It’s June, and I’ve just received my 2013 Annual Review of Anthropology,[i] proving that some things (like postal service) never change, and that anthropology still moves at its own pace. Because I live in Papua New Guinea, I’m able to inhale nonessential data about my research interests every day. Today there might be a rumour, tomorrow a FB news item on something I happen to be writing about, it’s like sitting midstream a tsunami of anecdotes rather than panning for nuggets of data that will make a few months in the field pay for a whole career. Living in the field makes me a source in my own right, and gives me a newsworthy edge when I’m at conferences of symposia overseas.
But it doesn’t make me a better anthropologist, and it may even erode the long distance perspective that other ‘Melanesianists’ who live elsewhere can share when they convene on panels and other fora. They can mull over details, draw the unique comparisons, size things up at another angle. I’m still speed typing notes from yesterday. It’s an important difference, I think, because it defines our audiences. My blog, my reports to NGOs or government agencies, the stories I collect on the side, are all pitched to a readership sitting beside me, somewhere midstream as all this information flows by. Whereas academic Melanesianists have cornered the market on profundity, I’m more like a warzone journalist with less time to make meaning of this flow of events, and a desperate need to close the door and think. Despite the enormous pressures and bureaucracy of an academic’s life, most of the anthropologists I know cannot wait to get back to the field, and they feel the distance bearing down on their ability to move the discourse forward. We grow very close in our old age, me pushing the door closed, he or she wrenching it open.
The longer I live in Papua New Guinea, the more I yearn for those remote discussions about ontology, identity, and abstract notions of power. But I prefer what I do for its immediate gratifications. My company conducts social impact assessments for all kinds of development projects in Papua New Guinea, and the real team of fieldworkers are ethnographers that I trained while teaching them ten years ago at Divine Word University. Nothing we do conforms to the longue duree, so we don’t publish much in academic journals, and we spend too much time making our reports more academic and (we hope) enduring than our clients ever need. There’s a page on our website www.nancysullivan.net that links to several of these reports, and some of them are publishable quality works, of which I’m very proud, but their real value can only be found in how much impact they’ve made on public policy. That’s unclear. While colleagues overseas regret that their efforts rarely translate into policy (when indeed they should), I’m seriously worried when ours do not---because that’s what they’re meant to do. So in this essay I want to talk about the role of our work, applied anthropology, and why it is best accomplished by Papua New Guineans, and why this is the only way to improve public policy in Papua New Guinea. Ours is a somewhat outcast position in the world of anthropology, and the nature of NGO or public policy work means that we’re never guaranteed of any ‘expert’ status here either. But this is a Dalit movement I’m trying to build. I want these brilliant colleagues of mine to get the respect in PN that they deserve, and for the field of indigenous applied anthropology to get more credibility in the halls of the discipline itself.
First, the timetable of academia defeats us. Quite apart from the financial impediments, just taking the time to get a PhD is daunting. Sometimes it takes ten years from start to finish, with a year or so for fieldwork, another to write and defend a thesis, and then at least as long on the market searching for a teaching job. It’s infantilizing, and requires a tribe of supporters even for the European candidate. Before you eventually and somehow find a publisher for your thesis you are further required to spin off as many peer review articles as possible (unpaid) that inch your data into the major discourse bit by bit. This requires enduring the anachronistic condescension of older and more published anthropologists selected to review your papers on the basis of similar fieldwork conducted possibly forty or fifty years ago. They will tell you what to write, and it will always be that which accords to their own perceptions. Remember footnotes? That’s where you can assert your contrariness. So even if there are blogs and social media outlets for your more piquant observations, you still need to be flayed by academics for a year before seeing your article in print, and it may feel either humiliating or beside the point. Print media is not dead, it is still exacting cruel tyrannies on young academics.
The apparatus of indentured servitude is so forceful that it repels most indigenous anthropologists from the international conferences and fora. Thankfully. Because the really funky political moment comes when that esteemed emeritus professor is forced to reject the contribution of an indigenous anthropologist who hasn’t learned the protocol---not just how to present the data, but how to curb the offending ideas. Even the indigene who cleverly couches his or her contributions in long lists of references can be knocked back by a old white guy who looks like the pre-Independence pastor in the village---because what you personally know about the field site is wholly original and hasn’t devolved from a long ethnographic history.
Let me be brutally clear. Indigenous anthropology no longer matters to academic anthropology. But that’s fine, because that is exactly where the next wave of important anthropology will emerge: from applied ethnographers and soi-disants who have been trained to think critically about social change. As the field withered in the last decades for political and practical reasons, indigenous anthropologists moved on to other careers where their skills were re-tweaked, but those field also began to reach out for ethnographic information, so some of them became even more aptly placed than they’d expected. It has made being in the field, living in Papua New Guinea, a more important asset to some.
Applied anthropology has its own peculiar timetable, not as slow as academia’s but still absurdly delayed by contrast to news or public opinion. For example, I may be writing a report for some International NGO about an urgent social issue---say, child abuse. After interviewing the appropriate representatives on the ground, the insights I might glean must still be couched in a deep pad of logical arguments built by the acronymic NGO jargon itself. Naturally, this leads the argument in a predetermined direction, and should any of my insights be controversial, they still must fall under the structure of what has been said before. Thus, I might discover in my research that more children are abusing children than ever before, and this radical new turn of events can only be placed under the heading of ‘Peer Violence’ somewhere down the long list of expressions of abuse already tediously carved by former researchers. Rather than highlighting this development, it gets buried as an aberration. There simply isn’t the vocabulary or format to present unexpected events. International NGOs also require that your findings be compared with those from other reports in the region---South East Asia and the Pacific, or perhaps Oceania---but always a region broad enough to make comparisons between teenager girls in Thailand utterly inapplicable to the girls Hohola. You draw the contrast between these, then skirt back to aspects that compare favourable, say, with what another NGO has found for girls in New Caledonia, and carefully make your way to statements that are applicable only to this group of girls now, in Port Moresby, PNG. It’s exhausting.
Then there is the language. Acronyms exist for every social issue: CEDAW, FPA, RTC, GBV, DV, CSA, CSES, CTQ, DBD…[ii] and many more, in the case of family violence, and they overwhelm the conversation on paper and in person, standardizing the international postures, the responsibilities of signatories, and even the actors themselves. MSM---men who have sex with men---all form a subset, as do JINs---Juveniles in Need, and VMC, Vulnerable Mothers and Children, and so forth. One of my favourites is CICL: Children In Conflict with the Law---which means nothing, and everything of course. These are good for charts and tables, of course, but there is another level of standardization for the quotes that get box-texted in a report: someone talking about running away from home becomes a “Goroka female, 15” or another is “Single Mother, 25” and so forth. Ironically, my team is often hired on the basis of our ethnographic bent---the anthropological literature reviews, and the way we describe our methodology. They get us hired, because these are buzzy now in the development world (which I will talk about later), and our EOI (Expression of Interest) in response to a TOR (Terms of Reference) will pop out because it ticks certain BINGO (Big International Non Government Organization) requirement. But that doesn’t make ours the most useful or widely read report. Often the length of our work gets it shelved, even after the office has sent it back for edits more than once. They need bullet points, memes, sound bytes, all of which do painful disservice to the close participant-observation we’ve conducted.
