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.     

Narokobi’s Melanesian Philosophy in the Papua New Guinean Legal System

ABSTRACT

Bernard Narokobi dedicated his career as a law reformer, jurist and parliamentarian to making Papua New Guinea’s legal system a catalyst for a distinctively Melanesian philosophy. This philosophy, ‘the Melanesian Way’, emphasized Papua New Guineans’ embeddedness within their local social worlds, including spirits and the natural environment. The legal foundation for the Melanesian Way was set down in the National Goals and Directive Principles and Basic Social Obligations, which are stated in the Preamble to the Constitution of Papua New Guinea. These make the ideals of social justice, participatory democracy, national sovereignty and sustainable development a legal aspiration and an impetus for formally recognizing the social forms that Papua New Guinean people themselves experience as providing order in their lives. Legislation that Narokobi promoted over the course of his career offered practical mechanisms for operationalizing these ideals in accordance with their original constitutional foundation.     

The Threefold Logic of Papua‐Melanesia: Constitution‐writing in the Margins of the Indonesian Nation‐State

Clashes over the status of West Papua and the political future of the territory proliferated markedly following the end of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998. Amid a wide variety of demands for justice and independence, and a series of demonstrations, mass gatherings and prayers, only a few Papuans mused on how Papua could become a state and what would constitute its nature as being distinctly Papuan and/or Melanesian. One exception is the work put into the Constitution for West Papua entitled Basic Guidelines, State of West Papua, a document edited by Don A.L. Flassy, a bureaucrat, writer and thinker, with a preface by late Theys H. Eluay, then chairman of the Papuan Council. In this article I analyse this Constitution to show how a combination of Christianity and local customs, and a mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation building and symbols of the Indonesian nation‐state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian nation‐building agendas. The Constitution shows that when Papuans imagine an independent state, forms of vernacular legality play a central role. ‘The state’ has journeyed to Papua and encouraged faith in ‘the law,’ and Basic Guidelines is partly the effect of this growing vernacular legality. My analysis shows that it is essential to see how legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems and practices – in particular Christianity and custom (adat) – and how they mutually allow for and invite strategies.     

Petztorme Women: Responding to Change in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

The goldmining project on Lihir Island in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea, has brought dramatic socio‐economic changes. In this matrilineal society, while women's economic contributions were substantial, their political status was not. Women's participation in decision‐making about the mine has been restricted, mainly because men have excluded them. The mining company established a women's section that has supported the development of women's organizations and a range of economic development projects. The women's organizations provide the context for new political roles for women but have experienced many setbacks that are common in such groups across Papua New Guinea. Through the Lihir experience in the first five years of the mine, this paper examines the tensions and divided loyalties that constrain women's organizations and often lead to the failure of income‐generating women's projects in Papua New Guinea.     

Anthropology and the Artifacts of Medical Practice

Brown, Paula. Beyond a Mountain Valley: The Simbu of Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. xix + 296 pp. including notes, glossary, bibliography, and index. $36.00 cloth.

Tuzin, Donald. The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xiii + 256 pp. including notes, maps, references, and index. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Biersack, Aletta, ed. Papuan Borderlands: Huli, Duna, and Ipili Perspectives on the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. xiv + 440 pp. including collected bibliography, other works cited, and index. $59.50 cloth.     

Preservation of and Access to South Seas Photographs

In August 2001, in a constitutional reform of potentially far-reaching consequences, Papua New Guinea's parliament voted to change the country's electoral system. As a result of this decision, all elections held after 2002 will be conducted under a system of preferential voting. A similar system was used for Papua New Guinea's first three elections between 1964 and 1972, before the change to a first-past-the-post system at independence in 1975. This paper, drawing on a combination of historical records, election studies and recent observations, looks at the historical impact of both electoral systems in Papua New Guinea, and at the different kinds of political behaviour encouraged by them, including their divergent influences upon election campaigning, candidature rates, support levels for successful candidates, electoral violence and the party system. It concludes by examining the potential consequences of a return to preferential voting in Papua New Guinea.     

