Seminar Series: Abstract

Mobs and Masses: Defining the dynamic groups
Hank Nelson

From their first arrival in Papua New Guinea, Europeans were quickly defined as belonging to particular groups. What placed them in groups was occupation and intent. The dominant groups of missionaries, miners, planters and traders, and government officers (often reduced to field officers – kiaps - only) accepted that they were indeed different from each other. They wrote aggressive statements about their own interests as opposed to those of the other groups in the Rabaul Times and Papuan Courier. If representatives were needed for a legislative council, then a planter, missionary and miner would be found to join the government offices. It was said that the groups naturally came together on the boats that took them to and from Port Moresby or Rabaul. These groups continued to be recognized as dominant when they were no longer clearly important by numbers or influence. Race and nationality were also significant in defining groups, and much of the defining was in legislation as well as in the unwritten rules that determined how people were expected to behave. Papua New Guineans were placed in groups by place and family, extended family and culture. That was a result of what was easily observed and because of the concurrent growth of anthropology as a discipline with the timing of the European century of contact in Papua New Guinea. That dominance of place, family and culture has continued to be used to define Papua New Guinean groups and to explain social, political and economic behaviour. Two exceptions have been the police and army. There has been enough written about these two occupational groups that it is possible to write histories of their histories. These reveal much about Australian colonial hopes and regrets. But the police and army aside, we now have a nation of six million, many urban dwellers, many people whose first language is tok pisin or English and almost no analyses of what are the dynamic groups other than those identified in generalities a hundred years ago. This is primitive scholarship.