Papua New Guinea

Permanent link to open access version: http://hdl.handle.net/10523/10586

Materialising Ancestral Madang documents the emergence of pottery production processes and exchange networks along the northeast coast of New Guinea during the last millennium before the present. This dynamic period in the Pacific’s human past involved important fluctuations to people’s mobility, social interaction, and technological organisation. It therefore remains crucial to understanding and historicising the expansive maritime subsistence trading networks that famously characterised the coast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This book investigates these transformations by exploring the archaeology of Madang District; the heart of the Madang exchange network that revolved around the production and distribution of distinctive red-slipped pots. Potsherds of this style have been previously found spanning a 200 km radius, reaching Karkar Island, the Bismarck Archipelago, and even the New Guinea Highlands. By combining archaeological survey, excavation, craft ethnography, and archaeometric analyses, the volume systematically delineates the production groups that were working within this broader community of practice. The study shows that pre-colonial potters made use of a range of local raw materials and were free to improvise with their forming and decorating techniques but learned and reproduced similar technological sequences over the past 500–600 years. It is likely that social restrictions permitted only potters from a small number of clans to produce ceramics and that the finished vessels were then distributed both informally within the local area and strategically during extensive trade voyages along the northeast coast of New Guinea. These results therefore cast light on an important but previously obscured aspect of Pacific culture history and provide a model for how craft production and exchange processes have manifested and co-modified across the generations

Final draft – published as Christine Winter, ‘Lingering Legacies of German Colonialism: the ‘Mixed Race’ Identities in Oceania,  Farida Fozdar & Kirsten McGavin (Eds), Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands (Routledge Studies in Anthropology), 2017, pp. 147-161.

So what about identity politics in the Pacific? When I meet Pacific Islanders who cheerfully refer to themselves and others as ‘mixed-bloods’ or ‘halfies’, does this mean that the legacies of colonialism have vanished? That the battles over legitimacy and belonging are over, and these terms, often ascribed to people in the past by others in order to denigrate can now be embraced? What history and what purposes do such identity assertions have? In this article I am examining assertions of identity of German-Pacific Islanders of multiple heritage during and after the end of the German colonial empire in the Pacific in order to see how mixed heritage was expressed in different political situations. My case studies focus on families of Samoan and German descent. This is not to say that these families and individuals did and do not have more diverse heritage, including Tongan, Swedish, Japanese, Filipino, Danish, Fijian or French. I am limiting this chapter, however, to an historical exploration how two specific building blocks of identity were used, German and Samoan.

In particular I build on and explore L.  Wildenthal's analysis of gendered responses to mixedness further, analysing the differences of male and female responses and identity desires for their children.

Institutional policy is an important although little researched and somewhat disparaged governance mechanism that establishes principles, parameters and ‘road maps’ for higher education institutional operations. The Institutional Policy Project was initiated in 2013 to unpack higher education institutional policy from an international, comparative perspective. The research involved surveys and interviews with higher education institution staff in the United States, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. The research identified consistent policy practitioner responsibilities including policy drafting, benchmarking, and consultation co-ordination. A consistent picture emerges of a pervasive dislocation between policy texts and policy practitioners, policy governance, and policy implementation evaluation and review.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s a wave of Ponzi schemes swept through Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Solomon Islands. U-Vistract, the most notorious scheme, along with other fast money schemes, attracted 300,000 investors, enticing them with promises of 100 percent interest to be paid monthly. Its founder, Noah Musingku, was a charismatic leader who promoted the scheme as a form of Christian mission and as the basis for establishing an independent kingdom.
Fast Money Schemes uses in-depth interviews with investors, newspaper accounts, and participant observation to understand the scheme’s appeal from the point of view of those who invested and lost, showing that organizers and investors alike understood the scheme as a way of accessing and participating in a global economy. John Cox delivers a “post-village” ethnography that gives insight into the lives of urban, middle-class Papua New Guineans, a group that is not familiar to US readers and that has seldom been a focus of anthropological interest. The book’s concern with understanding the interweaving of morality, finance, and aspirations shared by a global cosmopolitan middle class has wide resonance beyond studies of Papua New Guinea and anthropology.

Advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony is “[o]ne of the best-known and most-discussed features
of African phonology”, while such systems of vowel harmony have been claimed to be
“apparently unknown elsewhere in the world” (Clements & Rialland 2008: 50, 49). In this talk, I
will propose on the basis of first-hand data that the Papuan language Idi (Pahoturi River family)
as spoken in Sibidiri, Trans-Fly region (cf. Evans 2012) has ATR harmony, not unlike the
systems found in Africa (see e.g. Archangeli & Pulleybank 2002 on the Bantu language
Kinande). In my presentation, I provide an overview of the basic system and discuss exceptions and systematic cases of disharmony, making reference to African languages exhibiting similar systems for comparison (e.g. Kinande, cf. Archangeli & Pulleyblank 2002), and to systems of vowel harmony found in Northern Australia, e.g. in Jingulu (Pensalfini 2002).

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan dan menganalisis pengakuan terhadap Hak Penangkapan Ikan Tradisional berdasarkan Hukum Laut Internasional dan implementasinya di dalam praktik negara-negara, termasuk Indonesia. Penulis mempergunakan metode penelitian yuridis normatif dengan studi kepustakaan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kendati di dalam Pasal 51 (1) UNCLOS 1982 kewajiban untuk mengakui Hak Penangkapan Ikan Tradisional dibebankan kepada Negara Kepulauan, namun pengakuan tersebut juga dilakukan oleh negara-negara bukan Negara Kepulauan. Contohnya adalah pengakuan Australia terhadap Hak Penangkapan Tradisional nelayan Indonesia yang diakomodir di dalam MoU Box. Sejalan dengan hal tersebut, sebagai Negara Kepulauan, Indonesia juga telah membuat perjanjian dengan negara tetangga yang berdampingan langsung seperti Malaysia dan Papua Nugini untuk mengakui Hak Penangkapan Tradisional nelayan dari kedua negara tetangga tersebut di dalam Perairan Kepulauan Indonesia.

Trade in marketplaces is central to the domestic distribution of food and other goods throughout the developing world. The commodity networks involved are often complex with numerous intermediate transactions between producer and consumer. By contrast, in the Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG), marketplace trade has historically occurred through very short commodity networks. This article examines the appearance and growing significance of intermediary trading in PNG's marketplaces and associated trade networks. Reselling is supporting urban livelihoods at a time when making a living in town is increasingly precarious, but the transformation of marketplaces, I argue, also threatens to reduce the agency of rural producers and erode the incomes of certain producers. Growing intermediation may also see men increasingly involved in an economic domain where women have been central. The emergence of intermediaries is globally an important historical development, and this article provides a rare study of this process within the contemporary era. K E Y W O R D S commodity networks, intermediaries and middlemen, marketplace, Papua New Guinea, rural-urban relations, trade

In this paper, evidence is provided that suggests the Oksapmin language, previously classed as constituting an isolate within the larger Trans-New Guinea family, is related to the Mountain Ok branch of the Ok language family and, by extension, the entire Ok family. A list of cognates and sound correspondences is given, as well as evidence from bound morphology and pronoun

On the 26th of February 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck the Southern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea (PNG), affecting 544,000 people. In addition to traditional humanitarian actors, including international nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), civil society, government and United Nations (UN) agencies, the private sector – notably companies working in the extractive industries (mining, oil and gas) – contributed significantly to the response at unprecedented speed and scale. This practice paper is a rapid analysis of the role played by extractive organisations (‘extractives’) in the 2018 PNG earthquake response. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of their engagement, and proposes that for humanitarian organisations to work more effectively with extractives they need to engage with them more intentionally – to understand, to learn and to plan together. The paper provides a series of questions to guide engagement, in ‘Digging Deeper’ text boxes throughout the paper, for both humanitarian organisations and extractives.

