Data On The Pictorial History Of North East Papua New Guinea

1. Blacks and Whites : colonial administration and the natives2. Ol meri : Papuan wives and European husbands3. Misunderstandings, conflicts, punitive expeditions.

A history of New Guinea recording the ancient migrations, the early European explorers, and the reconstruction following World War II.

Photographing Papua is a study of photography in the public domain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that southeastern New Guinea, known as British New Guinea and then as Papua when it became an Australian colony, was created as a geographical place through visual representation in illustrated magazines and newspapers, lavishly illustrated travelogues and mission hagiography, serial encyclopedia, lantern slides and postcards. Readers :knew" Papua because many thousands of black and white photographs of Papuans, villages and material culture rapidly swamped the reading public once the process of halftone, newsprint reproduction became possible. In an innovative and breakthrough fashion Photographing Papua switches attention from a few well known prints in museums and archives, in some cases repeatedly reproduced, but mostly rarely seen outside of scientific and scholarly circles. It deals instead with thousands of photographs, often used in ways not intended when the photograph was taken, but which editors and publishers (and subsequent photographers) gradually made conform to an iconographic imperative, a sort of abbreviated visual gallery of "natives" and a quick-access pathway to the actual and imagined lives of Papuans in the "last Unknown" as New Guinea was titled. It is a study of representation, colonialism, cross-cultural encounters and the early world of illustrated media and photo-journalism.

Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.

The German Colonial Experience provides readers with an understanding of how the Germans gained, explored, pacified, ruled, and exploited their colonies prior to their loss in World War I. Knoll and Hiery show how Africans, Chinese, and Pacific Islanders reacted to German rule, how the Germans ran the daily affairs of government, their vision for the colonized peoples, and how the colonizers and the colonized perceived one another. In other words, how did German colonial rule actually work? This book intensely scrutinizes colonial documents, most of them in German script, from archives not only in Germany, but also from places such as Australia, New Guinea, and Samoa. Many of these documents have never previously been published, even in the original German.

In responding to the perceived threat posed by venereal diseases in Germany’s colonies, doctors took a biopolitical approach that employed medical and bourgeois discourses of modernization, health, productivity, and morality. Their goal was to change the behavior of targeted groups, or at least to isolate infected individuals from the healthy population. However, the Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians they administered to were not passive recipients of these strategies. Rather, their behavior strongly influenced the efficacy and nature of these public health measures. While an apparent degree of compliance was achieved, over time physicians increasingly relied on disciplinary measures beyond what was possible in Germany in order to enforce their policies. Ultimately, through their discourses and actions they contributed to the justification for and the maintenance of German colonialism.

Peasant societies in many parts of the world regulate their relationship with the natural environment through earth gods who anchor a group of families not in genealogical terms, as in the case of ancestors, but in ecological terms. The articles in this volume illustrate the role of, and the cultural activities surrounding, the earth gods in rural communities in Asian societies. More specifically, they show that, within the Asian context, it is possible to differentiate between two modes representing the earth gods and the relationship with nature, i.e., one that corresponds to state societies and the other to tribal ones.

"A publication revealing the extraordinary talents of the scultors of New Guinea, in turn, marked with staggering ferocity and surprising delicacy. The rituals of the native inhabitants of this major island sometimes involved headhunting, perceived as a need to appropriate the enemy's vital forces in order to increase one's own. It is a complex mythology that has given rise to numerous sacred or magic sculptures, the oldest of which were carved with stone tools or sharp shell edges and finished with the pointed teeth of small animals. The Barbier-Mueller Museum presents almost two hundred pieces from New Guinea belonging to its collections, documented by surperb photographs, some of which are previously unpublished." --Dust Jacket.