Seeing like an anthropologist
Monica Minnegal has turned watching the lives of others into a career
Chris Hatzis
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Take a moment in the course of your day to pause and observe what's around you. How are people behaving? In what ways do they interact with each other, and with the environment? Do you notice anything you didn't before? This, according to University of Melbourne Associate Professor Monica Minnegal, is the first step to seeing like an anthropologist.
For years Monica has been engaged with the Kubo people of Papua New Guinea, an indigenous community only recently facing the impact of modernity. Her studies centre around ideas of change - to be precise: how change affects people's relationship to their environment. Locally, she's applied this outlook to Victorian fishing communities. Monica met with our host Steve Grimwade to talk about her work, where she delves into what she's learnt from the Kubo people, and what we can learn from them.
Steve Grimwade
What was it about anthropology that first excited you? Who was it that inspired you?
Monica Minnegal
I'm not sure that it's a particular person, a particular lecturer. It was the material that I was reading. You've got to read this exciting stuff and talk to people in classrooms about things that you thought you knew, when it was obvious you didn't. It just wasn't necessarily the way that you'd just sort of grown up believing. That was exciting just having to rethink everything.
Steve Grimwade
Was there a moment as a young woman that your eyes did open and you realised you'd been seeing the world through sort of somewhat shaded eyes, or a shaded view?
Monica Minnegal
[Laughs] I grew up in country Queensland. When I came to university I had no idea there could be anything other than doctors and lawyers and teachers. So I started medicine and I suspect it was when I realised this was definitely not for me and I would do something different. So when in a sense I was kicked out of my comfort zone, I got to explore other things. But yeah, country Queensland is not really conducive to making you question very much. But some of us escape.
Steve Grimwade
At the time of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, was it?
Monica Minnegal
Absolutely.
Steve Grimwade
Surely that was conducive to all sorts of antagonism, I don't know.
Monica Minnegal
I think my family were definitely voters of - would have voted for Joh, I suspect some of my siblings vote for Pauline...
Steve Grimwade
The majority did vote for Joh, that's how he got in.
Monica Minnegal
That's right.
Steve Grimwade
Look, to start at the end, what did you expect to get out of anthropology and how has that unfolded? What has changed most during your years of study?
Monica Minnegal
Look, I think that all of my study ultimately has been about change. I don't think anyone can do anthropology without studying change. Wherever we go, whether it's the professional fishermen of Victoria who are constantly having to grapple with new forms of management regime, new forms of licensing and now climate change. Or people in remote parts of Papua New Guinea who have colonisers come and missions come saying they've believed the wrong things all the years. Now increasingly caught up in really big global financial systems with something like the PNG LNG project arriving on the doorstep of places that previously had no schools, no hospitals, no aid posts, nothing. Then a helicopter lands and says, we want to give you $40 million.
So I'm interested in change. I've studied change all the time and it's particularly those processes of change as people who have been embedded in particular places - so the fishermen with their seas, or Kubo people with their land increasingly pulled out of those places into much bigger structures.
Steve Grimwade
How do you find your understanding of change being translated into policy?
Monica Minnegal
That's always difficult. We have made submissions to say the Fisheries Management Authority in Australia and to parliament et cetera saying you really don't understand what people do on the ground. Why they need to be able to switch between different kinds of targets and you're trying to sort of lock them into one, and that's actually going to be harmful for the environment.
But it's very difficult from outside to make an impact there. Partly I think it's giving a voice to local people, but also being translators. I guess if there's one thing I think anthropologists do is that they translate between worlds. So I've talked about it. I've written about it in terms of us in a sense being spirit mediums. Able to say things that the local community actually can't articulate, or can't articulate safely. We are outsiders enough to be able to say these things, but also insiders enough that people recognise that we're describing what they actually do.
Steve Grimwade
I think we'll come to and from this problem of the impact of anthropology quite a bit because I think - I've been circling around this in my thoughts. Because really I mean when you - you can't present your work as a consultant, I mean you can't take sides, you can only represent what's happening. But you will be drawn - and you'll be pulled into research projects to do exactly that. So how do you not take sides as an anthropologist?
