Karen Sykes

After the ‘Raskol’ Feast Youths’ alienation in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

Youths’ alienation from both the exchange networks of their kin and the wage economy in urban Papua New Guinea depletes their spirit and will, thereby challenging that aspect of personal identity which establishes their relations to others. Their thefts, violence and gluttony exceed conventional habits of consumption and distinguish many youth as ‘rascals’ (in Tok Pisin, raskols), who have ‘no shame nor respect’ (nogat sem). In this article I analyse the practice of excessive consumption in light of the ethos of sem amongst kin in village mortuary feasts and amongst friends in urban settlements, thereby showing that nogat sem approximates the condition of alienation in Melanesia. By assessing consumption theory in light of its ability to account for alienation, I conclude that practices of consumption not only produce and reproduce mutually recognized hierarchical relations, but also fracture those relations and dismember the actors’ identities.

Mortgaging the bridewealth: Problems with brothers and problems with value

In this article I raise some questions about the nature of value, largely as these arise from a situation in which the implicit value of the brother-sister relationship is foregrounded and questioned as a challenge to the dignity of Papua New Guinean women living in North Queensland, Australia. In analyses of several case studies of how husbands and wives finance bridewealth payments with new personal financial arrangements, it is possible to identify the outline of a moral economy of risk and interest that has arisen in the last generation. Papua New Guinean women’s esteem for their clansmen (as well as their lack of it) is a measure that insures the persistence of their marital households against the risks and interests posed by their brothers. Following the theoretical arguments of Chris Gregory and of Anna Tsing (part one of this special issue), I show how anthropologists, like their informants, must always repose old questions about the nature of value as they sort out issues that arise in contemporary ethnography, and in matters of concern for their own lives.

‘Adopting an obligation’: Innovative forms of inter-clan democracy in the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea:

This article explores how aspects of clan equality and fraternity within segments of a state can be basic elements of democratic society. It describes the innovative forms of inter-clan democracy in the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea (PNG) that emerged during times of regional conflict at the site of a multinational-run copper mine in North Solomons Province. Those men who had been sent to reinstate civil services near the mining site adopted children from that war-torn province into the matriclans of their own respective wives. In the role of adoptive father they could provide them with access to health and education facilities in the home province; men in the region thus challenged the PNG state to meet its obligations to protect the rights of the youngest generation to grow to adulthood.

Prickly Pear polemics - Introduction to Feuchtwang and Strathern: Judgement, Commensurability and double vision

The following is the first in a series of ‘paired’ Prickly Polemics that highlight the experiential basis of moral reason, and that interrogate the relation between knowing and valuing through reflections on ethnographic and biographical experience. Such grounded reasoning has been central in the formation of anthropology as a critical discipline, and in everyday reasoning about the moral paradoxes of a global age when values are not shared. This first pair of polemics, by Stephan Feuchtwang and Marilyn Strathern, have several qualities in common: a personal voice, reflections on particular experience(s) and the polemical form of address. The first two qualities, the personal voice and the attention to experience are each features of writing that distinguish polemical style. The polemical ‘address’ is a genre of argument more akin to letter writing than to the essay. It cultivates a close relationship with the reader while talking about a third party or person. The third party is the focus of the critique because it represents the powerful perspective of the ‘received wisdom’ or an ‘established truth’. The author uses tropes of intimacy and appeals to personal experience in order to create suspicion and to enjoin the reader to see flaws in the perspective of the third party. A good polemic discredits the prevailing or conventional authority but does not attempt to establish new ones. A polemic can be a re-learning process, fortifying both reader and author to trust the common sense they have forgotten, or helping the reader to recall their previous learning. It joins, rather than separates, rationalities and sensibilities, politics and poetics, reason and sentiment, in a process of critical-moral reasoning that is from a specific ‘standpoint’. The following articles interrogate the possibilities of judgement in anthropology. To distinguish between the moralist and the critical polemic is a matter of knowing what judgement is, and is not. Each author therefore discusses the process or act of judgement in order to explore how some Article

Prickly Pear Polemics - Introduction to Sundar and Robbins: Culpability, Conversion and the Possibility of Justice

At least since Writing Culture ushered in the ‘crisis in Anthropology’, anthropologists have criticized their involvement in projects of colonialism and radically questioned their relationship with ‘informants’, the violence involved in ‘speaking for’ those ‘without a voice’ and the way the subjects of their studies have been represented in anthropological writing. In other words, they have questioned the culpability of the discipline and of themselves as anthropologists, by rethinking and rewriting anthropology’s history of colonial encounters. Rethinking culpability has radically reshaped the nature of anthropology and how it is done in contemporary times. Since then, professional ethics, the problematization of the issue of representation, and an ongoing angst over the place of the discipline and its legitimacy in a world that seems to become ever smaller, but, at the same time, ever more complex, have been right at the centre of the discipline. This had brought forth an ongoing debate about anthropology’s contribution to knowledge and the question of whether this knowledge could, or should, ever be value-free. In the terms of the famous debate between Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Roy D’Andrade, the question has become whether advocacy should, or even must, be at the heart of the discipline of anthropology. These authors, Robbins and Sundar pose pressing questions about scholarly responsibility for finding who is culpable for unjust action in a seemingly shrinking world of complex global involvements. The possibility of justice, the question of the adequate representation of certain groups by more privileged others, and the debate as to whether judicial tools such as ‘truth commissions’ indeed reveal ‘the truth’ show that moral reasoning over complex involvements, and their implications, sometimes leads to attempts to rewrite both (individual and collective) pasts and futures. It is a habit which is not limited to the discipline of anthropology. Journalists and historians of the 20th century have struggled Article

The ethnography of children's and youth's work in the age of capitalist restructuring

One of the effects of the globalizing processes over the last decades has been to bring children out of the household and home and into the spaces of the public world, thereby increasing the number of relationships in which young people live and work. As the number of different relationships in which children and youth live has increased, so too has the intensity of the connections that hold them together. Youth in the knot of relationships become one of modernity’s imbroglios, a part of the monstrous entanglement of long chains of associations that run between the younger generation, their families, their teachers, the social services, their peers and their employers. While youth and children become more visible, their labour becomes harder to define. Ironically, one of the effects of globalization has also been to hide from bodies seeking to regulate labour such as the International Labour Organization. The extent and nature of connections between people, which adds to the speed and immediacy by which youth can find access to modern goods, makes children’s and youth’s labour opaque by highlighting their consumer practices as the principal means by which they construct social identity. Hence, some relationships seemingly can be made to matter more than others, as youth and children flag their identity through consuming specific brands and commodities. The discrepancy between the expanding world of youth’s social relationships and the contracting world of others of immediate importance obscures the conditions in which youth might live, making it harder for youth and their families to realize the hopes they might have for the future. The fluctuating level of awareness of the social conditions in which people live remains a challenge to anthropologist and activist alike. This issue of Critique of Anthropology proposes that ethnographies of the work that children and youth do can enhance understanding of