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.