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.     

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.     

‘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.     

The Many Sexes of Risk: Gender,Disease, and Identity in the Asia-Pacific Region and Elsewhere

That potential pathogens transit to and through body parts and fluids of densely connected individuals belonging to highly mobile ethnic groups shows how relevant to health is the study of sexual networking. Five recent books show sexual networking has quickened owing to labor migration, poverty, religious double standards, militarism, tourism, and nation building. Gender conventions and sexual practice in Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea have hardened in some contexts and destabilized in others. HIV, HPV, AIDS, and cervical cancer are expressed in gendered and sexed bodies, behaviors, technologies, and ideas that are often situated in violent interpersonal and structural contexts.     

Great Ancestral Women: Sexuality,Gendered Mobility,and HIV among the Bamu and Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

Faced with a potentially devastating epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Papua New Guinea (PNG), sexuality and mobility have become a focus of national research and prevention programs. In Gogodala and Bamu communities in the Western Province, gendered mobility and sexuality intersect with ancestral narratives that form part of a wider series of Hero Tales found in the southern regions of PNG and Irian Jaya. In this paper we highlight the way these stories detail the travels and activities of female ancestors – known as Sagalu among the Bamui and Sawiya among the Gogodala. We outline the way such ancestral figures are now linked to understandings of contemporary STIs such HIV/AIDS as well as gendered mobility and sexuality more generally. Among the Bamu such links are sometimes directly asserted, with Sagalu represented as the origin if not cause of a uniquely defined variant of HIV/AIDS. Among the Gogodala, however, HIV/AIDS is predominantly understood as something external to the Gogodala and unrelated to ancestors like Sawiya. To explain this difference we note that, historically, Gogodala women have been less mobile and less transactable than their Bamu counterparts who have continued to enact unique understandings of the intersection of heterosexual marriage, gendered mobility, and illness. We argue that the mobility and sexuality of gendered ancestors is salient to understanding these contemporary enactments and their potential implications in light of the HIV epidemic in PNG.     

Research and Rhetoric on Women in Papua New Guinea's Village Courts

This paper addresses a recent and popular rhetoric in academic literature that women are discriminated against, often in the name of ‘custom‘, in the male‐dominated village courts of Papua New Guinea. The rhetoric is interrogated with reference to academic research findings and reports since the early days of the legislatively introduced village court system, and to data from the author's own research in recent years. On the basis of these two sources, it is argued that the evidence does not support the rhetoric, and further that the latter does less than justice to grassroots women in Papua New Guinea by portraying them as relatively passive victims of village courts. On the contrary, fieldwork research findings indicate that women are confident and reasonably successful disputants and that village courts are a community‐level resource which is becoming increasingly useful for grassroots women with limited avenues for seeking justice and recompense.     

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.     

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.     

Politicized Ecology: Local Responses to Mining in Papua New Guinea

Our paper draws on research in two sites where large goldmining projects are located — Misima and Lihir islands in Papua New Guinea. We examine the socio‐economic context in which criticisms of environmental degradation arise. We discuss the social and political meanings embedded in local demands for compensation for environmental damage, drawing attention to the disparities between local Melanesian conceptions of the environment and global, Western ideas that inform international environmentalist criticisms of mining. We dispute the ‘romantic primitivism’ of some environmentalist discourse, using the work of ethno‐ecologists and case studies of specific incidents on these islands, contesting the view that there is a natural conservationist ethic in Melanesia. The image of the ‘noble primitive ecologist’ that some environmentalists appeal to, would in most circumstances be rejected by Melanesians as racist and paternalistic, but is embraced as a strategy in conflicts with mining companies and when making legal claims for compensation. Alliances formed between landowners, environmentalists and western lawyers against mining companies such as BHP and Rio Tinto are based more on shared political ends than on the epistemological consistency of their perceptions of environmental damage from mining. Local Melanesian communities claim sovereignty over all resources and their compensation claims for environmental degradation constitute a new form of resource rent.     

Mother's Umbilicus and Father's Spirit: The Dialectics of Selfhood of a Yagwoia Transgendered Person

ABSTRACT This is an ethnographic exploration of a Yagwoia transgendered person and his‐her life‐situation within the specificities of libidinal dynamics and economy of intersubjective relationships that constitute Yagwoia matrix of kinship and affinal relatedness. Developed within a framework of psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology, and forged through a long‐term field research, this study offers an in‐depth perspective on concrete realities of gender experience and social existence in an Angan life‐world of east Papua New Guinea.     

