The Bugiau Community at Eight‐Mile: An Urban Settlement in Port Moresby,Papua New Guinea

Contrary to the popular tendency to scapegoat and demonize urban settlements in Papua New Guinea the trend among academics has been to normalize their existence. There is however little detailed information upon which to base either view. This paper reviews existing studies of urban settlements in Papua New Guinea and finds a lacuna of information on basic livelihood functions. On the basis of a household survey and general observations made during a four‐week period of residence in an urban settlement in Port Moresby, it presents data on household composition, employment, income, expenditure and social identity for one urban settlement. The picture presented describes a way of life that does not support popular stereotypes.     

The Return of the Ambush: ‘Raskolism’ in Rural Yangoru,East Sepik Province

Over the last 15 years or so, ‘raskols’ have become a prominent feature of the cultural scene in Papua New Guinea and have prompted a number of academic studies, focussed mostly on urban crime. This paper documents and analyses a dramatic rise of raskolism in a rural setting, the Yangoru Subdistrict of the East Sepik Province. It seeks to describe how interactions between raskols and the population they exploit evolved, and it focusses on why Yangoru raskolism emerged when it did. Although a conjunction of rising material aspirations, failed economic programs, and the erosion of traditional and modern sanctions probably are important explanations, what seems critical to understanding this sudden rise in crime is the experience some young Yangoru men gained in raskol gangs in urban environments, experience that facilitated their recognition and exploitation of pre-existing but hitherto unacknowledged weaknesses in the systems of control back home.     

Village and community in early colonial New England

The long-standing correlation between community function and nucleated settlement form in early colonial New England is mistaken. Puritan communities were established, but new communities—often called villages in colonial records—were developed and survived quite well regardless of settlement form. As in England at the time, village meant community and community was a social web. Village status in New England provided a community with land and thus enabled the community to undertake settlement. But the social web that comprised community did not require nucleated settlement, and the dispersed settlement form that many colonists had known in England dominated the village landscape of early colonial New England.     

Torres Strait and Dawdhay: Dimensions of Self and Otherness on Yam Island1

When Papua New Guinea attained independence two decades ago an absolute distinction was created between Papua New Guinea and the Torres Strait: Papuans were firmly placed in Papua New Guinea territory and Torres Strait Islanders in Australian territory. In constituting themselves as Torres Strait Islanders and more specifically as Australians, Yam Island people's contemporary expressions of their connection to, yet distance from, lowland Papua New Guinea can be best described as ambivalent, pulsing between identification and incorporation, distance and disavowal. I argue that this ambivalence is not an artefact of the establishment of the border per se, but rather it was through the establishment of the border that a new layer was added to Self and Other constructions by Yam Island people in terms of how they see themselves and their Papuan neighbours. The sometimes fraught nature of this relationship can be understood in light of the continuing socio‐political impacts of these international border lines on people who have recently combined a somewhat legalistic and political definition of themselves, and of Papuans, with perennial extra‐legal definitions. I suggest it is in isolating and exploring domains of interaction that we can see the fluidity and dynamism of Self and Other definitions in operation, and in so doing better appreciate their essential imbrication.     

Worlds in Mind: the Experience of an Outside World in a Community of the Finisterre Range of Papua New Guinea

This paper deals with how the Yupno's mental image of proper settlement patterns has been changed through the experience of an ‘outside world’. The Yupno inhabit a rugged, extremely remote, mountainous region of the Eastern Finisterre Range in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea. Teptep is the administrative centre. The region is one of the last unexplored areas of Papua New Guinea. The old Yupno grew up in an isolated world, which was bounded both externally (they knew only their own valley) and internally (the fenced-in dwelling house was the centre of the settlement structure). After the Second World War, however, the valley was ‘opened’: schools were established and some younger Yupno left their valley to visit the cities of Madang and Lae. This experience of the ‘outside world’ changed the mental image of their own settlement territory. When asked to draw their own area, i.e. to externalise their mental image in the sense of Piaget, the Yupno without ‘outside’-experience (the old men and the children without school education) drew a closed, usually oval world with the Yupno river at its centre (the valley as the ‘world’), whereas those who had ‘outside’-experience drew an open, rectangular map laden with details.     