Monica Minnegal
The idea of cultural relativity is fundamental to anthropology, that other people make sense of the world in ways that are just as valid as ours. But that doesn't mean that I'm not a person, that I don't have my own way of making sense of the world. No anthropologist is not also engaged. What's important is to reflect on how you're doing that. To reflect on how where you're coming from influences the way you interpret what's happening and to be honest about that.
Steve Grimwade
So do you believe your understanding of yourself has grown through the study of others?
Monica Minnegal
That's one reason why people do anthropology. As I said right from the start, you look at others and see other ways that you could be. That the way you thought you were is not necessarily the only way to be. So yes of course it's very much about reflexivity, about learning about yourself and your own society. So learning about how people in Melbourne - I think this is why students in classrooms really like this stuff, because they're forced to think about themselves. To imagine how they could do things differently. That's quite exciting too.
Steve Grimwade
For over a hundred years, from the time of Bronisław Malinowski, I can't say that, but a very - an important gentleman I think who is…
Monica Minnegal
Malinowski.
Steve Grimwade
...thank you, who visited PNG, I think, in 1914 for the first time. So people have been going to - or anthropologists have been going to - PNG for over 100 years. What is it about PNG that attracts people like yourself?
Monica Minnegal
Look, I honestly don't - what I do know is that people who go to PNG really get sucked into the place, there's something in the blood. Whether it's the young Kiaps who - young patrol officers, 18-19-20 who went up there as our colonial outlook people. Way out in the bush having these dramatic adventures. They're now all back in Australia and they all just constantly talk to each other about PNG. About what's happening in PNG now, about their times in PNG. That's the same for the teachers and for the missionaries, and it's certainly the case for anthropologists.
So PNG does get in the blood, which is why I keep going back. But the reason why people like it in the first place is it is so diverse. You've got 800 different languages. The people I worked with, Kubo people, when I first went there, there were 500 people who spoke that language. There's neighbours speaking a different language 30 kilometres away. Just the diversity that you see there.
Now that's also changing. This was a time when people didn't move anywhere near as much as they do now. They also have a population problem. So Kubo population has doubled in those 30 years. That makes a really big difference to the place. But it's that diversity. It's the fact that you can walk over the hill and be confronted with the fact that even this isn't the way to do it.
Steve Grimwade
I remember stories of people, and I believe this is true, about someone finding the last - or the last known tribe that hadn't met Western civilisation being found I think it was in the '60s. Is that true?
Monica Minnegal
Oh no, it's a - there are certainly people who stayed away from the government as much as they could. They all knew about the government. Most of these stories - when they do come in they're - you discover that their names are things like Tom and Joe. They've been influenced by the colonial authorities. But I will say that the place I work, the first government patrol to actually go to that area was in 1968. So colonisation reached this place very, very late. It was the last uncontrolled part of Papua New Guinea until 1961 when a government patrol station was set up in a place called Nomad, not very far away.
So there are definitely parts of New Guinea where certainly into the '60s and '70s - when I first went there in 1986 there was almost no-one who spoke English or Pidgin or Motu, the trade languages. People were - there was no-one who had gone to one of the towns and stayed. So it's all very, very recent, which makes of course for people like me who are interested in change, it's just - you're confronted with change in every level of society.
Steve Grimwade
If you tie change and you go to the other side and you think of the romance of the new, and also to the romance of the old, I sort - in my mind I think of anthropologists and I do think of colonial times and I do think of pith helmets. I figure there is probably less room for the romance of the old and finding totally new things in those sort of places. Yet now maybe anthropology is being drawn into the city now more about seeing change, how it happens in modern cultures. Would that be correct?
Monica Minnegal
Oh, yes. But it depends on what you mean by the romance of the - by the old. People may be engaging in different contexts. They may now be coming to the cities. They may be working for mining companies and running seismic lines through the mountains, operating heavy machinery. But they're still very much going to be making sense of the things that they see in ways that they did before. You don't wipe out a way of seeing the world and impose a completely new way on top of it. What it does is it draws attention to different ways, of different things but not necessarily different kinds of things. I could throw big words like ontology and epistemology at you, but I don't think you really need those.
It's really about knowing that - I'll give you one example. For people in this place it's really important to pay attention constantly to what's going on around you. What the weather's doing, what the trees are doing. It's unpredictable so you have to be ready to act whatever the weather's doing. This year will the acari nuts produce, okay, we'll do that. This year is there going to be a drought and we're going to have to move to a different part of the country. So you're constantly paying attention.
