Number‐One Enemy: Police,Violence and the Location of Adversaries in a Papua New Guinean Prison.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I aim to explore how prisoners at Bomana in PNG, in the period I was there between 1994–1995, figured the violence of police. This includes an examination of what they understand to be state power and what they take to be their response to it, including the possibility of critique. Do inmates at Bomana recognize a scale shift between state and citizen, between law and violence? If so, when? How do they relate the actions of the Constabulary to their own violent behaviour and to the forceful or violent behaviour of others? These questions will be approached through the notion of enmity. In particular, by a discussion of what inmates mean when they label the police their ‘number‐one enemy’.     

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.     

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).     

‘Talking Itself Out of a Political Future’: Education and Australian Army Engagement with Papua New Guinean Independence, 1966–72

The Australian Army, while having a long association with Papua New Guinea after the Second World War and before independence in 1975, is often conceptualized as a small player in the decolonization process, of interest to scholars because of its cost and potential threat to democratic government. This article examines the Army’s education programme and associated policies in the decade before independence to argue that the institution was acutely aware of looming decolonization, and actively sought to create a national Papua New Guinean military by repurposing policies originally designed to serve Australia’s defence needs, in particular through ‘civic’ education. It embarked on this path without direction from the Department of Territories. While the results of ‘civic’ education are difficult to determine, this article shows that the Australian Army was engaged in the profound shifts occurring around it in Papua New Guinea.     

Macropodines from the Pliocene Otibanda Formation,Papua New Guinea

Newly collected material of macropodines from the Otibanda Formation, P.N.G., includes previously unknown elements from described taxa, as well as material of a new and plesiomorphic macropodine, Watutia novaeguineae gen. et. sp. nov. Known only from adult upper and lower cheek tooth rows, this species shows a close similarity to undescribed macropodines of Tertiary age from northwestern Queensland and Hadronomas puckridgi from the Miocene of the Northern Territory, Australia. The upper molar row assigned to Dorcopsis sp. by Plane (1967), but regarded to be more closely related to Dendrolagus by Woodburne (1967), is here interpreted to be closer in morphology to species of Dorcopsis than Dendrolagus.     

Family Man: The Papua New Guinean Children of D. Carleton Gajdusek.

ABSTRACT The name Carleton Gajdusek is familiar to many scholars and those otherwise interested in Pacific anthropology and history. Yet while much has been written about Gajdusek's work on kuru and his achievements in science, little is known about his unusual family life. Addressing this gap, this article examines Gajdusek's adoption of sixteen Papua New Guinean children from among the Fore and Anga peoples. These children form part of Gajdusek's large family adopted from the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Micronesia. Drawing on Gajdusek's extensive personal journals and interviews with his friends, colleagues and children, the paper refutes arguments which explain the adoptions through reference to Gajdusek's sexuality or humanitarianism, demonstrating rather that Gajdusek adopted the PNG children primarily because he wanted to create a family. Highlighting some of the ways in which Melanesian models of kinship suited Gajdusek's preference for an extended family, the article addresses an under‐researched aspect of the life of this important twentieth century figure.     

Christian Marriage,Money Scams,and Melanesian Social Imaginaries

In this paper, we draw on fieldwork with middle‐class investors in ‘fast money schemes’ (Ponzi scams) to consider how Neo‐Pentecostal Christianity may be mediating social and economic change in Papua New Guinea, particularly in relation to gender equality. Ideas of companionate marriage and the cultivation of an affective self imply masculinities that are more sensitive and less domineering. As these images of fulfilled modernity flow out from Pentecostal churches into broader Papua New Guinean society, they corroborate Taylor's theory of how change occurs within the modern social imaginary.     

