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This book explores questions of identity and value posed by people
living on (or near) the small Pacific island of Karavar in Papua
New Guinea, focusing on how the Karavarans' long-term preoccupation
has played out in various social contexts.
This remarkable book explores questions of identity and value posed
by people living on (or near) the small Pacific island of Karavar
in Papua New Guinea. The complex social and cultural changes that
occurred during the century after Europeans first arrived in the
area have led Karavarans to wonder about-and to assert-who they are
and who they might become as citizens of a developing country that
is striving to create national coherence across some seven hundred
linguistic and cultural groups. Focusing on how the Karavarans'
long-term preoccupation with identity and worth has played out in
various social contexts, Errington and Gewertz convey a grounded
sense of how these people have actually lived and dealt with such
widely significant issues as ethnic diversity and the development
of national unity. The authors present a historical and
ethnographic analysis that, in its scope and mastery of detail,
does justice to the complexity and significance of change in a
colonial and postcolonial world. Errington and Gewertz's
discussions convey a perspective that simultaneously makes both
"other" and "ourselves" more understandable and readily comparable
as culturally constructed, historically contingent, and mutually
determinative. This book will be of interest to anthropologists,
sociologists, Oceanists, and all scholars concerned with questions
of national identity.
Class has become a feature of life in Papua New Guinea, evident in both "traditional" and "modern" settings. This book examines the emergence of class differences and its social and cultural ramifications in Wewak, capital of the East Sepik Province. It movingly conveys the injuries of class inequalities, and reveals how class has worked in similar and different ways, and how it has become possible and plausible for relatively affluent "nationals," even those living in modest urban centers, to present themselves as fundamentally superior to other Papua New Guineans.
This accessible 1999 study of social class in contemporary Papua
New Guinea deals with the new elite, its culture and its
institutions, and its relationship to the broader society. The
Papua New Guinea described here is not a place of exotic tribesmen,
but a modernising society, shaped by global forces, and
increasingly divided on class lines. The authors describes the
life-style of the elite Wewak, a typical commercial centre, their
golf clubs and Rotary gatherings, and bring home the ways in which
differences of status are created, experienced and justified. In a
country with a long tradition of egalitarianism, it has become at
once possible and plausible for relatively affluent 'nationals' to
present themselves in a wide range of contexts as fundamentally
superior to 'bushy' people, to blame the poor for their
misfortunes, and to turn their backs on their less successful
relatives.
Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have worked as anthropologists in Papua New Guinea for nearly two decades. In this, their second joint study of the Chambri, they consider the way those in a small-scale society, peripheral to the major centers of influence, struggle to sustain some degree of autonomy. They describe the Chambri caught up in world processes of social and cultural change, and attempt to create a "collective biography" that conveys the intelligibility and significance of the twentieth century experience of these Papua New Guineans whom they have come to know well. This biography consists of interlocking stories, twisted histories, commentaries and contexts about Chambri who are negotiating their objectives while entangled in systemic change and confronting Western representations of modernization and development.
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