What you did in the past doesn't really matter. What matters is the present and what you're going to do in the future. They didn't construct boundaries around what you could do, where you could go. Your relationship to land was predicated on what you do today, and there are no constraints on where you could garden tomorrow in this particular place. Now we come along and we say, who was your father and your grandfather? We need to know where you came from, we need to know those past connections. We need to know where's the edge of your land because if we put a mine here we need to know who to pay money to. So we have to draw lines on the land. Now that's a very different way of constructing things in the world, those categorical distinctions.
And people are now doing that because it's the only way they can see to engage with the state, to engage with the corporation. But that doesn't mean that they're not also deeply embedded in a relational way of being in the world. They get very frustrated when the people in the mining camp pay no attention to them as individuals. They are there watching the mining camp. This is an exploration camp at Swarbi. They're there watching the comings and goings, they're constantly trying to get hints of what the plans might be for the company. They're constantly paying attention. They say, "these people pay us no respect, they don't attend to us as people. We are just workers."
In a sense it's the same thing that I'm seeing with commercial fishermen where the thing that disturbs most, and the reason why they probably many of them will vote for Pauline Hanson - will vote for the hunters, shooters, fishers - is because what they see the government doing is turning them into numbers. Turning them into anonymous substitutable numbers. You have a licence and it's the number on your licence that matters. It's not about you or your relationship to the sea, or your knowledge of the sea. If we decide to cancel that licence you're no longer a fisherman. If we decide to - or you could decide to sell that licence to someone else, and you've now completely alienated yourself from place. But of course people don't live that way.
Steve Grimwade
So what are the structures or the processes that government and bureaucrats use to best enable people to be represented as people and not numbers?
Monica Minnegal
This is hard, and this is probably where most of our attempts to intervene have been. To say that actually go out there and see how people relate, rather than drawing up the grids, drawing up the maps before you go. Go out there and see how people switch between different fishing targets, okay. Go out there and recognise that what works over here is not necessarily going to work over there. This applies in all sorts of domains where anthropologists are trying to intervene.
There is not one solution for closing the gap on the various issues that Indigenous people confront. Because people are caught up in different local situations. Rural, regional, remote, urban, people live in all of those different contexts and if we don't actually understand how they live in those contexts and try to say, we can come up with one solution; one Indigenous policy. It's not going to work.
Steve Grimwade
Some of your work and the ideas that came from that with regards to your work in PNG and the fact that people were changing their tribal affiliations, or their group affiliations. That would potentially have an impact I suspect on the - on remuneration. I mean we're talking about communities on the edge of a $30 billion LNG plant or a field. The stakes are very, very high. So how are those relationships to land and community groupings changing?
Monica Minnegal
I hinted at that earlier when I said that they are now having to draw lines around the land and register ownership of land in a Western sense. That immediately means that you draw lines, you say, you're in, you're not in. We do this - they do the same things increasingly now with people where they say, you belong to my group, you don't belong my group; you belong in a different group.
Whereas previously those boundaries were always really fluid and that was very important in a place where you had to be able to be nimble in responding to whatever the environment threw at you. But we now draw these sharp boundaries.
There is a strong emerging sense of haves and have-nots. The lucky ones who got the gas and the unlucky ones. There's a lot of - what's emerging is a sort of - a horizontal inequality. Not a class distinction here now, but people who in all sorts of ways are exactly the same and yet some are rich and some are not.
Steve Grimwade
But that is the luck of the draw…
Monica Minnegal
Mm.
Steve Grimwade
…it is where your gas lies. Except I'm interest also in what that means for the groupings. Is there dissatisfaction, is there angst, is there - are these groups breaking down?
Monica Minnegal
There are some important shifts, and one is in a sense that they become more solid in terms of structure. So the government forms require that you identify the head of the household and the wife of the head and the children of. So at one level those sorts of structures become stronger. The forms require that you identify a chairman for your land group, and a secretary, and a - so those sorts of structures are new.
But there are also really crucial differences. Things that change. One has to do with it's the young people who know how to engage with this stuff. The elders haven't been to school, the elders don't know how to read and write. They're now dependent on the knowledge that the young bring. That immediately overthrows some principles of, where does authority, where does prestige come from? How can you guide the young when you're so deeply dependent on them and they know it?
