Review of the book "The Unseen City: Anthropological Perspectives on Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea", by Michael Goddard. “The Unseen City” that is the focus of this collection of essays is the part of Port Moresby that remains out of sight for most non-Melanesians. It is the everyday social environment of migrant settlers and urban villagers who daily negotiate the legacies of tradition and the colonial past and the contemporary challenges of living in a modern city. Contrary to stereotypical portrayals of Port Moresby as the site of crime and corruption, the essays in this volume present a picture of creative, dynamic “grassroots” responses to the demands of everyday life

Barber, Keith

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444 the contemporary pacific • 18:2 (2006)a self-fulfilling prophecy leading onlyto a further decline in local and busi-ness confidence as well as in law andorder. Moore sees the peace-monitor-ing Operation Helpem Fren in July2003 as a long overdue reversal ofAustralian policy following directlyfrom the aftermath of 9/11 and fromthe October 2002 bombing of Aus-tralian tourists in Bali. Moore con-cludes his book with the arrival inHoniara on 24 July 2003 of theAustralian-led intervention force,ramsi (Regional Assistance Missionto Solomon Islands), tasked to restorelaw and order and to begin to rehabil-itate the shattered economy andbroken society. He barely mentions,though, that the exhausted peopleof Honiara gave the Australians,and the New Zealanders, a rapturouswelcome.Moore’s work is scholarly, thought-ful, perceptive, and thoroughly worthbuying. But again there must be areservation about endorsing it for,like Fraenkel, Moore remains essen-tially an outsider looking in. Theindigenous history, or rather theindigenous histories, of the crisis inthe Happy Isles, have yet to bepublished. However, as Moore notes in hisacknowledgments, from 1999 onwardan extraordinary network of SolomonIslanders overseas began and main-tained an e-mail chat group called Iu-Mi-Nao, which translates intosomething rather like “It’s Up To UsTo Do It! And Now!” Over the nextfew years, students, academics, for-mer diplomats, and many othersdebated on the Internet the latestreports of day-to-day occurrences,media and other freedoms, and howbest to redress and reform the nation.By using the Net, these émigré patri-ots abroad sought from all sides tounderstand and share their indigenousperceptions of what was happeningamong their largely illiterate and oftenvoiceless wantoks (literally, “one talk”;relative or language group) at home.Thus, through e-mail, there wasindigenous discussion throughout,even though mostly from a distance.It is very much to be hoped that thesevigorous indigenous commentaries,a modern equivalent of “coconutradio” (gossip), has been preservedsomehow, somewhere. With furtherin-depth interviewing of the real par-ticipants while they are still alive, theaccumulated postings of that e-mailchat group could yet provide some-thing more like a view from theinside. Meanwhile these two expatriatechronologies by Jon Fraenkel andClive Moore, whether good histories,bad histories, or indeed “real” histo-ries, are certainly the best publishedso far. They are indispensable sum-maries tracing how the Solomons fellso unexpectedly and so quickly frombeing a struggling near-nation tobecoming a failed state.rhys richardsWellington, New Zealand* * *The Unseen City: AnthropologicalPerspectives on Port Moresby, PapuaNew Guinea, by Michael Goddard.Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005.isbn 1-74076-134-0; 225 pages,notes, bibliography. a$34.95.“The Unseen City” that is the focusof this collection of essays is the partof Port Moresby that remains out ofbook and media reviews 445sight for most non-Melanesians. It isthe everyday social environment ofmigrant settlers and urban villagerswho daily negotiate the legacies oftradition and the colonial past andthe contemporary challenges of livingin a modern city. Contrary to stereo-typical portrayals of Port Moresby asthe site of crime and corruption, theessays in this volume present a pictureof creative, dynamic “grassroots”responses to the demands of every-day life. The provenance of these essays is author Michael Goddard’s longassociation with Port Moresby, whichgoes back thirty years. More immedi-ately, it is an extensive period ofprofessional anthropological field-work conducted in and around PortMoresby during the 1990s. Duringfive years’ residence in the city whileteaching anthropology at the Univer-sity of Papua New Guinea, Goddardwas involved in two research projects:one involved interviewing gang mem-bers in Bomana Jail, and the other,the weekly monitoring of three urbanVillage Courts. These two projectshave provided a wealth of detailedinformation on grassroots urban con-cerns and perspectives, which, com-bined with meticulous documentaryand historical research, regular returnvisits to Port Moresby, and the typeof insights that only come from long-term intimate involvement in the dailylife of a city, have produced a coher-ent body of fine-grained anthropologi-cal analysis. Each of these essays hasbeen published before, but here theyare brought together with an original“Introduction” to constitute the firstmajor publication on urban PapuaNew Guinea for a very long time. Something must be said about thestyle of these essays. They often beginwith a simple observation—one thatonly long-term acquaintance with thecity and its inhabitants and closeobservation of daily events wouldrender curious or paradoxical. Theythen proceed by way of meticulousdocumentation of the historical back-ground, the ethnographic context,and the contemporary social andpolitical circumstances of these eventsto render the observations under-standable. In every instance, thereader is left with a wider under-standing and fuller appreciation ofPort Moresby’s social complexity. An example is the essay “FromRolling Thunder to Reggae.” It beginswith the observation that, followingthe well-publicized eviction of squat-ters from two Port Moresby settle-ments in 1998, the victims became therecipients of charitable distributionsand public sympathy (even from thesame authorities who had authorizedtheir eviction), and in one case wereallowed to eventually drift back. Asbackground to these events, we aretreated to a carefully documentedhistory of the development of PortMoresby’s housing since the SecondWorld War, and a history of stereo-typical portrayals of migrant settle-ments from colonial times to thepresent. The paradoxical treatment ofsettlement dwellers is then explainedby the concurrent existence of alter-native contemporary imagery ofurban