Changes in Latitude: An Uncommon Anthropology - Softcover

Varawa, Joana McIntyre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060973196 ISBN 13: 9780060973193

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1990

Synopsis

A woman who moved to Fiji and became involved with and married a local fisherman, describes the struggles she and her husband have gone through in adjusting to and ultimately coming to appreciate their radically different cultures

About this title

About the Author:

Joana McIntyre Varawa was the founding president of Project Jonah the international organization to save the whales, and is the author of two previous books, Mind in the Waters and The Delicate Art of Whale Watching. She has one grown son who lives in the United States. She and her husband Malé live on the island of Vedrala, near Galoa, in Fiji.

From Publishers Weekly:

The witty title says it all. This account, by a California-born environmentalist and anthropologist, of her exposure to life in Fiji by marriage to a Fijian fisherman is by turns touching, astonishing, amusing and deeply human. McIntyre, who as the book opens is acting as harbormaster on a Hawaiian island, with conventional dreams of a much more primitive tropical paradise, is a sometimes naive, often feisty woman with a poetic soul. Male Varawa is a physically splendid but emotionally childlike man half her age, deeply rooted in Fiji's ancient ways. Their meeting and eventual marriage was hardly idyllic. Male is a heavy imbiber of Fiji's intriguing yaqona , a drink men and women alike seem to lap up by the gallon, and given to fits of moody anger. McIntyre is frequently testy, as most Westerners would be, at the carelessness and indolence of so much of Fijian life. But she writes with such empathy about this oddly archaic society and her relation to it and with such lyrical fervor of natural splendors and horrors alike, that the book is utterly disarming. It would make a remarkable movie. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0060973196
• ISBN 13: 9780060973193
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250