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.     

‘Turning Sex into a Game’: Gogodala Men's Response to the AIDS Epidemic and Condom Promotion in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Rugby league is the national sport of Papua New Guinea and the game's huge popularity and international profile has been used in recent condom promotion campaigns in the nation's fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I argue that the promotion of condom use through rugby league requires a national campaign strategy that includes understandings of condom use and masculinity at the rural level. I demonstrate this through a study of Gogodala men's understandings of the epidemic and condom use in Western Province. The Gogodala are a Christian‐based society and many blame the national condom promotion strategy for an increase in promiscuity and for ‘turning sex into a game’. Condom availability in this rural area continues to be restricted to a family planning program that promotes Christian values and excludes unmarried men. I explore the male condom dilemma where young men are more concerned with avoiding accusations that their sexual behaviour puts them at risk of contracting HIV despite acknowledging the preventative value of using condoms. In this context young men disassociate themselves from the disease and condom use through a process of calculated risk or risk minimisation.     

‘Fighting from the fields’: developing the British ‘National Farm’ in the Second World War

The Second World War had a profound impact on British Agriculture, with state intervention at an unprecedented level cementing the idea of a ‘National Farm’ in both the popular and the governmental psyche. Critical attention has recently begun to refocus on this period, adding to the somewhat celebratory meta-narratives written in the official histories. Drawing from the practice of micro-historical research and recent work in geography that seeks to understand the production of the landscape ‘from within’, this paper explores how ‘small stories’ can afford an appreciation of the ‘complications of everyday existence’ and bring greater depth, nuance and understanding to these ‘larger’ historical events and their influence on the British countryside. Utilising oral histories from farms in Devon (UK), the paper explores the micro-geographies which shaped as well as destabilised the national farm message as it was translated into the local context.     

The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.     

Being and ‘Non-Being’ in Ambonwari (Papua New Guinea) Ritual

By focusing on children involved in the ritual practices in Ambonwari village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, this essay compares two types of ritual: that of healing and that of male initiation. Like other life crisis rituals both deal with two dimensions of the Ambonwari life-world, that is with the living and the dead and, in a broader sense, with people and spirits. Though both are based upon the same cosmology there are fundamental differences between them. First, healers in healing ceremonies treat uninitiated children as ‘non-beings’. From the perspective of Ambonwari ‘selves’ or ‘beings’, children belong to this domain. They exist as extensions of their parents or carers, from whom they cannot be separated conceptually. Second, by examining the Ambonwari concepts of negation I show that healers do not approach the domain of cosmological non-existence: they are not concerned with the cosmogony of the Ambonwari life-world. The male initiation rituals do just the opposite, however. It is only in the male initiation ritual, seen as a cosmogonic event, that young boys are cut off from their parents and ‘thrown’ abruptly into a state of becoming. Unlike the healing rites, these rituals treat young boys as both Ambonwari beginnings and Ambonwari beings. I argue that Ambonwari initiation rituals are not concerned with symbolic death followed by rebirth, but with states of being. Initiation means that death becomes possible for a child. The initiated boy will now be able to die as an Ambonwari being.     

Josephine's Journey: Gender‐based Violence and Marian Devotion in Urban Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang, Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender‐based violence. While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women living in Madang, this article shows how Mary empowers her followers to resist violence, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, is instrumental in sanctioning women to tolerate violence. Josephine's ‘journey of violence’ reveals not only Josephine's turning to Mary, but more so, her negotiations with values belonging to different cultural logics. Caught between ‘tradition’, Christianity and ‘modernity’, Josephine and other Catholic women engage in painful processes of self‐analysis and self‐transformation to adapt to and change their situation. In these processes, Mary is used as a role model.     

Neither ‘New Melanesian History’ nor ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’: Recovering Emplaced Matrilineages in Southeast Solomon Islands

ABSTRACT For two decades, Melanesianists have sought to reconcile what Robert Foster (1995) termed the ‘New Melanesian History’ and the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’. The former describes historically oriented studies that critique representations of Melanesian custom as recent objectifications of strategically positioned discourses and practices. The latter describes culturally oriented, particularist studies that characterize Melanesian sociality as an undifferentiated plane of being without integral a priori units; on every scale, human agency must individuate persons and collectivities by means of ‘fraction’, ‘de‐conception’, and ‘decomposition’. In this article I present data from Solomon Islands that resist analysis in terms of an unqualified both/and synthesis of these orientations. Specifically, I argue that articulations of matrilineal connections to land among the Arosi of Makira are neither merely postcolonial reifications of custom nor historically conditioned ‘depluralizations’ from an always pre‐constituted social pleroma. Through historically situated case studies, I show how Arosi land disputes both reproduce and revalue matrilineally defined categories, each understood as the humanized continuation of an autonomous primordial essence. Recognition of the continuing importance of these categories among Arosi highlights what the New Melanesian Ethnography has obscured: that some Melanesians confront a historically transforming problem of how pre‐existent parts fit together to make up social totalities.     

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.     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

‘Smoke in the Hills,Gunfire in the Valley’: War and Peace in Western Highlands,Papua New Guinea

The paper discusses accounts of recent tribal fighting and peacemaking processes in the Nebilyer Valley, Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea. My analysis is based on interviews conducted in January 2000 with Ganiga, and other peoples, who featured in Connolly and Anderson's film ‘Black Harvest’. I examine different strategies of peacemaking and peacekeeping employed in relation to the Nebilyer war, particularly the efforts of local Christian church representatives. I also explore how people in the Nebilyer Valley, construct particular events as significant, and the relevance of these constructions in processes of peace making.     

