[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar Wednesday 9 April

[Melinda Hinkson]

Anthropology seminar Wednesday 9 April, 9.30 am Seminar Room A, Coombs
Building

Transactions among the Me, Central Highlands, West Papua
Anton Ploeg, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
 
The Me, formerly ŒKapauku¹, have become best known via the ethnographic work
of Leopold Pospisil. He described the people as running an economic system
that amounted to a Œsimplified version of capitalism¹, with cowrie shells as
capital. Chris Gregory has commented that Pospisil¹s view was a Œprofound
misunderstanding.¹ He held that Pospisil¹s own data made it clear that the
Me lived in a gift economy. The data of the Dutch missionary / ethnographer
Sibbele Hylkema, who lived among the Me from 1969 to 1994, appear to provide
an alternative to both views. In the paper I introduce his work, focusing on
his analysis of transactions.
 
Anton Ploeg did field work among Western Dani, in the highlands of West
Papua, in the early 1960s as a research scholar in what was then the
department of Anthropology and Sociology of RSPacS. His later field research
took place in Papua New Guinea. After he had taken early retirement, in the
early 90s, he started documentary research on the extant ethnography of the
highlands of West Papua. That research is still continuing and the seminar
paper contains a part of the results.

____________________________________
Melinda Hinkson
School of Archaeology & Anthropology
A.D. Hope Building
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

T: +61 2 6125 8246
F: +61 2 6125 2711
W: http://arts.anu.edu.au/AandA/