Gregory Forth, A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society. Montreal & Kingston McGill-Queen’

Animal metaphors, the subject of this admirable book, characteristically use animals to talk about things that are not animals—most often human beings, their physical appearance, morals, or behavior. Gregory Forth, its author, has written extensively on eastern Indonesia, particularly on the Nage, a small society of subsistence cultivators in central Flores. In addition to a general account of Nage society, cosmology and religion (Beneath the Volcano, 1999), his recent work has focused largel...