scholarly journals ‘Food is life’: Documenting the politics of food in Melanesia

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Ceridwen Spark

In this article, I discuss two recent examples of women’s filmmaking in Melanesia. The documentaries are Tanah Mama (2014), focused on West Papua and Café Niugini (2015), set in Papua New Guinea. Both films explore and represent food in profoundly different ways. Here, I consider their respective depictions of food, demonstrating that Tanah Mama represents food as sustenance while Café Niugini renders food as ‘cuisine’ through the ‘creative performance’ of cookery. Nevertheless, and as I argue, both documentaries reflect the filmmakers’ interest in representing issues associated with food in the Pacific, including the importance of Indigenous access to land, population management, gender roles and the impact of changing cultural values on food consumption and health.

1993 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D'Arcy May

Do human rights in their conventional, Western understanding really meet the needs of Pacific peoples? This article argues that land rights are a better clue to those needs. In Aboriginal Australia, Fiji, West Papua and Papua New Guinea, case studies show that people's relationship to land is religious and implicitly theological. The article therefore suggests that rights to land need to be supplemented by rights of the land extending to the earth as the home of the one human community and nature as the matrix of all life.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (8) ◽  
pp. e1286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oriol Mitjà ◽  
Raymond Paru ◽  
Russell Hays ◽  
Lysaght Griffin ◽  
Nedley Laban ◽  
...  

Zootaxa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4991 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-168
Author(s):  
MING KAI TAN ◽  
SIGFRID INGRISCH ◽  
CAHYO RAHMADI ◽  
TONY ROBILLARD

Heminicsara Karny, 1912 is a katydid genus of Agraeciini from the Axylus genus group. It currently comprises 62 species from mainly New Guinea and surrounding archipelagos. Based on recent fieldwork in Lobo in West Papua, Indonesia, a new species of Heminicsara is described here: Heminicsara incrassata sp. nov. It is most readily characterised from congeners and other species of the Axylus genus group by the male tenth abdominal tergite forming a large shield-shaped plate. This represents the first species of Heminicsara described and known from the south-west of New Guinea.  


2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-35
Author(s):  
Peter Cronau

  Mercenaries expelled from Papua New Guinea in 1997 had worked a year earlier in West Papua assisting Indonesia's notorious Kopassus special forces troops in an operation that caused many civilian deaths. 


Tsunami ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 37-48
Author(s):  
James Goff ◽  
Walter Dudley

The 1998 Papua New Guinea tsunami was a significant puzzle for scientists who finally cracked the cause, but it also marks the most recent event of many that can be dated back to at least 6,000 years ago where the skull of the oldest tsunami victim in the world was found. Papua New Guinea was also the starting point for the most remarkable navigational feat in the world, with Polynesians moving rapidly east into the Pacific Ocean, their settlement of the region being punctuated by hiatuses caused by catastrophic tsunamis approximately 3,000, 2,000, and 600 years ago. It was on isolated Pacific islands that humans first came into contact with the deadly Pacific Ring of Fire. Settlement abandonment, mass graves, and cultural collapse mark their progress.


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