The etiology of a high-incidence focus of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and parkinsonism–dementia (ALS/P-D) in south West Papua (Irian Jaya, Indonesia), first described in the 1960s and 1970s, has been attributed to mineral deficiencies, hyperparathyroidism, and metal neurotoxicity arising from reliance on drinking water obtained from springs and shallow wells. More recent visits (1987 and 1990) to the south West Papua focus of neurodegenerative disease cast doubt on this explanation by revealing changes in disease prevalence in communities with an unchanged water supply. These communities have experienced a dramatic decline in ALS and a reversal in the relative prevalence of ALS and parkinsonism. The extrapyramidal disorder can be distinguished from Parkinson disease by pyramidal features (and dementia) reminiscent of Guam P-D. Topical use of cycad seed (termed kurru) gametophyte to treat large skin lesions is advanced as a plausible but unproven etiologic factor. Medicinal use of untreated cycad seed (Cycas sp.) has also been linked with ALS foci in Japan (oral use) and Guam (topical use), with the additional consumption on Guam of food items prepared from Cycas sp. seed or animals that consume cycad seed components. © 2005 Movement Disorder Society

Objectives To describe the discovery in a domestic pig of the first case of trichinellosis in Papua New Guinea, caused by a new taxon within the genus Trichinella (T papuae). Also, to establish if the disease occurred in the local wild pig population and in domestic pigs elsewhere in the country, and to test if the worm was infective to some other animals.Procedure Fresh and fixed tissue samples were examined by the digestion method and histologically, respectively, for the non-encapsulated larvae of T papuae. Feeding trials were conducted, using infected tissues and infective larvae, on animals under laboratory conditions.Results About 8.8% of a wild pig population in Western Province, adjacent to Irian Jaya, Indonesia, was found to be infected. Infection was not found in other local and feral animals or in domestic pigs from other parts of the country. Infection was experimentally established in cats, pigs and laboratory bred mice and rats.Conclusion Trichinellosis is confined to one remote locality in PNG. Domestic pigs in the initial case became infected, probably, by eating infected wild pig meat.

Kenneth McElhanon was graduated with a B.A. from Wheaton College (IL) in 1961 with two majors: anthropology and Greek. By 1970 he had completed seven years in Papua New Guinea with SIL and was graduated with a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Australian National University. From 1971 to 1986 he served in various consultative and administrative roles in SIL/PNG. After he and his wife completed a translation project for the Selepet people (PNG) in 1986, he joined the faculty of the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Theological Seminary (KY). Since 1991 he has taught in the TXSIL, and its successor, the GIAL. He currently serves as an SIL International Anthropology consultant. Abstract This essay addresses the relativity of knowledge and its relevance to the assessment of quality in translation. 1 The discussion is framed in terms of Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigms and paradigm communities. The concept of paradigm is used to delineate the various leg...

The Name Must Not Go Down is a study of local politics in the Mt Hagen area of Papua New Guinea, which situates this in the broader context of national politics and mixes ethnographic and historical details with perspectives from political science. Joseph Ketan considers theories of weak states but stresses the mutuality of state-society interactions: local societies have been incorporated into the state, but have in turn incorporated elections and other aspects of the state into their own political systems. A book review by Danny Yee © 2006 http://dannyreviews.com/

Unserdeutsch, in der englischsprachigen Fachliteratur auch unter dem Namen Rabaul Creole German bekannt, ist die einzige deutsch relexifizierte Kreolsprache der Welt. Es ist um die Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert unter mixed-race Kindern an der Missionsstation der Herz-Jesu-Missionare in Vunapope auf der Insel New Britain im damals vom Deutschen Reich als Kolonie verwalteten Bismarck-Archipel (Papua-Neuguinea) entstanden und wurde 1979 durch einen Zufall von Craig A. Volker für die linguistische Forschung entdeckt. Unserdeutsch wird heute nur noch von höchstens etwa 100 älteren Menschen gesprochen. Selbst die jüngsten aktiven Sprecher sind über 65, so dass die Sprache als stark gefährdet gilt und nach der zehnstufigen Gefährdungsskala von Ethnologue (Lewis et al. 2015) als nearly extinct (Stufe 8b) und nach der sechsstufigen Skala der UNESCO (Moseley 2010) als critically endangered einge-stuft werden muss. Aus diesen Gründen wird die hier beschriebene Dokumentation der Sprache in der näheren Zukunft nicht mehr möglich sein.

