Making temporal environments : Work, places and history in the Mengen landscape

Peer reviewe

Book review: West, Paige 2012. From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea.

In her newest book Paige West sets out to examine neoliberal capitalism, its effects and global connections by tracing the production, distribution and consumption of coffee. More specifically her focus is on coffee produced by the Gimi speaking peoples of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). In an ethnographically rich description West shows how the Gimi produce coffee; attach meaning to it and how coffee production has profoundly changed the Gimi environment and subjectivities. By tracing the movement of coffee, she shows how the Gimi interact with Papua New Guinean buyers, what social worlds coffee creates among coffee workers and coffee producer elites of urban PNG and finally how coffee from Eastern Highlands is being sold in capitalism’s centers.Non peer reviewe

Reprises: Chris Gregory’s Gifts and Commodities and the frontier

Chris Gregory’s Gifts and Commodities (1982) is widely regarded as a classic in economic anthropology as well as in studies on Melanesia. The work offers a lucid typology and definition of the concepts of ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’based on the tradition of political economy and economic anthropology. It shows how in colonial Papua New Guinea (PNG) gift and commodity economies articulated with each other and—contrary to the assumption of neoclassical economists—expanded simultaneously. In recounting how labour and primary production were commodi ed in colonial PNG, Gregory analyses the development and demise of the plantation economy and utilizes the concept of the ‘labour frontier’ that moved to new areas and eventually closed leading to the crisis of the plantation sector. In this essay I will briefly discuss Gregory’s notion of the ‘labour frontier’, relate it to later theorizations of the concept of ‘frontier’ and discuss how Gregory’s accounts helped me to understand contemporary dynamics of oil palm development in contemporary PNG.Non peer reviewe

Rupert Stasch. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place .

Rupert Stasch. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2009. Pp. 336. ISBN: 978-0-520-25685-9 (hardback); 978-0-520-25686-6 (paperback)

Introduction: Place, movement, and sociality in Oceania

Non peer reviewe

Editors' note: Activist anthropology, public engagement, and invasive species

In the Editors' note, we present the texts of this issue, which consists of individual article and research report submissions sent to us. Once again,by fortunate happenstance, the various articles, research reports and essays discuss related topics, lending the issue a sense of internal coherence. The texts discuss common topics such as migration and border violence, activist anthropology and the anthropology of activism, rootedness and displacement. In addition, the essay and conference report engage in debates over public anthropology and contesting hegemonies within the discipline

Introduction: Frontier Making Through Territorial Processes. Qualities and Possibilities of Life

In recent years, the concept of ‘frontier’ has become an important analytical device to discuss resource-making in connection with state formation, procurement of labour, environmental destruction, transformation of landscapes, and climate change. Current rapidly shifting frontier situations suggest that the frontier becomes a useful concept in connection with territorialization, since frontiers, as open or liminal areas, give rise to efforts to map, regulate, expand, and extract in them. We propose that frontiers are spatial, temporal, and relational situations that involve territorial processes that qualify landscapes and relations between humans and other beings, such as plants, animals, and so forth. In this special issue, the authors focus on different aspects and qualities of frontier making, namely questions about territorialization, the spatio-temporal dynamics of frontiers, and the possibilities of life under frontier conditions in the Indonesian Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Finnish Lapland, and the Brazilian Amazon. In all these areas, large-scale resource extraction and struggle over different tenure regimes are on-going. The various cases show that natural resources are not generic, they are specific natural elements that are revalued as commodities and resources that can be extracted in frontier situations. The articles of this special issue show that these nature elements, beings, and lives bear a great significance on different ways frontier dynamics and territorializing processes unfold in specific locations. The papers argue that these transformative processes lend specific qualities to socionatural relationships and limits to possibilities of life.Non peer reviewe

Editors' note: On rent extraction in academic publishing and its alternatives

In this editorial we introduce new members of our editorial team and the contents of this issue. In addition we discuss open access developments of the journal, namely our new license policy, which allows authors to choose a Creative Common license that best suits their needs or the requirements of their funders. This change in licenses makes our journal also compliant with the Plan S programme, which several large European research funders have signed, in order to promote open access publishing. We support such initiatives, but note that they are designed mainly to push large commercial publishers to publish publicly funded research in open access. While the Plan S is a welcome program, commercial for-profit publishers charge exorbitant charges for open access, usually paid for by the researchers' institutions. We note that these charges are a form of rent extraction, which produces little added value, as the commercial publishers rely on the free labor of researchers and publicly funded research to fill their journals' pages. More so, due to these charges the public ends up paying again for the research it funded in the first place. We argue that public support for both institutional and independent non-profit open access publishing is a socially more just and sustainable model.In this editorial we introduce new members of our editorial team and the contents of this issue. In addition we discuss open access developments of the journal, namely our new license policy, which allows authors to choose a Creative Common license that best suits their needs or the requirements of their funders. This change in licenses makes our journal also compliant with the Plan S programme, which several large European research funders have signed, in order to promote open access publishing. We support such initiatives, but note that they are designed mainly to push large commercial publishers to publish publicly funded research in open access. While the Plan S is a welcome program, commercial for-profit publishers charge exorbitant charges for open access, usually paid for by the researchers' institutions. We note that these charges are a form of rent extraction, which produces little added value, as the commercial publishers rely on the free labor of researchers and publicly funded research to fill their journals' pages. More so, due to these charges the public ends up paying again for the research it funded in the first place. We argue that public support for both institutional and independent non-profit open access publishing is a socially more just and sustainable model

Preface to the Second Edition

Non peer reviewe