James F. Weiner

Between a Rock and a Non-Place: Towards a Contemporary Anthropology of Place

Feld, Steven and Basso, Keith, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996. 293 pp.

The Incorporated What Group: Ethnographic, Economic and Ideological Perspectives on Customary Land Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea

24.95 paper. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 408 pp.

Conflict in the Statutory Elicitation of Aboriginal Culture in Australia

17.12 paper.

A Map of the Human Tongue: A Review Article

Land law and economic development in Papua New Guinea, by David Lea and Timothy Curtin. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK, 2011, 207pp. ISBN: 9-781443-826518. The incorporated land group (ILG), created by the Land Group Incorporation Act (1974) in Papua New Guinea, was one of a number of results of the 1971 Committee of Inquiry into Land Matters that convened in Papua New Guinea just before Papua New Guinea independence in 1975. It allowed for the legal incorporation of customary land-holding groups and was designed to promote business and cash-earning opportunities in rural Papua New Guinea in the post-independence period of nation- and citizen-building. In more recent times, the ILG however has been put under considerably more strain by being forced to acquire functions that were not envisioned by its architects in 1971—namely the receipt, distribution and investment of incomes from resource extraction projects. The ILGs set up by various resource projects (most significantly in the petroleum project areas of PNG) have all run into various and severe difficulties in meeting these requirements of resource income management and business development on a scale not ever anticipated in 1971. Using examples from Papua New Guineas petroleum project area and elsewhere, I cast doubts on the capacities of contemporary indigenous landowning units to make incorporation work for them in the face of current organization and financial challenges.

The Lost Drum: The Myth of Sexuality in Papua New Guinea and Beyond.

In order for Aboriginal rights and interests to be recognised under the Native Title Act (1993), such rights and interests must arise from laws and customs that can be shown to have continuity with the particular set of laws and customs that existed at the time of sovereignty, or, at least, at the time of first European contact. This interpretation of continuity has been applied in Australian native title cases since the High Courts Yorta Yorta decision (Yorta Yorta v the State of Victoria [2002] HCA 58). Yet todays Aboriginal native title claim groups are also required to participate in other statutory ventures outside of the native title domain. For example, ‘tribal’ representatives in north Queensland are obliged to represent their interests on the Wet Tropics Management Authority, and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. In native title terms, however, the activity and time spent participating in these ventures do not ‘count’ as instantiations of traditionally based rights and interests. Furthermore, the powers and rights granted to Aboriginal groups under these statutory ventures are often in conflict with the strictures of current native title interpretations of ‘traditional law and custom and rights and interests’. The effect is to elicit versions of Aboriginal action that may contradict each other legally. In this paper, I discuss some examples of these institutional conflicts engendered by the statutory actions of state and federal government, and comment on the implications for the contemporary Aboriginal articulations of identity and tradition.

Book Reviews : Creating Culture: Profiles in the Study of Culture: Edited by Diane J. Austin-Broos Allen and Unwin Australia, 1988. xxxi + 296 pages.

The land is a map: Placenames of Indigenous origin in Australia, edited by Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges, and Jane Simpson. Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, in association with Pacific Linguistics, 2002, xxiv, 304pp., maps, figures, tables, contributors, references, appendices, index of places and placenames, index of languages and language groups. ISBN 1-74076-020-4 (paperback).

24.95 (paper)

This text provides a theoretical experiment in anthropology and an analysis of myth and ritual in Papua New Guinea societies. Fashioning an anthropological method from psychoanalytic theories, it uncovers a discourse on sexuality, consumption, voice and subjectivity.

The forbidden sex in the New Guinea highlands

both the Chicago and The Australian schools and the current volume will be most welcomed by anthropologists and sociologists who sense a certain ideological curtain between Australia (and England) and America when it comes to the epistemological status of the culture concept. It repairs in a most sophisticated and up-todate manner the deficiencies (from a certain Chicago-centric point of view) of a previous generation of utilitarian, functionalist and neo-Marxist social science in this

Culture in a sealed envelope: the concealment of Australian Aboriginal heritage and tradition in the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair

Meigs, Anna S. Food, Sex and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984. xix + 196 pp. including appendices, glossary, bibliography, and index.

Anthropologists, historians and the secret of social knowledge

22.50 cloth.