Knowledge,Morality and ‘Kastom’: SikAIDS among Young Yupno People,Finisterre Range,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the extent of knowledge about HIV/AIDS among young Yupno women and men. Local understanding of sikAIDS is shaped by cultural, moral and religious concepts and processes that are based on social values and practices. Difficulties these young people face in accessing information about HIV/AIDS and using it to implement preventative measures — for example by obtaining condoms — have to be seen in the framework of ‘kastom’ and a moral discourse coined and influenced by the Lutheran Church. As the research shows, there is an urgent need for a broad and contextually sensitive approach to sexual health, including information about conception, family planning methods, and sexually transmitted diseases when planning awareness campaigns for teenagers in rural regions.     

Establishing a Liberal Political Order Through a Constitution: The Papua New Guinea Experience

The experience with the independent constitution of Papua New Guinea is examined in this article to argue that, while constitutions are able to set up institutions and define their jurisdiction, they are less effective in establishing values and norms. Constitutions establish broad frameworks for politics but are rarely successful in determining the dynamics of politics or the conduct of parties, which depend principally on social and economic circumstances. The parliamentary system in PNG has been influenced more by traditional notions of clan leadership and reciprocity than by any Westminster convention. In PNG, the courts and other institutions for discipline and control of administration have been more effective than in many other developing countries, principally due to the weakness of the state-political system. Nevertheless, there remains considerable tension between the Rule of Law and democracy as it has developed in PNG.     

Health in Papua New Guinea: a Decline in Development

Papua New Guinea has experienced the start of an epidemiological transition in health status from infectious towards non-communicable diseases, though the latter were absent until the post-war years. This transition is particularly marked in urban and coastal areas, where life expectancies are higher and mortality rates lower. Tropical diseases remain significant, malaria has worsened and new mobility has increased the severity of epidemics of influenza and measles. Indigenous medical systems have increasingly given way to modern medical systems, though disease aetiology is usually perceived through traditional cognitive models. Modern medical systems were mainly developed in the 1960s and 1970s, on either side of independence, but despite an official focus on primary health care, have had much reduced effectiveness since the 1980s. Rural health centres have been poorly maintained and serviced, and health workers have limited skills and access to resources. The health budget has been increasingly concentrated in urban areas, though the bulk of the population and of the health problems are in rural areas, resulting in a worsening ‘inverse care law’, that is particularly significant for women. Overall health status has declined in the past decade despite overseas advocacy of new policies and the prospects for improvement are poor.     

Community Archaeology as Knowledge Management: Reflections from Uneapa Island,Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Over the last decade the concept of community archaeology has become a worldwide phenomenon; a convenient tagline largely describing the involvement of non-archaeologists in the practice of interacting with, uncovering, interpreting, and presenting the past. A plethora of new definitions and methodologies have been postulated, a marked increase in public funds invested in such initiatives is notable, as is the development of more rigorous evaluation strategies. Using Etienne Wenger’s ideas about ‘communities of practice’ (1998), I argue that community archaeology can be conceived as a form of knowledge management. In doing so, this paper reflects on the interactions between a small research team and local community during six months fieldwork on Uneapa, a remote island in the Bismarck Sea, Papua New Guinea. It considers the sets of relations that emerged whilst fi?eld-walking, surveying, and excavating Uneapa’s monumental landscape, and discusses how local ideas and knowledge influenced and altered the project methodologies and research questions being asked. This paper also highlights the challenges faced when reifying such engagements into research outputs.     

Another Kind of Gold: an Introduction to Marijuana in Papua New Guinea

Widespread as marijuana has become in Papua New Guinea (PNG), little ethnographic investigation has been done on problems raised by its cultivation, consumption and traffic there. In this essay, we survey the legal contexts of its production and circulation both in PNG and throughout the Pacific. We assess how the drug has been depicted in the regional literature. While our primary focus is on PNG, our point in offering these broader perspectives is to begin to outline political and comparative issues suggested by the arrival of this substance on Pacific shores. Our overall goal is to encourage rigorous and comprehensive discussion of the ambiguous relationship among society, the state and global capitalism that the drug constitutes, in addition to the many other, rather smaller‐scale problems raised in each of our four essays about the ongoing construction of and debate about its meaning at the local‐level.     

Reto's Chance: State and Status in an Urban Papua New Guinea Settlement

According to the ‘state‐in‐society’ model developed by Joel Migdal, states cannot be analytically regarded as separate from the societies they govern and have to be viewed in their social contexts. Migdal's model has been well received by scholars discussing governance and, especially, social control, in Melanesia. An anthropological qualification which could be applied to the model is that local elements of state in Melanesia are socially permeable, since their employees are likely to come from the communities they serve. This permeability arguably contributes to a mutually transformative relationship between state institutions and local groups whose praxis is informed by exigencies of kinship and community. Heuristically viewing the colonially planned ‘village court system’ in Papua New Guinea as an element of state in terms of Migdal's model, this paper presents a narrative of the appropriation of a village court into community sociality and individual aspirations for status in an urban settlement in Port Moresby. Ethnographically, it suggests that an application of the state‐in‐society model in the Papua New Guinean context, at least, must allow recognition of the way colonially and neo‐colonially introduced institutions have been appropriated into the praxis of local communities, and thus must preserve a sense of the transformations both of the institutions and the social life of those communities, to be analytically viable.     

Growing Knowledge in Bolivip,Papua New Guinea

Knowledge practices in the Mountain Ok or Min area of Papua New Guinea have, since Fredrik Barth's pioneering Baktaman study, come to exemplify ‘secrecy’ in Melanesian ethnography and have consequently represented something of an enigma to anthropological interpretation. This paper reports research among the Angkaiyakmin of Bolivip village, Western Province, and addresses the problem posed by Min revelatory practices. The Barthian paradigm interprets awem as ‘secret knowledge’, and holds that revelations are restricted to infrequent performances of male initiation rituals which serve to manage the distribution of secrets exclusively among suitably qualified men. The Bolivip data, however, suggest that awem (glossed here as ‘important’) is more widely known, and conventionally revealed to women and junior initiates in hidden contexts. Through analysing the movements involved in composing efficacious forms by combining ‘halves' in Bolivip, and illustrating the comparison Angkaiyakmin draw between taro gardening and cult ritual, the paper argues for a reorientation of approaches to ‘secrecy’ and to conceptions of ‘knowledge’.     

Liberation: The End of Australian Rule in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

In its very early stages, the Bougainville conflict was analysed by academic observers in terms of three main perspectives: ethno‐nationalist demands precipitated by grievances about the Panguna copper and gold mine; cultural perspectives which emphasise the impact of a large mining project on either Melanesian communities generally or particular Bougainvillean communities; and class conflict and other forms of economic inequality. To assess the extent to which these perspectives illuminate the dynamics of almost 10 years of conflict, they are re‐considered in the light of both other published material about Bougainville and an overview of the main stages of development of the conflict. While each perspective illuminates aspects of the conflict, none of them stands alone as an explanation. Rather each tends to reinforce the significance of the others. Stresses in Bougainvillean societies caused by interaction of evoloving cultures with growing economic inequality within and between societies are central, with local grievances about the mine and ethno‐nationalism crucial to the way those stresses manifested themselves.