Kabit,Rimbu and Opa: Modalities of Anganen Sacrifice1

ABSTRACT At the time of colonisation and missionisation that quickly saw their abandonment, the Anganen practised two male exclusive cults in which animals were sacrificed in the hope of influencing powerful spirits. One cult, kabit, was only staged to overcome serious affliction thought to be sent by the spirits to individuals of subclans or women married into them. That is, it was a reaction to spirit power. The other cult, rimbu, while practised in response to widespread problems of humans, pigs and gardens, was also undertaken in the hope of increased health and productivity, and thus a possible action as well as a reaction. The paper describes and compares the cults. One major theme is male empowerment, as rimbu not only underwrites male power over others, it is also about empowerment to act on the world as well. While obviously radically different in many respects, at least in local consciousness, the adoption of opa, the giving of money, produce and labour to the church, has resonance with the pre‐colonial situation. Mostly it is undertaken to please what the Anganen see as a vengeful God based on Old Testament stories. However, on occasions such as the lead up to the yasolu pork distribution, the most prestigious event in Anganen, big men may ostentatiously present large gifts of money to missionaries or men may purchase cattle to slaughter, cook and distribute their meat on the opening of new churches. Both instances are beyond emulation by most in the community and, like rimbu may be, venues for male empowerment.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Mekeo Chiefs and Sorcerers: Metaphor,Ideology and Practice

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates two English expressions used by Michelle Stephen to translate the Mekeo terms lopia and ungaunga, traditionally rendered as “chief” (or “peace chief”) and “sorcerer” (Seligman 1910; Hau'ofa 1971, 1981; Mosko 1985). Stephen suggests that more “literal” translations are “man of kindness” and “man of sorrow”. I argue that the expressions proposed are only literal if we accept postulated etymologies based on Stephen's reading of the Desnoës Mekeo‐French Dictionary (1941) and a grammatical analysis Stephen puts forward as unproblematic. I use authentic texts from Desnoës and my own grammar of Mekeo to challenge Stephen's suggested translations, and suggest that the use of conventional labels for key cultural terms is preferable to searching for non‐existent “literal” meanings. More generally, I discuss the use of etymologies that are unverifiable, and often from a linguistic viewpoint unlikely, in ethnographies of the Mekeo and to some extent elsewhere. I outline linguistic processes whereby metaphors and other associative tropes rapidly become conventionalized, and lexical items become grammaticalized. I evaluate the role of metaphor and metonymy in the formation of concepts and belief systems, and sketch an interpretative framework capable of accounting for the different effects and uses of polysemy and homonymy.     

Logging,Violence and Pleasure: Neoliberalism,Civil Society and Corporate Governance in West New Britain

ABSTRACT The postcolonial world of Melanesia is made up of diverse experiments, which combine modern and customary technologies of power into new hybrid assemblages. In the 1990s, there occurred a proliferation of landowner companies in rural New Britain. This happened in a context of neoliberalism where the state divested itself of many functions and services by allocating these to a supposedly more efficient private sector. In the Kaliai area, this new economic partnership between state and capital gave rise to more militarised forms of policing, which sought to protect logging by a large Malaysian company from growing local unrest. Supplementing these coercive state actions were private strategies, which used sorcery to intimidate opponents to logging as well as rivals within the landowner company. Opponents were bought off and alliances created through using customary exchange relations as well as through modern gifts of money, western goods and commoditised pleasures.     

‘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.     

A landscape of powers in Highland Papua,C. 1899-1918

The article proposes that anthropologists and historians attend to a 'landscape of powers' to understand the ways colonial and mission projects become actualised in on-going social relations. An expanding body of scholarship for the Melanesian region has focused on the way missionaries and colonial agents, as much as the diverse Melanesian peoples, attain power through rendering persons and places in specific forms. This is documented here for Fuyuge-speakers relations with colonial and mission projects during their early phase. Although the forms and consequences of power among each--Fuyuge, colonial, mission--is different, attention is devoted to the resultant and emerging patterns of these long-standing interactions and interventions. In particular, the article maintains that when such projects become locally actualised a landscape of powers is established. A landscape of powers is the multiply constituted arrangement of persons and places in an historical and ethnographically delineated context.     

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.     

