The Time at Darwin's Reef: Poetic Explorations in Anthropology and History

This is a sensitive and in many capacities brilliant accounting of what can be perceived in the borderlands between sea and land, in the Pacific and on the islands of life in other places. — Robert Borofsky, Hawaii Pacific University, Hawai’i Pacific University

The Time at Darwin’s Reef is a graceful play of history, ethnography, and poetry that shows us the strange in the everyday and the familiar in the exotic, reflecting upon the thickness of the human endeavor without burdening the reader with pronouncements. It remains open even as it seeks coherence, a measure of a mature mind that has made its travels among us but is also poised for the future. The beautiful watercolors join the search in their own poetry of bright and dark, surface and depth. — Richardson Miles, Louisiana State University

With The Time at Darwin’s Reef, anthropologist and poet Ivan Brady has joined the lineage of earlier anthropologist-poets who date, at the very least, from Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir. The finest moments in these pages are gripping poetic narratives that combine the love of language with a story that takes us beyond ourselves. In these works anthropological poetics is not only alive, but given inspired impetus toward the future. — Dan Rose, University of Pennsylvania

What an anthropologist experiences and learns can have many audiences, can take many forms. In The Time at Darwin’s Reef, Ivan Brady invites us to share with him ways in which a range of places and kinds of knowledge can feed imagination, and imagination find novel forms in which to be expressed. The ways in which people use language are part of their culture. Here Brady explores ways in which language, as lines, relations among lines, can be used and varied as part of our culture as anthropologists. These uses of words are descriptive, reflective, admonishing, wondering, humorous, inventive, and varied in place and time. In short, an exemplar of poetry as a verbal tool of ethnography, wide-ranging there, as it is in life, and in this work, truly impressive, with something of the same spirit and flair as Pound and Williams. — Dell Hymes, University of Virginia

Lyrical, pensive, reflective, and witty in the right places, The Time at Darwin’s Reef is a highly innovative concept in cultural studies and anthropological texts; through poetic explorations in the times and spaces of journeying for research and other purposes, it clears its own scholarly path to knowing the cultures of self and others. Ivan Brady’s fieldwork, teaching experience, and thoughtful probings of substance and style make him the perfect author for such a book. Janie Brady’s paintings are imaginative, provocative, and resonate with the text―another reminder that there are many yet-to-be-discovered paths that lead to deeper understanding of cultures and peoples, including ourselves. — Lola Romanucci-Ross, University of California, San Diego

The Time At Darwin’s Reef is a direct response to the uncertainties attached to evidence, truth, and method in postmodernism. Brady has written in what is probably the only vein one could call ‘authorized’ by the new criticism and its attention to the misadventures and ruins of classical ethnography: ambiguous writing that ‘rings true’ rather than being strictly historical or always factually true―the ancient power of fiction, poetry, performance, and storytelling. He wants both to flag and to show us possibilities for transcending the academy’s problematics with representing experience by getting at many of the same knowledge objectives in radically different forms of expression and content, not in a war of science vs. art, but as a complement to both. The poetics and the metathesis on writing ethnography and history here are the work of a mature thinker set to words in a smart and pleasurable book. Darwin’s Reef is an exemplar of experimental writing and an anti-book of the finest kind. — Yvonne S. Lincoln, Texas A&M University

I have no hesitation to recommend Brady’s poems and short prose pieces in The Time at Darwin’s Reef. I was seduced by the lyricism of his language and the rhythm of his writing. ― The Contemporary Pacific