The State and Its Enemies in Papua New Guinea by Alexander Wanek

Author:Alexander Wanek [Wanek, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136779169
Google: LSpTAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-11T04:18:43+00:00

1.The system of Open and Provincial Seats is a remainder from colonial times, when the relatively high educational qualifications required of candidates for the Provincial Seat were only found among Europeans.

2.This is atypical in PNG, and due to the smallness of the Manus Province. Other provinces have one Provincial Member who is elected by all provincial citizens, and several Open Members who represent smaller constituencies within the province.

3.It has already been mentioned that the term ‘European’ applies to colour—to all white people—not to Europeans in the European sense of the word.

4.They had entered offices in the Provincial Government House in Lorengau and had smashed furniture and equipment there.

5.The People’s Democratic Movement of Prime Minister Paias Wingti was seen to have its strongholds in the Highlands, Wingti’s birthplace.

6.Some candidates said openly in their campaigns that their aim was not to become Member but to take votes from Rooney.

7.Some Polynesian parallels come to mind (cf. Firth 1961:222).

8.Campbell, an Australian, had a divorced wife in the Western Islands, and still enjoyed the support of her family.

9.This tactic is by no means new. Fink (1965) reports from the campaigns preceding the 1964 elections, that a candidate (Lepani Watson) successfully used his personal kula network (a network for ceremonial exchange of valuables; cf. Malinowski 1961) in the Massim for electoral support.

10.Independent candidates in PNG have no party endorsement.

11.Most of the male candidates, too, used gender-specific messages in their campaigns. They stressed that women in Manus traditionally had no part in politics, and sought to persuade fellow-males not to vote for a female candidate.

12.Her deliberate insult of the traditions compared unfavourably with Marsipal’s widely reported respect to traditional values. Arnold Marsipal had visited the cave of his forefather spirits on Nauna and had spent a night of tink tink there. (Tink tink is Tok Pisin and means ‘meditation’; cf. Chapter 19.)

13.It has been stated that European categories (such as religion) do not apply to movements like Makasol. This applies for Melanesian contexts, but not for the Western-inspired political context of election campaigns and elections.

14.Rooney promised a lighthouse for Nauna during three elections (beginning with 1977) and Campbell promised an airstrip for Nauna because it is not uncommon for boats to miss the island in bad weather. Neither lighthouse nor airstrip have come about.

15.We should however add that ‘democracy’ in Europe usually unites social strata, interest groups or classes (such as labourers) and contrasts them to other such groups (such as an upper class). In Manus, there was not much evidence for this type of stratification; rather, the category of ‘extended family’ united people, and set them also off from other such categories. In this context, ‘modernity’ was a vote-puller if promised to a certain ‘extended family’. This, incidentally, was always the case.

16.Actual polling took place between 13 June and 4 July 1987 (in some urban areas it lasted only a few days), and the counting of votes was done simultaneously throughout PNG between 4 and 14 July. In three Highlands electorates (Mendi, Hagen, Kundiawa) polling was postponed because a candidate had died in each of them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.