So you do get a breakdown of those sorts of hierarchies. You do get frustrated young people who are turning to things like guns. Not so much in the area where I work, but in Hela province which is just over the hill where the biggest part of the project is currently operating. There's a massive amount of tribal fighting. Now it's done not with bows and arrows but with AK-47s. A lot of that is driven by a sense of, we missed out. Really, really we were connected to that place. Remember I said that people - the connections were fluid. Everyone in a sense could build a connection. But now there's - they're being told, no, you don't have a connection to this place. So there's endless court cases going on that require people to say, I'm the true landowner, you're not the true landowner.
Steve Grimwade
Monica, you've travelled to PNG to live with the Kubo people and others for almost 20 years. You've lived with them for months if not years at a time. So given your knowledge and your understanding of the impact on these people, what do you hope the impact of your work is?
Monica Minnegal
Part of it - I definitely make sure that all of my material goes back to the people. I talk to them about it as well. I'm hoping to some extent that it helps them understand what they are doing to themselves, to be aware of the distinctions.
I mean you're dealing with people - like the local pastor who I work closely with, which might seem surprising, is also, he was 10 years old when we first knew him. He was the last - in the last initiation cohort, he's been initiated in the local language. Now he's this enormously really smart man of about - pushing 40 now, who is having a really important role in leading the community.
So I'm increasingly becoming interested in the brokers, the people who intervene between the local community and the company, or the state, or the church. The church of course is massively important in Papua New Guinea because it runs the schools, it runs the hospitals. I'm interested in these people and in talking with them around what they're doing.
So this young pastor now is really keen to say, we don't - we lost the stories. We need to learn how to talk to people again. He read the book and he - the first thing he did when he - we spoke to him on the phone, it's amazing, there's mobile phone coverage there now - was to say, you're right, what you were writing about Oobi, about the local social units. We call them clans now and we're being encouraged to think of them as clans. But that's not what they were they were assemblages, they were people being brought together for particular purposes. So getting people to think in a way that might allow them to communicate to the state and to the company how they want things to be organised I think is really important. You know, going back to the stuff where I was talking about relationships and counting...
Steve Grimwade
...yeah, please.
Monica Minnegal
...one of the differences is... for Kubo they talk - they count in the present. So again it's not that they can't count without counting on their fingers. But that it's really about saying one-two-three-four-five, but it's first-second-third-fourth-fifth. What we do with our counting system is we abstract numbers from the things in the world. As we teach people to abstract numbers from the things in the world we also force them to stand away from those things and to engage with those things differently. It's not the first pig and the second pig and the third pig, it's just there are an infinite number of pigs out there and we can count these infinite number of pigs. Whereas for them each pig is different, just like every finger is different.
Steve Grimwade
There's a platonic pig, but is there a platonic pig in PNG? Is there an idea of a perfect pig or there is…
Monica Minnegal
No.
Steve Grimwade
…just the next pig?
Monica Minnegal
This is important, too, in terms of understanding how they engage in exchange. When you and I decide that we actually quite like each other and we're going to be allies in the future we will exchange pigs. But these pigs have to be exactly the same. They have to be the same size, they have to be the same colour, they have to be the same sex. The reason is that that's the only way to ensure that you and I have put the same amount of effort into raising them. And the same way with wives, we exchange sisters. Or sisters exchange brothers, which is actually how the women think of it.
But you exchange exactly identical things, but you have to work to make them identical. There is no platonic pig. What's important is the relationship of that pig to the person who raised it. It's not an abstract pig. They get really puzzled when the mining company comes and says, oh look, I really don't care who raised the pig. The price I'll give depends on its size. This is really odd to them.
When we first went there - and this might give a better illustration - when we first went to Gwaimasi, the village where we worked, they had very little knowledge of money, our sort of money. For them every coin was defined. The value of that coin was defined by how it came to be in your hands.
So 20 cent pieces were not mutually interchangeable. There was no platonic 20 cent piece, okay. Six months later they could say, because they didn't have much to spend money on. See this 20 cent piece, that's the one that Peter gave me when I took him for a walk through the forest. That's the one that you gave me when I brought you a pineapple. This means that the coins given to the church can't be traded in for notes. Because those coins were given to the church, not some abstract sense of money but those coins.
