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New Britain (new + britain)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	83%

Selected Abstracts

Colonization of an island volcano, Long Island, Papua New Guinea, and an emergent island, Motmot, in its caldera lake.

JOURNAL OF BIOGEOGRAPHY, Issue 11-12 2001

Abstract Biogeographical context Long Island, in Vitiaz Strait, is 55 km north of New Guinea, 60 km from Umboi Island and 125 km from New Britain. After its explosive caldera-forming eruption in about 1645, Long is being recolonized by animals and plants. Through renewed volcanic activity in the 1950s a new island emerged from Long's caldera lake, 4 km from the nearest lake shore and was recreated by eruptions in 1968. Long Island thus provides the opportunity to study a nested pair of natural colonization sequences. The geological background, eruptive history, course and results of the seventeenth century eruption, and the geographical features and climate of Long Island are summarized. Existing knowledge of Long's recolonization, confined almost entirely to surveys of its avifauna in 1933 and 1972, is reviewed. The geological history of Motmot is outlined, and published knowledge of its colonization by animals and plants from 1968 to 1988 is summarized. The 1999 expedition and aims An expedition to Long Island and Motmot in 1999 set out to investigate the hitherto little-known flora and present vertebrate fauna of Long Island and to survey the entire flora and fauna of Motmot for comparison with the results of previous surveys. The methods used in the 1999 survey are described, and the papers setting out the results briefly introduced. [source]

Technologies of Visibility: The Utopian Politics of Cameras, Televisions, Videos and Dreams in New Britain

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2006
Andrew Lattas
This paper explores how Melanesian villagers have harnessed modern, technological ways of seeing. It begins by analysing the politics and narrative structures of dreams and popular stories about secret photos concerning the dead. These are stories about losing control and regaining hidden, alternative representations of Melanesians. I then analyse how millenarian followers have experimented with ,constructing' their own versions of cameras, televisions and videos so as to gain access to the omniscient powers of modern technology and merge them with those of a Christian god and with the gaze of the dead. In the Pomio Kivung movement, ,televisions' and ,videos' have even been used to create new forms of moral surveillance for policing and governing communities. Here the customary shamanic worlds of dreams and possession have been modernised and redeployed to re-mediate the governmental practices and disciplinary schemes of civilisating projects originally belonging to Western churches and government. [source]

Property rights for social inclusion: Migrant strategies for securing land and livelihoods in Papua New Guinea

ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 1 2009
Gina Koczberski
Abstract This paper examines the broad range of informal land transactions and arrangements migrants are entering into with customary landowners to gain access to customary land for export cash cropping in the oil palm belt of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Whilst these arrangements can provide migrants with relatively secure access to land, there are instances of migrants losing their land rights. Typically, the land tenure arrangements of migrants with more secure access to land are within a framework of property rights for social inclusion whereby customary landowners' inalienable rights to land are preserved and the ,outsider' becomes an ,insider' with ongoing use rights to the land. Through socially embedding land transactions in place-based practices of non-market exchange, identities of difference are eroded as migrants assume identities as part of their host groups. This adaptability of customary land tenure and its capacity to accommodate large migration in-flows and expanding commodity production undermines the argument common amongst proponents of land reform that customary tenure is static and inflexible. Before such claims are heeded, there must be more detailed empirical investigations of the diverse range of land tenure regimes operating in areas of the country experiencing high rates of immigration. [source]

To belong or not to belong: the Roma, state violence and the new Europe in the House of Lords

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2001
David Fraser
Issues of national sovereignty and membership in the body politic are central to many current political and legal debates surrounding ,New Britain' and Europe. Traditional understandings of citizenship and belonging are grounded in the ideal of a territorially limited and defined nation state. In this article, I explore a series of judicial and political decisions surrounding the fate of Roma or Gypsies, both as claimants to refugee status in Britain, or as subjects of domestic legal controls. I argue that these decisions construct this nomadic Other as a fundamental danger and challenge to the coherence of the legally protected body politic of the nation state ,Britain' . I argue that the deconstructive excess found in the construction of the Roma as dangerous nomads, without allegiance to a fixed and geographically delimited nation state, might contain the kernel for a possible re-imagining of the basis of our understandings of citizenship and belonging. [source]

The Short cut to international development: representing Africa in ,New Britain'

AREA, Issue 1 2000
Marcus Power
Summary Under New Labour, the British Department for International Development (DFID) promises a radical and alternative new ,development agenda' and, more specifically, an end to ,development handouts'. The short cut to international development envisioned by Secretary of State Clare Short is explored in this paper, as is the ,messy' contextuality of writing about development in ,New Britain'. This paper raises questions about New Labour's discussion of the ,moral authority' for international development in ,post-colonial' Britain, particularly in light of the recent ,arms-to-Africa' affair involving Britain and Sierra Leone. The paper argues that Britannia's neoliberal vision of development is not so ,cool' and that, in ethical terms, the development of foreign policy toward Africa has not been consistent. In conclusion, the paper raises doubts about the likelihood of world poverty being halved by 2015 (as the DFID has confidently predicted). [source]