Singapore, Big Village of the Dead: Cities as Figures of Desire, Domination, and Rupture among Korowai of Indonesian Papua

An important theme in the anthropology of space is that specific spatial forms often work for people as mediations of historical consciousness. I analyze here the example of cities in recent experience of Korowai of Papua, and I develop two theoretical points. First, a spatial form’s power as a focus of consciousness rests in how it draws together multiple different elements of the historical field. In the example of Korowai thought about cities, these elements include “foreigners” as a type of people, consumer culture as an economic system, and urban superiority as a new social hierarchy. Second, a spatial form can be a powerful sign through which people engage specifically with emotional features of their historical condition, including emotional contradictions entailed in subjection to new hierarchies. I look at a striking Korowai pattern of associating cities with death, which I suggest is motivated by death and cities both being objects of contradictory feelings of simultaneous desire and repulsion, or involvement and separateness. The power of specific kinds of spaces to attract contradictory but conjoined emotions is also important to why people often seize upon them for reckoning cognitively with history at large.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.1252

The iconicity and indexicality of “life” in Korowai sago grub feasts

This presentation examines the intertwining of technical, vital, and social processes in sago grub feasts held by Korowai of Indonesian Papua. Feasts are challenging intensifications of Korowai people’s contradictory value commitments to autonomy and relatedness, and the biological processes of grub production are also full of hazards. Across different levels of the feast process, Korowai focus reflexively on what can go wrong. A recipe-like sequence of steps by which a feast is carried out, a priest who mediates feast labor, and the longhouse built for the feast event are main signs by which Korowai enact stances of restraint and equality, in an effort to authorize a massive event of biological expenditure and the assertion of relatedness

The ASAO Monograph and Book Series

This paper, coauthored by the all of the editors of the Monograph (now Book) Series of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) since 1983, provides a detailed history of how the series began in 1967, the purposes it was intended to serve, the steps its publishing processes involved, arrangements with the various presses that handled the volumes over time, and how all of this evolved over more than half a century, including in response to macro-level changes and challenges in the world of academic publishing

NO-independent regulatory site of direct sGC stimulators like YC-1 and BAY 41-2272

BACKGROUND: The most important receptor for nitic oxide is the soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC), a heme containing heterodimer. Recently, a pyrazolopyridine derivative BAY 41-2272, structurally related to YC-1, was identified stimulating soluble guanylate cyclase in an NO-independent manner, which results in vasodilatation and antiplatelet activity. The study described here addresses the identification of the NO-independent site on soluble guanylate cyclase. RESULTS: We developed a photoaffinity label ((3)H-meta-PAL) for the direct and NO-independent soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) stimulator BAY 41-2272 by introducing an azido-group into the tritium labeled compound. The synthesized photoaffinitylabel directly stimulates the purified sGC and shows in combination with NO a synergistic effect on sGC activity. Irradiation with UV light of (3)H-meta-PAL together with the highly purified sGC leads to a covalent binding to the α(1)-subunit of the enzyme. This binding is blocked by unlabeled meta-PAL, YC-1 and BAY 41-2272. For further identification of the NO-independent regulatory site the (3)H-meta-PAL labeled sGC was fragmented by CNBr digest. The (3)H-meta-PAL binds to a CNBr fragment, consisting of the amino acids 236–290 of the α(1)-subunit. Determination of radioactivity of the single PTH-cycles from the sequencing of this CNBr fragment detected the cysteines 238 and 243 as binding residues of the (3)H-meta-PAL. CONCLUSIONS: Our data demonstrate that the region surrounding the cysteines 238 and 243 in the α(1)-subunit of the sGC could play an important role in regulation of sGC activity and could be the target of this new type of sGC stimulators

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

Self‐Lowering as Power and Trap: Wawa, ‘White’, and Peripheral Embrace of State Formation in Indonesian Papua

ABSTRACT: Building on Ferguson's account of ‘declarations of dependence’ and prior Melanesianist work on ‘humiliation’, I examine how enthusiasm for state‐formation among Korowai of Papua has been shaped by their understandings of self‐lowering as a politically complex way of influencing kin and equalizing relations. I begin with media firestorms in Australia and urban Papua about the need to save two vulnerable boys. Korowai understandings of these episodes, unknown to faraway media publics, illustrate their idea that self‐lowering toward a hoped favorable benefactor is a desirable way of exercising a degree of relational control in a wider situation of being dominated. Building on the Australia‐linked Wawa affair, I look further at why sending boys to school in towns is a main strategy by which Korowai try to ameliorate their felt inferiority to city people. Transactions between schoolboys and senior relatives are politically complex, in ways that suggest the schooling strategy is an application of old egalitarian kinship techniques to new geopolitical inequalities. Finally, I look at Korowai responses to the new environment of large money flows into the countryside under government policies of redistricting and community‐driven development. Strong Korowai interest in benefactor relations with ‘Regency’ leaders, and the new embrace of divisions between ‘heads’ and ‘community’ within villages, also exemplify a strategy of seeking out a more livable relation of inequality to ease a less livable one

Anarchists for the State: From Egalitarian Opacity to Anticipating Thoughts of the Powerful

Korowai of Indonesian Papua have shifted their political order from rejecting relations of authority, to actively subordinating themselves to government patrons and implementing state structures locally. This shift was caused by how internal complexities of the past Korowai egalitarian system have interacted with dramatic macrostructural changes in the intruding state. Previously, I linked Korowai ideas about opacity of minds to political egalitarianism. Analyzing the new political shifts here, I emphasize again how opacity doctrines are embedded in wider processes of exchange and kinship that involve attributing thoughts to others, trying to influence those thoughts, and trying to deal in egalitarian ways with unequal economic conditions, as well as with the intrinsically power-laden dynamics of intersubjectivity itself. The Korowai example suggests wider lessons in how state formation takes hold at extreme colonial and market peripheries, and how doctrines of the knowability of minds articulate with practical institutionalization of state administrative hierarchy.U.S. Fulbright Faculty Research Fellowship and ERC grant ‘Situating Free Speech’ (PI Matt Candea

Powers of incomprehension: Linguistic otherness, translators, and political structure in New Guinea tourism encounters

Meetings between Korowai of Papua and foreign tourists are an example of the historically common phenomenon of transient but close interaction between people lacking any shared language. This article contributes to a comparative anthropology of such contact communities of mutual incomprehension by exploring how Korowai and tourists take translation and incomprehension as sites for defining their relation, particularly in its evaluative and political dimensions. One main pattern I examine is that linguistic interactions are focused on linguistic otherness as such, with each side taking up the other’s difference of language as a figure around which to define what they are to each other more broadly. Another main pattern is that participants in the encounters actively value linguistic incomprehension as a resource for staying separate. Finally, I also address the pattern that the limited cross-language comprehension which does occur is mostly mediated by "guides." For Korowai, these translation specialists embody a model of authoritative speakerhood that is an important point of new commensuration between their political ethos of egalitarianism and the hierarchical social logics of markets and states