Lower and middle paleolithic of northern Asia: Achievements,problems, and perspectives

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the study of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic of northern Asia. There is growing evidence for initial human occupation before 700,000 years ago—as early as elsewhere in Asia—and for a very early adaptation to the arctic desert environment. New models of Lower Paleolithic settlement involve expansion and reduction of occupation in response to climatic variation, rather than simple colonization followed by steady occupation. The Middle Paleolithic of northern Asia is better documented, including actual finds of archaicHomo sapiens. The transition to the Upper Paleolithic seems to involve the survival of earlier cultural traits, but the mechanisms and processes are not well understood. Further significant knowledge concerning these periods awaits the development of common methodologies for classification and analysis.     

Naming,Mnemonics, and the Poetics of Knowing in Vula'a Oral Traditions

For the Vula'a people of south‐eastern Papua New Guinea names are a way of knowing that is intimately linked to a particular mode of being. The ethnography of Vula'a naming practices presented here, and an analysis of their stories – traditionally known as rikwana – suggests that names are essential in the Heideggerian sense that they bring the past, present, and future into proximity and thus may be understood as a form of historicity. In certain contexts names are also powerful because they are implicated in the kinds of transformations commonly described by anthropologists as magical. Magical names link knowing and speaking with a vital aspect of Vula'a cosmo‐ontology known as iavu (heat).     

Visiting Tieke Kāainga: the Authenticity of a Maori Welcome

ABSTRACT Whanganui National Park is one of New Zealand's leading tourist attractions. Tieke Kainga (Tieke settlement) is a Department of Conservation camp site in the middle reaches of the river that was occupied in the mid‐1990s by members of Tamahaki an indigenous group who claim that the land was taken from them illegally. Although a modus vivendi currently exists whereby the Department and Maori group co manage the site, Tamahaki's struggle for exclusive ownership of it continues. Part of the strategy they adopted to solidify their claim involves welcoming tourists and government officials to Tieke Kāinga in a manner that accords with Maori tradition. Such welcomes establish dramatically that Tamahaki own Tieke and that the guests formally acknowledge by their participation in the performance that they are visitors. This paper questions the authenticity of the welcomes performed there and concludes that they are real for good reason. Authentic Maori welcomes solidify Tamahaki's occupation of Tieke and broadcast the morality of their claim to the site.     

Piot,Personhood, Place and Mobility in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration of the nature of personhood through the medium of the concept of piot in the Lihir islands, Papua New Guinea. Piot is an embodied experience in response to the movement of others in space. When people leave or arrive at a place and spend the night, others in the area feel unwell. Piot is thus one aspect of the relations between persons. I suggest that ideas of relational personhood are inadequate to fully comprehend piot, and, following LiPuma (1998) and Clay (1986) rather than Strathern (1988), argue that persons in Lihir are more than just relational beings who always act with others in mind. Piot is predicated on the dual themes of fixed sociality and mobility that are important in Lihir as elsewhere in Melanesia (cf Eves 1998; Patterson 2002). Through piot, persons comment on and sanction the movement of others, yet this mobility still occurs.     

REVIEWS

The Introduction of Provincial Government in Papua New Guinea: Lessons from Bougainville. By Diana Conyers. Discussion Paper No. 1. Boroko (Papua New Guinea), New Guinea Research Unit. April, 1975. Pp. 54 + iv. Price: 1 Kina, ($A1).     

A new Pliocene tree kangaroo species (Marsupialia,Macropodinae) from the Chinchilla Local Fauna,southeastern Queensland

A new species of very large tree kangaroo, Bohra wilkinsonorum, is described from a maxillary fragment from the Pliocene Chinchilla Sands of southeastern Queensland. Allocation to Bohra, which has previously been known from postcranial material only, is suggested on the basisof its similar size and stage of evolution to Bohra paulae. Both species of Bohra are plesiomorphic with respect to species of Dendrolagus, and are much larger than any known species of Dendrolagus. This new taxon from Chinchilla has expanded the tree kangaroo record from the Pliocene of southeastern Australia, supporting the hypothesis that the group originated in the late Miocene of ‘mainland’ Australia, finding refuge in north-eastern Queensland and New Guinea as climate became drier in the Quaternary. Fossil tree kangaroos are unknown from the Pliocene of Papua New Guinea where most living species now occur.     