In the Long ‘Run’: Kanak Stockmen,the Cattle Frontier and Colonial Power Relations in New Caledonia, 1870–1988

ABSTRACT For more than a century, from the 1870s to the 1980s, stockmen were important intermediaries and figures of power and influence in the construction, maintenance and renewal of the colonial order in New Caledonia. Social relations between Kanak and settlers working in the cattle ‘runs’ permitted a unique form of mobility spanning the frontier. The relations developed between chiefs and cattle farmers are central to the processes by which certain administrative chieftaincies emerged in the late‐nineteenth century, and by which Kanak entered the ‘political’ sphere in the second half of the twentieth century. With reference to the locality of Koné, this article traces the political alliances fashioned between Kanak stockmen and their employers in the context of colonisation, rebellion, evangelisation, post‐war political emancipation, local development and, finally, the struggle between supporters and opponents of independence in the 1980s.     

From Blood to Oil: Mining,Cosmology, and Human Sacrifice in Central New Guinea

This article explores the intersection between cosmological history and mining geography among the Oksapmin of West Sepik Province. I show that the recent intrusion of mining activity into the local area has catalysed a revival of indigenous religious traditions to explain the occurrence and ownership of the precious materials believed to exist within the ground. Through an analysis of these parts of local cosmological history used to explain contemporary mining, I also seek to ethnographically and historically position the Oksapmin as a hybrid culture mutually influenced by the intersection of two overlapping regional cultural spheres: the Min cultural region, based on the ancestress Afek to the west, and a western highlands model based on sacrificial ritual to restore the vitality of the biocosmos, to the east. This builds upon earlier research done by anthropologists in the area that, on the one hand, portrays the Oksapmin as an anomalous ethnic group in the Min culture area and, on the other hand, that has stressed links between groups lying on either side of the upper Strickland Gorge. I also argue that the Oksapmin, Duna, and Bimin groups all shared a unique trans‐Strickland cosmological identity characterised by the pursuit of world renewal by means of human sacrifice.     

Geopolitics of gender and violence ‘from below’

This article examines geopolitical violence, gender and political constructions of scale from the site of the body to international discourse and politics. The political constructions of scale and body-politics analyzed in this study draw on feminist and political geographic analysis and an empirical study of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This study includes an examination of state, military and paramilitary violence from below as articulated through the lens of RAWA's documentation and political framing. RAWA clandestinely used photographic and video technologies to document the corporeal results of state/military violence and politically constructed scale by way of linking this violence to international discourses and political action. A number of opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls are identified as part of RAWA's geopolitics of violence from below. The post 9-11-01 U.S.-led military invasion of Afghanistan demonstrates a significant shift in the management and manipulation of RAWA's documentation. Both the U.S. and RAWA politically constructed scale and drew upon western-led “universal” moralities and human/women's rights discourses for alternative purposes. This paper also discusses the use of gender politics and its various manipulations to resist, criminalize, or legitimize the use of violence in the name of human/women's rights.     

Unpacking the ‘Emergent Farmer’ Concept in Agrarian Reform: Evidence from Livestock Farmers in South Africa

South Africa has historically perpetuated a dual system of freehold commercial and communal subsistence farming. To bridge these extremes, agrarian reform policies have encouraged the creation of a class of ‘emergent’, commercially oriented farmers. However, these policies consider ‘emergent’ farmers as a homogeneous group of land reform beneficiaries, with limited appreciation of the class differences between them, and do little to support the rise of a ‘middle’ group of producers able to bridge that gap. This article uses a case study of livestock farmers in Eastern Cape Province to critique the ‘emergent farmer’ concept. The authors identify three broad categories of farmers within the emergent livestock sector: a large group who, despite having accessed private farms, remain effectively subsistence farmers; a smaller group of small/medium‐scale commercial producers who have communal farming origins and most closely approximate to ‘emergent’ farmers; and an elite group of large‐scale, fully commercialized farmers, whose emergence has been facilitated primarily by access to capital and a desire to invest in alternative business ventures. On this basis the authors suggest that current agrarian reform policies need considerable refocusing if they are to effectively facilitate the emergence of a ‘middle’ group of smallholder commercial farmers from communal systems.     

Roads to Inequality: Infrastructure and Historically Grown Regional Differences in the Markham Valley,Papua New Guinea

Roads are one of the most salient symbols of development and modernity for rural citizens of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Multinational corporations, members of parliament, and villagers frequently point to roads as a key to development. However, while roads routinely improve the incomes of those connected, many of their effects are far less scrutable. Here, we examine the economic and social consequences of two roads, the Wau‐Bulolo Highway and Highlands Highway, for two villages in PNG's Morobe Province, and consider the processes that make their outcomes so different. Tracing the history of the two highways and considering a contrasting pair of case‐studies, we explore how roads simultaneously bolster income and drive interregional economic divergence. We demonstrate how the spatial and historical contexts the Highways run through, coupled with the relationships of patronage and dependence they rely on, produce contingent social outcomes and shape local ambivalence towards the outcomes of roads.     

The ‘Global’ versus the ‘Local’: Cognitive Processes of Kin Determination in Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT Morgan and his informants' interpretation of Australian social categories as ‘marriage classes’ has survived in Dumont's (and Viveiros de Castro's) distinction of a ‘local’ (Dravidian systems) and a ‘global’ (Australian systems) formula. This paper explains that the ‘global formula’ is neither a necessary nor an applied device in Australian kin category determination, even when genealogical memory is short and when there is a non‐limitation of range in the extension of categories. Instead, a heuristic model, which is called the relational triangle, is proposed. This model depicts the procedure through which Australian people pragmatically determine and extend kin categories. Moreover, it also offers a visualisation of the cognitive schema and processes framing discourse and behaviour in relation to kinship and draws some parallels with Greenberg's hypotheses on markedness in kinship classes.