Soren Syndicus, Ivo
(2018)
Social Stratification, Cultural Identities, and
Politics of Leadership: The Consolidation of a
National Culture at a Papua New Guinean
University.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This thesis explores how students and staff at a university in Papua New Guinea (PNG)
experience processes of social stratification and differentiation. In particular, I describe
and analyse how students and staff reflect on and enact reciprocal obligations to their
kin, how different cultural identities are forged and strengthened at university, and how
contemporary politics of leadership become manifest in student strikes. The thesis
draws on eighteen months of fieldwork, centred at the University of Goroka in the PNG
highlands, including stints at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, and
visits to homes of students and staff in different provinces of the country. Archival
research was also conducted in the Pacific Research Archives at the Australian National
University and the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology at the University of
California San Diego. Through participant observation, life histories, interviews, and
discourse analysis, in this thesis I explore how subjectivities shape and are shaped
through experiences of social stratification and differentiation inherent to higher
education, institutional politics and contests over styles of leadership, and how they link
to broader aspects of a consolidating national culture in PNG today.
Following introductory chapters that situate the thesis within concerns of regional
anthropological scholarship and contextualise the history of higher education in PNG
generally, and in Goroka in particular, ethnographic chapters are organised in two
sections. The first section starts with the introduction of a number of life histories of
students and staff at the university. I subsequently analyse the reflections and
experiences of interlocutors through two different lenses. I first foreground putatively
different sensibilities surrounding reciprocity and exchange across the PNG highlands,
and then shift focus to analyse these articulations as emergent normative reifications of
distinct cultural identities. The second ethnographic section provides a detailed account
of a student strike, which I also analyse from two distinct vantage points. First, I focus
on the strike as a deliberate harnessing of dynamics of emergent collectivities at the
hand of strike leaders to advance their own political ambitions. In a second step, I
foreground the perceived lack of recognition of students within the institutional
hierarchy of the university, which from the perspective of students leaves few
alternatives to the strike for making their grievances heard.
In both ethnographic sections I thus follow a specific structure and analytical strategy of
first foregrounding one angle of analysis that I subsequently seem to undermine through
another angle of analysis. Through this analytical strategy, I wish to present these
perspectives as complementary rather than mutually exclusive frames of understanding,
as which they often tend to become mobilised in public debate. I thus enact an
analytical strategy that mimics the reality of appropriate relating to kin and in
institutional hierarchies that is the subject of this thesis: what are appropriate forms of
action and relating depends on the perspective through which these are presented or
enacted, yet these perspectives, in turn, are subject to challenge and negotiation through
the ways specific actions are framed.
| Item Type: |
Thesis
(PhD)
|
| Keywords: |
Social Stratification; Cultural Identities;
Politics of Leadership; Consolidation;
National Culture; Papua New Guinean University; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology |
| Item ID: |
11011 |
| Depositing User: |
IR eTheses
|
| Date Deposited: |
04 Sep 2019 10:36 |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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