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\"By adopting ideas like 'development,' members of a Papua New Guinean community find themselves continuously negotiating what can be expected of a relative or a community member. Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives 'What about me?' This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like 'community' can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship. As the state withdraws, Mbuke people explore what social ends might be reached through involvement with the cash economy\"--Provided by publisher.

By adopting ideas like \"development,\" members of a Papua New Guinean community find themselves continuously negotiating what can be expected of a relative or a community member. Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives \"What about me?\" This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like \"community\" can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship. As the state withdraws, Mbuke people explore what social ends might be reached through involvement with the cash economy.

Wogeo Island is well-known to anthropologists of Papua New Guinea through the work of Ian Hogbin. Based on substantial fieldwork, the author builds on and expands previous research by showing how Wogeos establish and maintain social relationships and identities connected to place and movement in the physical landscape. This innovative study demonstrates how Wogeo worldviews and social organization can be described in relation to terms of movements, flows and placements in the landscape while, in turn, the landscape is constituted and made meaningful through people’s activities and buildings. The author not only addresses some of the key issues in contemporary anthropology concerning place, gender, kinship, knowledge and power but also fills an important gap in Melanesian ethnography.

Engendering objects explores social and cultural dynamics among Maisin people in Collingwood Bay (Papua New Guinea) through the lens of material culture. Focusing upon the visually stimulating decorated barkcloths that are used as male and female garments, gifts, and commodities, it explores the relationships between these cloths and Maisin people. The main question is how barkcloth, as an object made by women, engenders people’s identities, such as gender, personhood, clan and tribe, through its manufacturing and use.This book describes in detail how barkcloth (tapa) not only visualizes and expresses, but also materializes and defines, people’s multiple identities. By ‘following the object’ and how it is made and used in the performance of life-cycle rituals, in exchanges and in church festivities, this interaction between people and things, and how they are mutually constituted, becomes visible. How are women’s bodies and minds linked with the production of barkcloth? How do cloths produced by women both establish and contest clan identity? In what ways is the commodification of barkcloth related to gender dynamics? Barkcloth and its associated designs show how gender ideologies and the socio-material constructions of identity are performed and, as such, developed, established and contested.The narratives of both men and women reveal the ways in which barkcloth provides a link with the past and dreams for the future. The author argues that the cloths and their designs embody dynamics of Maisin culture and in particular of Maisin gender relations. In contributing to the current debates on the anthropology of ‘art’, this study offers an alternative way of understanding the significance of an object, like decorated barkcloth, in shaping and defining people’s identities within a local colonial and postcolonial setting of Papua New Guinea.\"Engendering Objects is among the most comprehensive and innovative new works emerging from Melanesia examining the intimate connections between material culture, cultural identity and gendered personhood. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and examination of museum collections, Anna-Karina Hermkens traces the enduring yet innovative place of tapa (barkcloth) among the Maisin people. Written with warm compassion and immediacy, the book is a theoretically provocative, accessible and compelling portrait of changing life in a Papua New Guinean village society.\" - John Barker, University of British Columbia\"This book makes a most welcome contribution to the study of the materiality by showing how gender is performed in the sensuous terms of clothing, food, and the exchange of objects. Anna-Karina Hermkens accomplishes this with enviable care and intellectual resources, and a prose and ethnography that make the book a pleasure to read.\" - David Morgan, Duke University\"Anna-Karina Hermkens takes us to look at designs on bark cloth from Papua New Guinea through a magnifying glass. A fascinating perspective on material culture evolves. Beyond the art work we discover individuals - mainly women - painting their stories about who they and their beloved are as women and men, as traditional members of a clan, and also what they head for as strugglers in a new economy driven world.\" - Christian Kaufmann, Honorary Research Associate, Sainsbury Reseach Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich UK, former curator for Oceania at the Museum der Kulturen BaselAbout the author:Anna-Karina Hermkens obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 2005 from Radboud University Nijmegen. She is currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the ‘College of Asia and the Pacific’ of the Australian National University in Canberra Australia.

