School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 4 of 4
-
ItemHaivaro Fasu modernity: embodying, disembodying and re-embodying relationships( 2017)In this thesis, I analyse ways in which relations that build the lifeworld of Fasu people of Haivaro, in the northwest lowlands of the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea, have been and continue to be renegotiated and reconfigured in the context of their engagement with multiple expressions of modernity, in particular with a logging company operating on their land. I show how these transformations entail processes of embodiment, disembodiment and re-embodiment of those relations. The relationships that people develop with the human and non-human beings that populate their environment are diverse and context-dependent. They emerge and consolidate as people engage with that environment and where the latter changes – either abruptly or gradually – so too the relations that built their lifeworld also change. In the years before 1996, several logging and oil companies operated in the Haivaro region. Fasu people engaged with these only sporadically. In 1996, however, a logging company established a base camp 3km northeast of Haivaro and remained there until 2016. This company was operated by the Malaysian Rimbunan Hijau group (RH). Timber extraction began on the land of Haivaro people and they engaged with this company more intensely than with any other. Two kinds of influence were significant. On the one hand, Haivaro people became connected to the outside world in ways they had never previously experienced or contemplated and, on the other, their immediate physical environment underwent substantial transformations such that, in some ways, it became foreign to them. These changes have had – and continue to have – impacts on the ways Haivaro people understand their relationships to the land, to their human and non-human neighbours and to the wider world. These relationships are integral to the ways in which Haivaro Fasu construct their identity and, as these relationships are renegotiated, so too identity is reconfigured. The relationships of fatherhood, brotherhood, conjugality, gender and otherness that are the focus of this study were deeply associated with the representations people at Haivaro had of bodily substances. In that sense, they were deeply embodied. In the modern context, a greater emphasis has been put on the performance of specific forms of reciprocity in creating and maintaining these relations. In some ways, they have been partly dis-embodied. Concurrently, new or modified forms of relations appeared that people at Haivaro attempted to integrate – to tame – by re-embodying them. In this thesis, I discuss such processes and their implications for ways in which Haivaro people now engage with the world.
-
ItemGovernance and uncertainty: the public policy of Australia's official development assistance to Papua New Guinea( 2002)Against the backdrop of the historical failure of official development assistance to alleviate poverty in the Third World, this thesis examines the current approach of Western aid donors toward development. The thesis asks whether aid policy processes indicate a willingness, or capacity, on the part of official donors to more fully engage with the causal complexity of development, and so potentially improve development outcomes. Considering the case study of the Australian bilateral aid program to Papua New Guinea from both top-down and bottom-up policy perspectives, the thesis concludes that, in relation to Australia, there are significant structural and institutional impediments to change. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and its interpretation of national interest, dominate high-level aid policy-making, even though the objectives of foreign policy and those of foreign aid differ. Australia's official development agency, AusAID, is limited in its capacity to legitimately challenge this dominance, not least because its use of contracted-out projects restrict its corporate knowledge and its ability to influence policy agendas and networks. Overcoming this impasse requires creative management on the part of senior public servants and non-governmental members of the aid policy community alike.
-
ItemOverseeing and overlooking: Australian engagement with the Pacific islands 1988-2007( 2012)This thesis aims to explain the discrepancy between Australia’s stable interests and objectives in the Pacific islands and the volatility of its approach to achieving those objectives. The thesis proposes a cyclic model of Australian engagement that it illustrates using a historical narrative of Australia’s relationship with the Pacific islands. The key finding is that weak institutionalisation renders Australian engagement dependent on the foreign minister and susceptible to influence by advocates who capture the minister’s attention.
-
ItemDeception and disillusionment: fast money schemes in Papua New Guinea( 2011)This thesis examines Papua New Guinean attitudes to money and modernity through an exploration of contemporary “fast money schemes” (Ponzi scams). The largest of these, U-Vistract Financial Systems, collected millions of Kina from 100,000s of “investors” on the promise of monthly returns on deposits of 100%. The scheme was declared bankrupt in 2000 but its founders escaped imprisonment, fleeing first to Solomon Islands and then to the “no go” zone of Bougainville, where the scheme re-established itself as the Royal Kingdom of Papala. U-Vistract claimed to be a Christian reform of global finance systems that would deliver abundant prosperity to Papua New Guineans. U-Vistract cultivated a moral vision of its middle-class investors as compassionate Christian patrons whose coming wealth would deliver “development” to a nation disillusioned with social inequality and the postcolonial state. U-Vistract investors emerge from this study as morally engaged members of a transnational Christian civil society. This is a surprising conclusion to draw from studying fraud but it is all the more surprising in Papua New Guinea where anthropological interest has historically constructed the “village” as the central place where social meanings are generated. Here, urban Melanesians demonstrate moral and relational sensibilities that combine global aspirations for prosperity with Papua New Guinean disillusionment with the nation. In doing so, perhaps a more individualistic rendering of Melanesia emerges but these are individuals who are also more cosmopolitan in sentiment.