Forest and Demons in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The Wola people of the Southern Highland Province of Papua New Guinea believe that two kinds of demon spirit inhabit the montane forests of their region. They call them saem and iybtit. When people are attacked by these frightening creatures, they are injured or fall sick, and may die; their relatives perform rituals to drive the demons away and promote their recovery. The attitude of the Wola towards demon spirits expresses something of their ambivalent and enigmatic attitudes towards the forest that covers large areas of their region. They are neither innate conservationists nor reckless destroyers of forest, but something more equivocal, an antipathetic combination of both.     

Hunting for Conservation in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The animals of the Papua New Guinea highlands are relatively defenceless. People not only value their meat, hunters sharing catch with kin, but also formally transact several creatures in the all-important socio-political exchanges that characterise their social life. The local sedentary population is dense, yet it has not hunted species to extinction regardless of their value and vulnerability to predation. This paper seeks an answer in the context of socio-political exchange values that inform social status. It uses data from a survey of animal skull trophies displayed in a sample of houses in the Was valley of the Southern Highlands Province to investigate connections between hunting and social standing - exchange status, kin group affiliation and age - with a view to elucidating tacit conservation behaviour which agencies concerned to protect biodiversity might profitably consider given current participatory rhetoric.     

A Place against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Place against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Paul Sillitoe. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. 438 pp.     

Many medicines in one: Curing in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

The actual means by which the clinical successes of non-Western medical treatments are achieved has been little explored. More specifically, analyses have focused almost exclusively on their psychotherapeutic value, with some attention to the pharmacodynamics of plant remedies. The central argument of this paper is that such a perspective has been generated more by the selective psychiatric orientation of cross-cultural field workers than by the diverse realities of the curing systems themselves. The paper describes medical care among the Nekematigi, Benabena-speaking horticulturalists of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Presented within an ecological framework, these materials demonstrate dependence upon a wide range of physical manipulations such as bleeding and flagellation with nettles, dietary alterations including increased protein consumption, social rearrangements, verbal spells, and plant medicinals of both specific and general application. The potential effects of each contribution to the medical regime are examined and a twofold conclusion is reached: (1) that it is precisely the mix of physical and psychological elements that accounts for Nekematigi success in treating the chronic infectious diseases which predominate in their environment, and (2) that this is likely to be true of many previously reported medical systems hitherto interpreted primarily in psychological, social, or symbolic terms.     

A Social Anthropologist's View of Papua New Guinea Highlands Prehistory

The Highlands of Papua New Guinea have usually been regarded as relatively homogeneous, socially, culturally, and ecologically. In this article I begin with the view that the ethnography of the Eastern and Western Highlands shows great diversity. I argue that this diversity is also evident in the prehistory of the Highlands and that the Eastern and Western Highlands have followed markedly different paths in the development of agriculture and pig husbandry and in their rates of change and transformation. Intensive agriculture and linked pig exchange are very old in the Western Highlands, nascent in the Eastern Highlands. This difference is clear in the ethnographic present, but I argue that it is upon the very different prehistories of the Eastern and Western Highlands that a synchronic comparison of Highlands societies should be mounted.     

Fluid Ontologies: Myth, Ritual and Philosophy in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Fluid Ontologies: Myth, Ritual and Philosophy in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. L. R. Goldman and C. Ballard. eds. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. 172 pp.     

Contested Knowledge, Contingent Classification: Animals in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

New Guinea highlanders appear to conceive of animal taxonomy in a way that is simultaneously familiar to a scientist, yet different. This is often attributed to interaction between natural ecology, which constrains content, and cultural context, which conditions the structure of any taxonomy. The evidence presented here confirms this view, although the considerable, and initially disconcerting, disagreements between persons over taxonomic issues raise the question: To what extent is Wola classification of natural phenomena analogous to Western hierarchical classification? The stateless political environment conditions the Wola constantly to challenge hierarchy, obfuscate boundaries, and think in terms of "fuzzy sets," confounding the assumption of agreed classes and threatening intellectual anarchy. However, their taxonomic regime offsets this, facilitating discourse in the absence of authorities to adjudicate in disputes. No formal classificatory scheme devised so far can adequately represent such an oral tradition's ever negotiated ordering of animals; whatever framework we adopt will somewhat distort it. [Keywords: Papua New Guinea, ethnozoology, taxonomy]     

Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea

Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea . Paige West. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 320 pp.     

Ecology and community dynamics of Kubo people in the tropical lowlands of Papua New Guinea

Kubo producer-units (families and independent bachelors) could have been self-sufficient in the production of bananas but chose not to be. Nor did they seek self-sufficiency in the production of any combination of staple carbohydrate foods (bananas, tubers, sago flour) or, in the long term, strive for balance in the exchange of food with other producer-units. Despite the fact that bananas, which provided 50% of people's energy needs, were a delayed-return crop Kubo communities were very unstable. This instability and the failure to choose the option of self-sufficiency were connected and were mediated through intense intracommunity sharing that, ultimately, served to negotiate a concern with sorcery. The people grew bananas in the way they did, not out of environmental necessity, but to accommodate the crop to the needs of sharing and, thereby, facilitate community living.     

Alpha-thalassemia in Papua New Guinea

Summary A study of the distribution of -thalassemia in Papua New Guinea (PNG) was carried out by DNA analysis. A total of 664 DNA samples were screened for -thalassemia 2 and -thalassemia 1 caused respectively by either deletion of one or both of the duplicated -globin genes. -Thalassemia 2 was detected in high frequencies in coastal and lowland regions where malaria has been holo- to hyperendemic but in low frequencies in non-malarious highland regions. The highest frequency was observed in the north coast of PNG. The distribution of -thalassemia 2 seems to be in accordance with other conditions such as ovalocytosis and G6PD deficiency which are also prevalent in this population, suggesting that they may interact in protection against malaria. However, it appears to be negatively correlated with -thalassemia and -thalassemia 1, the latter being extremely rare in this population. Analysis of the types and subtypes of the single -globin gene deletion revealed a predominance of the –^4.2 type in general, except in some regions in the south where the –^3.7 type is prevalent. The –^3.7 I subtype is the common form of the –^3.7 deletion in the PNG mainland. The –^3.7 III subtype, previously reported to be unique in Melanesians and Polynesians, was detected in an offshore island of PNG. However, this subtype is very rare in Melanesians from the PNG mainland.