Beginning in 1998, I have conducted detailed ethnographic research in the Asaro valley of Papua New Guinea (PNG), as well as archival research on PNG colonial history in Port Moresby, Canberra, and San Diego.  Like many people today, the Dano-speakers of the upper Asaro perceive their lives to be undergoing rapid social change.  The social transformation exhibits ambivalent forms:  signs of progress such as new roads, new technologies, and the reduction of traditional warfare coexist with signs of pathology like disease, crime, social disorder, and incipient economic inequality.  People point to men's bodies as further evidence of social decay -- they claim that the present generation of men are smaller, weaker, and more fragile than the ancestors.

Far from resenting social change, however, people in the Asaro embrace it and seek to hasten its pace.  'Change' itself has become a project for them, and they seek to reinvent themselves through a panoply of innovative forms, such as new evangelical churches and new business enterprises.  Like people everywhere, people in the Asaro have come to perceive themselves as having a 'culture.'  Unlike people everywhere, however, they have come to regard this culture and themselves as needing dramatic reform.  They thus speak in ways that belie a paradoxical relationship to their cultural traditions, ways that may surprise those who have come to see culture as a source of meaning and value or as a touchstone of identity in the modern world.  The people of the Asaro not infrequently invoke their culture in starkly negative terms.  They say it is 'savage,' 'dark,' 'backwards.'  For them, it comprises a tradition from which they wish to escape, even as it is also that which affords a sense of self and a way of life.

Presently, I am analyzing a constellation of themes that connect the contemporary experience of people in places like Papua New Guinea's Asaro Valley with those elsewhere in the world for whom 'culture' has become a problem, a site of representation, contestation, and intervention.  My research thus tracks a set of related ideas or images that have worldwide ethnographic and theoretical salience because people everywhere today are reflecting on globalization and its consequences.  These ideas include loss, melancholia, nostalgia, self-abnegation, and obsolecence.  Though my concern with this cluster of topics emerges from my ongoing ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea, my aim is to advance an analysis that can encompass the reappearance of these ideas in diverse cultural domains and I am presently focusing on specific sites and events that bring these dynamics into sharp focus, including post-colonial cultural policy and politics, the representation of 'indigenous' peoples in the discourse of global government, and the interface between the demands of socioeconomic development schemes and the 'backward' cultural systems they seek to supercede.

Recent publications:

2007 "'Dying Culture' and Decaying Bodies." In Embodying Modernity and Postmodernity: Ritual, Praxis, and Social Change in the South Pacific, ed. Sandra Bamford, Carolina Academic Press.

2006 "Land and Life: Some Terrains of Sovereignty in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea." Suomen Antropologi, vol. 31, no. 3-4, pp. 37-52.