School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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Item"We Are Fire Clan': Groups, Names and Identity in Papua New Guinea(Wiley, 2018-03-01)This paper draws on two case studies concerning Kubo and Febi people of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, to reveal, first, ways in which people present themselves to the state as groups that qualify as legitimate beneficiaries of financial benefits expected to flow from extraction of natural gas on or near their land and, second, simultaneously present themselves to their immediate neighbours in ways intended to either lay claim to particular areas of land or offset possible challenges to their asserted rights to land. To achieve these ends, people strategically employ names to variously connote or denote particular assemblages of people.
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ItemCaptain Everill's Error: Mapping the Upper Strickland River in Papua and New Guinea, 1885-1979(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2018)An error dating from 1885 in mapping the upper Strickland River, Papua New Guinea, was reinforced and extended by government officer Charles Karius in 1929 when reporting results from a lengthy exploratory patrol. Detailed maps produced by the US Army and the Royal Australian Survey Corps in, respectively, 1942 and 1966 perpetuated these errors. It was not until 1979, with release of a series of 1:100,000 topographic maps, that long-standing errors were finally put to rest. Throughout these years, the contributions of well-informed people tended to be ignored in favour of the opinions of those whose status implied authority.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableRefugees on their own land: Edolo people, land, and earthquakes(Berghahn Books, 2018-06-09)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableLandowner identification in PNG: a job for government(ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, 2019)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableFrom business development to protection money: landowners and the PNG LNG project(ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, 2018-07-04)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNavigating the Future: An Ethnography of Change in Papua New Guinea(ANU Press, 2017)'Navigating the Future' draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Kubo people and their neighbours, in a remote area of Papua New Guinea, to explore how worlds are reconfigured as people become increasingly conscious of, and seek to draw into their own lives, wealth and power that had previously lain beyond their horizons. In the context of a major resource extraction project—the Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas (PNG LNG) Project–taking shape in the mountains to the north, the people in this area are actively reimagining their social world. This book describes changes in practice that result, tracing shifts in the ways people relate to the land, to each other and to outsiders, and the histories of engagement that frame those changes. Inequalities are emerging between individuals in access to paid work, between groups in potential for claiming future royalties, and between generations in access to information. As people at the village of Suabi strive to make themselves visible to the state and to petroleum companies, as legal entities entitled to receive benefits from the PNG LNG Project, they are drawing new boundaries around sets of people and around land and declaring hierarchical relationships between groups that did not exist before. They are struggling to make sense of a bureaucracy that is foreign to them, in a place where the state currently has minimal presence. A primary concern of 'Navigating the Future' is with the processes through which these changes have emerged, as people seek to imagine—and work to bring about—a radically different future for themselves while simultaneously reimagining their own past in ways that validate those endeavours.
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ItemCounting systems of the Strickland-Bosavi languages, Papua New Guinea(Linguistics Society of Papua New Guinea, 2016-03-15)Information on the counting systems of 12 East Strickland and Bosavi languages is collated. In seven cases the body‐part tally system is symmetrical, with cycle lengths varying from 27 to 35. In four cases, the tally system is asymmetrical or truncated and in one case detailed information is not available. Methods of counting beyond one cycle have been described for all but one of the Bosavi languages but not for any of the East Strickland languages. An additional 2‐cycle or 2, 5‐cycle system is indicated for several East Strickland languages but not for any Bosavi language. Comparison with the counting systems of languages beyond the Strickland‐Bosavi region – especially with Ok languages to the northwest and Huli to the northeast – suggests a process in which the terminology of body‐part tally systems is progressively disembedded from bodily commitment such that counting words assume the status of cardinal numbers and, thereby, facilitate expressions of the commensurability of difference.
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ItemWild dogs and village dogs in New Guinea: were they different?(CSIRO Publishing, 2016-01-01)Recent accounts of wild-living dogs in New Guinea argue that these animals qualify as an ‘evolutionarily significant unit’ that is distinct from village dogs, have been and remain genetically isolated from village dogs and merit taxonomic recognition at, at least, subspecific level. These accounts have paid little attention to reports concerning village dogs. This paper reviews some of those reports, summarises observations from the interior lowlands of Western Province and concludes that: (1) at the time of European colonisation, wild-living dogs and most, if not all, village dogs of New Guinea comprised a single though heterogeneous gene pool; (2) eventual resolution of the phylogenetic relationships of New Guinean wild-living dogs will apply equally to all or most of the earliest New Guinean village-based dogs; and (3) there remain places where the local village-based population of domestic dogs continues to be dominated by individuals whose genetic inheritance can be traced to precolonisation canid forebears. At this time, there is no firm basis from which to assign a unique Linnaean name to dogs that live as wild animals at high altitudes of New Guinea.
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ItemWhere all the rivers flow west: Maps, abstraction and change in the Papua New Guinea lowlands(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2014-01-01)'Abstraction' has been often identified as a key element in social change. Analyses, however, have often conflated the ideas of abstraction as 'object' and as 'process'. This paper discusses two maps drawn by or on behalf of Kubo men, of the interior lowlands of southern Papua New Guinea. They were drawn in the context of recent exposure to a vast Liquefied Natural Gas project initiated on the land of their neighbours and both, as abstractions from new observations and experiences, were intended as assertions of rights to land. They derived, however, from entirely different logics: one more compatible with 'Western' understandings of ownership, the other more in keeping with earlier Kubo understandings of belonging. By reference to these maps, we consider the role of abstraction in social change and argue that while, as object, abstraction is relative as a process it is universal.
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ItemReshaping the Social: A Comparison of Fasu and Kubo-Febi Approaches to Incorporating Land Groups(Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis, 2015-10-20)