective of the Orokaiva people of Oro Province in mainland Papua New Guinea. ‘Whitemen’ is the distinctly masculine racial gloss that Orokaiva (and Bashkow) use to substantiate objects, activities, places, and institutions associated with the attributes of western modernity in the postcolonial landscape. Bashkow adeptly examines how Orokaiva selectively appropriate stereotypical qualities and values of whitemen, at once desired and disdained, and appraise them within their own moral economy as a cultural self-critique