Hybrid, Friday 05 November, 17:00-18:30 

Campus unibz Bressanone-Brixen, viale Ratisbona 16, room 1.60 or Zoom: LINK

Growth, relations and movement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Almut Schneider, unibz

Growth, relations and movement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea

In my talk, I will look at how the Gawigl in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea conceptualize growth, in particular of the staple sweet potato and how ideas about this tuber are linked to other aspects of social life: such as the rootedness of the tuber and the movement of its vines that can be linked to differences in gender concepts. These are, in turn, reflected in life-cycle events that go along with exchanges between local groups and that take up a considerable part of people’s time and daily preoccupation.

Almut Schneider

Almut Schneider is a research assistant at the University of Bolzano and an associate researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is currently working on a research project with mountain farmers in the alpine region and issues to do with their perspectives on the environment and relations to land. For her dissertation at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, she did 20 months of fieldwork with the Gawigl people in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, and focused on exchanges and kinship relations, horticulture and rituals.