Ethnography: Papua New Guinea

Introduction

Ethnography is traditionally a social scientific concept concerning an extensive study of a particular society’s political and social organisation, historical portrait, culture, religious institution, kinship system and economic arena for the purpose of delineating the researched group’s social behaviour and sometimes, their relationship with their environment (both physical and social). It traditionally stems from cultural anthropology and has been adopted by other sub-disciplines as means to collecting accurate data. Ethnography draws in some sort of fieldwork where an ethnographer joins in a group of the researched, participates in their daily life while attempting to work meticulously with informants who could be useful to

Most importantly, she wants to verify whether or not Leahy-Dwyer’s observations were ever sensible, true, sensitive and relative. She says her “book [is] concerned with change among the Chimbu [which is one of the tribes in the Papua New Guinea] and is thus connected both with social anthropology and culture history” (Brown 1972: 3). It is a critique of the previous studies on the region. Brown, as an attempt to emphasise her point that, uses diachronic (a relation to culture as it experiences changes over a period of time) and dialectic (which in this case implies a form of systematic argument that connects contradictory ideas with a goal to reach a sensible conclusion about those ideas) form of writing. Her book goes back and forth vice versa- from the present to the past and from the past to the present with a sole purpose of arriving at the main argument that the New Guinea highlanders are not fenced around fixed segmentary systems and that it is not because of the contact with the outside world but due to the fact that culture is dynamic and change is inevitable (Brown 1972: 121). Unlike Leahy and Dwyer’s ethnography which has no precise introduction, Brown’s introduction refutes previous studies on the region which assumed that the natives viewed themselves as unchanging and stable. The diction used is academic and formal and seeks to remain objective. Brown does refer to the above authors’ expedition and acknowledges their importance in opening up the highlands to the anthropologists and rest of the world but criticised them for being incomprehensible towards the tribal groups and accused them of trying to undermine the Chimbu’s way of trade as uninformed ignoring the fact that the natives had their unique ways of interpreting trade and gifting (Brown 1973: 134). Although the study occurred in