It all reminds me of a gag my girlfriends and I pulled in fourth grade, on a teacher who never seemed to read our homework essays. Three of us inserted in our essays the same sentence “And we all love Cary Grant’ for a year, and were never called out on it. That’s how report writing can feel sometimes.
But applied anthropology has its advantages. It’s easier here to mix media with academic text in this work, and to blindly prattle of strings of unread references because they all draw the same conclusions. It’s stuffing, but it can be so stiff that moving the dialogue forward takes a lot of work. It must be subsumed by the format of course, but sometimes the evidence we uncover can be sensational nevertheless. Or at least it should be. When we at NSA (Nancy Sullivan and Associates, not National Security Agency) studied ‘street children’ in PNG for Dame Carol Kidu’s Department for Community Development in 2009[iii] we learn very quickly that terms like ‘street children’ didn’t even apply. What children working on the streets and in markets within PNG are doing, is very different from what we think about when we read the term ‘Street Children.’ It almost takes their situations entirely out of that NGO-speak category. Most children seen hawking goods are actually members of intact families, families that have migrated to town or fled domestic violence (most likely a violent father) or a land issue in the village. There are few homeless orphans in PNG, and a remarkable number of group homes established by heroic individuals to bring displaced children into an ad-hoc family. The title ‘orphan’ is itself dangerous to apply in this country because a child loses entitlements to land and resources once he or she is stripped of a clan or place. We recommended more family services rather than building orphanages. Dame Carol understood what we were saying, and the Department took our report seriously. But one department in one East Asia and Pacific government hardly redefines the discourse, and even now, five years later, there are few references to our findings found in any reports by International Child care NGOs working in Papua New Guinea. Instead, the issue keeps getting redefined on their own terms.
Brevity and its pitfalls
What I like about the Annual Reviews of Anthropology, and what seems appropriate to their coming 6 months late, is that they synopsize all the work done recently on a subject, most of which is beyond access to me in Papua New Guinea. These reviews are always put together by esteemed anthropologists at pains to do justice to the main point made by all the writers, and as counter-intuitive as it seems for them to be generalizing these issues, there is a brevity to the reviews that can’t be found anywhere else (save social media).
The 2013 volume has an excellent review by David Mosse of ”The Anthropology of International Development” [iv], which catches us up on the twin trends of inserting ethnographic work into development, and in turn, anthropologizing the field of development itself. Just as more and more anthropologists are studying these BINGOs, the institutions are incorporating more ‘ethnographic’ information into their research reports. Or so they say. Bronislaw Malinowski’s classic ‘participant-observation’ mandate for the ethnographic method[v], which evolved from his work in the Trobriand Islands one hundred years ago, not only remains the centrepiece of anthropology, but has inspired other social sciences to seek fine-grained observation of culture themselves. Mosse’s review also covers some of the writing on ethical problems that have always emerged from anthropologists working within development, and while he acknowledges the way the field has been implicated in oppressive power structures from the days of its colonial inception, he shows us how nuanced those issues can be in the range of material produced by anthropologists now working within this thing we (still) call ‘development.’
Mosse mentions Paul Sillitoe, for example, who has worked in Papua New Guinea, and started talking about a ‘revolution’ in ethnographic research as far back as the nineties (1998, 2001, 2007[vi]). This was at the tail end of an era filled with Foucault-ian examinations on knowledge and power, and Sillitoe was calling for a more ‘participatory’ anthropology that would incorporate Indigenous Knowledge (a concept that became its own acronym, IK) in development planning and policymaking. At the same time, Mosse himself was part of a wave of anthropologists working in and writing about Africa and the development agencies that had descended upon it. [vii] This material is so rich, I taught it at Divine Word for a while, and still recommend it to recruits for our company as a way of seeing casework analyses that can be reshaped by ethnographic information. Katy Gardner and David Lewis have an edited volume, called Anthropology, Development and the Post-modern Challenge (1996[viii]), that was then and still is one of the best teaching tools for applied anthropology, and much more readable than Lucy Mair’s groundbreaking Anthropology and Development (1984[ix]).
As an American anthropologist who entered grad school in the eighties, I am as squeamish as any of my peers about voice and neocolonial ethnographic power structure, sensu Clifford and Marcus’ classic 1986 Writing Culture[x]. I cannot pretend to speak for Papua New Guineans, or to assume my work stands apart from politics as an objective science. But I regret that some of this postmodern reflexivity has prevented people from working in the old-school field sites where there still exist vast power differentials---‘tribal’ societies, for example. This is where ethnographic critique is desperately needed, because the vacuum left by anthropology’s retreat has been filled by inept neoliberal policy and the condescending generalist literature found on bestseller lists today. [xi] Apart from Sillitoe, PNG lacks anthropologically informed development theory, and even though excellent ethnographies of PNG social change have been written in the past twenty years, few anthropologists have dared to get their hands (and reputations) dirty in development theory or implementation. At the same time, a lot of the ‘grey’ literature of NGOs ignored by anthropologists in their literature reviews, and worse, their critiques—especially in Oceania (but for some excellent exceptions like Annelise Riles’ 2001 ethnography of the Fiji women’s NGOs called The Network Inside Out)[xii].
Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern put out an edited volume in 2005 that addresses a number of issues covered in this chapter, titled Anthropology and Consultancy, and among the best contributions is their own, the Introduction, which spells out some of the reason why applied anthropology is stigmatized. Generally applied anthropology is done for international aid organizations or commercial developers, and these are but the latest incarnations of the ‘science of colonialism’ with which anthropology has long been associated (Stewart and Strathern 2005:2[xiii], see also Goody 1995:7-15 and 1977[xiv]).
Whereas anthropology has long been prodded to ‘study up’[xv] –to study the systems of power rather than its victims, and thus provide a service to us all---Sillitoe was calling for a revolution of how we study that would radically democratize the up, down and middle of our field. He called for a kind of participatory development that would break down ontological hierarchies, in a sense, recreate the very epistemology of anthropology. If we incorporate indigenous knowledge systems within our western ones, as part of the analysis of ethnographic data, we are honouring the cultural systems from within, not without. It’s a nuanced contribution to the ideas about indigenized methodologies in the field which emerge not just from applied anthropology, where Sillitoe was standing, but from the academic theory about insider-outsider perspectives. This is a little harder than it sounds, however, and the concept of ‘participatory development’ that included grassroots alongside western knowledge systems quickly morphed into a formula that inserted ‘ethnographic research’ into policy planning as it has always been done before. And in PNG it’s always easy to make room for ‘cultural sensitivity’ in your public planning, if only because it’s written into the constitution. It sounds so good. But actually giving credence to non-Mendelian ideas about biology, using the carefully detailed knowledge systems ethnographers commonly record in the field as the lens through which to apply your ideas, and to recast development, that is another thing altogether. That never happened. Instead, Malinowski’s ethnographic method has been abbreviated into formats like the RRA (Rapid Rural Assessment), and the PRA (Participatory Rural Assessment), reducing those signature fine-grained studies into quick snapshots in a sacrilege accepted too readily, for the sake of institutional efficiency, and preventing any real ethnographic insights from getting through to policy after all. It is a serious problem.
