Retelling Chambri Lives: Ontological Bricolage

In this article, we provide an update on a combined biography of Chambri friends and acquaintances living in their Papua New Guinea home villages and beyond, a biography originally published in 1991 but based on 1987 field research. Incor- porating fieldwork extending over the subsequent twenty-eight years, we describe what has happened to some of those we came to know best. In so doing, we address twenty-first century anthropological questions concerning contemporary ontology(ies) and the nature of difference(s) by conveying how these Chambri have continued to seek personal and collective worth, while remaining caught up in an encroaching and shifting regional, national, as well as world system

Reflecting on loss in Papua New Guinea

This article takes up the conundrum of conducting anthropological fieldwork with people who claim that they have 'lost their culture,' as is the case with Suau people in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea. But rather than claiming culture loss as a process of dispossession, Suau claim it as a consequence of their own attempts to engage with colonial interests. Suau appear to have responded to missionization and their close proximity to the colonial-era capital by jettisoning many of the practices characteristic of Massim societies, now identified as 'kastom.' The rejection of kastom in order to facilitate their relations with Europeans during colonialism, followed by the mourning for kastom after independence, both invite consideration of a kind of reflexivity that requires action based on the presumed perspective of another

Translating environments

Far from being inert materials activated by human ingenuity, natural resources come to be made and unmade through ongoing processes of translation, through which they acquire new potentialities and meanings. In this introduction, we review the key concept of translation for anthropology and explore some of its multiple analytical possibilities in the context of human-environment relations. Based on insights offered by the articles in this collection, we propose a twofold definition of environments as both translating subjects and objects of translation. In grounding our analytical definition, we focus on the enactment of material transformations (as the result of both relations of mutual determination with humans and processes of objectification of the environment), the implications of incommensurability and erasure in processes of (attempted) translation, and the indeterminacy that accompanies (re)configurations of materials, relations and values

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Sleights of Hand and the Construction of Desire in a Papua New Guinea Modernity

This paper is a case study of processes at work to deflect the anger and jealousy many grassroots Papua New Guineans felt toward an indigenous urban middle class that had increasingly monopolized positions of influence and affluence. We focus on the activities of Sepik Women in Trade, a private organization begun by middle-class women whose explicit objective was to assist poor women living primarily in Wewak’s squatter settlements to market their handicrafts. Through this organization’s activities, individual accumulation came to appear not only practically feasible but also morally justified. These processes, reflecting middleclass expectations, were based on a modernist claim that almost everyone could gain access to a certain quality of life. Almost everyone had the potential opportunity and capacity—indeed the right and virtual obligation—to work and save to consume self-evidently desirable goods and services. Correspondingly, those unable or unwilling to accumulate and thereby acquire these goods and services would have primarily themselves to blame. Any ensuing—and persisting—inequality would be understood as less the product of unfair exclusion or repudiation of kin obligations than of personal failure to fulfill reasonable expectations. Such a perspective, focusing on personal responsibility for failure in (what was being defined as) an open and just system, undercut the idea that categorical exclusion was even a systemic possibility. Through virtual sleights of hand, what were the slights of class exclusion were being presented as reflecting less social injustice than individual failure