Steve Grimwade
Do you have to be reasonably tough-willed and tough emotionally to deal with the changes in these communities? Because I mean I get a sense of something, that God these sounds like really remarkable beautiful communities that are now having change thrust upon them and they're losing these traditions. I mean, is that a bad thing, or we just accept that that is?
Monica Minnegal
Yes, you have to accept that it is, but of course it's - there are things that I think are good. One thing, you should not romanticise these people. When I first went up there the first person - the oldest person with true father alive was 11 years old. The oldest person with both true parents alive was seven. People did not live to see their kids marry. Which is one reason why they had the sister exchange system. Of course they want their kids to live, of course they don't want to die. We wouldn't want to either. But if they want to change those aspects of their lives other aspects will change. I'll give you one key example. I said, people did not live to see their children get married. Now with a very little bit of Western medicine they do.
Now when it comes time for kids to marry, Mum and Dad say, well, what's in it for us? They want to influence the choices of the kids. They are pushing a switch to bride price rather than exchange marriage, the parents are, the older generation is. We're not imposing this on them. These people are making decisions about how they want to engage with the world. How they want to improve their lives. I might say, oh God, I think you're making a terrible mistake, but that's not really for me to say either.
Steve Grimwade
Having spent so much time with these various people, I mean they've drawn you into their lives and obviously you must be very closely connected to a number of people in PNG. How to remain separate from the cultures you're embedded in, how do you keep a little bit of distance?
Monica Minnegal
I'm never going to be a Kubo, I'm sorry, I can't walk through the forest in the way that they do. I fall off logs and I can't chop down trees. I mean every time they swing the axe it goes in the same place, I can't do. So they know and I know that I'm not them. Frankly, I don't want to live my life in a bush material house in Papua New Guinea with no access to books and no access to the other parts of my life.
So that's really important as an anthropologist, to know that you're not the people you're working with. You can be deeply committed to trying to make a difference. I mean one of the things that they are trying to organise at the moment, in the people in the wider area including Bedamuni people who we've also worked with, is to organise a high school and a distance college at Mogulu. The first time they will have anything like this so that the kids don't have to leave town if they want to go to high school.
That's really important but it's also known that unless the local people own it, it's not going to be sustainable. So they want people like us to come in and work with them to try and say, how do we do this? How do we communicate? How do we perhaps create a sense of ownership in the community here? Why don't they have that sense of ownership? Well, actually there's good reason because in the past you didn't become committed to particular things. You didn't fix stuff in advance because you didn't know - it was much more important to wait till it broke down. They didn't have that sense of continual ongoing maintenance of something, of planning ahead in that sense. Because what matters was being ready to react now.
There are good reasons why they interact as they do. If you start simply changing those and saying, you've got to do things otherwise, it seems easy but you actually destroy their connection to the land. Like the commercial fishermen who said, I believe in global warming. I think people are doing it. But if we talk that talk to our kids, our kids will no longer be able to fish. Because we're saying what shapes the environment is out there, it's people on the other side of the world. It's this abstract category called people. Our kids need to know to pay attention - well, young fishermen, not too many of them anymore. But our kids need to know about what the waves are doing here and now, what the wind is doing. Where the fish are, what the birds are doing.
Steve Grimwade
I don't want to use the word impact again, but when you - I mean you're really, I mean like a novelist you're getting into the heart of what is making these people and their lives tick, and their view of the society and the culture that informs them. But I'm interested now, I mean surely someone is going to be reading this work to help them inform the way they impact these communities. Has there been much change?
Monica Minnegal
The industry has certainly been interested in some of the questions around how they organise. The fact that the scallop fishermen organise quite differently from the Danish Seine fishermen and how that causes tensions in the community. I have students who have done PhDs as part of this project. One of them for example, a young woman called Tanya King who's now a lecturer at Deakin in anthropology, has done a lot of work on the psychological problems of change. So she's worked with fishing industry bodies, she's worked with the Fisheries Management Authority. Looking at what are the social implications, how can we put support networks into place for people who are being displaced by some of this stuff.
There's a - you have to recognise that change happens. That we're not going to stop change, that's not the purpose. But perhaps to work out how to do it better. The way that you manage a buy-back so that it doesn't sort of leave people feeling, like Kubo, "we are not respected, we are just not of any value, any importance to them whatsoever".