John Clammer’s essay, “Beyond the Cognitive Paradigm: Majority Knowledges and Local Discourses in a Non-Western Donor Society” [xvi], describes how incorporating indigenous knowledge into development projects can actually create an illusion of equality, without changing anything in the power structures of development. Often, he contends, decisions about which projects to undertake are not driven by ethnographic information, or even indigenous knowledge, so much as they are by streamlining protocols—and project managers finding ways to co-opt one project to achieve dual objectives (and save money). Development is a business, after all.
Several years ago, for example, my team and I were enlisted to produce a rapid assessment of fishing groups along the Madang coast for the European Union Rural Coastal Fisheries Project.[xvii] One of the roadblocks to success in that scheme, which gave fishing groups loans for small boats and coolers, and connected them with private industry partners for their sales, was that people were just not paying back their loans. The EU fisheries people kept saying the Madang were not ‘committed’ fishermen, didn’t work hard enough, and so forth. We took a look at everyone’s fishing group ledgers and found they were all pretty profitable, and successful on their small scale.
What was the problem? The NGO, and other specialists from Milne Bay, all compared the Madang fishermen unfavourably to their brethren in New Ireland and elsewhere. We reported that Madang fishermen were indeed half-hearted, and they stopped fishing at important times of the year to attend to the yam harvest and its ritual celebrations. These months were precisely those when their fishing boat loans were coming due, so everyone forfeited on their loans. We drew a calendar of the times when boats and loans should be offered, when savings should be mustered for each group, and so forth, which was a pretty simple fix for the main problem. Nevertheless, the loan forfeitures forced the EU to close down the Madang project anyway---our intervention came too late. But to this day, fisheries people across PNG talk about the lack of enterprise in Madang fishing groups as proven by their EURCF failure. It drives me bonkers.
‘‘A worrying criticism of those of us who try to relate indigenous knowledge and practices to science and technology,’’ Sillitoe observes, ‘‘is that we reinforce the idea that the former is somehow inferior.’’ (Sillitoe 2002:111).
Indigenous anthropology
The clarion call for indigenous anthropology in Papua New Guinea was first sounded thirty –five years ago by Louise Morauta, Sir Mekere’s first wife who was teaching at UPNG at the time. She wrote in 1979[xviii] about 12 non-anthropologist indigenous writers who had already begun, by that time, ‘decolonizing’ the inquiry into PNG culture in their own work. It’s a great article, especially for striking out at the institutional and academic barriers that have prevented anthropologists from seeing or crediting indigenous work, and really defines some of the terms for how Papua New Guineans would research themselves---what their priorities were at the time. It is published in a peer-review journal with the reviewers’ comments following the article, and a reply by Morauta at the end. The call for indigenous anthropology at that time was bold and timely, coming only a couple of years after Independence during a global postcolonial academic shift. She says the wave of new PNG writers who emerged during the seventies were already forging a new view of tradition, emphasizing cultural unity over diversity, as deeply inscribed in the anthropological literature of PNG by then (and in the interest of forging national identity, she suggests). Their reaction to the ‘preservationist’ ethic of anthropology and museum studies was a tendency to adapt tradition to modernity form overseas.
She makes a very important point by citing John Waiko, a UPNG Historian (not yet an Oro MP), where he says that development practitioners cultivate a ‘false consciousness’ in villagers of being oppressed, when they do not actually feel this, and yet are not given tools to adapt their culture to the new era. Waikos work, Morauta says, is a radical critique of development policy. He wrote some of the most enduring pieces of indigenous Papua New Guinea ethnohistory, including the especially teachable, Australian Administration Under the Binandere Thumb[xix] (from 1989’s Papua New Guinea: A century of colonial impact, 1884—1984; which is so nicely paired with IraBashkow’s 2006 The Meaning of Whitemen : Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World[xx]).
This debate seems like an idea long buried and reclaimed by the next zeitgeist. Much of what Morauta says would have been common critique in an academic discourse by then---and I say that because when I went to graduate school a decade later, these points were offered more matter of course. But thirty years has changed a lot of academic discourse, and anthropology has been knocked off its perch here in PNG, while fewer and fewer foreign or indigenous students choose to study the discipline. Very little theorizing has been done with indigenous anthropology. A generation of students at UPNG were trained by Colin Filer taught his students at UPNG in the late nineties to conduct social impact assessments for resource development projects[xxi], but I assume many of them went on to other work. Currently our conbsulting company is the only one boasting indigenous anthropology for Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile applied anthropology in general has not much improved its reputation as a bastard sell-out of the academic discipline.
Looking back at 1979, Morauta’s reviewers took her to task for her class. A collective of UPNG students comment on her paper as follows: “We feel that the title of the paper is rather ambiguous. Here we might ask, is it indigenous anthropology or elite indigenous anthropology? (p567)”
Another reviewer asks (p 568):
How can one begin to do truly responsible and modern anthropology without asking what the relationship of the anthropologist (whether national or foreign)is to power and property in comparison with the subjects he or she studies, and how that relationship influences the methodology and the conclusions that are drawn? By raising the ‘insider doctrine’ in this way, she implies that the best Papua New Guinean social science would be such that one could not discern whether it was written by a Papua New Guinean or a foreigner. In the current situation, that amounts to ‘intellectual colonialism’ ….
It is true that at the time, anthropologists working at UPNG would have conceived of indigenous anthropologists as new versions of themselves. “To some extent the historical task of anthropologists working in someone else’s country is still to build in their own obsolescence.” (p568)
You feel the post-colonial outrage in this critique, knowing that that feeling has dissipated in the succeeding years somehow. This may have to do with the interdisciplinarity of the field now, with more economic, environmental and other positivist scientific research being braided into anthropology. We’ve taken reflexivity for granted so much that it is startling to come upon phrases in international aid pamphlets that refer glowingly to ‘change’ and ‘modernity’ in 2014. Some anthropological revulsion at working in development is justified by the frustration of having to reclaim a lot of critical thinking every time you write a report. As another reviewer notes, it was the Ghanian anthropologist Maxwell Owusu[xxii] who said back in 1978 that a requirement for informed intellectual dialogue in Africa today is now for foreign Africanists to realize that they can no longer be the unchallenged interpreters of African countries.
The same must be said about Papua New Guinea.
