“Ethnography”, says Dr Will Buckingham when introducing his book Stealing with the Eyes, is “that curious brand of high-minded intrusiveness amongst peoples too polite, or too powerless, to tell you to go [expletive] yourself.”

Subtitled Imaginings and Incantations in Indonesia, on one level it’s about a young British graduate’s adventures in the Tanimbar Islands in Maluku late last century. Ostensibly he went in search of three carvers and to learn more of adat, a word with more definitions than dictionaries.

It can be culture, magic, ritual, wisdom, tradition, a reason for doing unreasonable things, an excuse for avoiding people and places, and a jumbled mixture of the lot. Adat is ever-present in rural Indonesia but in Tanimbar it’s most fertile for here the dead walk, women give birth to octopuses and witches are the root of all wrongs.

The island is isolated, 570 kilometers southeast of Ambon in the Banda Sea, though not so distant it couldn’t be reached by Europeans brandishing Bibles, guns and empty barrels to fill with exotic produce for shipment and profit.

After World War II, it became a center for “primitive” art, drawing collectors and a few tourists. A booklet for craftsmen by a normally prurient government suggests “differences in the sexes of sculptures should be made explicit. The sexual organs should not be seen as shameful or pornographic.”

A weird place, and a fine location for a thinker to learn more about himself, his purpose and Western values, not always well scrutinized by its practitioners.

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