M Minnegal
Biographic Data
| ID | 3379 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Minnegal |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Minnegal |
| SIGNATURE | MINNEGAL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5008-3770 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Brokerage, bridewealth and benefits on a resource frontier in Papua New Guinea
In this paper, we examine tensions over intermarriage and resource sharing between two groups on a Papua New Guinean resource frontier. These tensions are mediated by a ‘brokerage fix’ led by Febi clan heads responding to financial demands from their Pangia neighbours and sometime affines. Here social and financial debts have become entangled in the shadow of much‐anticipated resource rents. In the ethnographic case study considered here, tension…
When brokers fail, brokers proliferate! Generational change and the failure of development in remote Papua New Guinea
Recent efforts to secure development by Febi and Kubo people in Papua New Guinea's Western Province reveal a patterned history of failing brokers, incomplete projects and wasted money. Within this longer trajectory, three overlapping waves of brokerage can be discerned, each emerging in response to the limitations of its predecessors. These waves differ in brokers' social positioning, the bases on which they claim representative legitimacy, and t…
Imagining the city in remote Papua New Guinea
‘Nation’ and ‘City’ are exemplars of much more general phenomena – categorical identities (language group, province) and the central sites (village, town) through which connections among and beyond the members of that category are channelled. Drawing on examples from Western Province, Papua New Guinea, we look at how relational logics of kinship and categorical logics of citizenship are articulated around such sites, regardless of scale. We begin…
A Road, a Border, and Development in New Guinea
A road being built in north-western Western Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), addresses local desires for mobility, for development, and for establishing materially beneficial relationships with people living west of the border in the Indonesian province of South Papua. This road is explicitly intended to reach beyond the nation and, like all routes to border-crossings, exposes differences even as it connects. On the Indonesian side a new sealed …
The Beharell Patrol of 1938
In 1938, John S. Beharell led the first colonial government patrol into the then ‘uncontrolled’ land of Kubo people east of the Strickland River. That patrol is not referred to in reports of subsequent patrols a decade and more later. Nor does it appear in published histories of the area. That is unfortunate, for Beharell encountered a social landscape that differed from the landscape documented by later patrols. Analysis of Beharell’s report poi…
Paying attention to pigs
The idea of 'equity', largely grounded in Western legal tradition, has come to permeate evaluations of what is fair and just within environmental governance programmes. But what constitutes equity in climate change and conservation projects? And does everyone affected by such projects see equity as desirable? Local encounters with global environmental governance interventions in Suau, Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, provide an entry point…
Policy and the Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas pipeline
Person, Place or Pig
This chapter focuses on differences across societies of New Guinea in the ways in which people manage young pigs and to the implications this has for the kinds of attachments established by pigs. It then shows that the strategies of management are themselves correlated with other aspects of human ecology — with mobility, settlement pattern and subsistence — and argues that they have consequences for social life in either limiting or facilitating,…
Appropriating Fish, Appropriating Fishermen
In this paper we ask what happens to fish and to fishermen who are subjected to modern forms of risk management. First, we consider how fish are being or have been reconfigured in the imagination of fishermen, managers and others who have some tie to the fishing industry. Secondly, we ask how the imagination of fishermen is being reconfigured by the imposition of management strategies that, ultimately, translate the uncertainties inherent in macr…
Covid‐19 and Facebook in Papua New Guinea
This article examines use of a Papua New Guinea (PNG) Facebook group, Fly River Forum, with reference to the COVID‐19 global pandemic. From about mid‐March 2020, when the PNG Government declared a State of Emergency, to early May, members of that forum shared an intense interest in the pandemic and were deeply concerned with its possible implications for the country. The great majority of COVID‐related posts, and associated comments, combined del…
On Reading Patrol Reports – 3
Pre-independence patrols through remote areas of Papua and New Guinea were concerned both with mapping land and with identifying and counting those who lived there. People do not always stay in place, however, as colonial authorities envisioned, and patrols seeking to render them legible took different paths, at different times, through the same land. Reports from patrols to the vicinity of the Burnett River, which flows westwards from the Muller…
On Reading Patrol Reports – 2
Reports of patrols through remote areas of Papua and New Guinea led by officers of the Australian administration must be read with care. We discuss the case of a patrol report from the mid 1960s where the patrol cannot have travelled the route indicated on the accompanying map. By cross-referencing to reports from later patrols, we provide both an improved reading of the report in question and, more generally, an appreciation of motivations that …
On Reading Patrol Reports – 1
