Social and Cultural Anthropology

In this paper I will examine how logging in Papua New Guinea affects the relationship between the state and the local communities on whose lands logging operations take place. The point of departure of my argument is the Ili-Wawas Integrated Project, a combined logging and agricultural project which seeks to bring economic development to the remote Pomio district of East New Britain Province by connecting existing logging roads to the limited national road network around the provincial capital. Developing the national road network and creating standardized or—to use James Scott’s concept—legible environments can be seen as an integral part of state-making and strengthening the role of the state. In addition to the environment, the state also needs to make social life legible in forms of maps, censuses and laws. As I will argue in my paper, the Ili-Wawas, and other similar projects, may indeed strengthen the role of the state not only by creating the infrastructure and legibility needed by the state, but also in unintended and accidental ways. The side effects of logging and road building include, among others, fear of crime and land disputes. It is these that create among the locals a perceived need for state institutions, which may be as significant in advancing the role of the state as is the creation of infrastructure and legibility.

In this article I examine the relationship between new oil-palm plantations and state-formation in Pomio, a remote rural district of East New Britain Province (Papua New Guinea). I am particularly interested in the kinds of spaces of governance produced by the new oil-palm plantations and how this contributes to state formation and territorialisation in Pomio. Plantations in Pomio do not became state-like spaces as a result of top-down processes alone, but also because of active worker initiatives. By contributing to state formation in this way, the inhabitants of Pomio also make claims on what the state should be like. While plantations become governable and statelike spaces, they do not produce simply governable subjects, nor do they produce a uniformly governable temitory but an uneven space in which some places are more governable than others. The inhabitants of Pomio move between these places in their pursuit of different goals.

Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family is a study of the sons and daughters of Chinese single-child families who go abroad to study and in particular explores the increase of familial investment in daughters' education within the wider socio-moral transformation of China. The relationships of support in the family are renegotiated, and lines of generational and gendered power are changing. While this generation of young women have been raised in an environment that fosters individual achievement and competition, they must eventually find their place in the marriage and job markets that are highly gendered. Women are directed towards less demanding career paths and are wary of becoming 'too successful' to marry. Both female and male student migrants draw from their cosmopolitan experiences and resources when negotiating these tensions. Through their individual journeys of migration, they are at the forefront of the current transformation of the Chinese symbolic markets.

This article uses Mahler and Pessar’s (2001, 2006) model of “geography of power” to interrogate how the general dynamic of Chinese student migration generates a variety of experiences at the individual level. Each Chinese student-migrant embarks on their journey from a different position vis-à-vis the flows and interconnections of the international education market. Some of them set out to achieve concrete goals, while others are motivated by a more intangible mission to become cosmopolitan subjects. As they move around, their shifting position in the hierarchies of nationality, class, gender, and generation influences their decision-making and their experiences. These power systems function simultaneously on multiple geographical scales, exemplified by the contradictory ways gender operates in the family, education, work, and marriage. To further develop the connection this model makes between personal characteristics, cognitive processes, and various power systems, I draw attention to the politics of ordinary affects.

The reform era Chinese society is characterised by two things: new opportunities and unequal access to them. The rising living standard is coupled with the growing gap between the rich and the poor. One of the main routes to socioeconomic mobility is education. Regional disparity in educational investment and the more relaxed implementation of family planning policies in rural areas puts one group of people in a particularly weak position in the education market. In their quest for educational achievement rural girls need to overcome economic disadvantage vis􏰁à􏰁vis their urban counterparts, and to challenge gender and kinship models that favour investment in sons’ education when competing for family resources with their brothers. The story of a young rural woman who makes her way to the urban educated middle class sheds light on the complex ways in which new social opportunities and cultural ideas of family and gender interact. Gender and class differences are intensified and played down to create distance, or to cut across it, at times in surprising ways.

Recent research has shown that children’s sense of fairness is shaped in part by cultural practices, values, and norms. However, the specific social factors that motivate children’s fairness decisions remain poorly understood. The current study combined an ethnographic approach with experimental tests of fairness (the Inequity Game) in two Chinese schools with qualitatively different practices and norms. In the “University school,” children received explicit moral instruction on fairness reinforced by adults when supervising children’s activities. By contrast, in the “Community school,” children received less formal moral education and little adult supervision during play time, but norms of cooperation and fairness emerged through informal interactions with peers and other members of the community. Contrary to our predictions, children in both schools (N = 66) rejected both disadvantageous and advantageous allocations of resources in the test trials. However, in the very first practice trials, children from the Community school tended to reject all inequalities, whereas children from the University school tended to accept inequalities. We draw on the ethnographies of the schools to interpret these results, concluding that, despite the similarities in the experimental results, different motivations and social factors likely underlie the rejection of inequality in the two schools.

This article investigates the development of competitive motivation in children in the context of the extreme emphasis on competition in post‐reform Chinese society. Drawing from ethnographic and experimental approaches, it compares the competitive modes of children in an urban middle‐class school and a semi‐rural working‐class school. A conceptual model is developed that distinguishes between zero‐sum and mutualistic modes of competition, and the individual orientation and group orientation. The zero‐sum mode emphasises the benefits and losses derived from winning and losing, while the mutualistic mode emphasises the elements of competition that are beneficial to all participants regardless of the outcome. Through these distinctions the article contests the common association of competitiveness with individualism and the opposition between competition and cooperation, and proposes a working model for a comparative study of competitiveness.