Refugees are at risk of experiencing a combined constellation of complicated bereavement and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms following exposure to complex traumas associated with personal threat and loss. Features of identity confusion are central to both complicated bereavement and PTSD and these characteristics may be particularly prominent amongst refugees from traditional cultures displaced from their homelands, families, and kinship groups. We investigate whether a combined pattern of complicated bereavement and PTSD can be identified amongst West Papuan refugees participating in an epidemiological survey (n = 486, response rate: 85.8%) in a remote town in Papua New Guinea. Latent class analysis was applied to derive subpopulations of refugees based on symptoms of complicated bereavement and PTSD. Associations were examined between classes and traumatic loss events, post-migration living difficulties (PMLDs), and psychosocial support systems. The four classes identified comprised a complicated bereavement class (11%), a combined posttraumatic bereavement class (10%), a PTSD class (11%), and a low symptom class (67%). Symptoms of identity confusion were prominent in the posttraumatic bereavement class. Compared with the low symptom class, the combined posttraumatic bereavement class reported greater exposure to traumatic loss events (OR 2.43, 95% CI 1.11-5.34), PMLDs (OR 2.24, 95% CI 1.01-4.6), disruptions to interpersonal bonds and networks (OR 3.3, 95% CI 1.47-7.38), and erosion of roles and identities (OR 2.18, 95% CI 1.11-4.27). Refugees appear to manifest a combined pattern of complicated bereavement and PTSD symptoms in which identity confusion is a prominent feature. This response appears to reflect the combined impact of high levels of exposure to traumatic losses, PMLDs, and disruption of relevant psychosocial systems.

Culture is often problematised as a key structural driver of HIV transmission in Papua New Guinea. Official HIV programmes, as well as church teachings, tend to focus on customary marital practices of polygyny and bride price payments as 'harmful traditions'. This focus can oversimplify the effects of current and historical nuances of cultural, political and economic change on sexual concurrency and gender inequality. Community-based healthcare workers in Southern Highlands Province explain that customary marital practices are now highly reconfigured from their traditional forms. A recent mining boom has financially advantaged local and travelling men, who are driving an increase of sexual concurrency, transactional sex and inflation of bride price payments. Healthcare workers suggest that the erosion of important social relationships and kinship obligations by the expanding cash economy has caused an intensification of individual male power while enhancing the vulnerability of women. Yet without the means to challenge the effects of uneven economic development, healthcare workers are left to target 'culture' as the central influence on individual behaviours. A commitment to address structural inequality by political leadership and in HIV prevention programmes and a careful contextualisation of cultural change is needed.

The emergence of Virulent Plasmodium falciparum in Africa within the past 6000 years as a result of a cascade of changes in human behavior and mosquito transmission has recently been hypothesized. Here, we provide genetic evidence for a sudden increase in the African malaria parasite population about 10,000 years ago, followed by migration to other regions on the basis of variation in 100 worldwide mitochondrial DNA sequences. However, both the world and some regional populations appear to be older (50,000 to 100,000 years old), suggesting an earlier wave of migration out of Africa, perhaps during the Pleistocene migration of human beings.

\"Foster shows us how seemingly banal activities like making a phone call, chewing betel nut, watching a Coke commercial may give important insights into the ways in which the nation is constructed, materialized or contested.\"-Orvar Löfgren, author of On Holiday: A History of Vacationing Why, in the current era of globalization, does nationality remain an important dimension of personal and collective identities? In Materializing the Nation, Robert J. Foster argues that the contested process of nation making in Papua New Guinea unfolds not only through organized politics but also through mundane engagements with commodities and mass media. He offers a thoughtful critique of recent approaches to nationalism and consumption and an ethnographic perspective on constructs of the nation found in official policy documents, letters to the editor, school textbooks, song lyrics, advertisements, and other materials. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the links among nationalism, consumption, and media, in Melanesia and elsewhere.

In the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, sexuality is valued as a positive expression of relational personhood, registering the efficacy of consensual and pleasurable practice in producing and maintaining social relations. The power of sexuality to demonstrate individual and collective capacity and potential holds particular salience for unmarried young people. This paper draws on my ethnographic research on culture and HIV in the Trobriands to address perduring questions about the locus of individual autonomy in Melanesian sociality, where relational personhood shapes identity and modes of exchange in the moral economy. I focus on the gendered agency of youth sexuality, including the use of kwaiwaga, or love magic, in exercising and controlling desire. The narrative identities of two young women provide the lens through which questions of agency are explored, revealing how the autonomous mind, nanola, is central to understanding the embodiment of social relations, how the power of love magic transfers agency from one individual to another, and how individual assertions and acts are ultimately expressions of situated relationality.

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the 'dividual androgyne' and 'sociality' have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The 'dividual' is considered to be 'a new, non-unitary model of embodiment and ... one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20 th Century' despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous 'dividual' challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other 'premodern' form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the 'dividual' (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti-female ideology - including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy - for benign accommodation between the sexes. The 'dividual' does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi-Strauss 'classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that 'the gender of the gift' is invariably female.