Reports of patrols through remote areas of Papua and New Guinea led by officers of the Australian administration have much to contribute to understandings of the work entailed in rendering both land and people legible to the colonial state. But these must be read with care. Using the text and maps produced by one patrol, led by John McGregor in 1968, we demonstrate how topographic maps, produced well after particular patrols were undertaken, may …
Storytelling climate change – Causality and temporality in the Redd+ regime in Papua New Guinea
Climate change is shaped and understood through assumptions of causality and temporality that enable and constrain feasible approaches to environmental governance, approaches that may reproduce inequalities. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) provides an entry point to examine the intersecting assumptions and politics around climate change and how it is managed. Actors in the REDD+ regime promote particular assum…
‘We Are Fire Clan’
This paper draws on two case studies concerning Kubo and Febi people of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, to reveal, first, ways in which people present themselves to the state as groups that qualify as legitimate beneficiaries of financial benefits expected to flow from extraction of natural gas on or near their land and, second, simultaneously present themselves to their immediate neighbours in ways intended to either lay claim to particular …
Captain Everill’s Error
An error dating from 1885 in mapping the upper Strickland River, Papua New Guinea, was reinforced and extended by government officer Charles Karius in 1929 when reporting results from a lengthy exploratory patrol. Detailed maps produced by the US Army and the Royal Australian Survey Corps in, respectively, 1942 and 1966 perpetuated these errors. It was not until 1979, with release of a series of 1:100,000 topographic maps, that long-standing erro…
Reshaping the Social
In Papua New Guinea, local communities increasingly strive to render themselves 'visible' to the state as entities entitled to control and claim benefits from developments on their land. When people commit expressions of social form to paper they inevitably reshape previously operative social and political forms. This article compares ways in which two groups of Papua New Guineans have gone about the process of forming Incorporated Land Groups. D…
Where all the rivers flow west
‘Abstraction’ has been often identified as a key element in social change. Analyses, however, have often conflated the ideas of abstraction as ‘object’ and as ‘process’. This paper discusses two maps drawn by or on behalf of Kubo men, of the interior lowlands of southern Papua New Guinea. They were drawn in the context of recent exposure to a vast Liquefied Natural Gas project initiated on the land of their neighbours and both, as abstractions fr…
Theorizing social change
We outline primary features of a theoretical perspective on processes of social change in human systems that deals with broadly defined kinds of process, the nature of variants that are expressed and consolidate as change occurs, and, with specific reference to agency, the ways in which intentional actors are implicated in the changes that befall them. Our aim is to contribute to a general theory of process that is not prejudiced by the possible …
Managing Risk, Resisting Management
At Lakes Entrance, in Victoria (Australia), locally-based commercial fishers utilize diversification (e.g. multiple targets, fishing areas, boats, or markets) as a means of managing the risks that characterize the biological and economic environments they experience. These strategies have contributed to numerical stability of the local fleet at a time when most southeastern Australian fishing fleets are in decline. In effect, the Lakes Entrance f…
Fire, Flood, Fish and the Uncertainty Paradox
When the planet was created, the areas of the greatest biodiversity also happened to be the areas where mankind wants to reap the best reward of resources. It is not actually that complicated when you think about it, because where there is biodiversity happens to be where the resources are and it is where we happen to want to get them from. As it happened, the uranium was put in the middle of Kakadu and gold is in places where it is hard to get o…
Fun for Them, Fun for Us and Fun for All
A common sense of irony may often be at the core of shared fun for anthropologists and the people who study them as they are studied; but this is possible only where epistemological contexts converge. [2] Between 1986 and 1999, we lived with Kubo people, most often at the village of Gwaimasi on the west bank of the Strickland River, on five occasions for periods ranging from one to 15 months. [3] After his second injury, Gwande was flown, courtes…
Social change and agency among Kubo of Papua New Guinea
An account of the history and actions of one man is used to show how agency was central to processes of social change among Kubo people of the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Through a thirteen-year period, a growing awareness of, but little exposure to, 'Western' modes of living challenged earlier certainties, created desires, and suggested alternatives. Modernity thus provided the context for change. But modernity is not itself a process…
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
In this paper, decision-making by Australian commercial fishers is explored with reference to aspects of risk or uncertainty that characterize their experience of the physical and biological environment, the socioeconomic environment and the environment of management. In these environments decisions are grounded in, respectively and particularly, skill, strategy and (often) recklessness. In a broader frame it is argued that ways in which fishers …
Ink and Land
This book, in analyzing the dynamics of factionalism through time around one prospective mine in Papua New Guinea, provides deep insight into processes that are shaping social transformation in man...