Warrior Women,the Holy Spirit and HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article analyses a group of Gogodala Christian women in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea who are referred to as ‘Warrior women’ and who pray, sing and call upon the Holy Spirit to cleanse their own bodies and ‘turn their eyes’, so that they are able to see those who threaten the health and well‐being of the wider community. These women have focused primarily on bringing male practitioners of magic — iwai dala — shadowy and powerful men who operate covertly and away from the gaze of others, out into the open. Whilst this has been happening for many years, the spread of HIV and AIDS into the area, fuelled by what many in the area believe is the rise of unrestrained female and male sexuality and the waning of Christian practice and principles, has meant that those perceived to bring harm to the community through their sexual behaviour have become recent targets for Warrior women. HIV/AIDS, referred to in Gogodala as melesene bininapa gite tila gi — the ‘sickness without medicine’ — is understood as a hidden sickness, one that makes its way through the community without trace until people become visibly ill. Warrior women seek to make both AIDS and those who, through their behaviour, encourage or enable its spread more visible. In the process, however, a small number of them are overcome by the Holy Spirit, so much so that they become daeledaelenapa — mad ‐ their behaviour increasingly characterised by childishness and uncontrolled sexuality.     

Elaboration of a settlement system: the New England village in the federal period

Contemporary New England villages arose as nineteenth-century central places. The emergence of these commercial places reflected not the creation of something new out of whole cloth but an elaboration of an existing settlement system, a legacy of the colonial period and a manifestation of long-standing cultural habit. Town centers, more or less equally spaced and comprised of little more than a meetinghouse and a tavern, served as foci for town activities, as auxiliary central places. Most of the considerable localized economic exchange that characterized the colonial period occurred at dispersed places. The emergence of true central places about colonial town centers in the federal period marked a shift in scale or a general and widespread development of extra-local exchange, division of labor, and provision of centrality—the ability of a place to provide goods and services beyond the needs of its residents. Central places became accretions of full-time nonfarmers, of storekeepers, artisans, and professional people. Moreover, these places were interlinked to form a system of central places and, although a sorting process took place, the system was both a material manifestation of contemporary economic experience and an elaboration of the colonial settlement system.     

Fathers and sons: preparing noble youths to be lords in twelfth-century Germany

The most prominent noble lineages of the twelfth-century German empire drew much of their authority from scattered collections of heritable rights and properties, a state of affairs that led each family to exercise its lordship in a unique manner. As a result, it was important for the success of a lineage that heirs understood the diverse administrative, political, diplomatic and military foundations of their family's power before they came into their inheritance. This article argues on the basis of evidence from several leading noble houses — including the Staufen, Welf, Zähringen, Wittelsbach, Andechs and Wettin — that fathers played an essential role in the training of their sons to succeed and inherit. For the noble heirs of twelfth-century Germany, therefore, the period in life known as youth was principally a time of instruction and preparation. Models of youth that emphasise the adventurousness and rebelliousness of noble sons during the central middle ages are therefore insufficient for explaining father-son relationships within the imperial nobility.     

REVIEWS

Collective Violence. Edited by James F. Short, Jr., and Marvin E. Wolfgang. Ancient Polynesian Society. By Irving Goldman. New Guinea Highlands Pidgin: Course Materials. By S. A. Wurm. Materials in New Guinea Pidgin (Coastal and Lowlands). By Don Laycock. Land Tenure and Economic Development. Problems and Policies in Papua-New Guinea and Kenya. Marion M. Ward (editor).     

Assessing the cities of Messenia in the newly-founded Greek Kingdom: the medieval walled town of Koroni based on early nineteenth-century architectural plans

Abstract

The article examines the fortifications and the settlement of Venetian and Ottoman Koroni (it. Coron), through the accurate record of early nineteenth century engineers of the newly-established Greek Kingdom. The basic plan was conducted in 1835 by the military engineer Metaxas, who recorded all the buildings, their function and current owners, including a proposal for the urban re-planning of the city. His work proved its usefulness, since an exact copy was made in 1856 by lieutenant colonel Manitakis. It was supplemented by a second plan produced in 1842 by the surveyor Friedrich Zerse who focused on the settlement beyond the walls. These plans are set within the framework of the administration's endeavours to assess and reorganize the cities of Messenia following wider town-planning aspirations and policies.     

