Mining and Indigenous Lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea

Mining and Indigenous Lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea
Author: Alan Rumsey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780954557232

This volume gives a vital and unique insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive fieldwork with the people concerned, it offers a comparative focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction with the forces of 'development'.A central dimension of contrast is that Australian as a 'settled' continent has had wholesale dispossession of Aboriginal land, while in Papua New Guinea more than 95% of the land surface remains unalienated from customary ownership. There are also important similarities owing to a shared form of land title (largely unheard of outside Australia and Papua New Guinea) in which the state retains ownership of underground resources, and some surprising parallels in the ways that social identities on either side of the Arafura Sea have traditionally been grounded in landscape.These studies are essential reading for all scholars involved in assessing the effects of resource extraction in Third World and Fourth World settings. Their distinctive contribution lies in their penetrating study of the forms of indigenous socio-cultural response to multinational companies and Western forms of governance and law.

Emplaced Myth

Emplaced Myth
Author: Alan Rumsey
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780824823894

Australia and Papua New Guinea share a number of important social, cultural, and historical features, making a sustained comparison between the two especially productive. This situates the ethnography of the two areas within a comparative framework and examines the relationship between indigenous systems of knowledge and place - an issue of growing concern to anthropologists. The essays demonstrate the manner in which regimes of restricted knowledge serve to protect and augment cultural property and the proprietorship over sites and territory; how myths evolve to explain and culturally appropriate important events pertaining to contact between indigenous and Western societies; how graphic designs and other culturally important iconic and iconographic processes provide conduits of cross-cultural appropriation between indigenous and non-indigenous societies in today's multicultural nation states.

Revealing the Invisible Mine

Revealing the Invisible Mine
Author: Emilia Skrzypek
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2020-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789208572

Exploring the social complexities of the Frieda River Project in Papua New Guinea, this book tells the story of local stakeholder strategies on the eve of industrial development, largely from the perspective of the Paiyamo – one of the project’s so-called ‘impact communities’. Engaging ideas of knowledge, belief and personhood, it explains how fifty years of encounters with exploration companies shaped the Paiyamo’s aspirations, made them revisit and re-examine their past, and develop new strategies to move towards a better, more prosperous future.

Natural Resource Extraction and Indigenous Livelihoods

Natural Resource Extraction and Indigenous Livelihoods
Author: Gavin Hilson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317089715

This book provides an extended analysis of how resource extraction projects stimulate social, cultural and economic change in indigenous communities. Through a range of case studies, including open cast mining, artisanal mining, logging, deforestation, oil extraction and industrial fishing, the contributors explore the challenges highlighted in global debates on sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and climate change. The case studies are used to assess whether and how development processes might compete and conflict with the market objectives of multinational corporations and the organizational and moral principles of indigenous communities. Emphasizing the perspectives of directly-affected parties, the authors identify common patterns in the way in which extraction projects are conceptualized, implemented and perceived. The book provides a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the human environments where resource extraction takes place and its consequent impacts on local livelihoods. Its in-depth case studies underscore the need for increased social accountability in the planning and development of natural resource extraction projects.

The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology

The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology
Author: James G. Carrier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2020-06-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000184676

he Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology presents a state of the art overview of the subject - its methodologies, current debates, history and future. It will provide the ultimate source of authoritative, critical descriptions of all the key aspects of the discipline as well as a consideration of the general state of the discipline at a time when there is notable uncertainty about its foundations, composition and direction. Divided into five core sections, the Handbook: examines the changing theoretical and analytical orientations that have led to new ways of carrying out research; presents an analysis of the traditional historical core and how the discipline has changed since 1980; considers the ethnographic regions where work has had the greatest impact on anthropology as a whole; outlines the people and institutions that are the context in which the discipline operates, covering topics from research funding to professional ethics.Bringing together leading international scholars, the Handbook provides a guide to the latest research in social and cultural anthropology. Presenting a systematic overview - and offering a wide range of examples, insights and analysis - it will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students in anthropology as well as cultural and social geography, cultural studies and sociology.

What Anthropologists Do

What Anthropologists Do
Author: Veronica Strang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-06-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000190293

What is Anthropology? Why should you study it? What will you learn? And what can you do with it? What Anthropologists Do answers all these questions. And more.Anthropology is an astonishingly diverse and engaged subject that seeks to understand human social behaviour. What Anthropologists Do presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and cutting-edge thinking contribute to a very wide range of fields: environmental issues, aid and development, advocacy, human rights, social policy, the creative arts, museums, health, education, crime, communications technology, design, marketing, and business. In short, a training in Anthropology provides highly transferable skills of investigation and analysis.The book will be ideal for any readers who want to know what Anthropology is all about and especially for students coming to the study of Anthropology for the first time.

Transactions and Creations

Transactions and Creations
Author: Eric Hirsch
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781845450281

In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent economic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language. In a bold theoretical move, "property" is put alongside two other terms: "transactions" and "creations." The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people's creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises!

Saltwater Sociality

Saltwater Sociality
Author: Katharina Schneider
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857453025

The inhabitants of Pororan Island, a small group of ‘saltwater people’ in Papua New Guinea, are intensely interested in the movements of persons across the island and across the sea, both in their everyday lives as fishing people and on ritual occasions. From their observations of human movements, they take their cues about the current state of social relations. Based on detailed ethnography, this study engages current Melanesian anthropological theory and argues that movements are the Pororans’ predominant mode of objectifying relations. Movements on Pororan Island are to its inhabitants what roads are to ‘mainlanders’ on the nearby larger island, and what material objects and images are to others elsewhere in Melanesia.

The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia

The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia
Author: Holly Wardlow
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351886215

Authored by well-established and respected scholars, this work examines the kinds of efforts that have been made to adopt Western modernity in Melanesia and explores the reasons for their varied outcomes. The contributors take the work of Professor Marshall Sahlins as a starting point, assessing his theories of cultural change and of the relationship between cultural intensification and globalizing forces. They acknowledge the importance of Sahlins' ideas, while refining, extending, modifying and critiquing them in light of their own first hand knowledge of Pacific island societies. Also presenting one of Sahlins' less widely available original essays for reference, this book is an exciting contribution to serious anthropological engagement with Papua New Guinea.