The South Fly District of Western Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), is one of the poorest regions of the country. Drivers of change affecting livelihoods in the South Fly are accelerating in pace and magnitude. Population growth, climate change, sea level rise, gas extraction, over-fishing, ongoing environmental impacts of Ok Tedi mine, and the growing Asian market for illegally-harvested marine products are all undermining sustainable human development.
Within the context of the Purari Delta’s transforming materialities of resource extraction,and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku (‘hand head’) lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit-beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups’ identities manifest.
The Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea, is a rapidly changing geomorphic and cultural landscape in which the ancestral past is constantly being (re)interpreted and negotiated. This paper examines the importance of subsurface archaeological and geomorphological features for the various communities of Orokolo Bay in the Gulf of Papua as they maintain and re-construct cosmological and migration narratives.
Arriving in the Torres Straits in 1871, the London Missionary Society (LMS) commenced their attempts to convert communities along the south coast of what is now Papua New Guinea. Building upon their initial efforts in Tahiti (1797), their work in Papua was connected by belief, letter and the flow of objects to their efforts in Africa, China,
Whom and what do we touch, hear and see when we hold, listen and look at photographs? What histories are enfolded within photographs’ materiality? What elided pasts do they contain, and what possible futures can be negotiated with source communities by engaging with these artefacts in the present? In this paper I consider these related questions through an exploration of the nexus of relations, perspectives and histories enfolded within a particular glass plate (A6510,499) held in the National Australian Archives.
Within this article I discuss the productive potentials of looking at historic photographs of the Purari Delta with indigenous communities today. A particular type of artifact, the meanings of photographs are promiscuous. Thinking about the shape of cultural property relations that are manifest photographs, I show how engagements with
indigenous communities unsettlesEuropean preconceptions about what photographs are as well as how doing so
On the bank of the upper reaches of the Aivei River sat an empty cargo container, detritus from a failed logging and oil palm venture initiated in 1993 (Filer with Sekhran 1998: 188–9; Bell 2009). In 2002, when I first encountered this container, the forest was slowly engulfing its blistering orange-red surface (Figure 6.1). All the heavy equipment brought to this site had been removed r scavenged for parts, and the empty cargo container was all that remained.
Since the 1970s the site of Emo (aka ‘Samoa’, ‘OAC’) in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea has been cited as one of the earliest-known ceramic sites from the southern Papuan lowlands. This site has long been seen as holding c.2000 year old evidence of post-Lapita long-distance maritime trade from (Austronesian-speaking) Motu homelands in the Central Province, where pottery was manufactured, to the (non- Austronesian) Gulf Province some 400km to the west where pottery was received and for which large quantities of sago were exchanged (the ancestral hiri trade).
Carettochelys insculpta, the pig-nosed turtle (Family Carettochelyidae), is the sole surviving member of a family of turtles that was widely distributed during the Tertiary. It is restricted to the southern rivers of New Guinea and the rivers of the Northern Territory in Australia. Carettochelys is therefore a distinctive geographic and taxonomic relict and, although locally abundant, it is rare in the sense of being geographically restricted. Moreover, Carettochelys is unique or unusual among turtles in many facets of its morphology, ecology, and behavior. Populations in New
This paper reports upon a series of recent developments in New Guinea highlands warfare. Building upon existing literature highlighting the deep influence of modernity within this context, we draw attention to two particular developments yet to be reported in the literature and which appear to be of special significance. Through an analysis of Aiya warfare, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, we document the direct and increasing involvement of women within warfare, as well as the important role played by mobile phones used by warriors to communicate before and during fighting.
In 2003-2004, the Small Arms Survey completed a series of research projects across 20 nations of the southwest Pacific. One of these, a survey of the proliferation of small arms and firearm-related violence in the strife-torn Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (Alpers, 2005), relies on a range of background information, field interviews from 19 communities, weapon descriptions and summaries of supplementary material which are not included in the published work.
In the volatile Southern Highlands Province (SHP) of Papua New Guinea (PNG), approximately 2,450 factory-made firearms are held by private owners. These include between 500 and 1,040 high-powered weapons, most of which are assault rifles. Very few of the guns in SHP were smuggled from foreign countries. Instead, police and soldiers within PNG supplied the most destructive firearms used in crime and conflict.
Papua New Guinea (PNG) has long been a site of analysis for exploring the links betweennatural resources and conflict, having been cited as an example in prominent studies of the ‘natural resource curse’ and used as a source of learning in international debates on CorporateSocial Responsibility (CSR). Over the past d ecade, this scholarship has expanded to encompass conflict analysis and peace building.
Papua New Guinea (PNG) has long been a site of analysis for exploring the links between natural resources and conflict, having been cited as an example in prominent studies of the ‘natural resource curse’ and used as a source of learning in international debates on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Over the past decade, this scholarship has expanded to encompass conflict analysis and peace building.
Papua New Guinea (PNG) has long been a site of analysis for exploring the links between natural resources and conflict, having been cited as an example in prominent studies of the ‘natural resource curse’ and used as a source of learning in international debates on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Over the past decade, this scholarship has expanded to encompass conflict analysis and peace building.
The media in their privileged position as the makers and shapers of public opinion have a responsibility to ensure fair and balanced coverage in the context of crisis situations in the Pacific—for refugees in Nauru and Manus Island, those on the borders of PNG and West Papua, IDPs in Fiji and the Solomon Islands (Action, 2002: 1).
In the lead-up to the Australian Federal Election in September 2013, public attention focused dramatically on Papua New Guinea (PNG) in terms of the joint PNG–Australia Regional Resettlement Arrangement, the subject of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed on 6 August 2013 (DFAT 2013a). In short, Australia would transfer
Since 1961, West Papuan people in the ‘Indonesian Province’ of Papua raising the Morning Star flag in public have been shot by Indonesian soldiers.1 Public declarations of allegiance to West Papuan nationhood broadcast beneath the flag have provoked violent retaliation. Raising the flag in public recalls the nascent state.
The Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea is a subject of contention in the international development community. Anthropologists are among a range of scholars who have investigated community-mine relations since 1981, as solo postgraduate students, as leaders of university research teams, as members of social impact assessment teams, and as members of an oversight body.