Waiting for Company
Les Kubo sont une petite population de chasseurs cueilleurs qui vivent dans les Basses-Terres interieures de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee. Jusqu'a present ils sont restes largement en dehors du developpement et de l'occidentalisation qui ont eu lieu dans de nombreuses parties du pays. Cependant, faute de se materialiser, la modernite a eu un impact significatif dans la region. Dans cet article nous caracterisons d'abord les relations des Kubo avec l…
Intensification and Social Complexity in the Interior Lowlands of Papua New Guinea
The Transformation of Use-Rights
Use and ownership of land and resources in two related societies of lowland Papua New Guinea are shown to covary with residence, gender, marriage, kinship, and local understandings of rights that are accorded by either conventions of practice or conventions of inheritance. We argue that the articulation of these material and social relations is predicated on the potential for a lack of congruence between discourse and behavior. Differences betwee…
Bower birds, bones and archaeology
Reshaping the Social
In Papua New Guinea, local communities increasingly strive to render themselves 'visible' to the state as entities entitled to control and claim benefits from developments on their land. When people commit expressions of social form to paper they inevitably reshape previously operative social and political forms. This article compares ways in which two groups of Papua New Guineans have gone about the process of forming Incorporated Land Groups. D…
Storytelling climate change – Causality and temporality in the Redd+ regime in Papua New Guinea
Climate change is shaped and understood through assumptions of causality and temporality that enable and constrain feasible approaches to environmental governance, approaches that may reproduce inequalities. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) provides an entry point to examine the intersecting assumptions and politics around climate change and how it is managed. Actors in the REDD+ regime promote particular assum…
Rereading Relationships
Through a ten-year period and in contexts of increased sedentism and monetization, Kubo people have altered the emphases of identity construction. An emphasis upon the social identity of individuals as a basis for action has shifted toward expressions of the importance of groups. An emphasis upon the future in the constitution of personal relationships and identity has shifted toward expressions of the importance of the past. And an emphasis upon…
Consumption and Production
Dugong Bones from Princess Charlotte Bay
Dugong are large marine mammals that inhabit northern Australian coastal waters from Shark Bay in the west to Moreton Bay in the east. Two hundred years ago they were being regularly hunted by Aborigines and Islanders along much of this coastline. Dugong are the largest animals known to have been traditionally hunted by the Aborigines of northern Australia; with an average adult weight of 350 kg they are at  least twice the size of green turtle …
Theorizing social change
We outline primary features of a theoretical perspective on processes of social change in human systems that deals with broadly defined kinds of process, the nature of variants that are expressed and consolidate as change occurs, and, with specific reference to agency, the ways in which intentional actors are implicated in the changes that befall them. Our aim is to contribute to a general theory of process that is not prejudiced by the possible …
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
In this paper, decision-making by Australian commercial fishers is explored with reference to aspects of risk or uncertainty that characterize their experience of the physical and biological environment, the socioeconomic environment and the environment of management. In these environments decisions are grounded in, respectively and particularly, skill, strategy and (often) recklessness. In a broader frame it is argued that ways in which fishers …
Paying attention to pigs
The idea of 'equity', largely grounded in Western legal tradition, has come to permeate evaluations of what is fair and just within environmental governance programmes. But what constitutes equity in climate change and conservation projects? And does everyone affected by such projects see equity as desirable? Local encounters with global environmental governance interventions in Suau, Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, provide an entry point…
Social change and agency among Kubo of Papua New Guinea
An account of the history and actions of one man is used to show how agency was central to processes of social change among Kubo people of the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Through a thirteen-year period, a growing awareness of, but little exposure to, 'Western' modes of living challenged earlier certainties, created desires, and suggested alternatives. Modernity thus provided the context for change. But modernity is not itself a process…
Covid‐19 and Facebook in Papua New Guinea
This article examines use of a Papua New Guinea (PNG) Facebook group, Fly River Forum, with reference to the COVID‐19 global pandemic. From about mid‐March 2020, when the PNG Government declared a State of Emergency, to early May, members of that forum shared an intense interest in the pandemic and were deeply concerned with its possible implications for the country. The great majority of COVID‐related posts, and associated comments, combined del…
