Since creating the internet site The Anthropologist in the Field in
1996, I have continued to do research with the Gende in Papua New Guinea and
have written both scholarly and more community-focused works on gambling,
development, inequality, gender violence, the politics of culture and sexuality,
and the internet as a teaching tool and a platform for cultural heritage
projects and e-museums. In addition to teaching and writing, I was the first
visual media review editor for Pacific Studies (1996-2001) and have acted
in a variety of leading roles in the Association for Social Anthropology in
Oceania and Melanesian Interest Group.
In
2007, having retired from teaching, I began several new research projects, one
focused on Betty
Higgins’ run for National Parliament in 2007, two cultural heritage books
printed expressly for the Gende (The Gende: People of the High Country of New Guinea 2011 and
Growing up Gende 2012), and a major social mapping/census project between
2007 and 2011 that included the residents and absentees of more than twenty
Gende villages currently being impacted by Marengo Mining’s search for copper
and the expansion of the “Yandera project”. While technology has made fieldwork
easier (such as being able to email, skype, and Facebook friends and family both
at home and in Yandera village; and the recent spread of cell phones throughout
Gende villages and other areas of Papua New Guinea allowing me to ask questions
from afar), fieldwork in remote villages still requires the efforts described in
The Anthropologist in the Field (such as packing the right clothes, being
prepared to undergo culture shock, fitting in and achieving rapport at the same
time as one carries out organized research and interviews).
As
I reflect back on the past thirty-one years since I first went to work with the
Gende in 1982-83, I have many ideas about sharing that work and its results with
the Gende and others, including a website I am working on that will include many
of the old photos I took as well as those taken by early missionaries and
several collections of stories focusing on the human side of the anthropologist
in the field and the many transitions Gende individuals have been going through.
Learning to write for a general audience while maintaining ethnographic
verisimilitude is an exciting and necessary challenge in a world where all too
many people see Papua New Guineans as stone-age survivors living in a
Hollywood-like Navi-land.
Dr. Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi
May 2, 2013