How do you deal with the mental health issues that have to - that are associated with a really dangerous activity? How do you deal with the family support questions when fishermen increasingly may have to go out to sea for months at a time, instead of going out on much shorter trips? How do you have conversations with fishermen about changes to fish stocks that are partly their fault? Partly the problems are because they caught so many they flooded the market. Partly it's because global warming is happening and fish are moving.
How do you have conversations with people to help them make decisions differently? Does the government want anthropologists to tell them how to make policy? Mmm, we complicate matters. We make it harder to make simple policy so there's resistance there. But you do have some influence along the way.
Steve Grimwade
You want influence, but you don't want to change policy. I mean…
Monica Minnegal
I don't personally.
Steve Grimwade
But does that mean can an anthropologist want to change policy?
Monica Minnegal
Oh, absolutely. Yes, so there are a lot of people who do work on - I mean the anthropology of policy is actually a field. Where there - now what you're studying is the policymakers and how policymakers make decisions. But that can be difficult. So again I know of people who have worked with fisheries who because they'd worked with fisheries were then excluded from the policymaking bodies because of the suspicion that policymakers have about the people they're making policy for.
Steve Grimwade
Who's sponsoring your work.
Monica Minnegal
That's right. So there's actually talk about being on the dark side. A lot of anthropologists, for example in Papua New Guinea, do work for mining companies in trying to map the communities. Trying to say, how do we work out who is entitled to a share of the benefits. I explicitly have made a decision not to do that. Because if I did once go up there as an employee of the mining company it would completely change my relationship, my position in the community.
So people do work for government. Another one of my students who actually also started off working with fishermen now works for the Environment Department in Victoria, I cannot remember what the latest acronym is. It has changed over the years. But she works on fire knowledge. So she's a researcher in the public service in Victoria working on fire knowledge, negotiating with people in communities as to how we should shape a policy about burning, controlled burning, those sorts of policies.
Steve Grimwade
Given the students you're working with and who are going on to do PhDs and work in all these glorious places, what advice would you give them, or new researchers, new students entering the field?
Monica Minnegal
Advice about what?
Steve Grimwade
[Laughs]
Monica Minnegal
That you can make a difference. That if you want to make a difference understand what's going on first. So don't go in there saying, I know what the world should look like, I know what should be done. Be prepared to have your assumptions about how the world works challenged, and your assumptions about how the world should work challenged. Because some of the biggest mistakes we've made is sticking our fingers in pies without understanding what's in the pie first.
Steve Grimwade
Finally, when I'm visiting another culture how can I - I'm not an anthropologist - but how can I best open my eyes to what's really going on?
Monica Minnegal
By asking what's going on. Too often we don't even ask what's going on. This is one of the first things we do when we're training anthropology students. We say, we've got to teach you how to see like an anthropologist before we ask. So we send people out to do observation exercises. Go see something that's probably something you've done - go to a football game, you do this often. Now tell someone about what was happening there. Write down what you actually saw. Suddenly you see things that you just took for granted before. So seeing like an anthropologist is the first step of becoming an anthropologist. After that we can move into, so now ask questions like an anthropologist. But first of all just see the extraordinary things that people do.
Steve Grimwade
No, there you have it, that's the name of my sixth album, 'Seeing Like an Anthropologist.' Monica Minnegal, thank you so much for joining us.
Monica Minnegal
Thank you.
Chris Hatzis
Thanks to Monica Minnegal, Associate Professor and Lecturer in anthropology at The University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade. Thanks also to Claudia Hooper.
Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on February 23, 2018. You'll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website.
Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production by Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall.
Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, copyright 2018, the University of Melbourne.
If you enjoyed this podcast, drop us a review on iTunes and check out the rest of the episodes in our archive. I'm Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.
Anthropologist Monica Minnegal has spent her career observing “the extraordinary things that people do”, with much of her work dedicated to learning more about the Kubo people in Papua New Guinea.
A community in the last uncontrolled part of the country, the Kubo are now encountering the West through mining companies and navigating the many cultural and social changes that brings.
Episode recorded: February 23 2018
Producers: Dr Andi Horvath, Chris Hatzis and Silvi Vann-Wall
Audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis
Banner image: Supplied
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