The Garden and Beyond: the Dry Season,the Ok Tedi Shutdown,and the Footprint of the 2015 El Niño Drought

This paper offers a snapshot of the 2015 El Niño drought among Min people in Papua New Guinea's West Sepik and Western Provinces. Local assessments of food, water, and health show variation between locations, but with an overall tendency for the drought's effects to spread from lower to higher elevations as the drought progresses. This zone is in the hinterland of the Ok Tedi Mine, and the drought's regional impact was intensified by Ok Tedi's abrupt closure when low water in the Fly River stopped shipments of concentrate and cut off fuel and food supplies. The decision to close the mine was accompanied by the mandatory ‘repatriation’ of workers and their families to ‘home’ communities in the drought‐stricken hinterland. This, combined with deteriorating regional links, has eroded the capacity of Min communities to weather the drought, suggesting that we must look beyond the garden when calculating El Niño's costs.     

Brideprice and Prejudice: An Audio-Visual Ethnography on Marriage and Modernity in Mt Hagen,Papua New Guinea

The relationship between bridewealth and women's autonomy is not only discussed amongst anthropologists, development practitioners and other scholars but also amongst brides themselves. Women continue to embrace such marital exchanges, despite their knowledge of ‘modern’ development discourse about the constraints of the practice on women's status and its links to gender-based violence. This paper provides a visual exploration of contemporary brideprice practices and women's autonomy in Mt Hagen. We draw on scenes from our ethnographic film (An Extraordinary Wedding: Marriage and Modernity in Highlands PNG) to explore deliberations and developments that occurred in the case of a particular marriage that took place in 2012. We argue that the institution of brideprice has the potential to enhance the visibility of some women and the importance of their contribution to their own and husbands' kin groups. Despite current tensions regarding brideprice, it can serve as an avenue for the enhancement of women's political participation. The particular brideprice exchange featured in our film, raised concerns for the participants, which we consider in terms of three questions: Does brideprice commodify women? Does it play a role in gender-based violence? Is it inimical to aspirations for modernist individuality? We discuss the importance of bekim (‘return gift’) and suggest that this practice challenges the notion of brideprice as a commodity transaction. We argue that, while there may be an association between brideprice and gender-based violence, brideprice, in and of itself, is not causative of violence. The marriage represented in the film, and discussed in this paper, reveals the creativity of participants in adjusting the values inherent in the customary practice of brideprice to their contemporary aspirations.     

Epilogue: Homegrown in PNG — Rural Responses to HIV and AIDS

ABSTRACT A three‐years‐long, multi‐sited, multi‐method study conducted throughout Papua New Guinea by the Institute of Medical Research revealed a staggering prevalence of sexually transmitted disease (STD) that threatens an already fragile political‐economy and health services delivery system. Logistics, methodological complexities, and political and especially religious sensitivities hampered conduct of such research. Extremely little HIV social research has been allowed to inform interventions or serosurveillance protocols. Well‐ intended but ill‐conceived international initiatives have promoted a normative AIDS paradigm that misconstrues HIV transmission risk, incites greater fear, increases stigma, and promotes anti‐condom rhetoric. This collection ‘HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea’ presents a sustained series of ethnographically based accounts of rural responses. In this epilogue I situate the importance of those responses in a discussion of the great divide between the lived realities of HIV infection and AIDS related suffering on the one hand, and the discursive practices and policies of media, public health, international donors and NGOs on the other.     

Re-analysing the Baining: The Mytho-Poetics of Race,Gender and Art

This article criticises primitivist caricatures of the Baining in Melanesia as a society that lacks exegesis, symbolic logics, religion, structures of power and control, and even an interest in play. The mytho-poetics of gender and procreation in Mali Baining society are documented by focusing on how art and sexuality are traced onto each other. The formative power of painting, barkcloth, dancing masks, netbags and music are merged with the formative power of women. Art and sexuality are made to inform each other's generative potential, and even each other's aesthetic charm. These fertile mytho-poetic practices also underpin Mali political practices. Mali indigenous identity is celebrated as local control over the original powers of creation, which continue to reside in the earth, in the local landscape and, above all, in that which underpins all creation, women's procreative bodies with their creative potential to bring forth something new. The Mali localise creative processes so as to empower and revalue themselves within a culture of resistance to the hegemony of colonialism, modernity, settlers and regional ethnic elites.