Married women in rural Papua New Guinea are at risk for HIV primarily because of their husbands' extramarital relationships. Labor migration puts these men in social contexts that encourage infidelity. Moreover, many men do not view sexual fidelity as necessary for achieving a happy marriage, but they view drinking and "looking for women" as important for male friendships. Although fear of HIV infection is increasing, the concern that men most often articulated about the consequences of extramarital infidelity was possible violent retaliation for "stealing" another man's wife. Therefore, divorced or separated women who exchange sex for money are considered to be "safe" partners. Interventions that promote fidelity will fail in the absence of a social and economic infrastructure that supports fidelity.

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The "culture concept" has been challenged on a number of fronts, both by medical anthropologists researching AIDS and in the discipline of cultural anthropology more generally. Medical anthropologists have argued against the "etiologization" of culture, and cultural anthropologists have taken issue with the tendency to treat beliefs and practices as static and seamlessly shared. Using the narrative of one Huli woman's shifting explanation of a diagnosis of syphilis, this article argues that, rather than avoid the notion of culture, we should strive for representations that demonstrate how individuals use discourses in expedient, ad hoc, and yet deeply felt ways. This article also argues for the importance of a sociology of knowledge approach to understanding local notions of etiology. The woman's understanding of her situation was strongly influenced by her entry into a new "community" of women who had similarly been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.

The globalization of standardized knowledge about HIV and AIDS depends in part on local AIDS awareness educators who receive training from national and international organizations and then, ideally, disseminate what they have learned. In this article I analyze textual and observational data from a five-day introductory AIDS awareness workshop in rural Papua New Guinea. Although the instructor adhered to the handbook provided by the National AIDS Council for much of the information, she departed from it significantly when informing participants about the "root causes" of HIV's spread and in giving them advice about prevention. I explicate where her extratextual knowledge came from as well as its overall message to target audiences. I suggest that textual silences in AIDS awareness handbooks can motivate local HIV translators to embark on a kind of semiosis-the ongoing production of new, hybrid knowledge about HIV.

By juxtaposing a contemporary myth with an exegesis of Huli "passenger woman" (physically and sexually mobile women), I address the gendered nature of modernity. Huli women are expected to enact tradition, both through their consumption practices and through participation in the bridewealth system. Passenger women become modern through their repudiation of these roles. An analysis of women's experiences suggests that modern forms of identity can emerge in response to the shifting meanings and practices of social reproduction, [modernity, bridewealth, social reproduction, sexuality, myth] Once there was a Huli woman who had two lawini (boy-or girlfriend, romantic interest), one who lived at home in Tari and another who had a job in Port Moresby, the capital city of Papua New Guinea. She was willing to marry either one of the young men, but the latter's family was able to assemble the necessary bridewealth pigs and money first, and so she married him. Her husband remained in Port Moresby, and she moved in with his mother and sisters, helping them to make gardens until he sent her a plane ticket and asked her to come join him. Wanting to show her husband how happy she was that he-unlike many husbands-desired her company in the city, she decided to bring him some taro, a food symbolic for the Huli of intimacy, rituals remembered if no longer practiced, and the value of hard physical labor. Better than words, a gift of taro would tell him about the kind of wife she would be and would perhaps reassure him that city life would not make her lazy or selfindulgent. So she rushed off to her garden without telling anyone where she was going.Her other lawini had never forgiven her for marrying someone else, and all this time he had been spying on her and plotting how to take his revenge. Seeing his opportunity, he followed her to her garden, attacked her with a bush knife, and chopped her head off. When her body was finally found, a message was sent to her husband in Port Moresby, but-as messages often do-it went astray, and he never received it. So the woman's ghost took her plane ticket, wrapped a scarf around her neck, and got on the plane to Port Moresby as scheduled. When her husband met her at the airport, he thought that her skin looked a little sallow, and it seemed odd that she never removed her scarf, but he was so happy to see her that he insisted on carrying all of her baggage, and he loaded her up with a profusion of gifts-shoes, watches, purses, sunglasses, and radios.After they had lived in Port Moresby for almost a year, they decided together that it was time to make a visit to Tari. When they got off the plane, there was a white fourwheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser waiting for them. The woman jumped into the driver's seat, her husband took his place in the passenger seat, and he was amazed and proud that she was able to drive. She drove him to a permanent fiberboard house Ampriran Ethnologist29H ):5-32.