Money,Manipulation and Misunderstanding on Manus Island

The treatment of asylum seekers at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has attracted much international attention, but there has been little analysis of its local and transnational impact. This article investigates the repercussions for the communities on Manus Island, on domestic affairs in PNG, and on the relationship between PNG and Australia. Overall, it concludes that the costs arising from the money, manipulation and misunderstanding generated by the centre seem likely to outweigh the purported benefits, particularly for Manusians and other ordinary Papua New Guineans.     

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.     

Study of the Technique and of the Materials of a 19th‐Century Polychrome Wood Mask from Papua New Guinea

This paper presents the results of the analysis carried out on a polychrome wood mask from Papua New Guinea during conservation work at Pigorini Museum's restoration laboratory. The significance of this study is that no prior work has characterized the painting materials of Papua New Guinea masks both with spectroscopic and internal microstratigraphic analysis. In fact, these objects were studied especially from an anthropological or conservative point of view and the wood was wrongly defined by its visual appearance. Microstratigraphic and spectroscopic investigations discovered a refined execution technique that up to now has not been demonstrated. The stratigraphy of the painted layers demonstrates a deep knowledge of the materials and of the application techniques on the part of the Papua New Guinea people, together with the ability to foresee the aesthetic result for the artefact. The analysis of the constitutive materials and of the stylistic features supplied valid results in favour of provenance of the mask from Papua New Guinea.     

Food Markets in the Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea: Actors, Power and Rural Development Geography

Discussions of rural development in the highlands of Papua New Guinea have often centred on coffee, and been couched either in narrowly economic terms or in class analysis terms. Fresh food marketing has received less attention, although it is an important activity for many highland people. An approach which takes into account the subjectivity of actors, and the contests of power which permeate markets, is explored in this paper. The history and present forms of fresh food marketing in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea are then outlined. The author concludes by arguing for a geography of rural development, which is based on close attention to social interaction at the local level, coupled with an awareness of global structures provided by non-universalist political economy.     

To Excel at bridewealth,or ceremonies of Office

At a bridewealth payment made at the start of a wedding in Papua New Guinea, the groom diligently kept a note of contributions from relatives and co‐workers. The next day, he used one of his employer's computers to compile an Excel spreadsheet that detailed all the guests, what each one brought, and, in a separate column, its value in money. Turning people's gifts into nominal amounts of money helped register these into an enduring electronic form. The spreadsheet – an all too familiar tool of enumeration – gave the groom a record of transactions going forward. Papua New Guinea is most often known for the widespread emphasis placed on gift‐giving, especially the large prestations that are particularly important in the making of ‘Big Men’ and which are based on the belief in the high status of the giver and the onus of reciprocity. Today, spreadsheets permit transactions to be analyzed in a very different way – namely, in terms of currency‐like properties – allowing Papua New Guineans to understand, tap into and ultimately control the powers of money that echo current debates about the manipulation of big data.     

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.     

Review

The Song to the Flying Fox: The Public and Esoteric Knowledge of the Important Men of Kandingei about Totemic Songs, Names and Knotted Cords (Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea). By Jurg Wassmann. (Apwitihire: Studies in Papua New Guinea Musics, Don Niles, ed.; vol. 2) Boroko, Papua New Guinea: Cultural Studies Division, The National Research Institute, 1991. Pp. xxi+313. Price: Kina 6.50.     

Gramsci's activists: How local civil society is shaped by the anti-corruption industry,political society and translocal encounters

The rise of the international anti-corruption industry over the past two decades has led to questions about how this industry impacts local civil society organizations in developing countries. For some academics the rise of the anti-corruption industry has led to more meaningful local responses, for others it has helped reinforce apolitical and neoliberal-inspired solutions. This article suggests that these debates would benefit from more nuanced and multi-scalar analysis. Drawing on in depth interviews, media analysis, grey materials and academic and practitioner literature, this article focuses on a group of anti-corruption activists in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The article compares a group of activists called the Coalition to its more radical predecessors, a local non-governmental organization by the name of Melanesian Solidarity. It uses a Gramscian framework to argue that responses to corruption in PNG have not simply been shaped by the anti-corruption industry. Rather they have been shaped by: the incentives and capacity of political society, international discourse on corruption and the nature of ‘translocal encounters’. These findings show that much of the academic literature on the anti-corruption industry has fallen into a ‘transnational trap’, by overemphasizing transnational linkages between organizations working to address corruption. Approaching the study of local anti-corruption movements with a focus on the complexity of scale, as this paper does, has important implications for theorizing responses to corruption in developing countries.