ABSTRACT
This chapter conveys the idea that events have taken place in particular historical contexts, not in some timeless state, in some "ethnographic present". Brought into existence in the late 1970s in a remote part of Papua New Guinea, Ramu Sugar Limited (RSL) was an embodiment of imported industrial production. Concerning the rhetoric of amity and of moral equivalence in much of Papua New Guinea, the logic of reciprocity and of commotion, people thinks that this process has become rather far advanced. Indeed, a casual perusal of Papua New Guinea's English-language daily newspapers, the National and the Post Courier, shows that there are currently a range of meanings concerning this rhetoric and this logic. Members of the emergent middle class in the Papua New Guinea town of Wewak often spoke about themselves in ways that strongly implied an inevitable superiority because of ancestral precedent. In a contemporary Papua New Guinea, where social relations have become increasingly mediated by money.
