Christopher Healey, BA, PhD (UPNG)
Visiting Fellow, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program

Email: : chris.healey[at]anu.edu.au

Biographical Statement

Chris has held academic posts in social anthropology at the University of Papua New Guinea, Monash University, the University of Adelaide and Charles Darwin University. He has carried out field research in the Papua New Guinea highlands on exploitation of forest resources and networks of exchange, on contemporary livelihoods and ethnoecology in eastern Indonesia (primarily western Seram and the Aru Islands), and on Aboriginal land tenure in the Top End of Australia. He has also undertaken research on pre-colonial political economy in Borneo and West Papua.

Research Interests

Current projects focus on ethnobiological knowledge and practice among the Maring (Menga) of the Papua New Guinea highlands and Alune of western Seram, Indonesia.

Key Publications

• Trade and sociability: balanced reciprocity as generosity in the New Guinea highlands. American Ethnologist 11: 42–60, 1984.
• Pioneers of the mountain forest: settlement and land redistribution among the Kundagai Maring of the Papua New Guinea highlands (Oceania Monographs 29). Sydney: University of Sydney, 1985.
• Tribes and states in "pre-colonial" Borneo: structural contradictions and the generation of piracy. Social Analysis 18: 3–39, 1985.
• Maring hunters and traders: production and exchange in the Papua New Guinea highlands, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
• (with D. Mearns) (eds) Remaking Maluku: social transformation in eastern Indonesia (Special Monograph 1). Darwin: Northern Territory University Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1996.
• Political economy in the Kepala Burung region of Old Western New Guinea. In Jelle Miedema, Cecilia Odé and Rien A.C. Dam (eds), Perspectives on the Bird’s Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Amsterdam/Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 337–50, 1998.
• (with Margaret Florey) ‘Work well and guard your honour’: temporary labour migration and the role of adolescent women in eastern Indonesia. Asian Studies Review 26: 355–81, 2002.
• Birds and the terrors of the state in the Aru Islands of eastern Indonesia. In S. Pannell (ed.) A state of emergency: violence, society and the state in eastern Indonesia, Darwin: Northern Territory University Centre for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph, 104–16, 2003.

Career Highlights

Formerly Professor of Anthropology, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management, Northern Territory University/Charles Darwin University; Chair, Humanities Panel (1996) and Member, Social Sciences & Humanities Panel (1994-96) Australian Research Council; Visiting Professor, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK (1995); Visiting Fellow, International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden University, The Netherlands (1999).