Early paper on Rebaibal in Telefolmin, situating it in the context of: a previous movement known as Ok Bembem; Christian evangelism, mineral exploration and the cash economy; the men's cult, gender relations, and household consumption. That now seems to me like contextual overkill - a kind of grab-bag of stuff. Made sense at the time, but 30 years in retrospect now make it clear that it wasn't so easy to figure out where this was going...

Since its second issue in November 1969, Kivung (rebranded as Language & Linguistics in Melanesia - LLM in 1981) has come to be a repository for writing about the languages of Melanesia and a reflection of the many interests of members of the Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea. In this repository, there are many articles on Tok Pisin, the most widely spoken language in Papua New Guinea.

While all of the issues of Kivung / Language & Linguistics in Melanesia are online, and there is much valuable research on Tok Pisin and languages related to it, it is not always easy to sift through the many volumes of the journal to search out what is needed. Nor is it easy to see immediately where researchers have been particularly active over the years (e.g., education and sociolinguistics) and which areas have been neglected (e.g., phonology and syntax).

In an effort to stimulate further research into Tok Pisin (and to organise my own research a bit better!), I have put together the following bibliography of articles related to Tok Pisin and its closely related languages (Solomon’s Pijin, Bislama, Torres Strait Creole, and PNG English), from the earliest issues of Kivung to the 2020 issue of Language & Linguistics in Melanesia. The articles have been arranged in three lists: by topics, by chronological order, and by authors' names.

The Finisterre Mountains and western Solomon Sea of northern Papua New Guinea are the site of an active, oblique arc-continent collision. Comparison of structures along the length of the collision zone provides a history of its structural evolution. Here we compare the results of structural mapping in the Finisterre Mountains, where collision is in an advanced state, with side scan sonar images and potential field data from the western Solomon Sea, which illuminate the structure of the juvenile collision zone. An accretionary wedge complex, composed of a southwestward younging stack of imbricate thrust sheets, developed along a westward extension of the modern New Britain Trench prior to collision. This accretionary wedge crops out in the Finisterre Mountains as the Erap Structural Complex. Consequences of collision were doubling of the crustal thickness to 50-52 km, rapid up-lift of the Finisterre terrane, and initiation of a major out-of-sequence thrust that displaced the Finisterre Volcanics over younger sediments of the accretionary wedge. This out-of-sequence thrust is mapped in the Finisterre Mountains as the Wongat Thrust, and it is recognized in the western Solomon Sea on side scan sonar images. A second generation out-of-sequence thrust formed after substantial uplift had subaerially exposed the collision zone. This thrust crosscuts the Wongat Thrust, forming a window of accretionary wedge sediments bounded to both the NE and SW by Finisterre Volcanics. This younger out-of-sequence thrust is the Gain Thrust of the Finisterre Mountains. At least 15 km of crustal shortening has occurred across the Wongat Thrust at 146°30'E longitude, and the Gain Thrust has accommodated up to 7.4 km of shortening in the same area. It is probable that the well-lithified Finisterre Volcanics serve as the backstop for the accretionary wedge/collision complex that is forming in the collision zone of the western Solomon Sea. Potential field models indicate that this backstop is arcward dipping. Thrusting of the back-stop material over the accretionary wedge, as we observe along the Wongat Thrust, is expected for wedges with arcward dipping backstops. A series of NE-SW trending cross faults, perpendicular to the dominant structural trend, exist in the collision zone. These faults have components of left-lateral strike-slip and SE down dip-slip motion. It is likely that the Finisterre terrane is being segmented along these faults, with the segmentation caused by differential resistance to convergence between the downgoing continental crust of the collision zone and the oceanic crust of the subduction zone to the east. The origin of the faults is uncertain. Previous authors believed that they formed during Paleogene volcanic activity in the Finisterre terrane. The colinearity of several of these cross faults with major mapped faults on the downgoing plate raises the possibility that the Finisterre Range cross faults are upper plate manifestations of lower plate structures and, as such, reveal strong interplate coupling in the collision zone.

Gope (spirit) boards are characteristic carvings in the Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea. The processes involved in laying out the design, carving and painting a gope board are described using information gathered in Kinomere Village in 1981.