Keeping the Network out of view: Mining,Distinctions and Exclusion in Melanesia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the ‘property effects’ surrounding competition over access to mining benefits in Papua New Guinea. Under conditions of rapid social change engendered by large scale resource extraction, Lihirian islanders have increasingly recalibrated their social networks, manifest through shifting notions of sociality and obligation, and ownership strategies that seek to limit other people's claims to wealth. These local changes are paralleled by larger and more paradoxical processes: although the state uses the mining project to consolidate itself, Lihirians have consistently challenged the state through their attempts to appropriate the mine for their own ends. By keeping the multiple layers of their social networks out of view, Lihirians deny the connections that can provide others with access to benefits. In considering the strategic responses to the inequalities, discontents and inconsistencies of life in modern Papua New Guinea, it becomes apparent that questions of property are simultaneously questions about identity and belonging.     

Kamapim gutpela man: Papua New Guinean and Chinese refinery workers' changing understandings of becoming a good man

This article adds to research on emerging masculinities in the Pacific by analysing how Papua New Guinean and Chinese male employees' intercultural work experiences impact their perceptions of becoming a good man. The idea of a good man acts as a benchmark for assessing the adaptability of Papua New Guinean employees to new work environments and determining if Chinese colleagues are their desired partners. I illustrate this point by first considering ‘becoming’ as an alternate framework to the binary framework reflected in earlier research. I next describe how Papua New Guinean workers impress their Chinese supervisors through negotiations and concessions about industrial and subsistence farming time, as well as how working with Papua New Guinean workers alters Chinese employees' perceptions of work. Finally, I demonstrate how employment practices foster Papua New Guinean workers' evolving perspectives on becoming a gutpela man (‘good man’) and Chinese employees' evolving perspectives on becoming a good person, a vital route to becoming a chenggong man (‘successful man’). This article proposes characterizing emerging masculinities as hybrid identities that are context-dependent, interculturally exchanged and temporal by presenting two parties' new thoughts on becoming a good man. This article demonstrates modulatory power dynamics in the Chinese refinery based on a two-way narrative as opposed to portraying Chinese management as the dominating force.     

‘Part of Our Own Story’1: Representations of Indigenous Australians and Papua New Guineans within Australia Remembers 1945–1995 — the Continuing Desire for a Homogeneous National Identity

Throughout 1995 the Australia Remembers 1945–1995 programme sought to commemorate and celebrate Australia's involvement in the Second World War in ways which included all Australians and reflected the continuing potency of the Anzac legend. Indigenous Australians and Papua New Guineans were included in what became, essentially, an exercise in imagining a national past. Their inclusion in the national memory fostered by Australia Remembers 1945–1995 revealed ways in which Indigenous Australians' presence within the nation remains contested. Within Australia Remembers‘ commemorations of Pacific Islanders, Papua New Guineans remained constructed as ‘the other’, in ways which remained in essence colonialist.     

Nupela Masta? Local and Expatriate Labour in a Chinese-Run Nickel Mine in Papua New Guinea 1

Abstract

Studies of mining projects in Papua New Guinea, since the development of the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville during the 1960s, have contributed to our understanding of the politics of interactions between resource companies, host governments and landowners. The Ramu Nickel mine, situated in northern Papua New Guinea, is China’s largest investment in the Pacific to date at US$1.4 billion. The project is managed by a state-owned enterprise, China Metallurgical Corporation, and financed by China ExIm Bank. This venture presents an opportunity to understand Chinese resource investment in a comparative perspective. While many issues, such as conflict over land, internal migration, and the limited involvement of the Papua New Guinean state, are constant, one aspect specific to Chinese resource investment is the use (or non-use) of host country labour, and the high proportion of Chinese labour employed at the mine sites. This practice differs from the relatively limited, short-term use of expatriate labour common to Western mining projects in developing countries. The attitudes and experiences of local and Chinese workers and managers will be examined to determine what is new in this approach to resource extraction.     

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).     

Social Werktreue and the musical work's independent afterlife

New musicology's rejection of formalist precepts eclipses how the subjectivization of aesthetics institutes the schema of music's opposition to reality. Social Werktreue—fidelity to the work and to the faithful reproduction of an original intent—replaces ideals of aesthetic transcendence with analyses of a work's socially constructed meaning. Hence, absolute music's social demystification positions music criticism within a system of oppositions ratified by bourgeois culture. The power individual works exercise in contesting reality deconstructs formalist dogma and social Werktreue. The temporality evinced when works address us in new situations attests to the work's independent afterlife. By confronting formalist criticism and social critique with the schema Kant initiated when he legitimated aesthetic judgment's transcendental function, this independent afterlife argues against transposing the principle of interpretive fidelity onto the social plane. Works reveal dimensions of experience in the midst of existing social and historical conditions, thereby opening new horizons for music criticism.     

