War and peace in Highland PNG: Some recent developments in the Nebilyer Valley, Western Highlands Province

"During the entire period from about 1950 to 2005 the Kopia and Kubuka tribes, with whom we have lived at Kailge, were not involved in any lethal warfare. They were on the verge of it in 1982 when they joined in with their eastern neighbours - the Epola-Alya and others - in a fight that had broken out between them and their neighbours to the south, the Tea-Dena. This conflict (for reasons discussed in Merlan & Rumsey 1991) became known as the Marsupial Road War (see Map 3). But that war was stopped by a dramatic intervention by a local women’s group who marched out on the battlefield between the opposing sides and broke it up. That intervention established a peace that lasted 23 years. This changed dramatically in 2005 when the Kopia and Kubuka people got into the biggest fight that they had experienced in living memory in which approximately 80 people were killed over then period 2005-2007. Here I give an account of how that turn of events took place, use it to illustrate what I see as some general features of the socio-political order in this region, and try to develop some conclusions about the problems and prospects for conflict resolution there and in Highland New Guinea more generally ..." - page 1-2AusAI

Musical, Poetic and Linguistic Form in Tom Yaya Sung Narratives from Papua New Guinea

Tom yaya kange is a genre of metrical, sung narrative performed in the Ku Waru region of Highland Papua New Guinea. Describing and exemplifying two varieties of this genre, I show how the language used in them differs from ordinary spoken Ku Waru. The K

Worrorran Revisited: The case for genetic relations among languages of the Northern Kimberley region of Western Australia

In this book we attempt to establish the genetic related ness of a set of some twenty named regional speech varieties of the Northern Kimberley region of Western Australia . We argue that, contrary to recent claims by some scholars, they constitute a genetic family-like unit. The case is argued by application of the comparative method, along with a lexical-statistical method, a modified version of lexicostatistics, that compares lexical similarities (in both form and semantics) within the basic vocabularies of the languages with no presumption of genetic relatedness. The results of these two independent methods are in substantial agreement, thus providing independent support for our proposals. The main thrust of the volume is an application of the comparative method, whereby we establish the genetic relatedness of the languages by reconstructing features-mainly phonological and grammatical, to a lesser extent lexical-of a protolanguage from which features of the modern languages could plausibly have derived. We also present comparative evidence that three primary subgroups can be distinguished in the family