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.     

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.     

Migration,myth and magic in Papua New Guinea

The author examines some of the assumptions, classifications, and techniques that affect the study of migration in specific countries. Using migration in Papua New Guinea as an example, he critically reviews the conventional approaches to the study of migration     

Women,Nation and Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea

This paper explores the question of women, decolonisation and nation-building. It argues that the inclusion of women within the nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG) was problematic partly because women had rarely experienced mainstream colonial rule — an experience that elsewhere provided a basis for participation in the post-colonial state. The paper also investigates how women were perceived and represented by male writers at independence. While the Pangu Pati attempted to include women in state-building, these efforts were not adequately supported. PNG's achievement of independence coincided with the globalisation of second-wave feminism, and this was to prove critical for PNG's female citizens in their efforts to be included in the new state, for PNG's membership in the United Nations provided an external push to raise women's participation in the nation. Nevertheless, the government's dependence on international organisations to push the women's agenda also hampered the development of an autonomous women's movement in the country. The paper argues that, for PNG's female citizens, colonisation, independence and decolonisation occurred simultaneously after 1975.     

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’.