Counterparts: Clothing, Value and the Sites of Otherness in Panapompom Ethnographic Encounters

Abstract

IntroductionWhen we blacks go to other places, we start hearing people talking about birds and we just fit in, but with whites, it's different: we deal with them as counterparts and just get along. both an offer and a demand from white people that they, too, take part in the same work as white people did, while retaining their national-cum-ethnic marker as Nationals. Conservation International's project was, from the beginning, a 'stakeholder'-driven participatory exercise, in which capacity was to be built with the help of outside experts, who would train and empower local 'counterparts' to take over their work. Indeed, those elements of the project based on establishing lasting local committees and organisations especially included a local person whose role was explicitly as 'counterpart' to an expatriate whose position was seen as temporary and enabling; the latter's anticipated withdrawal would then leave a National at the helm.

Partible penitents: dividual personhood and Christian practice in Melanesia and the West

“…3 3 See Barker (1992), Biersack (1991), P. Brown (1992: 126), Carrier (1992: 10‐13, 33n), Douglas (1998 a : 33; 2001), Foster (1995: 2‐4), Jolly (1992: 139, 145‐7), Keesing (1992: 131‐4), LiPuma (2000), Macintyre (1995), Rollason (2008), Scott (2007: 24‐34), A. Strathern & Stewart (2000: 63‐4), and Thomas (1989: 44‐5, 52‐7, 211n; 1991: 52‐3; 1999).…”

A ‘PNG’ Study into Racial Difference In Contemporary Service Delivery Practices

“…Equally important to note, PNG people use racial difference to explore and evaluate ideals beyond race, such as, but not limited to, morality, self-worth and nationalism. (Bashkow, 2006;Denoon, 1983Denoon, , 1985Fanon, 1967Fanon, , 1968Gewertz & Errington, 1998Gilroy, 2001;Lattas, 1998;Narokobi, 1983;Otto & Thomas, 1997;Rollason, 2008;Said, 1978;Wassmann, 1998;Wolfers, 1975;Wood, 1995) Race also allows an exploration and evaluation of the success of PNG people to be 'modern'. In their interaction with expatriates, PNG people deploy forms of moral reasoning about these and other topics.…”

“…One difficulty here is that a knowledge tradition is essentialised and reified into an unhelpfully abstract entity -'the West'. In PNG the European has been subject to all sorts of entanglements with local projects -involving cargo cultus , mimesis , conversion , education etc (Bashkow, 2006;Gewertz & Errington, 1998;Lattas, 1998;MacLean, 1998;McPherson & Association of Social Anthropology in, 2001;Robbins, 1998;Rollason, 2008;Stasch, 2009;Wolfers, 1975;Wood, 1995Wood, , 2013. These local projects have always involved embodied connections with the European so that the West has never been simply a homogenous external Other.…”

“…In view of the established PNG-expatriate relationship, the study will focus on developing an understanding of the perceptions of racially different service provision from the point of view of the Papua New Guineans who are urban dwellers. Previous literature has documented accounts of the PNG-expatriate interaction within rural settings, (Bashkow, 2006;Lattas, 1998;Rollason, 2008;Wood, 1995) with a particular focus on how PNG people construct their own identity through their relationships and understandings of foreigners. This study will be one of the few recent urban based studies of perceptions of racial difference in PNG.…”

“…(Bashkow, 2006;Lattas, 1998;Rollason, 2008;Wolfers, 1975;Wolfers & Australian Institute of International, 1976;Wood, 1995). This is further influenced by globalisation and shifting value systems of individuals within urban areas and within the broader community in PNG, the emergence of PNG national elites (Gewertz & Errington, 1998Narokobi, 1983;Wolfers, 1975), the on-going relationships with 'expatriates' and the influences of modernity on individual and community values, which all provide a complex and intricate environment in which Papua New Guineans and 'expatriates' interact.…”