Transforming Ideologies and Hopes of the Past in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea

Summary

In the wake of several decades of resource extraction (logging and oil/gas exploration), the past as articulated in particular places, material things, names and narratives has taken on new urgency in the Purari Delta. For over a decade communities have struggled to marshal these assemblages of cultural heritage to demonstrate their traditional ownership to acquire resource royalties. An imperfect and highly political process, claimants must overcome the legacies of out-migration, Christianity, and iconoclasm which have unevenly configured the distribution and knowledge of the past. In the midst of these processes, aspects of this diffuse heritage emerge unexpectedly: a WWII airplane rising up from the delta, stone tools unearthed by bulldozers, or rumours of ancestral beings encountered in the forest. In this paper I examine these periodic returns as a way to think through the region’s transforming ideologies, how the past is being marshalled by individuals and their communities to make a more hopeful future, and what role anthropology has in these processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21172