Seeking Personhood: Anthropological Accounts and Local Concepts in Mount Hagen,Papua New Guinea

Terms such as person, self, and individual have been deployed with varying success either as a set or separately to encompass cross-cultural contexts of human action and experience. The difficulties involved in using these terms as tools of cross-cultural analysis suggest that a concentration on indigenous terms and their applications is preferable. In the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea the most significant organizing concept in this domain is that of noman, variously glossed as mind, consciousness, intention, will, social sentiment, and understanding. The idea of the noman is thus an ontology in and of action that engages personhood with history and biography in contemporary lives among the Hagen or Melpa people. The noman is seen as in a continuous process of differentiation and change over a lifetime, and it encompasses ideas of process, incompletion/completion, relationality, individuality, character, creativity, and identity. Two different life-history narratives are used to show how people seek their personhood over time. We interpret their narratives as stories of how they attempt to achieve ‘a strong noman’. They monitor their own successes and failures in contexts of change and turbulence in their lives with reference to their overall wishes and ideals, and this corresponds to an assessment of the state of their noman.     

Chinese in Rabaul —1921 to 1942: Normal practices,or containing the yellow Peril? ∗

Abstract

Chinese men were brought to New Guinea initially by the German New Guinea Company as labourers on plantations. The climate, harsh working conditions and disease reduced their numbers drastically. The sporadic flow of labourers soon stopped, but Chinese were brought to New Guinea by the Company and — later — by the German Administration as artisans and domestic servants. Most returned to China but some remained to become small traders. Hard work and determination to succeed saw many become a threat to European, enterprises. The German and subsequently Australian Administrations were urged to restrict their entry and control their enterprises. At the same time European attitudes prevalent in Southeast Asian colonies were transplanted to New Guinea. Chinese were seen as desirable, if not essential, but were kept at a social level between local villagers and the colonisers. Their status was clearly shown when European, but not Chinese, women and children were evacuated at the threat of Japanese invasion. Many suffered unspeakable treatment by the Japanese and their abandonment by Australia rankled throughout the post‐war years.     

Singing about the Land among the Biangai

This paper examines Biangai (Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea) expressions and transformations of environmental imaginaries through women's mourning songs (yongo ingi) and the songs of string bands. Biangai personhood, once intimately connected to garden lands and trees, hunting and forest paths, is increasingly influenced by global capitalism. Through their songs, they betray an increased tension between acting as an individual person and acting in terms of kin based relationality. While yongo ingi still memorialize the social spaces and land rights of the deceased, they also express conflicts in Biangai engagement with gold mining. Biangai string bands emerged just prior to Papua New Guinea's Independence in 1975, with the first band recording and releasing a national cassette in 1982. Dominated by young men, they depict the intersection of local music with a Melanesian modernity composed of compensation payments, gold mining, love, travel, and marketing. Both yongo ingi and string bands inform each other and provide insight into how local music engages images of both global economy and global ecology. By examining the uses, meanings, and performative contexts of these songs, this paper contributes to our understanding of the role of such expressive forms in connecting persons and their environment.     

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF CARD PLAYING AMONG THE DAULO

While most Daulo people in Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea gamble at cards, there is disagreement about the acceptability of this activity. Organized opposition to card-playing comes from two sources that, in other contexts, are at odds with each other: the wok meri (‘women's work‘) movement and the Village Court. Both criticize card-playing as individualistic, economically unproductive, and unpredictable. Gambling at cards contributes to differences in individual wealth and the Daulo are ambivalent about inequality. While they strongly approve of competition, they believe that it should be harnessed for the good of the group, not just the individual. The tension between these sometimes conflicting values is expressed by the polarity of Daulo people's strong attraction to card games and the organized opposition that gambling elicits from wok meri and the Village Court.