Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology, 12, Band 12) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520077458 ISBN 13: 9780520077454

Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR, 1992

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No detailed description available for "Ethnographic Presents".

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Terence E. Hays is Associate Professor (Anthropology), Department of Anthropology and Geography, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI.

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"Each of the 'pioneers' gives new insights into her/his own work while not incidentally adding chapters to the history of anthropology."

--Eugene Ogan, University of Minnesota

 

"Insightful, instructive, and delightful to read. . . . I found the variation of background, anthropological focus, and personality of the fieldworker to be one of the most important contributions this edited volume makes."

--Jane C. Godale, Bryn Mawr College

Aus dem Klappentext

"Each of the 'pioneers' gives new insights into her/his own work while not incidentally adding chapters to the history of anthropology."

--Eugene Ogan, University of Minnesota

 

"Insightful, instructive, and delightful to read. . . . I found the variation of background, anthropological focus, and personality of the fieldworker to be one of the most important contributions this edited volume makes."

--Jane C. Godale, Bryn Mawr College

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Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

By Terence Hays, editor

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Terence Hays, editor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520077458


One
A Historical Background to Anthropology in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Terence E. Hays

In 1971, newly arrived in Port Moresby to begin fieldwork in what was then the Eastern Highlands District of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea,1 my wife, Patricia Hurley Hays, and I checked in with the Department of District Administration. After introductory small talk, we described to the administrator what we hoped to accomplish and showed him on a map the field site we had chosen. He said that he had no personal familiarity with the region indicated, as was usually the case in such interviews. Expressing surprise that we seemed already to have a general idea of what we were likely to find there, he said, "I've never understood how you anthropologists can choose villages for your research from halfway around the world."

The process didn't seem so mysterious to us, although, as is obvious from the essays in this volume, the choice of a specific field site for ethnographic research is always the result of a combination of professional priorities, personal tastes, and chance. I had been captivated by the Highlands literature, both popular and professional, and had chosen the University of Washington for my doctoral training because of the presence there of three Highlands specialists: L. L. Langness, Kenneth E. Read, and James B. Watson. All three had done their work in the Eastern Highlands and, with Watson as my supervisor, I soon became convinced that the Kainantu region served my needs concerning my intended research focus (folk biology in a subsistence-based economy) and that Watson's expertise and his continuing contacts there would aid in the logistics of fieldwork. As for the precise field location, several alternatives seemed equally suitable, but conversations with David Cole and Kerry Pataki-Schweizer, who had personally walked over most of the region, led my wife and me to choose a settlement they independently praised for its

friendly people and gorgeous physical setting. Those factors were important to us as novices who anxiously wanted our field experience to be pleasant as well as productive.

Our case was probably typical of fieldworkers who went to the Papua New Guinea Highlands in the 1960s as well as the 1970s, but what of those who had trained us and guided us in our choices? Almost no intensive ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the Highlands by professional anthropologists until the early 1950s, when the contributors to this volume were participants in an unprecedented boom, with a dozen ethnographers entering the Highlands from 1950 to 1955: Kenneth E. Read and Paul Wirz in 1950; Catherine H. and Ronald M. Berndt in 1951; Richard F. Salisbury in 1952; Marie Reay and James B. Watson in 1953; D'Arcy Ryan and Virginia D. Watson in 1954; and Ralph N. H. Bulmer, Robert M. Glasse, and Mervyn J. Meggitt in 1955. This was also the period when Louis J. Luzbetak began his service as a missionary anthropologist in the Wahgi Valley, as Heinrich Aufenanger, John Nilles, and others continued their long-term work in this dual capacity.

Beginning fieldworkers today usually have a general appreciation of the vast intellectual legacy of these "pioneers" (see Andrew Strathern's discussion in the concluding essay in this volume). But they often lack a clear sense of what field research in the Highlands was like before the natural, social, and cultural landscapes were transformed by cash cropping, trade stores, and local government councils, and before the painstaking hand recording of texts and notes gave way to the tape recorders and portable microcomputers increasingly regarded nowadays as indispensable aids. Beyond providing much-needed historical perspective on how fieldwork was conducted in the earlier days, the essays in this volume address why questions as well. Both anthropologists and Papua New Guineans can benefit from a fuller and more accurate sense—from the viewpoints of those who were actually there—of what ethnographers were trying to accomplish in the Highlands during the colonial period. How and why did they choose the Highlands? On what informational base did they make their choices? What did they expect to find there, and how were their expectations met? What were they trying to achieve, individually and collectively? And how did these factors inform the intellectual and social legacy of this burst of activity?

Opening Up the Middle Kingdom

In 1847, J. Beete Jukes, naturalist aboard H.M.S. Fly , wrote (Vol. I, p. 291): "The very mention of being taken into the interior of New Guinea sounds like being allowed to visit some of the enchanted regions of the

Arabian Nights , so dim an atmosphere of obscurity rests at present on the wonders it probably conceals." An aura of mystery still surrounded the Highlands a century later, when Paul Hasluck (quoted in Downs 1980: 174) assumed his duties as administrator in the territory in 1951: "It was as though [the] north of the great island was a coastal China, and from this the land rose in a Himalaya ruggedness of mountains that tumbled away in the south to a lowlands India . . . and nobody knew that a Tibet lay in between, in the heart of New Guinea."

Like other people, professional anthropologists were attracted by the mystique of the Highlands as they turned their focused attention to this "Middle Kingdom," as Australian Patrol Officer James L. Taylor had called the region (Downs 1980:175). Until his and others' exploratory patrols in the 1930s, little was known of this vast area and its peoples. Arriving within two decades of official discoveries of the densely populated high valleys, the "first generation" of ethnographers had an unparalleled opportunity. Perhaps nowhere else in the world could fieldworkers follow so closely in the tracks of first contact patrols, and while the Highlands were by no means pristine by that time, nowhere else was it possible to experience more immediately the "ethnographic present" of which most anthropologists write: "Here was the chance to study the social, economic and political life of people relatively 'untouched' by the influences which made analyses of Australian Aborigines or the [Nuer], for instance, seem, by comparison, more like reconstructions of the past than accounts based on first-hand observation" (Fell 1987:1).

In fact, the Central Highlands—that portion of the central cordillera bounded by the Strickland River in the west and Kassam Pass in the east (see maps 1 and 2)—was not, strictly speaking, a terra incognita even in the 1930s, when exploration and administration intensified. To be sure, it had not been the scene of major scientific expeditions such as those that had crisscrossed the central ranges of neighboring Netherlands New Guinea (now Irian Jaya) from 1904 to 1922, with resulting voluminous, detailed publications (mostly in Dutch) describing their peoples as well as natural environments (see van Baal et al., 1984). The sponsoring of such large-scale ventures was not the style of the British or Australian administrations of the eastern half of the island, though the Germans, whose domain included most of the Highlands until 1914, had begun to make similar inroads from the northeast coast: H. Zöller had seen and named the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520077458
• ISBN 13: 9780520077454
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 324
• Herausgeber: Hays Terence E.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: De Gruyter Niemeyer; orders-books@degruyter.com; ; Genthiner Str. 13; Berlin; 10785; Deutschland