settlements—as criminogenic(tending to produce criminality) onthe one hand and as representinggrassroots integrity on the other—both of which can be mobilizedsimultaneously by the same or differ-ent authorities to satisfy differentpolitical constituencies.446 the contemporary pacific • 18:2 (2006)Chapter 2, “Off the Record,”begins with a puzzling oddity: In thestatistical records of the KonedobuVillage Court there is no record ofany cases involving sorcery—and yetthe micro-ethnic community that thecourt principally serves is one inwhich sorcery is a prevalent tradition.After a general description of the vil-lage court system and the KonedobuVillage Court and its ethnographicand demographic setting, the tran-script of a case involving an accusa-tion of sorcery is analyzed, focusingon its careful circumlocution of “the‘S’ word.” The opening paradox isexplained by the desire of thisrespectable and law-abiding commu-nity to manage its reputation in lightof the prevailing unfair and prejudi-cial imagery of settlement communi-ties as unruly and criminogenic.The following two chapters, “Big-Man, Thief” and “The Rascal Road,”deal with the motivation and organi-zation of criminal gangs in PortMoresby. These are probably the bestknown of all the articles reproduced inthis volume, as they have been citedin every discussion of “law and order”in Papua New Guinea since their ini-tial publication in 1992 and 1995.They start with the author’s observa-tion as a resident of Port Moresby inthe 1990s that gang members camefrom all walks of life and were oftennot settlement based. Then, frominterviews with gang members inBomama Jail it becomes clear thatthey are not necessarily driven bypoverty, unemployment, lack of edu-cation, or moral indignation at socialinequalities. Therefore, the explana-tion for gang behavior moves beyondcommon sociological assumptions totake into account its Melanesian con-text. By comparing the motivationof gang leaders with the economicbehavior of traditional “big men,”their behavior is explained as a per-verse example of the way Melanesiansare integrating the capitalist economyinto a traditional gift economy.This relationship between the giftand capitalist economies is revisited inthe following chapter, “Expressions ofInterest,” which deals with the activi-ties of small-scale moneylenders resi-dent and operating in an urban settle-ment. The source of information ishearings of a village court, which as aregular part of its business adjudicatesdisputes over loan repayments. Theessay addresses the question of how,in the midst of a wantok system (abroadly kin-based, informal welfaresystem), driven by the resilient Mela-nesian rationale of kinship, is moneylending for profit to be understood?The answer is given by situating small-scale usury within the articulation ofa traditional Melanesian gift economyand a capitalist economy, in a waythat raises important questions aboutwhether we can continue to see PapuaNew Guinea’s urban grassroots sup-port system as based entirely on therationale of kin-ordered societies.In Chapter Seven, “Reto’s Chance,”the scene is again an urban villagecourt. This chapter provides the mostcomplete account of the developmentof the village court system and of itsoperation in an urban settlement. Butits most compelling aspect is the por-trait of two protagonists in a strugglefor the position of village court chair-man. In this essay, intimate observa-tions of settlement life are contextual-ized within a critique of contemporarybook and media reviews 447political theory—namely Joel Migdal’s“state in society” model, whichrecently attracted attention withregard to Melanesia (“The State inSociety,” in State Power and SocialForces, edited by Joel Migdal, AtulKohli, and Vivienne Shue, 7–34; Cam-bridge University Press, 1994). God-dard concludes that his observation ofthe village court “serves as a handyexample of Migdal’s basic argumentabout the lack of autonomy of thestate from social forces,” but impor-tantly, it also shows how “elementsof the state” (in this case a villagecourt) can be transformed by theirincorporation into “communitypraxis” (177).The last chapter, “The Age ofSteam,” is concerned with the struggleof a two-hundred-year-old village topreserve its “traditional” identity inthe face of its intimate engagementwith a burgeoning city. The “steam”of the title is the illicitly distilledliquor, the consumption of which getsthe young village men into conflictwith the police and with their owncommunity. The focus is the villagecourt, which in this village serves asan instrument of community reinte-gration rather than punishment, andits endeavors to maintain the tradi-tional integrity of the village in theface of recalcitrant urban youth.This book will be welcomed as amajor contribution to the ethnogra-phy of Melanesia. Very little has beenpublished about Port Moresby byanthropologists, and there is a generalpaucity of urban ethnography inPapua New Guinea. The Unseen Citytherefore fills an important gap. Italso serves as a model for the con-textualization of local ethnographicresearch in wider social, economic,and political processes. For thesereasons, and for the style and qualityof its prose, it deserves a very widereadership. keith barberUniversity of Waikato* * *Sovereignty under Siege? Globaliza-tion and New Zealand, edited byRobert Patman and Chris Rudd.Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2005. isbn 0-7546-3064-1; ix + 247 pages,table, figures, notes, bibliographies,index. Cloth, us$99.95.In their introduction, and followingan identification of the properties ofglobalization, this collection’s editorstreat the phenomenon as terrain wheresome view the erosion and shrinkageof state sovereignty as irrevocable;where others are convinced that the“Westphalian temple” (the interna-tional system of sovereign states) islargely intact; and where a smaller,though important contingent look toglobalization as a transformationalprocess shaped by the perceptions,interpretations, and responses of itsdiverse actors. However, the editorsclaim, facing all is a key questionabout the actual nature of the sover-eignty and globalization relationship.The challenge is pertinent given thatNew Zealand, as focus for this collec-tion, joins other small, well-developed,and sovereign-sensitive states such asSingapore, Switzerland, and Finlandfor inclusion among the ten mostglobalized of states, societies, andeconomies.Part One, “Political and Economic

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The Unseen City: Anthropological Perspectives on Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, by Michael Goddard (Book Review)

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