It is not that the ‘insider doctrine’ has come to dominate, but that the resource boom in PNG has really preoccupied all the home-grown and foreign anthropologists since the 1980’s. There is brilliant material being produced about social change in Papua New Guinea, but far few academic jobs to fill as professional anthropologists. The kind of critique John Waiko perfected in the eighties has no counterpart today, but for the social media entries of NGO workers and disaffected political economists. It is astonishing that the small field of indigenous research has not raised a more concerted challenge to the hidebound thinking of an Australian academia and development. The State, Society and Governance program in Australian National University does a good job of this, but they occasionally recruit PNG scholars away from universities here to join their think tank. This leaves an anachronistic feeling to the blogs and posts of social media, most of them fervently neoliberal and a small amount informed by Marxist materialism. If you attend the Mining Conference in Sydney the halls are filled with obiescant politicians, safari suited mining CEOs, and elbow patch academics who’ve never heard a bad word about global capitalism.
Strategic essentialism
The issue for Morauta in 1979 is painfully familiar today. Whereas she imagines a time when indigenous anthropologists will be just like foreign ones, indigenous anthropologists have more political ideas. If foreign researchers value cultural diversity, indigenous ones at the time were keen to promote national unity (in a recently Independent country). Most poignantly revealing is the last comment made in her response to the points made by readers (and this is one of the best parts of the paper).
In a few years’ time the emphasis [in this debate over whether PNG researchers stress national unity over the diversity that foreigner’s stress] will have shifted to a substantive debate on a broad range of issues. At such a time a paper like this will have no place. There will be no need to establish or broadcast that indigenous anthropology exists, and those writing indigenous anthropology in Papua New Guinea will find fellow-travellers overseas as well as at home as do social scientists anywhere in the world.
What did not occur to Morauta was the possibility of indigenous anthropologists reshaping the field itself, at an ontological level. She imagined a future of anthropologists who all shared ‘outsider’ status, rather than make differential claims to being an ‘Insider.’ Sillitoe’s ideas about indigenous knowledge were still some time away, and Morauta could be accused of academic chauvinism. Student anthropologists were more interested in making anthropology conform to them, rather than vice versa. It reminds me of something a University of Goroka English teacher (from Canada) told me years ago, about how she refused to compromise the standards of her course just because Papua New Guineans have a different tradition. This is not the same as saying all physics must include Euclidean maths, but it comes close to saying the western way is the only way.
These days “strategic essentialism” is common in applied anthropology everywhere. It’s related to the concept of “situated knowledge” and gets raised in arguments about objectivity and activist research. Informants are apt to talk about themselves in hackneyed terms, as if all the bad travel brochure language had been internalized even before they read Jared Diamond[xxiii]. We are savages---they are cannibals, and all that. But key phrases the repertoire of indigenous actors have become reified to the point of a meta-language for negotiation. They show up in the speeches and documents of indigenes themselves, for various reasons. Terms like Pagan, backwards, underdeveloped, illiterate, etc. are terms Papua New Guineans use for themselves, for example, as they define themselves against their past every day. In the words of one applied anthropologist: “Anyone who has worked closely in support of indigenous land claims, for example, cannot be completely comfortable with the way these phrases sit with our allies. Quite apart from remaining awfully abstract, they often do not capture very well what is going on.“[xxiv] Nevertheless, these are the tools of ‘strategic essentialism’, reserved for insiders in select battles against outsiders---and against the postmodern claims of being beyond race or tribe, which would eliminate the entitlements that accrue from these terms. Once the crude racist distinctions are history, how does an indigene claim his or her rights?
Decolonized methods
In 1999 the Maori anthropologist Linda Tuhiwai Smith published Decolonizing Methodologies. It beamed us up into a world of fourth world politics where the struggle to control indigenous identity was (at that time) everything. Smith describes an example of decolonization in something called Kaupapa Maori Research, which refers to research from the Maori perspective. It is complication, but she fine-tunes the description by saying it is not open to all Maori writers, as any Maori writer could also have a Western European perspective on an issue. It refers to writing that reclaims the Maori identity as its point of view. It may sound politically constraining (because, as we know, there are anti-feminist women, surely there may be anti-indigenous rights Maori), but it actually brackets a voice, not so much a political agenda or a corporeal identity. You can be non-Maori (she says), and you can be a critic of Maori culture or politics, but you cannot be Kaupapa Maori by assuming the western positivist research agendas that prevail in academia.
This is beyond the identity politics of most Papua New Guineans today, although there have long been articulate spokespersons for the inherently Melanesian point of view, and there are today social scientists both PNG and non-PNG who have explicitly rendered an indigenous perspective. The debate simply exists beyond the frontlines of contemporary PNG research. Partly because the country is fraught with a painful and poorly defined class battle between the elites who benefit from the new economy and the rest of PNG which seems never to benefit from economic growth. Nevertheless, the issue is important as we return to the need for Papua New Guinean Research, and the claims and counter-claims from the Morauta article that in 1979 PNG researchers were largely focused on presenting a unified rather than a diverse culture.
The debate about indigenous anthropology has largely shifted to matters of insider-outsider voice. Archaeologist Polly Schaafsma[xxv] writes about the ethics of interpretation in American southwest rock art and archaeology In very general terms, processual archaeology is an analytic science grounded in logical positivism (2013:8), struggling now to come to grips with hermeneutics and even phenomenological participant-observer methods. But engaging indigenous knowledge is never straightforward, she says, and an indigenous worldview can only be described in archeology by being subsumed to the western one. The idea that one epistemology can only be grasped by a member of that worldview created impossible barriers to science. If we want to talk about social science, which is a science after all, we needn’t skew the data into a western perceptual framework, but we can make indigenous knowledge interpretable by outsiders—to some extent. Outsider knowledge is always crucial in science, even when fine-grained ethnographic detail of one’s own community by insiders is increasingly available. It is really about emphasis in that participant-observer position prescribed by Malinowski so long ago. Insofar as any indigenous knowledge must be made known to another public, it must be subject to interpretation by the scientists, indigenous or otherwise. But it’s easy to get caught in this insider-outsider double bind. In fact, it’s binary nature belies the reality of blurred identities today. When indigenous experts focus on a subject related to their own culture, they too are outsiders, but with a distinct advantage---epistemologically and politically. When an obvious outsider like myself becomes ‘embedded’ in Papua New Guinea (marries, has children) she has also blurred those lines and can identify as insider on some levels, and still be an outsider on others. This devolves into hermeneutics, but it is possible to argue we all stand ‘outside’ an indigeneity of some sort and ‘inside’ a hybrid or syncretic field of multiple cultures. I will return to this later.
The other point to be made here is that there is a different agenda for applied indigenous anthropology. One has to be sensitive to ethnographic detail and also anticipate social change. This also requires the longue duree of living through radical social change in this country. I can acknowledge revolutionary shifts in my own lifetime, but that’s no basis for comparison to what’s happened in my fieldworkers’ lives, and what they can imagine will happen in our informants’ lives. The team may not have advanced degrees in anthropology, but they certainly have advanced understandings of social change, and the way ‘development’ works for some and not for others. They know how projects get built, aborted, forgotten, and how dreams can misfire slightly, inflate wildly and eventually be misappropriated. These are not lessons learned from Pakistan or New Caledonia. These are anecdotal experiences that can be crucial to projecting long term social impacts on project today.
