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.     

Insect trypanosomatids in Papua New Guinea: high endemism and diversity

The extreme biological diversity of Oceanian archipelagos has long stimulated research in ecology and evolution. However, parasitic protists in this geographic area remained neglected and no molecular analyses have been carried out to understand the evolutionary patterns and relationships with their hosts. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a biodiversity hotspot containing over 5% of the world's biodiversity in less than 0.5% of the total land area. In the current work, we examined insect heteropteran hosts collected in PNG for the presence of trypanosomatid parasites. The diversity of insect flagellates was analysed, to our knowledge for the first time, east of Wallace's Line, one of the most distinct biogeographic boundaries of the world. Out of 907 investigated specimens from 138 species and 23 families of the true bugs collected in eight localities, 135 (15%) were infected by at least one trypanosomatid species. High species diversity of captured hosts correlated with high diversity of detected trypanosomatids. Of 46 trypanosomatid Typing Units documented in PNG, only eight were known from other geographic locations, while 38 TUs (~83%) have not been previously encountered. The widespread trypanosomatid TUs were found in both widely distributed and endemic/sub-endemic insects. Approximately one-third of the endemic trypanosomatid TUs were found in widely distributed hosts, while the remaining species were confined to endemic and sub-endemic insects. The TUs from PNG form clades with conspicuous host-parasite coevolutionary patterns, as well as those with a remarkable lack of this trait. In addition, our analysis revealed new members of the subfamilies Leishmaniinae and Strigomonadinae, potentially representing new genera of trypanosomatids.     

Sanguma and scepticism: questioning witchcraft in the highlands of Papua New Guinea

Some anthropologists prefer clear-cut depictions of the societies they study, preferring to ignore differences of opinion, failures of belief, and expressions of scepticism and doubt. This tendency is increasingly being challenged, and an emerging literature now explores scepticism. Contributing to this literature, I discuss the scepticism towards witchcraft expressed by my interlocutors in the Papua New Guinea highlands province of Chimbu. I do not juxtapose witchcraft to science, for witchcraft must be taken seriously – especially since accusations often have severe consequences. Expressions of scepticism bring into doubt the absolute certainty of witchcraft as the explanation for misfortunes such as illness and death, and its study provides a more nuanced picture of a society, showing how cultural norms can be transformed and the foundations of violence can be disrupted. This applies to the scepticism I heard expressed, because the challenge it poses to witchcraft accusations may help prevent further violence. An anthropology of scepticism could usefully be applied more broadly to many aspects of culture, since study of scepticism is one way of reaching an understanding of how social change occurs.     

Keratinolytic and keratinophilic fungi in the soils of Papua New Guinea

A study was made of soil samples collected during an expedition to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Fungi were isolated from the samples by the method of hair baiting (To-Ka-Va). Of the 33 species isolated, about half showed keratinolytic activity. Such activity is previously unreported for Mucor hiemalis f. hiemalis, Myrothecium roridum, Paecilomyces carneus, P. marquandii, Penicillium brevicompactum, Rhinocladiella mansonii and Verticillium lecanii. The species most active keratinolytically were Chrysosporium an. Arthroderma cuniculi, C. an. A. curreyi, C. indicum, Myceliophthora vellerea and Trichophyton ajelloi. The spectrum of fungi with keratinolytic activity isolated from the different sites differed considerably according to the frequency of use by man, heaviest use being correlated with greatest activity. The pH of the soil (varying from 5.8–7.5) had little influence on the type of such fungi isolated.     

Notes on the Sociology of Wantoks in Papua New Guinea

In Melanesian pidgin languages, wantok means someone with a similar origin as oneself, and connotes a familiarity and mutual solidarity. Wantok has also become a watchword of politics and elite discourse on the Pacific Islands' political and social development, where it is a figure of corruption, clientelism, and the lingering influence of tribal identity. Even among grassroots people, wantok sociality is common, especially in urban places, but wantok talk tends to paint the wantok as a drain and burden. In this paper, I argue that when people perform wantok status they juxtapose village and town as inversions. They thereby create familiar relationships in uncertain situations, but also posit intimacy as inimical to the idea of modernity as embodied in towns. This suggests that the wantok idiom draws upon a particularly segmentary logic of relatedness in which solidarity is relative to difference of varying scales. In so doing, wantoks transform the nature of the kinship ties which inform them. As evidence, I examine debates over urbanisation in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and ethnographic observations of a rural-urban nexus of Normanby Island and Alotau in Milne Bay Province, PNG.     

Introduction: The Politics of Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

This collection of articles seeks to demonstrate that the concept of order – the intensive and extensive coordination of human action across space and time – is useful for answering some of the most pressing theoretical and practical questions in contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG) today. Building on existing work in this field [Benda-Beckmann, K., and F. Pirie. 2007. “Introduction.” In Order and Disorder: Anthropological Perspectives, 1–15. New York: Berghahn Books] in this special issue we ask: How do people create enduring, stable, and routinised life in contemporary Melanesia today? We position our work as the next step in a growing movement to study contemporary institutions in PNG as order-making projects, rather than attempting to divide them into legitimate projects like ‘government’ and false or ineffective ones like ‘cargo cults’.     

