Inequalities of Aspiration: Class, Cargo and the Moral Economy of Development in Papua New Guinea

Uneven development and its effects: Livelihoods and urban and rural spaces in Papua New Guinea

“…home' for burial remains strong, as do remittances to kin, even as these are becoming understood as 'development' (Cox, 2021;Dalsgaard, 2013;Rasmussen, 2015). However, new generations of people who have grown up in towns and who are not familiar with the day-to-day rhythms of village life are now growing in number.…”

The Promise of Education: Schooling Journeys in the Southwestern Pacific

“…On the surface at least, there is now more scope than ever for schooling to instill the "know it best" attitude Bugotu worried about. Some contemporary elites do treat the village with a "know it best" attitude, which they often justify with moral judgments about their lesswell-educated relatives (Cox 2021). Whereas these educated elites credit themselves with an openness to new experiences and ideas, they are prone to depicting their village kin as keepers of traditional values and culture.…”

Notions of (In)Dependence at a Papua New Guinean University

“…These notions are often ambivalent, as they juggle the acknowledgment of social interdependencies and a desire to limit their reach (see Martin 2021b introduction, this issue). This brings up recognisable themes about navigating novel forms of social stratification in PNG (see for example Cox 2018Cox , 2021Gewertz and Errington 1999;Golub 2014;Martin 2013;Rasmussen 2015), which I wish to add to and develop in several ways. Firstly, rather than describing divergent rhetorics based on established differentiated subject positions with competing interests and narratives, I map the conceptual concern with notions of interdependence, and explicit ascriptions of dependence as emerging from specific processes that lead to social stratification: in this instance, higher education.…”

“…In these instances, an emerging wage-earning PNG middle class (cf. Cox 2014Cox , 2018Gewertz and Errington 1999;Gibson 2019;Rasmussen 2015) draws attention to what they perceive as their unwaged relatives' dependence on them for financial needs. Nation-making and development theory are never far away in these ascriptions of dependence either, as notions of interpersonal dependence become evaluated against the imagery and concept of welfare states in other countries and the potential scope for such systems in PNGcould a social welfare system make PNG's so-called grassroots population become independent of their more privileged and wage-earning kin (cf.…”

“…A lot has changed, however, from the early days of gendered migration into the urban and then explicitly colonial Port Moresby (Strathern 1975). This includes the emergence of a new socio-economic stratum which is increasingly involved in the globalised economy and in national developmental aspirations while still connected to less privileged kin (Cox 2018;Rasmussen 2015). All this exists entangled within gendered relations and gender conflicts that are inherently rooted in PNGs social fabric as much as they can be analysed through global gender categories (Demian 2017;Spark 2020).…”