ABSTRACT
In a polemical article that draws on the ‘racial borderlands between Aboriginal identity and the national Australian identity’, Cowlishaw (2000:101) argues that ‘the deletion of race from analysis has contributed to the concealment of the painful consequences’ of race and the reproduction of racial categories. Her argument is important because burgeoning literature that does enter the fraught terrain of conceptualizing and discussing race suggests there is a significant divergence between accounts of ‘mixed race’ in contemporary anthropology (Bernstein and De La Cruz 2009; Bettez 2010; Christian 2000; Fish 1995; Katz 1996; Olumide 2002; Parker and Song 2001; Pollock 2008; Song and Hashem 2010) and what Johnson (2004), based on her field research in Pacific New Caledonia, has termed ‘mixed heritage’. This chapter contributes to the literature on race via an exploration of concepts of ‘mixed race’ and ‘mixed parentage’, which are the specific terms used in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Just as de Bruce (2007:113-114) privileges Pacific Indigenous knowledge in her discussion of race and identity, so too do we within this chapter. We propose that in PNG, peles is a key notion and key descriptor used to signify, separate and shape the identities of people into the social organizing categories of ‘mixed race’, ‘mixed parentage’ and ‘Indigenous non-mixed’. 1
But what does peles mean? For the purpose of this chapter, we conceptualize peles as a multivalent Tok Pisin term that, at its simplest, denotes village. For example, the term liklik peles denotes the village of Indigenous origin, regardless of whether ego was born there, has ever lived there or has ever physically visited the village. Peles may also connote region, landscape, seascape, starscape, songscape, spiritscape, animals and physical features, as well as shape social relationships and interactions (McGavin 2014:148, 2016:1). Feld (1997) and Fox (1997) concur that Austronesian-and therein Papua New Guinean-notions of place, while primarily denoting a person’s village of origin, also designate the village’s environment, performances and social relationships. The meaning of peles also transforms in relation to who is speaking and with whom, and in which location the conversation
is taking place. Thus, peles may also refer to the nearest urban centre to a person’s liklik peles , to the province or region.