The Legacy of Bernard Narokobi and the Melanesian Way

ABSTRACT

This special issue on the life and legacy of Bernard Narokobi documents and contextualizes Narokobi's life and thought. A central figure in Papua New Guinea's transition from Australian territory to independent nation, Narokobi was a jurist, philosopher, and poet who is best remembered for making ‘the Melanesian Way’ an important theme – if not the guiding ideological principle – in the discourse of independence in Papua New Guinea. In looking closely at Narokobi's biography, the collection also contributes to a growing body of work on political life writing in the Pacific. The collection speaks to Narokobi's role as a theorist of Oceanic modernity more broadly, one who deserves a place alongside two other important philosophers of Pacific independence, Epeli Hau‘ofa and Jean-Marie Tjibaou, as one of the main visionaries of Pacific decolonization and Oceanic modernity of the post-war period.     

BOOKS RECEIVED

Hal B. Levine and Marlene Wolfzahn Levine. Urbanization in Papua New Guinea: A Study of Ambivalent Townsmen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 160 pp. $21.50.

T. J. May, ed. Change and Movement: Readings on Internal Migration in Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Australian National University Press, for Papua New Guinea Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research, 1978. xii + 284 pp. $21.95, Aust.     

REVIEWS

Storytracking. Text, stories, and histories in Central Australia. By Sam D Gill . Reason and Passion. Representations of gender in a Malay society. By Michael G. Peletz . They Make Themselves: Work and Play among the Baining of Papua New Guinea By Jane Fajans . Rethinking Visual Anthropology Edited by Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy . Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman and the Samoans. By Martin Orans . Anyan's Story. A New Guinea Woman in Two Worlds. By Virginia Watson . Simbu Plant-Lore: Plants used by the People in the Central Highlands of New Guinea By Joachim Sterly . Vernacular Christianity Among the Mulia Dani: An Ethnography of Religious Belief Among the Western Dani of Irian Jaya. Indonesia. By Douglas James Hayward .     

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).     

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Substantial Justice: An Anthropology of Village Courts in Papua New Guinea by Michael Goddard Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney's Georges River. By Heather Goodall and Alison Cadzow . Contesting Native Title By David Ritter The Native Title Market By David Ritter Melanesian Odysseys: Negotiating the self, narrative and modernity. By Lisette Josephides . Tattooing in the Marshall Islands. By Dirk H. R. Spennemann The Warm Winds of Change: Globalisation in Contemporary Sāmoa. By Cluny and La'avasa Macpherson In God's Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity. By Matt Tomlinson A CRITIQUE: Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability and the Aftermath of Empire. Edited by Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee     

As Basket and Papu: Making Manus Social Fabric

Between 2012 and 2019, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, hosted Australia's offshore detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, known as the Regional Processing Centre (RPC). This paper analyses some of the social impacts of the RPC on Lorengau town, the urban centre of Manus, through the analytical lens of the Manus idiom, as basket (Tok Pisin). Materially this refers to the everyday Manus basket whilst metaphorically, it refers to an individual's or community's social, cultural, political and economic base. First, I examine asylum seekers and refugees as a social category that emerged during this period when they were referred to as papu by locals. Papu is an honorific kinship term for grandfather or elder man; for men who are symbols for family identity, social belonging, and rights to land. Second, I examine the changing materiality of Lorengau's markets as indicative of wider societal transformations and dissonance brought about by the RPC. My ethnographic data are based on long term involvement in Manus, including three recent visits to Lorengau in 2017, 2018, and 2019 where I studied the social impacts and the changing social practices of Manus people in response to the RPC.     

Where Do You Belong? Identity,New Guinea Islanders,and the Power of Peles

Peles is a Melanesian concept related to the grounding of a person's Indigenous origin in a particular place. This notion is especially important in Papua New Guinea where, upon first meeting, people are likely to ask, ‘Where are you from?’ Ascertaining someone's peles enables the rapid establishment between previously unknown people of social connections and obligations, kinship, and identity. Despite the increasing influences of westernisation, globalisation, urbanisation, and migration, peles remains steadfast at the centre of Papua New Guinean social identity construction. This article addresses the current and emerging ways in which people of New Guinea Islander descent – both at ‘home’ or in the diaspora – connect to peles, whether physically or otherwise and details the social politics of these assertions.