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Accepted Paper:

Domestic moral economies of the borderlands: an analysis of transformations in the social relationships between Torres Strait Islanders and Papua New Guineans  
Kevin Murphy (Australian National University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper applies Peterson’s model of the “domestic moral economy” to analyse the changing structure of relationships between Torres Strait Islanders and Papua New Guineans since the introduction of the international border that now divides them.

Paper long abstract:

Peterson proposes the "domestic moral economy" as a model of the intersection of culture and economy that can account for the persistence of kinship and sharing as fundamentally important to the structure of economic distribution among indigenous peoples. This paper applies the analytical model of the domestic moral economy to consider social interaction and the structure of relationships between Torres Strait Islanders and Papua New Guinean visitors who regularly cross the international border to Australia under the Torres Strait Treaty. I extend the domestic moral economy model by using it to analyse the interface between an indigenous people, welfare dependent and encapsulated in a first world state, and neighbouring citizens of a "third world" country, who are economically independent and experience minimal direct involvement of their own government in day to day life. One of the effects of the introduction of the international border between Australia and Papua New Guinea has been an attenuation of relationships between people from opposite sides of the border. As a result, Papua New Guineans today are largely excluded from the domestic moral economy of Torres Strait Islanders as Islanders have in turn withdrawn from participation in the domestic moral economy of Papuans. I explore how it is that Islanders are now able to say "no" to Papuan demands, and how the possibility of such refusals characterises contemporary social relations in the border area.

Panel P04
Ethnography and the production of anthropological knowledge: essays in honour of Nicolas Peterson
  Session 1