FORMER DOCTORAL RESEARCH STUDENTS

Dr Priscila Santos Da Costa

2018. “Re-designing the nation” : politics and Christianity in Papua New Guinea’s national parliament

My thesis addresses how Christianity can constitute itself as a creative force and a form of governance across different scales. I carried out 12 months of fieldwork between 2013 and 2015 in Papua New Guinea’s National Parliament (Port Moresby). My interlocutors were bureaucrats, liberal professionals and pastors who formed a group known as the Unity Team. The Unity Team, spearheaded by the Speaker of the 9th Parliament, Hon. Theodor Zurenuoc, were responsible for controversial initiatives, such as the destruction and dismantling of traditional carvings from Parliament in 2013, which they considered ungodly and evil, and the placement of a donated KJV Bible in the chamber of Parliament in 2015. My interlocutors regard Christianity as central to eliciting modern subjects and institutions. They consider Christianity to be a universal form of discernment, contrasted to particularistic forms of knowing and relating which are thought to create corruption and low institutional performance. I show how the Unity Team regarded Christianity as more than a way of doing away with satanic forces and building a Christian self. They expected Christianity to be a frame of reference informing work ethics, infusing citizenship and, finally, productive of a public and national realm. By exploring Christianity ethnographically, I offer a contribution to Anthropological discussions concerning politics, bureaucracy, citizenship, and nation-making.

PhD Thesis, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14580

Dr Tomi Bartole

2016. ‘The Work of the Heart’: Self-Transformation amongst the People of Awim, Papua New Guinea

This thesis analyses a significant shift in how Awim people in the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, conceive of, experience and talk about themselves, their relations with one another, and their world. My ethnographic analysis uses Awim categories to reveal processes of transformation and continuity, in particular the transformation of a ritual form and its eventual abolition. In the Awim world every living being has a ‘heart’ (manga) – life itself – that metamorphoses from fruit to seed and from seed to fruit, engendering a container. When ‘heart’ (manga) is made verb (mangananm), the ‘work of the heart’ is evinced as the continuing constitution anew of a spiral-form. The ‘work of the heart’ is materially effective thoughts that may be found on the spiral boundaries that traverse the body’s flesh, coincide with the finger tips, the words of my mother’s brother or dwell between two moving hands in a problem-solving ritual called ‘the handshake’. My analysis begins with people’s concerns about the precariousness of the world and problematic relations, which were especially dangerous. Attempts to ‘straighten’ relations were made through ‘the handshake’ ritual, in which two persons stand facing each other shaking hands and expressing their regrets. In presenting three case-studies I describe how ‘the handshake rituals’ were rendered efficacious, and also their limits, which materialized once the problems in the village were deemed to be grounded first in witchcraft and later in sorcery. Conscious of the limits of ‘the handshake’ ritual, people resorted to the revival of a local religious movement called The Michael Angel Ministry. After the Ministry solved the village’s problems the people were most interested in preserving Michael’s otherwise intermittent power through the restructuring of the Ministry. One of the provisions included the abolition of ‘the handshake’ ritual inside the Ministry and with it a significant shift occurred.

PhD Thesis, 2016, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18011

Dr Simon Kenema

2015. Mineral resource development and the nature of economic, social and political relations between host communities, the governance institutions and other special interest groups in PNG

This thesis offers an ethnographic study of everyday life in Nagovisi of Southwest Bougainville. The study focuses on aspects of how the Nagovisi construe social relations with a specific focus on vernacular categories and ideologies. The thesis deals with ideas about land, perceptions about the fluid nature of Nagovisi sociality, movement, and U-Vistract. The study is primarily based on thirteen months of field research I conducted in the Nagovisi between September 2011 and November of 2012. Through the exploration of the various thematic issues in the individual chapters the thesis offers a comparative scope for a tangential re-evaluation of the mine related crisis on the island. The focus on Noah Musinku and the Kingdom of Papala further illustrates this comparative scope by drawing an analogy between Panguna and U-Vistract and the complex entanglements and interrelationships between ideas relating to land, history, myth, relatedness, social unpredictability, and notions about wealth. It deals with the question of how persons, land and knowledge are mutually constitutive, and how each can affect the other as a result of history, and movement in time and space. By focusing on Nagovisi notions of the unpredictability of talk, knowledge, and the implication this bears on the nature of how people relate to each other and different places the thesis deals with what has long been proven a recalcitrant problem in PNG anthropological literature in which local life worlds are characterised by a fluidity of social forms.

