ABSTRACT

In the late 1920s, while conducting fieldwork in Manus, New Guinea, Margaret Mead made note of the fact that young boys spent two, five, sometimes seven years away from their villages working for the white man. “This is the great adventure to which every boy looks forward. For it, he learns pidgin, [and] he listens eagerly to the tales of returned work boys” (Mead 1930:119). Similarly, 52 percent of the Chambri (Tchambuli) men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were working as migrant laborers and therefore absent from the Papua, New Guinea, village where Mead was living in 1933. Despite these observations, Mead’s ethnographic descriptions of life in New Guinea at this time are largely portraits of discrete and timeless cultures unaffected by the outside world.1 This mode of representation was characteristic of the anthropology of Mead’s time and of the functionalist paradigm that shaped much anthropological analysis until 1960. It was an anthropology that contained a “sedentarist bias” (Malkki 1995:208) and a rooted definition of culture, both of which explain why anthropology, by comparison with a range of other social science disciplines, did not give the study of migration high priority as an area of research until the late 1950s and early 1960s. As anthropologists progressively rejected the idea of cultures as discretely bounded, territorialized, relatively unchanging, and homogenous units, thinking and theorizing about migration became increasingly possible.