Recently we were enlisted to conduct a comprehensive social mapping of a region where landowners were to be resettled after construction of a major resource project. Another stakeholder had already hired a social scientist (economist I believe) from UPNG to conduct a similar study a few years earlier, and we were wary of its glib assessments. That researcher had relied on ethnographic accounts from fifty years ago or more, updated by interviews with clan leaders at the time, and come to a reasonable assessment of what this project could mean for the people’s future. Among his projections there was absolutely no discussion of women’s roles and whether or not they might change. You could almost hear the transcripted interviews of clan leaders assuring him women have no say in public life, they are very shy and prefer not to get involved, and so forth. Our clients (Australian) were keen to tick off a gender equity box so they asked us to query this assessment when the author was in a meeting of stakeholders.
There was no confrontation, and it was not a feminist issue, more an ethnographic oversight, typical of rapid social assessments conducted all over PNG these days. The man said that men had assured him women were subservient, and they had no say in the clan’s future. He hadn’t asked them himself because he didn’t need to, we were told. It was custom. You can imagine how he wanted to play this out: the European woman insisting on a foreign concept of equity be applied to a traditional setting. But my male colleague was the one to speak first: he explained that land tenure issues were the first to change during large scale projects like this and we had worked in many places where the women’s claims were expanded, their roles altered significantly by relocations like this. This is easy to understand: patrilineal tenure systems are often flexible enough to allow married daughters to live with their fathers, and we assumed this would be the case here—more women coming home, more women exercising their access to benefits in what Laura Tamakoshi has elsewhere called the ‘ancestral gerrymandering’ of claims[xxvi]. Our report emphasized this and the issue had become controversial with some of the male landowners. Importantly, it was my male colleague who made the point in the meeting, winning over the landowner representatives as well as the researcher. Had it only been myself in that room, the point would remain contentious and the entire report might have been dismissed by stakeholders on the argument that it didn’t reflect tradition.
By the time I left DWU, I’d recruited a cadre of my best students to work in my anthropological consulting company, and we took their critical thinking into the field. Even hampered by RRA and PRA formats, these researchers bring so more than I to the field. They hit the ground running. No one has to brief them about the limits of a Councillor’s reliability or why the most gregarious informant may have something up his sleeve. They see each field site with the slightly better vision I might bring to market research in New York. And slowly, project by project, we have built a resume of fine-grained research for clients that range from environmental NGOs to government agencies and resource developers. We can also reject clients if we like. But my thinking about development has always been borrowed from Eldridge Cleaver: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
Real change moves at a glacial speed. You’d have to look at the long chains of knowledge production in this country to understand why major international development organizations and even local volunteer agencies still live by rigid templates coined elsewhere in Oceania to Asia. Bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy, and it is like rust growing on the gears of community action. People come and go, desk reviews incorporate more findings from elsewhere in the southern hemisphere, projects are tweaked according to what worked in Kiribati or Vietnam, and failure provides yet more conferences about the ‘lessons learned.’
Applied anthropologists Katy Gardner and David Lewis (1996[xxvii]) talk about moving beyond ‘anthropologists as experts’ now that ‘participant-observation’ has been picked up and (too often) simplified by NGOs and development agencies themselves. Morphing into the realm of government bureaucrats and businessmen, it legitimizes anthropology but doesn’t really improve the discipline. Anthropology has not become more indigenous as a result, even though NGO reports look a little more ethnographic these days. What Gardner and Lewis point out, importantly, is that anything that brings the research agenda back to its source, back into the hands of its subjects, is a way of wresting the field itself from the academy, something long overdue. They also say that the very professionalism many indigenes aspire to, the ‘objectivity’ one covets as a social scientist, and not just a commentator, is itself a danger, a new form of quicksand, because it is just as easily subsumed for other peoples’ agendas as are the physical sciences. Local people strive to speak with scientific authority, but that voice is often part of a western chorus about power and subordination. One way for indigenous anthropologists to push beyond such parameters is for them to gain experience in many different fieldwork settings, not least away from their home country (Ibid:165). Perhaps this is the best way for anyone to comprehend the relativity of epistemological frameworks, as well as the politics of science itself.
In the nineties people used to buy conservation project ‘handbooks’ and modules and methods, like you would buy a Reality Show template in a franchise. Real Housewives of Anywhere always require character arcs, confrontations, fights, and unsteady resolutions. The documentary filmmakers need a ‘script’ for their shoot, they need a beginning and an end, and they need a familiar moral of the story. The same for donor agencies. There are boxes to tick for Women In Development, Gender and Development, Poverty Reduction, etc. National or local NGOs love their Venn diagrams, lists and ‘problem trees.’ When the steps have been laid out, they are rarely followed. But they are meticulously diagrammed. The stakeholders simply conform to the relations and roles of tradition, or convenience. We write up reports that spin our efforts so many different ways, to please so many donors, that it’s hard to make a theoretical point about development in general. When our work is effective, it is because it combines both participatory and indigenous anthropology, not because it applies a formula found effective elsewhere, and never because it has discovered a snapshot solution to a problem.
But only anthropology can really explain the dissembling practice of development, the way it dresses up global dependency and rigid hierarchies of value in what looks like a level playing field. Really it just produces more playing fields, more referees and a better and better illusion of the flat earth. Anthropologists do a good job of tearing down the curtain before this Wizard of Oz. They critique and upend development beautifully, and hold it at arm’s length to discuss ontology and epistemology in a twenty-first century world. But now it’s time for anthropology to get involved again, get off the sidelines and build a better theory. The ethical questions persist: By participating in development, does the anthropologist simply become part of the prevailing discourse and help oil the anti-politics machine? Expatriate researchers can easily undermine the work of local practitioners by taking jobs or by using local workers in subordinate positions. Foreign anthropologists need to take responsibility for developing, through their work, the abilities of local researchers to carry out applied and other research. They need to ‘transfer skills’ as we say in Aid Land. The ‘fly in, fly out’ expert role is anachronistic and often breeds distrust.
The problem is that when conscientious anthropologists flee development work, the place of ‘cultural advisor’ is often filled with someone considerably less aware. Most projects in PNG use cultural filler rather than serious ethnographic detail to shape their plans. PNG has also not had the kind of critique of development theory Escobar (1995[xxviii]) gave Latin America. You hear PNG academics citing Hernando de Soto’s (1988, 2003[xxix]) ideas about land registration, in fact, when the Melanesian context is entirely different. We don’t have critical elder statesmen talking about new forms of capitalism as you do, for example, in Singapore (Mahbubani 1998[xxx]), or even young critics of globalization like Tsing (2005[xxxi]); no ethnographies of foreign aid to PNG (like Crewe and Harrison 2000[xxxii] give us for Africa). There are few commentators challenging the pervasive economic model in PNG that touts downstream processing and foreign investment as the goal of PNG’s economic growth, as if postwar dependency theory had never occurred. Where are the William Easterly (2001[xxxiii]) exposes of malicious growth for PNG? We don’t even have a pyramid like India to be up-ended by new capitalist strategies (Prahalad 2006[xxxiv]).
