ABSTRACT
I begin with a dream, recorded after the first time I left my fieldsite in Papua New Guinea.
I dreamt we returned to our highland Kewa village, to find it built up out of all recognition. There was a supermarket and a department store, and scores of brightly-clad Europeans ambled about leisurely. It looked to our shocked eyes like a scene from The Village in The Prisoner, the 1970s cult television programme, with the same aura of unreality about it. Our old house was completely run down, dwarfed by a luxurious mansion that Rimbu, my Kewa patron and adoptive brother, had built alongside it. Rimbu told us that he often put up European guests in his palatial home. I felt a tightness in my throat and a hollowness in the pit of my stomach. We’d been cheapened! With so many Europeans around we’d go unremarked, and with the glut of luxury goods we would lose our superiority. In a flash our relationship with Rimbu and other villagers appeared in stark outline: it was based on inequality, and once ‘democratisation’ took place we would lose our structural advantage.
