In Anarchy and the Art of Listening: The Politics and Pragmatics of Reception in Papua New Guinea, anthropologist Jame Slotta asks his audience to listen up and reassess their assumptions about Indigeneity and empowerment through speaking. After spending years living in the village of Yopno in Papua New Guinea, Slotta offers a reflexive ethnography of the community’s critical listening skills. The Yopno community is somewhat remote from centralized state power, but must frequently reckon with outside interlopers including mining companies, missionaries, anthropologists, and environmental NGOs, who have their own agendas. Contrary to any Western fantasy of Indigenous people as pliable victims or sage conservators of an older way, Slotta documents the negotiations of the Yopno people with outside forces through their careful evaluations of speech. The Yopno people are recent converts to Christianity, eager to gain access to the affordances of state development like economic opportunity and infrastructure, but they are equally leery of power imbalances and the risks of being misled. Slotta shows how their listening practices are part of an epistemology that defies Western academic calls to define Indigenous ontologies. In the process of writing about Yopno people’s anarchic practices of listening, Slotta writes to his field: what if ethnography needs to better listen to listeners?

Slotta opens his book with a scene in the Yopno village where community members perform a skit about the arrival of missionaries from Nopoko, another community in Papua New Guinea, to convert the people of Nian. The choice of whether to listen to the missionaries is the central concern of the skit. From here, Slotta launches into his core thesis: counter to liberal democratic narratives of rhetoric, listening is a significant and active aspect of communication with its own power. Although the leaders of the community are valued for their oratory skills, their position is contingent on listeners deeming their advice worthy. In a context where leaders have little access to state-sanctioned force, such as firing someone from their job, evicting them, fining them, or incarcerating them, a leader’s ability to guide community activities hinges on their listeners’ sincere buy-in. 

In the first chapter, Slotta describes the practices associated with anarchic listening. Gathering people for a consensus on community activities such as fundraising for schools or gathering gifts to host an event proves to be a complex process marked by openness and closedness. Slotta explains, “In asserting themselves as agentive listeners in this process, participants assert their self-­determination: their capacity to work on the talk of others­ and not simply be passive recipients of another’s dictates. It is when people do not feel they have been consulted in this way that complaints arise about being treated as the laborers or slaves of community leaders.” Centralized village life is relatively new and a product of conversion to Christianity. Slotta describes the negotiation of people living more closely together who appreciate the benefits of a common place. However, concerns about sorcery and manipulative rhetoric abound. The people of Yopno desire the benefits of collective efforts, and also hold onto the right to retreat from dubious speech by ignoring leaders or not showing up at all. As Slotta pithily summarizes, “The trick—t­he art of anarchic listening—is knowing what to disregard and what to hold onto.” 

Slotta then pivots to a big-picture discussion of the ontology of the Yopno village in the second chapter. He describes the folk stories people tell one another as third-person omniscient tales that emphasize the perils of misunderstanding, poor information, and perception. For instance, in one story, peril came to a woman who did not recognize her infant as a demon despite visits from injured community members. This considered approach to knowing emerges in the Yopno community’s assessment of education, largely led by members of the Lutheran church. Local culture, Christianity, and the standard Western K-12 curriculum are infused with educational parables that reveal what was previously unseen. An epistemology of uncertainty emerges: “The act of instruction itself is typically performed in a way that instills in listeners both a sense that reality is hard to grasp and an appreciation of their own deficient grasp of it.” With this in mind, Slotta asks how Yopno epistemology fits with calls in the field for Indigenous people to become confident speakers of their culture’s distinct ontology to empower themselves. The considered openness and uncertainty of Yopno epistemology challenges the hard cuts premised in empowerment through the mapping of a consistent ontology.

Yet expertise is still of interest to the Yopno community. In Chapter Three, Slotta examines the considerations people make in soliciting advice from experts and brokering power through knowledge. People spend a considerable amount of time and effort triangulating expertise from various speakers to glean knowledge about “inscrutable third parties” including NGOs, mining companies, netsa (spirits), and the Christian God. The Yopno people empower themselves through expert knowledge by discerning that some speakers have bad intentions and bad information. Slotta explains, “Anarchic listeners in the Yopno Valley do not turn to experts to have worlds constructed for them; they turn to experts to gain access to better, more accurate and comprehensive insight into the world around them.” Being receptive to expert knowledge is not the same as being commanded. Rather, they equip themselves with consultant information to act in their own best interests.

Building from the benefits and hazards of expertise, Slotta assesses in Chapter Four how people in the Yopno Valley consider the possibility of lies and misinformation, and sometimes deploy it for their own aims. As a matter of course, adults and older children will prank younger children to instill skepticism. Discretion is heralded as a virtue in the community, though more often attributed to men than women under their patriarchal norms. Keyed into the complexity of deception, people will seek second and third opinions amongst each other, and tactically withhold information. Careful triangulations of the whisper network underpin the daily diplomacy of living together.

Slotta’s final chapter reflects on how the growing presence of education and state power in the Yopno village are deepening the stratifications. The community was never egalitarian, but access to capital and wage jobs are creating a more defined cut between those who work subsistence agriculture and those who can purchase goods and services with cash. Slotta writes, “In a sense, the distinctions ­people see between the global north and global south are being reproduced in the valley: educated/uneducated, rich/poor, powerful/powerless. Schools and churches are domesticating global and national inequalities, bringing them into the villages of the valley itself.” The people of the Yopno Valley are not naive participants in the change. Ambivalence about the power of the church and other third parties resides within the desire for an easier life through material wealth. 

In an epilogue, Slotta concludes with his own ambivalent observations about his presence as an outsider anthropologist. Throughout the text, Slotta made careful notes about how being a white American man with a PhD fundamentally impacted his interactions within the village. Although ethnography aspires to some degree of critical distance, people saw his presence as an opportunity to glean insight into the workings of NGOs and the value of education. He entered with the desire to be a listener, but the people asked him to become a speaker. After all, they gave him a considerable amount of their time. In the exchange of knowledge Slotta became attuned to his key conclusion, “listening requires the kind of close ethnographic attention to culturally informed, richly contextualized practice that speech has long received.” Sometimes, in the spirit of reciprocity, Slotta became a speaker himself and bore witness to how he was received.

As a researcher in rhetoric and composition, I found Slotta’s work a welcome contribution to the study of listening. He pairs the micro observations of ethnography with compelling theoretical analysis in a strong demonstration of what the methodology still has to offer. The White anthropologist observing an Indigenous community is a scene with a fraught history that some have argued should be at least put on pause. Slotta navigates this with careful awareness of what he can and cannot know that seems to resonate with values imparted by the people of the Yopno Valley. I suspect that Slotta’s receptivity was what enabled him to effectively question the Western academy’s conceptions of Indigenous philosophy. It is boring to critique another scholar for not citing one’s own field, so instead I want to end by inviting Slotta to join us in the existing conversation on listening and epistemology in rhetoric and composition. His observations are in good company, and we would find listening together mutually fruitful.