Frederick K. Errington – författare

This remarkable book explores questions of identity and value posed by people living on (or near) the small Pacific island of Karavar in Papua New Guinea. The complex social and cultural changes that occurred during the century after Europeans first arrived in the area have led Karavarans to wonder about-and to assert-who they are and who they might become as citizens of a developing country that is striving to create national coherence across some seven hundred linguistic and cultural groups. Focusing on how the Karavarans' long-term preoccupation with identity and worth has played out in various social contexts, Errington and Gewertz convey a grounded sense of how these people have actually lived and dealt with such widely significant issues as ethnic diversity and the development of national unity. The authors present a historical and ethnographic analysis that, in its scope and mastery of detail, does justice to the complexity and significance of change in a colonial and postcolonial world. Errington and Gewertz's discussions convey a perspective that simultaneously makes both "other" and "ourselves" more understandable and readily comparable as culturally constructed, historically contingent, and mutually determinative. This book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, Oceanists, and all scholars concerned with questions of national identity.

This book explores questions of identity and value posed by people living on (or near) the small Pacific island of Karavar in Papua New Guinea, focusing on how the Karavarans' long-term preoccupation has played out in various social contexts.

Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have worked as anthropologists in Papua New Guinea for nearly two decades. In this, their second joint study of the Chambri, they consider the way those in a small-scale society, peripheral to the major centres of influence, struggle to sustain some degree of autonomy. They describe the Chambri caught up in world processes of social and cultural change, and attempt to create a 'collective biography' which conveys the intelligibility and significance of the twentieth-century experience of these Papua New Guineans whom they have come to know well. This biography consists of interlocking stories, twisted histories, commentaries and contexts about Chambri who are negotiating their objectives while entangled in systemic change and confronting Western representations of modernization and development.

This accessible 1999 study of social class in contemporary Papua New Guinea deals with the new elite, its culture and its institutions, and its relationship to the broader society. The Papua New Guinea described here is not a place of exotic tribesmen, but a modernising society, shaped by global forces, and increasingly divided on class lines. The authors describes the life-style of the elite Wewak, a typical commercial centre, their golf clubs and Rotary gatherings, and bring home the ways in which differences of status are created, experienced and justified. In a country with a long tradition of egalitarianism, it has become at once possible and plausible for relatively affluent 'nationals' to present themselves in a wide range of contexts as fundamentally superior to 'bushy' people, to blame the poor for their misfortunes, and to turn their backs on their less successful relatives.