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This chapter examines the impact of social diversity on state development across the Asia-Pacific region. It argues that variation in ethnic structure both between and within states helps to explain some of the distinctive features of political and economic development across the region. However, these vary across different dimensions of governance. With regards to public policy, highly diverse societies almost inevitably face difficulties of government coordination and policy implementation due to competing ethnoregional demands. On the other hand, in certain situations such diversity may also assist democratic continuity by necessitating cross-ethnic power-sharing and making challenges to the existing order difficult to organize and sustain.

This chapter presents the HIV cases in Papua New Guinea. After an exponential statistical rise in HIV/AIDS cases since 2000, Papua New Guinea has been classified as suffering from a generalized epidemic of HIV and AIDS, indicating that the epidemic is firmly established in the general population through substantial sexual networking, as subpopulations continue to spread HIV disproportionately. At first the epidemic was characterized as urban, but very recently the characterization has shifted just as problematically to a rural emphasis. Both claims are based on patchy evidence and limited reflection on the constant interrelation between the urban and the rural in Papua New Guinea.

This chapter discusses the concept of wantok, one of the signifiers of the “altered contexts” of the social in Papua New Guinea. Wantok, a Melanesian term, refers to a person connected to others by a relationship of reciprocity, genealogy, or cultural affinity. Such relations have customarily been founded in kinship relations and in ethnicity or language groupings—wantok literally means “one talk” in Pidgin. The term wantok flows easily in moments of discussion in Papua New Guinea—almost too casually, like the term “community” here and in other parts of the world. Even with the interaction of strangers who have momentarily come together in a situation of adversity, the sense of relating to a wantok seems comfortably positive and overwhelmingly connected over time and place.

This chapter addresses the construction of authoritativeness in Bible translation projects in Papua New Guinea. For the Summer Institute of Linguistics and its local branch, SIL PNG, the possibility of authoritative Bible translation hinges on gaining access to native speakers of local vernaculars. The chapter examines the language ideology under which an asymmetry in translation training and practice between Papua New Guinean versus Euro-American translators appears. More generally, it uncovers the presuppositions in Christian missionary discourse about the conditions under which biblical translation is felicitous.

This chapter discusses microfinance, microcredit, and other similar initiatives that support microenterprise. Many of these initiatives, especially in Asia, have reported tremendous successes and are increasingly touted as the solution for poverty alleviation, especially for the Global South. Some of these initiatives have also reported spectacular results in terms of their outreach as well as their lending and saving portfolios. The chapter then outlines of the origin and operation of microfinance and microcredit schemes and introduces some of the major schemes applied in Papua New Guinea. The Papua New Guinea Asian Development Bank (PNG-ADB) through the Bank of Papua New Guinea (the central bank) targeted service providers, donors, central banks, microfinance networks, and practitioners from Asia and Africa and the PNG microfinance fraternity as conference attendees.

This introductory chapter demonstrates that the independence of Papua New Guinea was marked by both bold anticipation and uncomfortable ambivalence. The Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea (1975) brought the nation-state into being on the basis of a set of careful principles as far-reaching as its constitutional ancestors, including the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) and the Constitution of the United States (1861). Whereas most constitutions are one-dimensionally modern and center on the nation-state as the most important level of community and polity, the Papua New Guinea Constitution proclaimed a more complex aspiration by placing the nation-state in a continuing relation to other social institutions—in particular, local community and family.

This chapter examines the religious dimension of a complex power struggle at Bougainville, a small island group in Papua New Guinea, and elaborates the double role of religion as empowerment and inspiration of resistance. From 1988 until the late 1990s, people on Bougainville Island were immersed in a vicious war that destroyed nearly all infrastructure and social services. Religion, particularly Catholicism, played a major role during and after the crisis. The Bougainville struggle for independence was conceptualized as a holy war, whereby God was called upon in “an ideology of resistance”. People believed that peace could be achieved through prayers, especially pleas directed to Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. Thus, Mary's power became intertwined with national identity constructions and attempts to realize a more just and responsible society at Bougainville. The Bougainville crisis demonstrates how nationalism, custom, and religion are intertwined and how they mutually enforced an ideology of warfare.

This chapter examines the West Papuan independence movement. It describes long-term research with West Papuan refugees living in Papua New Guinea and exiled political leaders. It discusses a shift in the late 1990s from paramilitary opposition to Indonesian violence to human rights activism. It also describes how negative representations of West Papuans, including claims about lost tribes, undermine their pursuit of sovereignty. The author discusses his participation in various forms of solidarity politics.

This chapter shows that the health services and health status of Papua New Guinea have been in a general decline since independence, and the health and life expectancy of people in Papua New Guinea are rated as the poorest in the Pacific. This is mainly due to an unequal distribution of resources with the country’s most disadvantaged groups relatively excluded from quality health care. The chapter argues that argue that there is a need for a more deliberate national commitment to health, with a focus on developing strategies for improving equitable access. Hence, health equity and community-based insurance can be considered as promising initiatives.

This chapter discusses the beginning of anthropology or fieldwork in what was then the Eastern Highlands District of the Territory of Papua New Guinea. The choice of a specific field site for research in ethnography is always the result of a combination of professional priorities, personal tastes, and chance. The chapter explores the Kainantu region as the focus (folk biology in a subsistence-based economy) and shows that James B. Watson's expertise and his continuing contacts there would aid in the logistics of fieldwork. Almost no intensive ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the Highlands by professional anthropologists until the early 1950s. The chapter provides a historical perspective on how fieldwork was conducted in the earlier days. Both anthropologists and Papua New Guineans can benefit from a fuller and more accurate sense of what ethnographers were trying to accomplish in the Highlands during the colonial period.

