@phdthesis{82291,
  author          = {Bashkow, Ira Robert},
  pages           = {340},
  school          = {University of Chicago},
  title           = {'Whitemen' in the Moral World of Orokaiva of Papua New Guinea},
  year            = {1999},
  abstract        = {This dissertation is a theoretically focused ethnography of an Orokaiva community in Papua New Guinea, based on two years of fieldwork in a cluster of villages in Oro Province, and several months of archival research and fieldwork with Orokaiva migrants in towns. I examine Orokaiva conceptions of “whitemen”, “development”, and the West, exploring the racial symbolism which is central in indigenous development efforts, and offering an account of the cultural construction of race and “whiteness” in a non-western culture. Roughly a century after colonization and two decades since Papua New Guinean independence, “whitemen” have become a familiar cultural other for Orokaiva people: an other that is a butt of jokes as well as a major, creative force in historical narratives; an other that is moral and “good to think with” as a foil for Orokaiva evaluations of themselves and their society; an other that is conventionalized in ritual feasting and patterns of consumption of imported foods; and an other that is internalized in Orokaiva individuals' own experiences of “turning whiteman” in town life, schooling, church activities, and village business. The dissertation examines both the history of Orokaiva constructions of whitemen and today's highly conventionalized symbolism of whitemen's bodies, foods, sex, skin, social habits, wealth, and travel. The dissertation increases our understanding of postcoloniality and globalization in Melanesia, suggesting that whitemen and the West exist in distinctive local cultural “versions,” and that people, as they construct these, help shape the western influences they feel. In a non-western context, I examine an analog of western orientalist and primitivist discourses (as well as occidentalism) that have been much criticized for associations with colonial expansionism and racial domination. Reconceptualizing the creative role that such discourses play in culture, I show that moral ambiguity characterizes ideas of “the foreign” and the “own”/“other” distinction, and I argue that these ideas are not inherently anti-humanistic, as is often assumed, but instead are a necessary, important, and probably universal part of culture, though they must be understood as part of the culture in which they are produced, rather than the culture they appear to be about.},
  adviser         = {Munn, Nancy; Sahlins, Marshall; Stocking, George W. Jr.},
  bestfn          = {papua\bashkow_orokaiva1999_o.pdf},
  besttxt         = {ptxt2\papua\bashkow_orokaiva1999_o.txt},
  cfn             = {papua\bashkow_orokaiva1999_o.pdf},
  degree          = {PhD},
  delivered       = {papua\bashkow_orokaiva1999_o.pdf},
  digital_formats = {PDF 16.58Mb image-only PDF},
  fn              = {papua\bashkow_whitemen1999.pdf, papua\bashkow_orokaiva1999_o.pdf},
  hhtype          = {ethnographic},
  inlg            = {English [eng]},
  isbn            = {9780599554870},
  lgcode          = {Orokaiva [okv]},
  macro_area      = {Papunesia},
  source          = {DAI-A 60/11, p. 4068, May 2000},
  src             = {hh},
  subject         = {ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326); HISTORY, ASIA, AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA (0332); PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL (0451)},
  umi_id          = {9951760}
}