Where all the rivers flow west
‘Abstraction’ has been often identified as a key element in social change. Analyses, however, have often conflated the ideas of abstraction as ‘object’ and as ‘process’. This paper discusses two maps drawn by or on behalf of Kubo men, of the interior lowlands of southern Papua New Guinea. They were drawn in the context of recent exposure to a vast Liquefied Natural Gas project initiated on the land of their neighbours and both, as abstractions fr…
Responses to a Drought in the Interior Lowlands of Papua New Guinea
Spatial analysis on a dugong consumption site at Princess Charlotte Bay, North Queensland
On Hunting Ability, Reproductive Success, and Statistics
Intensification, Complexity and Evolution
Agricultural systems must be understood as embedded within the total socio‐cultural system of which they are a part. Difference in the intensity of those systems is, therefore, but one aspect of difference in the complexity of the total systems. Processes of intensification and innovation that are implicated in change to agricultural systems are, similarly, instances of more general processes of adaptation and transformation which underwrite chan…
A Necessary Unity
This article is concerned with the way that ecological and social factors interact to influence behaviour, and takes issue with those who ascribe causal priority to one or the other set of factors. Ecological relationships are identified as those that affect the material outcome that can be expected from an action; social relationships are identified as those that affect the use an actor could make of that outcome. This distinction maps onto that…
Ownership, Individual Effort and the Organization of Labour among Kubo Sago Producers of Papua New Guinea
At a remote Kubo community, in the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea, access to sago palms was influenced by rights to the land on which the palms grew and kinship was the primary determinant of the composition of sago-processing work groups. An outcome of these patterns was that women with stronger connections to local land produced more sago flour than did other resident women. It is suggested that, among Kubo, a failure to generalise the u…
Konai, Febi And Kubo
Au Sud-Ouest de la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee, dans le Strickland Bosavi, 18 populations forment la famille linguistique du Bosavi. L'etude concernant les Konai, Febi et Kubo au Nord-Ouest de cette region, vise a clarifier la distribution linguistique en terme d'auto-identification, a partir de la litterature existante. Bien que l'identite clanique prime sur l'identite linguistique, l'affiliation clanique et linguistique se recoupe. D'apres sa lan…
A Note on Butchering Dugong at Princess Charlotte Bay
Bones from three dugong were found in a small site at Princess Charlotte Bay, far north Queensland. Many of them showed signs of butchering damage. This paper describes the assemblage and discusses differences in the way bones from the three dugong had been treated
Fun for Them, Fun for Us and Fun for All
A common sense of irony may often be at the core of shared fun for anthropologists and the people who study them as they are studied; but this is possible only where epistemological contexts converge. [2] Between 1986 and 1999, we lived with Kubo people, most often at the village of Gwaimasi on the west bank of the Strickland River, on five occasions for periods ranging from one to 15 months. [3] After his second injury, Gwande was flown, courtes…
A sea of small names
This article does not have an abstract
A Note on Butchering Dugong at Princess Charlotte Bay
Bones from three dugong were found in a small site at Princess Charlotte Bay, far north Queensland. Many of them showed signs of butchering damage. This paper describes the assemblage and discusses differences in the way bones from the three dugong had been treated
Dugong Bones from Princess Charlotte Bay
Dugong are large marine mammals that inhabit northern Australian coastal waters from Shark Bay in the west to Moreton Bay in the east. Two hundred years ago they were being regularly hunted by Aborigines and Islanders along much of this coastline. Dugong are the largest animals known to have been traditionally hunted by the Aborigines of northern Australia; with an average adult weight of 350 kg they are at  least twice the size of green turtle …
Andaman Islanders, Pygmies, and an extension of Horn's model
Bower birds, bones and archaeology
On Hunting Ability, Reproductive Success, and Statistics
Spatial analysis on a dugong consumption site at Princess Charlotte Bay, North Queensland
Yams and megapode mounds in the lowland rain forest of Papua New Guinea
Hunting in lowland, tropical rain forest
Ecology and community dynamics of Kubo people in the tropical lowlands of Papua New Guinea
Konai, Febi And Kubo
Au Sud-Ouest de la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee, dans le Strickland Bosavi, 18 populations forment la famille linguistique du Bosavi. L'etude concernant les Konai, Febi et Kubo au Nord-Ouest de cette region, vise a clarifier la distribution linguistique en terme d'auto-identification, a partir de la litterature existante. Bien que l'identite clanique prime sur l'identite linguistique, l'affiliation clanique et linguistique se recoupe. D'apres sa lan…