PhD Thesis, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/10289

Dr Mei-Li Roberts

2013 Gender based violence & masculinity in an urban PNG settlement

Many studies of missionaries have taken an historical perspective, looking particularly at missionaries’ role in colonialism. However, missionaries are still very much part of contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG), with a significant number of expatriate missionary groups working in PNG. This thesis is a study of a present day mission in PNG, SIL International, formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). It examines the way in which the mission community is constructed and the boundaries and divisions within the community itself. It attempts to challenge some of the stereotypes of missionaries and show that there are different views of what it is to ‘be a missionary’ even within the missionary community itself. I focus particularly on what it means to ‘be a missionary’ and the ambiguities and ambivalences between the ideals and realities of mission work. The focus of the study was on SIL members themselves and their identities as missionaries rather than the effect of their missionising on others. This is examined through a number of different themes. Debates about the fence surrounding the mission station highlighted the way in which it created both a physical and a symbolic boundary between those living inside the fence and the people living outside of it. Related to this were debates regarding the mission station, Ukarumpa and how SIL members should ‘communicate the gospel’. SIL’s main goal is Bible translation and the thesis explores the challenges and problems of translation, both the practical aspects of Bible translation and translating between cultures. Literacy work is also an important part of SIL’s goal and is shown to be especially significant in maintaining a good relationship with the PNG government. Finally, notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’, particularly in relation to the children of missionaries, and the notion of ‘citizens of heaven’ is shown to help shape SIL members’ identities as ‘missionaries’.

PhD Thesis, 2006, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/22134

Dr Emilia Skrzypek

2015. “Stories of the Invisible Mine: Ethnographic Account of Stakeholder Relations at the Frieda River Project, Papua New Guinea”

Located amid tropical rainforest, in an upper tributary of the Sepik River, the Frieda River area is home to one of the biggest undeveloped gold and copper deposits in the Pacific. Exploration of Frieda’s rich deposits has been ongoing since it began in 1969, bringing together unlikely partners in a process of preparing for a large-scale resource extraction project. This thesis offers an ethnographic account of stakeholder relations as they were unfolding at Frieda over forty years after the first company arrived on the banks of the River. It presents the key stakeholders of the Frieda River Project as outcomes of relations which produced them, emergent from an interplay between prescribed roles and expectations of responsibilities, and on the ground activities of forming and negotiating social relations. Through an ethnographic study of the Payamo it describes a process through which the Frieda River Project’s local stakeholders mobilized a range of complex and contested relations to turn Frieda’s rich deposits into development, and to make the mine at Frieda happen. This study provides an ethnographic insight into complex and contested processes of planning for a resource extraction project as they were actually taking place. It proposes an analytical framework of looking at a mine as a social relation and argues that although it might not yet have the appearance which would make it visible to the company and the government, from the perspective of its indigenous stakeholders the Frieda River Mine is already happening, but it has not yet revealed itself.

PhD Thesis, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11971

Dr Jonathan Tracey

2015. Anthropology in the Vernacular: An Ethnography of Doing Knowedge on Choiseul Island, Solomon Islands

This thesis absorbs and reflects on Choiseul Island responses and caution towards the making of anthropological knowledge. Initial interests that can easily become familiar to anthropology as research topics such as village life, local cosmology and local alternatives to cosmologies of climate and ecology, make way here for another activity of working through Choiseul responses to anthropology. In taking seriously the precautions and the considerations of people in this Solomon Islands locality, anthropology is invited to put a stoppage to practices that it would consider ordinary and part of anthropological knowledge making. This impasse for the discipline is outlined and explored in various chapters, in which usual styles of ethnography and topic-making take formation in respect of a Choiseul world that does not fit easily into encapsulation by anthropology. Effects for the discipline of anthropology are given consideration, within a wider view of imagining how an alternative anthropology in the vernacular can also entail an obviation of anthropology itself in favour of new forms of cultural sensitivity.

PhD Thesis, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7822

Dr Fiona Hukula

an ethnography of a Mosbi settlement

This thesis is about urban sociality in the context of an urban settlement in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. I explore issues of urban life through everyday stories of settlers who reside in a settlement (also known as a blok) at Nine Mile, Port Moresby. I present settlers’ ideas of work and money through their income generating efforts as well as their perception about giving. This thesis explores settlement notions of the forms that relatedness takes through everyday interactions of eating together, sharing and thinking of one another. These actions in turn inform ideas of personhood and gender. I use blok ideas to rethink assumptions about the meaning of land and place in an urban setting. Furthermore I seek to use blok understandings of kinship, personhood and gender to portray an urban sociality that is entwined in relations.

