Bougainville revisited : understanding the crisis and U-Vistract through an ethnography of everyday life in Nagovisi
Abstract
This thesis offers an ethnographic study of everyday life in Nagovisi of Southwest
Bougainville. The study focuses on aspects of how the Nagovisi construe social
relations with a specific focus on vernacular categories and ideologies. The thesis
deals with ideas about land, perceptions about the fluid nature of Nagovisi sociality,
movement, and U-Vistract. The study is primarily based on thirteen months of field
research I conducted in the Nagovisi between September 2011 and November of
2012.
Through the exploration of the various thematic issues in the individual
chapters the thesis offers a comparative scope for a tangential re-evaluation of the
mine related crisis on the island. The focus on Noah Musinku and the Kingdom of
Papala further illustrates this comparative scope by drawing an analogy between
Panguna and U-Vistract and the complex entanglements and interrelationships
between ideas relating to land, history, myth, relatedness, social unpredictability, and
notions about wealth. It deals with the question of how persons, land and
knowledge are mutually constitutive, and how each can affect the other as a result of
history, and movement in time and space.
By focusing on Nagovisi notions of the unpredictability of talk, knowledge, and
the implication this bears on the nature of how people relate to each other and
different places the thesis deals with what has long been proven a recalcitrant
problem in PNG anthropological literature in which local life worlds are
characterised by a fluidity of social forms.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Rights
Embargo Date: 21-02-19
Embargo Reason: Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 19th February 2021
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