Frustrated Modernity: Kerewo Histories and Historical Consciousness, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea (original) (raw)
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Within the context of the Purari Delta's transforming materialities of resource extraction, and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku ('hand head') lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit-beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups' identities manifest. However, given the ambiguous status of the traditional past among the I'ai, the power of these forms is circumscribed to the village thus making them ineffectual tokens in the bid to secure royalties from resource extraction. Instead, highly coveted documents known as ILG certificates have emerged as efficacious things by which royalties can be secured. Examining these certificates as objects, I investigate how these documents help materialise anew descent groups, communities' relations to their environment and thus their aspirations for development with its attending materialities. The problem for the I'ai, however, remains how to obtain these documents and, as with eve uku, how to control them.
2015
'criminals' would not dare attack us. In particular I would like to thank Patrick Tanget, the local businessman who helped me in many ways, and his wife Maisie, who even lent me money when I was trying to secure a drum of petrol for our travels. Without this I know that Volker Gast expects me to add a subsection called 'disacknowledgements' and list his name there, but I will disappoint him and instead positively acknowledge his contribution to this thesis. Our many arguments about the methods and call of anthropology made me reconsider what we often take for granted when talking to our fellow-anthropologists, 'our own tribe', or others with whom we share a lot of common ground. I thus thank Volker for our arguments, for reading the Xlll drafts of several of the thesis chapters, and for sharing with me his field site in Sibidiri in Southern New Guinea. Several other people commented on earlier chapter drafts, some of which were published as papers or presented as conference talks. In this connection 1 wish to thank
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