Papua New Guinea today, the aftertaste of colonialism is never so bitter that it doesn’t intoxicate. Those brave iconoclasts of the Independence generation, centered at UPNG in the seventies, whose writing formed the basis of a Constitution that broke away from the past (and which can be felt in Morauta’s paper) had no real second act. They stepped outside European paradigms for a moment, but moved back again for careers in business and politics. And the juggernaut of global capital swallowed them up. This is still where the elite, educated Papua New Guineans operate, even if they chafe at some of the neoliberal economic fences. There is very little ideological questioning of Late Capital, and even less indigenous criticism of what it has done to the cultures of PNG.
Indigenous Methodology
Linda Tuhiwai Smith produced a classic on indigenous anthropology in 2012, called Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples[xxxv] (Smith 2012). Elsewhere referred to as indigenist research, Smith it talking about how Maori New Zealanders can take bak the control over research about themselves. Interestingly, she does say Maori research can only be conducted by Maori, but she advocates a Maori point of view –which she calls Kaupapa Maori research---that includes a Maori identity, shared principles, presumption of legitimacy to Maori culture, and a concern for Maori cultural autonomy.
Smith talks about the importance of the postwar Nuremburg Code of Ethics (2012:208) for all science research. And yet, she says, “From an indigenous perspective …[it] came too late, the history of research and exploitation was already embedded in European imperialism in the lead-up to the Twentieth century.”
When Smith says indigenous Maori research can also be conducted by non-indigenous researchers, she is saying that it is an ontological matter: your worldview defines the ‘indigeneity’ of the data. Sillitoe, Schaafsma, and all the other people cited here have struggled with the balance of insider-outsider, and what constitutes the ontological shift from being indigenous to being ‘western.’ Is it when the indigene goes to university overseas? Or when she becomes Christian? Who is to say? But like debating the violence of the Yanomami---and Jared Diamond’s more recent assertions about New Guinea violence---we must always acknowledge the sociopolitical subtext of our point. Violent ‘primitives’ can imply humans have a long way to go before peace is the norm rather than the exception. But even Papua New Guineans know that violence surrounding a mine site in the highlands is highly atypical Melanesian behavior. It certainly requires distance to say this, but it probably does not require being a European to say this about Melanesia. And conversely, it does not require a grassroots perspective to formulate public policy in Papua New Guinea. Every man, woman and child in PNG is a complex collection of identities, some more stable than others. Sometimes, as a long-term resident married into this country, I shared a proximate empathy with other women, mothers, wives; sometimes I don’t. But I think the same thing can be said of my PNG fieldworkers, as ethnographers working ‘inside’ as well as ‘outside.’ That’s just life today.
This returns us to the issues of class which silently cross-cut everything in Papua New Guinea today. The indigenous ethnographers with whom I work share my ‘class’ insofar as they are educated and socially conscious people---neither strivers nor gentry, they are farmers and community activists, and vaguely materialist, reactionary and selfish in the way all of us are. They are skilled in their respective specialties, considered elites when they sit in the village, but yokels when they visit Port Moresby. These people who slip through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class distinction (2013 [1979][xxxvi]), but they are not rational operatives either. Their doxa is always being challenged, whether they know it or not, and no one can fully define their habitus (Bourdieu 1977). But that makes them just like me, in fact. And just like thousands of other Papua New Guineans today (all of them potential ethnographers)
Informed consent
Unfortunately, the terms of ‘informed consent’ remain vague today, and while local NGOs seek to better define this for the people with whom they work, the majority of applied anthropological tasks in Papua New Guinea today require little more than a ‘release’ that might be signed, marked or thumb-printed by a prospective subject. This is little more than what any photojournalist would distribute. Nevertheless, the information can be misconstrued at any point along an information chain, resulting in, at best, pointless development investment (tractors for people without roads, computers for those without electricity), and at worst, relocation, disenfranchisement, and violations of basic human rights. The anthropologist has a code of ethics, but so often the applied or activist anthropologist is left to invent ethics in the field. Is it really ethical to invite a photojournalist to cover a remote community because they look primitive? (I am guilty of this). What if the photojournalist raises funds for their welfare? (Guilty again). These issues are rarely tackled in the offices of donor organizations, much less in business school or NGO handbooks. Martha MacIntyre has written about this, about levels of consent, and what constitutes informed consent (2007)[xxxvii], based on her experience with mining projects in PNG. “In my view,” she writes, “‘free, prior and informed consent’ necessarily entails commitment to a process of educating and informing people about the ‘worst case’ scenarios and the likelihood that some of these will eventuate” (2007:7). This kind of information is not to be found in any mining best practice handbook. It must come from an ethnographer, and someone with experience with these scenarios.
And yet Anthropology has a dark past, with stories of abused data, exploitation, and complete lack of consent. We can be very bad people. There are plenty of instances where anthropology has turned against its subjects, as for example, during the Vietnam War when it was used to help train soldiers in guerilla warfare. Perhaps the most celebrated of recent cases comes from Napolean Cagnon, who works with the Yanomami people of Brazil. Patrick Tierney wrote about in his 2000 book Darkness at El Dorado[xxxviii], and Chagnon put up his own defense recently in Noble Savages[xxxix]. These books feature a battle of the subtitles: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (Tierney) versus My Life Among Two Dangerous tribes—the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists (Chagnon), with accusations flying across decades and mountains of media on the same events. Tierney’s accusations centre on lack of consent, and conducting science at the cost of informants lives, which he documents in sordid detail. It is Chagnon’s methodology he challenges, and says that Chagnon exaggerates Yanomami violence and may even have contributed to some of it himself. It is a battle over sociobiology---an evolutionary approach to human social behavior. Tierney (and others) have long said that Chagnon and his mentor, geneticist James Neel, not only gave the Yanomami measles, but that Chagnon inflated claims about the bellicosity of the Indians to serve an evolutionary model of culture at the time. Neel is said to have been a eugenicist, who would have felt no qualms eliminating the population for his own research. Chagnon went on to become famous for giving Amazonian culture its ferocious reputation. Tierney’s journalistic research uncovers the ugly side of both these men, who consistently denied being influenced by politics, and yet have very reactionary political views. These, the aver, have nothing to do with the quality of their science. But no science has been untainted by scientists, as we learned as early as the 1887 Michelson-Morely experiments with aether. These famously failed experiments taught science that nothing we observe is ever untouched by our observing it. This was a premise that fueled physics for the next several decades and ultimately gave us the particle-wave concept and Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle. We can never be written out of the picture. The scientist must be factored into the data.