PhD Thesis, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11367

Dr Anthony Pickles

2013. The Pattern Changes Changes: Gambling Value in Highland Papua New Guinea

This thesis explores the part gambling plays in an urban setting in Highland Papua New Guinea. Gambling did not exist in (what is now) Goroka Town before European contact, nor Papua New Guinea more broadly, but when I conducted fieldwork in 2009-2010 it was an inescapable part of everyday life. One card game proliferated into a multitude of games for different situations and participants, and was supplemented with slot machines, sports betting, darts, and bingo and lottery games. One could well imagine gambling becoming popular in societies new to it, especially coming on the back of money, wage-work and towns. Yet the popularity of gambling in the region is surprising to social scientists because the peoples now so enamoured by gambling are famous for their love of competitively giving things away, not competing for them. Gambling spread while gifting remained a central part of the way people did transactions. This thesis resists juxtaposing gifting and selfish acquisition. It shows how their opposition is false; that gambling is instead a new analytic technique for manipulating the value of gifts and acquisitions alike, through the medium of money. Too often gambling takes a familiar form in analyses: as the sharp end of capitalism, or the benign, chance-led redistributor of wealth in egalitarian societies. The thesis builds an ethnographic understanding of gambling, and uses it to interrogate theories of gambling, money, and Melanesian anthropology. In so doing, the thesis speaks to a trend in Melanesian anthropology to debate whether monetisation and urbanisation has brought about a radical split in peoples’ understandings of the world. Dealing with some of the most starkly ‘modern’ material I find a process of inclusive indigenous materialism that consumes the old and the new alike, turning them into a model for action in a dynamic money-led world.

PhD Thesis, 2013, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3389

Dr Craig Lind

2010. Placing Paamese: Locating Concerns with Place, Gender and Movement in Vanuatu.

This is a study of coming to know what it is to be Paamese. The work seeks to present an anthropological understanding of ontological concerns that constitute a Paamese perception of subjectivities. I take my lead from Paamese perceptions that the internal capacities of subjects or “things” (e.g. persons, villages, islands, and movement itself) are revealed through relations with others. This correlates with anthropology’s methodology of testing its analytical strategies through the ethnographic practices of others in order to reach more accurate representations. Paamese, as is common elsewhere in Vanuatu and Melanesia, have an extremely fluid attitude towards sociality and easily accommodate urban dwelling without leaving Paama behind. I suggest that a nuanced multi-positioned approach in which several aspects of Paamese sociality are considered from a point of limitation employed by Paamese to focus an event, such as a marriage exchange, will present a better understanding of how these subjectivities, that is Paamese people and Paama Island, adhere such that they do not part company wherever they go. Paamese suggest that each event should be considered as if following a single branch in the canopy of a tree – a scalable perception that offers the promise that a multi-faceted approach will reveal a replicable form. I take this approach to specificity seriously and employ a looping aesthetic, measi, adapted from Paamese sand-drawing in order to consider the shifting concerns expressed by Paamese perceptions of out (place), āmal (agnatic clans), sise (road), vatte (origin), ara (blood) and asi (bone). I suggest that these, parts, can be considered together as a holography for how to come to know what it is to be Paamese.

Dr Marlit Rosolowsky

Infrastructure in Melanesia : imaginaries, experiences and practices of road making in Buka Island

This thesis explores Melanesian concepts of roads based on multilocal ethnographic research on different kinds of roads in Buka Island, the northern island of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. It explores how different modes of socialities, politics, and future imaginaries have to be negotiated in the context of infrastructural transformation and varying degrees of infrastructural fragility. Taking the idioms for roads like maroro in Haku dialect and rot in Tok Pisin as an analytical vantage point, my thesis analyses how people in Buka conceptualize, build, maintain, and move along different types of roads, including garden roads (beaten footpaths), coral roads, and sealed sections of a highway. It compares the different socialities, politics, and imaginaries these roads generate and the ways in which they intersect and mutually inform each other. Inspired by the anthropology of roads and infrastructure, I argue that Melanesian socialities and politics and their continuously changing articulations can be addressed particularly well by looking at infrastructural transformations, specifically of roads. In addition, this thesis contributes a Melanesian perspective to the anthroplogy of roads and infrastructure by experimenting with the question of what practices and imaginaries create roads and what makes them infrastructural in Buka. It demonstrates the importance of taking other concepts of roads and types of roads into account when seeking to understand the changes large-scale public infrastructure projects like highway construction bring about for people.

PhD Thesis, 2021, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/29081