This chapter covers the significance of Maisin Christianity and the religious conversion process in Uiaku, Papua New Guinea. Some general comments on the political aspects of the Maisins' conversion and on the relationship between hegemonic structures reflected in the station and in external conversion and consciousness are provided. The contribution of the Anglican mission to the Maisins' incorporation into the wider politico-economic structures of the colonial order is explored. All Maisins participate in the macrocosm and the microcosm, and all engage in station and village activities and ideas that together influence the overall direction of conversion. It s suggested that Uiaku society has a dual culture that has to be understood in the context of a multicultural Papua New Guinea. The introduction of Christianity in Uiaku has been inseparable from incorporation into larger political and economic systems.

This chapter explains why the formal education in Papua New Guinea remains inadequate to meet the learning needs of the population. Firstly, a substantial section of the population either does not receive education through the schooling system or receives only a partial basic education. Secondly, it is overwhelmingly geared toward preparing students for waged employment within the formal sector. Attempts at coordinating and developing nonformal education in the country—such as the basic education including information about government and nongovernment services, literacy and numeracy training, and short-term skills training aimed at the rural village population—have consistently been articulated in response to these recognized deficiencies.

As recent history (seen especially in terms of ego-centric genealogies) seems to provide only disappointment, sin, and conflict, more and more Guhu-Samane Christians look to the possibility of salvation in a purported deep socio-centric genealogical connection to Israelites. Israelites are held up as models for conversion as people with a “traditional” culture, while they are also understood as the people who first converted to Christianity. Israelites are thus the primary model for the sacred ethnicity of transformation. Lost Tribes discourses are found all across Papua New Guinea and are starting to be a mode of political engagement at the level of an emerging Christian public sphere, in which different people recognize one another as engaged in similar projects of critique and reform of their own cultures and the nation at large.

This chapter explores Christian missionization as a form of cultural contact, which, among other things, transforms vernacular speech practices. Closely analyzing literacy and translation activities as they developed during missionization in Bosavi (1975–95), the focus is on church services in which local pastors read from the Tok Pisin Bible—orally translated verses into the Bosavi language—creating hybridized, translocated, and dislocated forms of oral vernacular speech. These activities are critical sites for studying the linguistic and cultural processes that reshape a language. In particular, the chapter examines the metapragmatic domain of reflexive language—specifically reported speech and thought—to illustrate what happens when language ideologies associated with fundamentalist missionaries, biblical scripture, and Bosavi pastors come into contact. What is found in translating reveals that reflexive language and the ideas that underlie its use are culturally and sociohistorically specific and, as such, do not travel easily across texts and time.

This concluding chapter reiterates some of the main arguments presented, and comments, from a comparative perspective, on how minority rights regimes are evolving in the specific settings selected. Rather than arriving at a definitive insight into a unifying theory for the protection of minority and indigenous rights in the region, it aims to identify nuances and principles that have emerged from state practice. The book concludes with a series of concrete recommendations and suggestions with a view to enhancing regional and international cooperation, with a special emphasis on models for indigenous and minority protection.

This chapter draws a comparison between male cults in a specific part of Papua New Guinea and in a limited region of Amazonia, considering the myth of matriarchy, the exclusion of women, and physical ordeals for boys. It focuses on the rebirth dimension of men's cults, as they appear among two Anga groups and in two related societies of the Vaupés region. The male cults in these two areas have much in common; the elements are acted out, the goals are assigned to them, and the discourses people have in respect to them are quite similar. However, there are certain differences in the representation of the rebirth of the boys during initiation rituals in the Anga and the Tukano areas, which may be related to differences in the ideas the respective populations have concerning the origin of the cosmos and of the living species.

This chapter begins with the claim that language ideologies stand in complex relationships to ideologies of material exchange. It argues that in Melanesia, contemporary changes in language ideology have been in important respects shaped by transformations in traditional ideologies of exchange. Among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, such linked changes have arisen in the wake of conversion to Christianity. Changes in linguistic and exchange ideologies have come to the fore in debates over the practice of charismatic Christian rituals of Holy Spirit possession. This chapter analyzes these rituals and the debates that surround them to show how these transformations have come about.

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a “resource-rich” country with extreme levels of poverty and very poor human development indicators. This chapter questions the common assumption that jobs created in the extractive industry sector make little or no contribution to improvements in national wellbeing because of their isolation from the rest of PNG’s economy and society. It summarizes what is known about changes in PNG’s job configuration since Independence in 1975, including those induced by the recent “resource boom,” and shows how the PNG government currently treats the problem of job creation in national development policies. The poor quality of existing datasets prevents any quantitative assessment of the contributions that different types of jobs make to productivity, living standards, and social cohesion at a national scale, but interview data collected for this study does provide some fresh insights into the contributions made by citizens employed in the extractive industry sector.

This chapter explores the issue of non-heteronormative sexuality in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Drawing on PhD fieldwork conducted mainly in Port Moresby in the mid- to late 2000s, it considers people's lived experience of non-heteronormativity in relation to the wider community. It discusses the ways in which respondents described themselves, their processes of developing self-understanding, how they fit into the general society, and the worst experiences of discrimination they had encountered. It also examines the prevalence of “homosexual” behavior in PNG as well as the high levels of stigma and abuse experienced by gay people. Finally, it assesses homosexuality laws in PNG and the reasons why social perceptions and practices in PNG with regards to non-heteronormative sex differ significantly from those in the other Pacific Island countries.