Changnon’s supporters have called Tierney’s book a hoax, and the biggest smear campaign in anthropology’s history. EO Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker---and others who share a sociobiological (i.e. evolutionary) perspective about human culture—have declaimed the story Tierney tells by saying it is a political witch hunt that obscures the radical science being uncovered. Chagnon’s book smears his critics as politically motivated and jealous, and says Tierney and the anthropologists who line up to support him have debased science and turned the field into a humanitarian mission.
But in one sense the positivist argument is already debased, as an epistemological premise. If Chagnon did exaggerate (or personally aggrevate) the violence of people he studied, then his claims of scientific objectivity are false. He may have launched an academic career in a bold statement at the time, but he did so at the price of science and the reputation of all Amazonian Indians. The world knows the Amazon as a ferocious place because of Chagnon’s claims. On the other hand, it is always important to study genetics and physical anthropology alongside cultural work, and to stand by results even when they are politically unpopular.
The problem is (and this harkens back to the controversy surrounding Morauta’s call for indigenous anthropology that looks and feels like European anthropology) no one has ever been able to exclude politics from science, or separate the disposition of the scientist from the questions they choose to raise. Hypotheses are framed, fieldwork is funded, and papers get published on the basis of power structures and who may benefit. That said, there are also anthropologists who believe Chagnon’s science is sound and his personality unsound. All you can do, if your data looks dangerous to one or another population, is to frame is as accurately as possible. It will never stand alone, and never be without consequences. But then, science is a lightbox of refractions anyway, nothing is a final view. The real dilemmas are more subtle than these debate, and they never make the headlines. What does an anthropologist do when his or her research implies a project or development will have disastrous consequences for a population, or may generate violence between different groups? It’s easy to call people out on the basis of their theoretical orientations, if these are pronounced. But its harder to work with unreflexive researchers who simply cannot fathom the impact their findings may have on others.
Again, the advantage of Papua New Guinean ethnographers is that these consequences seldom escape them, and unlike Chagnon or Neel, they won’t be flying home to another land. If you plan to live with the results of your work and the people they affect, there’s far less chance of making egotistical choices. Granted, this may have a censorious effect upon one’s work. But it may also have an ameliorating effect upon the stakeholders involved. It’s easier to cope with dashed expectations and disasters if your interlocutor, the ethnographer, hasn’t run away to another country.
Reciprocity
In Papua New Guinea the unwritten Best Practice manual requires long term relationships with the people you partner, study or serve. Some call it Payback[xl], and it lies beneath the Retributive Justice that define customary law. But it is Marcel Mauss’ 1925 concept from The Gift and Chris A. Gregory’s thesis in his 1982 Gifts and Commodities[xli]. It’s going to sound glib for me to conclude on this point, but reciprocity is, frankly, everything in Papua New Guinea. We needn’t turn to theories of value to explain this, only to every outsider’s personal experience of being ‘adopted’ or ‘initiated’ into their study population and made to feel ‘like family.’ Little does the neophyte know what family entails in PNG, and the obligations this mantle proffers upon you—for years and years to come. I had dinner with a another anthropologist who was back in her field site for a visit, catching up with old friends, and helping them come to terms with the fact that the resource company that has doinated their comunity for the past decade is now phasing down, and the CEO left in rather a hurry. How are they to make sense of that? The new CEO was thoroughly chuffed, though, when the community put him through an enormous welcome ceremony ("They made me a chief!"), and is convinced that there is more thn enough good will to go around. My friend th antnropologist thoght otherwise. But who is she to tell this guy that they've pulled him deep into a honey trap from their very anxiety abut the future?
If you wish to come as a volunteer for two years, or spend nine months as a fieldworker, a long enough period to settle in but not be anchored to the place, then you need to be prepared for massive obligations. Not just the immediate requests for goods and services in accordance to your putative social position (you need to pay school fees for your ‘siblings’ and foot the bill when your ‘father’ dies too), but the long term guilt of going away that will bore into you like a Jewish mother (or the Irish mother whose stoic ‘don’t worry about me’ really means you’re a lifelong disappointment).
This is not the place to go into detail about debts and layers of ‘fictive kinship’ that surround an outsider living her for twenty-five years. It is enough to say that while academic anthropologists speak in warm tones about coming back to visit their ‘family’ (albeit chuckling about their need to provide, like the prodigal son), those of us who live, marry and raise children here are more likely to dream about bolting to another planet, maybe Antarctica, and spend more money on the family left behind than the folks we bring with us on whatever brief holidays we can eek out. Because living here in any capacity makes you prominent, visible, and a walking ATM. I remember years ago dating a PNG diplomat who said he dreaded coming back home to his obligations, and when he did, he had to create diversions from his wantoks to meet me in public. Well, that’s me today. Well, that’s me today. I not only have Sepik, Bougainville and Madang relatives who keep me on edge, but everywhere I go in a PNG town I run the risk of bumping into someone from a field site---one of the scores of places we have studied, been welcomes as family, and initiated the kind of reciprocity that ties everyone together in PNG.
More importantly, it is this inability to flee, the idea that you can never get away, which makes indigenous anthropologists so effective. No one really breaks the bonds of reciprocity if they remain in the country. Given the restrictive time frames and sensitivity of some of the things we study, it is important to informants that they know we will always be here. Papua New Guinean ethnographers are assumed to be facilitators, and they take on the role of being the interlocutor to modernity for people in remote places. How do we incorporate our landowner group? What cures coffee rust? I always complain about being woken in the middle of the night by someone testing their mobile phone from a mountaintop, usually to shout an urgent concern I might have a way to fix. But these are rare disturbances compared to what my fieldworkers suffer. They get ges paia calls from the field all the time. I see them exchanging mobile phone numbers with villagers every time we leave the field and I know they will live to regret it. But that’s their job, too. It’s very different from academic anthropology, and when we walk away with scraps of phone numbers in our pockets we know that being there, whatever report we write up, has really made a difference.
P.S. There may be more pleasing discover concerning our impact on public policy than the fact that a former student, and now Madang Town Manager, Lous Solum, just posted a letter from the Urban Local Level Government to the Mayor on a matter that refers to the "socioeconomic landscape" of the town. Bravo! I can die in peace.
[i]Brenneis, Donald and Karen B. Strier, eds. 2013. Annual Review of Anthropology. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews.
[ii]These are: Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Family Protection Act, Rights of the Child, Gender Based Violence, Domestic Violence , Child Sexual Abuse, Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, and Disruptive behavioural Disorder.
[iii]Sullivan N. and K. Keleba, 2010. Working Street Children of Papua New Guinea: A public policy. Port Moresby: Department for Community Development Child Welfare Branch www.dfcd.gov.pg . Available at www.nancysullivan.net/Reports
[iv]Mosse, David. 2013. The Anthropology of International Development, in Brenneis and Strier, eds., Annual Review of Anthropology. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, pp227-248.
