Cheap Meat Summary

The book Cheap Meat by Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington is an analysis of culture in pacific islands, specifically Papua New Guinea. Flaps are a cut of meat from sheep that are especially fatty. This meat is undesirable to the white community and is often fed to their dogs. .For many within the lower socioeconomic status bracket, the only meat that is affordable is flaps. As a research paper or an informational book Cheap Meat does a decent job at presenting information in a concise and informative way. This book cannot be considered an ethnography. The anthropologists who conducted the research did so from a distance and used unethical methods to gain their information. They instead did what would almost be considered armchair anthropology. …show more content…
‘The Pacific Islands’ is a broad term that refers to all the islands that lie in the Pacific Ocean. With over twenty different countries in this area they all have a different culture and way of living. The authors of Cheap Meat only conducted research on Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Tonga. They also study New Zealand and Australia but these countries are not part of the Pacific Islands. The way that they use Pacific Islands is much too broad for the purpose of this study. They can 't make assumptions that every island involved in this grouping has a similar enough culture that you don 't even have to address the fact that Fiji and Papua New Guinea are in Melanesia while Tonga is in Polynesia. In order to make an accurate comparison there should be context of the cultural background of the communities. The countries can be compared or made reference to but the background and the cultural differences need to be included. I understand the argument that the average person would just group them all in the same area and probably doesn 't know the difference but in a ethnography like this it 's better to be accurate than to present incorrect