ABSTRACT This article engages with the conjunctures between migration and religion by focusing on the celebration of Papua New Guinea's ‘National Patron Saint’, the Blessed Peter To Rot, in the Australian diaspora. Both in Sydney and Brisbane, Catholic Papua New Guinea (PNG) migrants have been ‘relocating’ PNG shrines, regalia, relics and ritual celebrations to Australia to celebrate their Blessed Peter To Rot. As shown, by relocating spiritual material and performing pilgrimages, migrants create belonging and new communities, but they also mobilize To Rot's divine presence and intervention in the diaspora. This article shows how Australian Peter To Rot chapels have become potent sites for the expression of PNG identity and nationalism, as well as for moral intervention in the diaspora.
This article examines an Indigenous-led approach to conservation developed through more than 17 years of collaboration between Ailan Awareness, a community-based organization in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, and an anthropologist working in the region. Our partnership is grounded in kinship, reciprocity, and long-term accountability, and it demonstrates how conservation can be reimagined as an Indigenous resurgence practice rather than an externally imposed model. Drawing on ritual traditions such as Vala, which integrates socio-spiritual authority with ecological restoration, and institutions such as the Ranguva Solwara Skul, which fosters intergenerational knowledge transmission, we show how biocultural diversity is enacted as both a political claim and an ecological necessity. Ethnographic, ecological, and archival research conducted in partnership with local communities reveals that conservation here is inseparable from Indigenous sovereignty, spiritual obligation, and cultural revitalization. We argue that these efforts constitute biocultural sovereignty: a mode of environmental governance that centres customary law, ancestral ties, and collective decision-making. By situating conservation within the lived moral fabric of kinship and community life, our work challenges dominant conservation paradigms and offers pathways for decolonial, place-based environmental practice. Ultimately, we show that conservation grounded in kinship and love sustains both ecological and cultural futures.
Based on my fieldwork on Duau, Normanby Island, I will argue that kula is best modelled as a meshwork. Through this concept, which I borrow from Ingold, I ask the reader to re-imagine kula as constituted of lines of connectivity that extend far beyond kula's confines to a person's local and non-kula inter-island exchange relations. To demonstrate the working of kula as a meshwork, I first look at how it more closely corresponds to Duau conceptualizations of space, which imagines their social world as comprised of emplaced persons who are all connected together via keda (roads) of exchange. Next, I examine what actually occurs during a kula expedition, comparing Malinowski's classic account to my observations today. As well, I assess the flows of kula shells into and out of circulation in kula as a special category of valuables called kitomwa. Then I revisit Munn's exemplary analysis of fame, inspecting how the meshwork model provides a better understanding of this integral kula concept. Finally, I conclude by arguing that by modelling kula as a meshwork we are better positioned to understand how kula gives shape to islanders' experience of their lives.
This paper carries forward the comparative study of patterning in Austronesian relationship terminologies. Its strategic focus is on a specific region with societies whose languages are classified as belonging to the Papuan Tip Cluster. The paper examines the defining patterning of ten separate but related terminologies, tracing the distribution of these patterns from their likely area of origin within the Austronesian-speaking world. The paper compares these terminologies according to a matrix of features that situates these terminologies within a wider Oceanic network. As a whole, it presents a methodology of possible relevance for significant categorical comparison of all Austronesian relationship terminologies.
Standard typologies of Australian Aboriginal kinship systems recognize half a dozen main types of kin terminology. An examination of sibling terminologies recorded in the Austkin database, however, reveals much more variation in the forms of kin classification than is implied by those typologies. The article examines diversity in the forms of sibling terminologies, their relationship to the broad types of kin terminologies and the languages in which they appear, and the spatial distribution of these patterns. In a notable feature, the distribution of forms of kin terminologies tends to cut across language boundaries. The general picture is one of considerable variation, reflecting the age and variety of Australian languages.
Addressing recent critiques concerning the accuracy of Alice Duncan-Kemp's accounts of the Channel Country, this essay evaluates her extraordinary statements concerning the structure of the Kooroongoora millenarian movement and what she called 'warrior lodges'. The essay considers the implications of these descriptions for our current understandings of how First Nations groups organised militant resistance against inroads of settlement. After defining millenarian movements and warrior sodalities, the paper considers how Duncan-Kemp's accounts align with common features of these phenomena. Evidence is presented for large-scale alliances, medicine man resistance leaders and warrior associations in many regions of Australia. The author suggests these may have been central to First Nations resistance during Australia's Frontier Wars.