[v]Here’s Wikipedia on the man: He is often referred to as the first researcher to bring anthropology "off the verandah" (a phrase that is also the name of a documentary about his work), that is, experiencing the everyday life of his subjects along with them. Malinowski emphasized the importance of detailed participant observation and argued that anthropologists must have daily contact with their informants if they are to adequately record the imponderabilia of everyday life" that are so important to understanding a different culture.He stated that the goal of the anthropologist, or ethnographer, is "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world" (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Dutton 1961 edition, p. 25.)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronis%C5%82aw_Malinowski
[vi]Sillitoe, P. 1998. The development of indigenous knowledge: A new applied anthropology. Current Anthropology 39(2): 223–252; Sillitoe, P. 2002 Globalizing indigenous knowledge, In P. Sillitoe, A. Bicker, and J. Pottier (eds) ‘Participating In Development’: Approaches To Indigenous Knowledge (pp. 108–138). London Routledge; Sillitoe, P. 2004 Interdisciplinary experiences: Working with indigenous knowledge in development. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 29 (1): 6–23; Sillitoe, P. 2012 From participant-observation to participant-collaboration: some observations on participatory-cum-collaborative approaches. In R. Fardon et al. (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology (pp. 196–210). London: Sage Pubs.; Sillitoe, P. and A. Bicker 2004 Introduction: Hunting For Theory, Gathering Ideology. In A. Bicker, P. Sillitoe and J. Pottier, eds., Development and local knowledge: new approaches to issues in natural resources management, conservation and agriculture (pp. 1–18). London: Routledge. See also Grillo. R.D. and R.L. Stirrat, ed., 1997, Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford: Berg.
[vii] See Mosse, D., ed. 2011.Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development, New York: Berghahn; Mosse, D. 2005. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice, London: Pluto; Mosse, D. And D. Lewis, eds., 2005. The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development, London: Pluto Press; Lewis, D. And D. Mosse, 2006, Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies, Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian; Gardner, K. 2012, Discordant Development: Global Capital and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh, London: Pluto Press; Gardener, K. And D. Lewis, 1996. Anthropology, development and the Post-modern Challenge, London: Pluto Press; and Hobart, M. ed. 1993, An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance. London: Rutledge.
[viii]Gardener, K. And D. Lewis, 1996. Anthropology, development and the Post-modern Challenge. London: Pluto Press.
[ix]Mair, Lucy 1984. Anthropology and Development. New York: Macmillan.
[x]Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[xi][xi][xi]By this I mean the genre that includes Jared Diamond (e.g. Guns, Germs and Steel, the fate of human societies, 1997, New York: W.W. Norton), Steven Pinker (e.g The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011, New York: Viking Books), and now Nicholas Wade (e.g. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History 2014, New York: Penguin Books).
[xii]Riles, Annelise 2001. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: Univ of Michigan Press.
[xiii]Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern, eds., 2005. Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates. New York: Berghahn Books.
[xiv]Goody, Jack. 1995. The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Goody, Jack 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[xv]A concept coined by Laura Nader in her classic essay, "Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up" In Dell H. Hymes, ed., Reinventing Anthropology. New York, Pantheon Books, 1972. p. 284-311.
"Nader issued one of the first calls to anthropologists to think more about the 'study of the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty.' "---Orin Starn 1994 "Rethinking the Politics of Anthropology: The Case of the Andes."
Current Anthropology, vol. 35, no. 1, p. 13-18.
[xvi]Clammer, John. 2002. Beyond the Cognitive Paradigm: Majority Knowledges and Local Discourses in a Non-Western Donor Society, In Sillitoe, P., A. Bicker, and J. Pottier, eds. ‘Participating In Development’: Approaches To Indigenous Knowledge. London Routledge.
[xvii]Sullivan, Nancy, Joseph Rainbubu. Kritoe Keleba, Yunus Wenda and Chris Dominic. 2004. European Union’s Rural Coastal Fisheries Development Project Baseline Study Follow-Up RRA for Madang. Available at www.nancysullivan.net/reports/
[xviii] Morauta, L. 1979. Indigenous anthropology in Papua New Guinea, Current Anthropology 20(3):561-76.
[xix]Waiko, J. 1989. Australian Administration Under the Binandere Thumb. In Latukefu, Sione, ed., Papua New Guinea: A century of colonial impact, 1884--1984 (1989). Port Mresby: National Research Institute and UPNG. Pp 75-108.
[xx]Bashkow, Ira. 2006. The Meaning of Whitemen : Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[xxi]See, for example, Filer, C. 1999. The Dialectics of Negation and Negotiation in the Anthropology of Mineral Resource Development in Papua New Guinea, in Cheater, A, ed., The Anthropology of Power, London: Routledge, pp. 88-102.
[xxii]Owusu, Maxwell 1978 Ethnography of Africa: The Usefulness of the Useless. American Anthropologist June, 1978 Vol.80(2):310-334.
[xxiii][xxiii]Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.; Diamond, Jared 2008. Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? The New Yorker April 21.
[xxiv]Hale, Charles R. 2006. Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology Vol. 21, Issue 1, pp. 96–120.
[xxv] Schaafsma, P. 2013. Images and Power: Rock Art and Ethics. Springer Briefs in Anthropology and Ethics.
New York: Springer Books.
[xxvi] Zimmer-Tamakoshi, Laura, 2000.Development and Ancestral Gerrymandering: David Schneider in Papua New Guinea, in R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer, eds., The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, University of Michigan Press; Zimmer-Tamakoshi, L. 1997. When Land Has A Price - Ancestral Gerrymandering and the Resolution of Land Conflicts at Kurumbukare. in P. Brown and A. Ploeg, eds., Rights to Land andResources in Papua New Guinea: Changing and Conflicting Views, Special Issue Anthropological Forum, Vol. VII, No. 4, pp. 649-666.
[xxvii]Gardener, K. And D. Lewis, 1996. Anthropology, development and the Post-modern Challenge. London: Pluto Press.
[xxviii]Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[xxix]De Soto, Hernando, 1988. The Other Path. New York: Basic Books; de Soto, Hernando, 2003. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the Wst and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books.
[xxx] Mahbubani , Kishore 1998. Can Asians Think? 1998 Singapore: Times Books International.
[xxxi]Tsing, AL. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[xxxii]Crewe, E. And E. Harrison, 1998. Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid.London: Zed Books.
[xxxiii]Easterly, William. 2001. The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[xxxiv]Prahalad, C.K. 2006. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating poverty through profits. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Wharton School Publications.
[xxxv]Smith, Linda Tuhiwai.2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
[xxxvi]Bourdieu, Pierre. 2013 (1979). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge Classics; and Bourdieu, Pierre 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[xxxvii]2007. Informed consent and mining projects: a view from Papua New Guinea. Pacific Affairs: an International Review of Asia and the Pacific. 80:49-65.
[xxxviii]Tierney, P. 2000. Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. New York: Norton Books.
[xxxix]Chagnon, N. 2013. Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the AnthropologistsNew York: Simon and Schuster.
[xl]See Trompf, G.W. 1994. Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[xli]Gregory, Chris A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities: studies in political economy. London: Academic Press.
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