Ownership, Individual Effort and the Organization of Labour among Kubo Sago Producers of Papua New Guinea
At a remote Kubo community, in the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea, access to sago palms was influenced by rights to the land on which the palms grew and kinship was the primary determinant of the composition of sago-processing work groups. An outcome of these patterns was that women with stronger connections to local land produced more sago flour than did other resident women. It is suggested that, among Kubo, a failure to generalise the u…
Migration and Transformations
In this work on migration in New Guinea, migration is seen as the total circulation of people, objects, ideas and ritual complexes across, as well as within, cultural boundaries. The essays discuss how processes of flow have a transformative effect on the constitution of cultural groups themselves
A Necessary Unity
This article is concerned with the way that ecological and social factors interact to influence behaviour, and takes issue with those who ascribe causal priority to one or the other set of factors. Ecological relationships are identified as those that affect the material outcome that can be expected from an action; social relationships are identified as those that affect the use an actor could make of that outcome. This distinction maps onto that…
Sago games
Women, Pigs, God and Evolution
This paper depicts connections and interactions between several apparently disparate themes of change observed in recent years at a village in the interior lowlands of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Changes in patterns of association between men and women can be traced, in the first instance, to altered management practices necessitated by intensified pig production. That intensification, in turn, reflects the growing importance of money in …
Consumption and Production
Waiting for Company
Les Kubo sont une petite population de chasseurs cueilleurs qui vivent dans les Basses-Terres interieures de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee. Jusqu'a present ils sont restes largement en dehors du developpement et de l'occidentalisation qui ont eu lieu dans de nombreuses parties du pays. Cependant, faute de se materialiser, la modernite a eu un impact significatif dans la region. Dans cet article nous caracterisons d'abord les relations des Kubo avec l…
Intensification and Social Complexity in the Interior Lowlands of Papua New Guinea
The Transformation of Use-Rights
Use and ownership of land and resources in two related societies of lowland Papua New Guinea are shown to covary with residence, gender, marriage, kinship, and local understandings of rights that are accorded by either conventions of practice or conventions of inheritance. We argue that the articulation of these material and social relations is predicated on the potential for a lack of congruence between discourse and behavior. Differences betwee…
Rereading Relationships
Through a ten-year period and in contexts of increased sedentism and monetization, Kubo people have altered the emphases of identity construction. An emphasis upon the social identity of individuals as a basis for action has shifted toward expressions of the importance of groups. An emphasis upon the future in the constitution of personal relationships and identity has shifted toward expressions of the importance of the past. And an emphasis upon…
Responses to a Drought in the Interior Lowlands of Papua New Guinea
Intensification, Complexity and Evolution
Agricultural systems must be understood as embedded within the total socio‐cultural system of which they are a part. Difference in the intensity of those systems is, therefore, but one aspect of difference in the complexity of the total systems. Processes of intensification and innovation that are implicated in change to agricultural systems are, similarly, instances of more general processes of adaptation and transformation which underwrite chan…
Deep Identity, Shallow Time
Like commercial fishers everywhere, it seems, those living in coastal communities of Victoria perceive themselves to be under threat from recreational fishers, environmentalists, imposed management regimes, and modernisation and globalisation of the industry. In responding to these threats they appeal to conventional props of tradition—to continuity in genealogical time, affiliation with place and specialised knowledge and practice. This seems pa…
A sea of small names
This article does not have an abstract
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
In this paper, decision-making by Australian commercial fishers is explored with reference to aspects of risk or uncertainty that characterize their experience of the physical and biological environment, the socioeconomic environment and the environment of management. In these environments decisions are grounded in, respectively and particularly, skill, strategy and (often) recklessness. In a broader frame it is argued that ways in which fishers …
Sociology (32 works) · Geography (31 works) · Ethnology (26 works) · New guinea (26 works) · Political science (21 works) · Archaeology (18 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (16 works) · Biology (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (13 works)