Litter production and seasonality of mangroves in Papua New Guinea

Productivity, as measured by litter trapping, of a mangrove dominated by Rhizophora stylosa Griff. at Motupore Island (lat. 9° 31′34′?S; long. 147° 17$\text{\$}\text{?}$02‘ E) was 1430 g dry weight m^?2 year^?1. This is a high figure when compared with other studied mangrove sites. Phenological data were obtained for R. stylosa, R. apiculata Blume and Sonneratia alba Smith. All species have a major leaf fall in the wet season. Flowering in both Rhizophora species is greatest during the wet season, but S. alba peaks during the dry season. Leaf emergence data were only available for R. stylosa and these appeared to be trimodal. Correlations were calculated for each component with rainfall, wind run, maximum temperature and minimum temperature. Some significant correlations were obtained with rainfall and maximum temperature. These correlations are discussed and it is suggested that the seasonality of mangrove phenologies needs to be considered in terms of whole tree physiology rather than isolated environmental factors.     

Education and the "new" inequality in Papua New Guinea

Literature has been produced over the last fifteen years in Papua New Guinea (PNG) concerned with the increasing level of socioeconomic differentiation which has accompanied political independence. Consensus exists that postcolonial PNG is experiencing increasing disparities in education, wealth, political power, and the general set of benefits typically associated with development and modernization. This author argues that studies of such growing socioeconomic stratification in the country have ignored or dismissed gender as a source of inequality. She focuses upon educational opportunity as the key to wealth and political power and shows that the most educationally disadvantaged group in PNG is rural women. Data to support her thesis are drawn from national censuses, the author's field work in the area of Madang Province, and literature on stratification. The national census includes data from both lowland and highland populations. Since the authors' field site is culturally and ecologically highland, however, the paper focuses upon the highlands, using data from nonhighland areas primarily for comparative purposes.     

Finding Money: Business and Charity in Auhelawa,Papua New Guinea

There is a growing consensus that money and the market principle have not led to a great transformation into modernity. Rather, market exchange is everywhere socially embedded. But what does this embedding consist of, structural limits, tactics of resistance, or moral boundaries? Auhelawa (Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea) have incorporated money into their local economy in a variety of ways which keep the logic of the market in check. The comparison between two modes of accumulation – business and charity – sheds light on the precise nature of embeddedness. Local entrepreneurs describe themselves as navigating dilemmas which arise from contradictions between accumulation and reciprocity. Church congregations, however, appear to have transcended this conflict by representing their charitable contributions of money as love-gifts which are not subject to reciprocity. While charity, like business, is an embedded form of accumulation, I argue that it creates links to an alternative hierarchy of values, and thus contains the potential to create a great transformation of its own.     

Genetic distance: probing the origin of a Papua New Guinea isolate

In an attempt to elucidate the origin of an isolated peripheral Highland, Papua New Guinea population (the Karimui), HLA, blood group and serum protein markers were investigated. Due to the paucity of published HLA marker data, genetic distances using non-HLA markers were constructed between populations surrounding the Karimui and compared in 3-dimensions by multidimensional scaling analysis. Genetically, the Karimui is most closely associated with Highland populations to the east and northeast. In a attempt to develop a more global view of relationships, distances constructed from HLA marker data between 2 close Highland populations, 2 Coastal Papua New Guinea populations and 4 Australian aborigine populations were compared. The Karimui associated most closely with the Highland populations and equidistantly and at opposite poles from both the Coastal Papuan and aborigine populations. A paradigm of the composition of the founder group and the early population dynamics is developed from genetic, linguistic and anthropologic data.     

Conceiving relatedness: non-substantial relations among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea

This article considers the implications of imagining kinship as a non-embodied relation. In recent years, it has become commonplace to argue that relatedness is a gradually acquired state that can be built over time and by non-sexual means. In this view, relationships of consanguinity are not given at birth but are created through purposeful acts of feeding and caring. Here, I address a question that has been less commonly asked by anthropologists: need kinship always be imagined as entailing an embodied connection? Is there a way of thinking about cross-generational relationships that does not ground them in bodily connectedness, or, at the very least, one that imagines contexts in which they are not embodied as a substantial link between people? Drawing upon data collected among Kamea of Papua New Guinea, I describe a world in which the parent-child tie is conceptualized as one that is inherently non-embodied.     

Mobility,Violence and the Gendering of HIV in Papua New Guinea

The links between gender, sexuality and violence hold serious implications for HIV transmission and its social and economic effects. In Papua New Guinea, enduring and pervasive patterns of male sexual behaviour involving coercion, violence and gang rape are highly conducive to the transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections and have a critical bearing on women's sexual autonomy and health. The realities of violence are intensified by the widespread view that women are responsible for the spread of the virus. This paper engages the theme of mobility to consider the fluid and dynamic character of gender relations and sexuality in contemporary Papua New Guinea, and to gain perspective on constructions of modern masculinity and the discursive representations of gender violence in the context of the escalating HIV epidemic.     

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.     

Generic plant assemblages in the highland forests of Papua New Guinea

Virtually complete tree lists from seventy-eight sites in four regions above 1900 in a.s.l. in Papua New Guinea are analysed numerically and the results compared with classifications already in use. A major floristic break occurs between 2800 m and 3000 w a.s.l. The Upper Mountain Forest above this is tentatively divided into four nodes, the altitudinally lowest (< 3400 m) being pliysiognomically similar to the forest below. The Lower Mountain Forest below the major break has two nodes, one of which may be an assemblage of variously depauperate and less stable derivatives of the other: they are not altitudinally distinct.