Oliver Kortendick:
Knowledge Transmission and Political Communication
The anatomy of a village in North-West Papua New Guinea
KTAPC tried to solve the following questions:
* What are the variables that influence people's decision to agree in
selling logging concessions?
* To what extent is the social structure of a given community in itself
an influencing variable in this process?
Fieldwork was conducted in the Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea, in June 1996. The area was selected, because parts of it were already logged, in other parts the logging was ongoing, and some parts are still primary rain forest areas. The village chosen for the research seemed to be an ideal setting, because its population is a distinct cultural entity, the logging took place five years ago, and the political leaders agreed in the participation of a research.
The official government census data is based on unreliable and intransparant data collection. The last census available estimated the overall population on 250 people. The area it self is semi remote: Having good weather conditions, the village is accessible from Vanimo by car in 2,5 to 6 hours (depending on the vehicle). The "village" itself is distributed among several hamlets. There are what people refer to as "settlements" in Vanimo, however. They are built by people who left the actual village to find work. No data was collected in those settlements, because of budget and time constraints. Within the more obvious limits of the village, however, every adult was asked to participate. Adult was defined as someone "who is able to take care of himself, thus being able to live independently from his parents". In the field, I spent the first two days with walking around in the village, trying to see at least each hamlet once, (also the remote ones) and with the help of a translator, asked for co-operation and explained the purpose of the research.
The questionnaire aims to be as close as possible to existing research. It is orientated around two earlier designs: The social consequences of modern telecommunication technologies, a research that was conducted in 1987 in Cologne (Jörg Berger: Soziale Folgen moderner Telekommunikation, Abschlußbericht, Institut für angewandte Sozialforschung, Köln - see also Lorenz Gräf: Probleme mehrstufiger Netzwerkerhebungen - Empirische Ergebnisse einer Erhebung von Freundesketten in Köln-Nippes. Vortrag, Tagung Netzwerkanalyse, Sektionen "Methoden" und "Modellbildung und Simulation" der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, Köln, 1996), and the Costa Mesa study, conducted by Schweizer et al. in 1995 (Thomas Schweizer, M. Schnegg und S. Berzborn: Personal Networks and social support in a multiethnic community of Southern California. Social Networks 19, 1997).
It was then translated into Pidgin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. It started with an introduction, that was read by the Interviewer to each respondent. In this introduction the project was explained, informant protection was guaranteed, and co-operation was asked on an entirely voluntary basis. It also was explained, that the Interview could be stopped at any time.
There were 50 questions: Question 1 to 19 related to personal background information of the respondent, like gender, age, education, income and household composition. A section of 12 name generators followed. Questions 32 to 50 asked for possession of household items, political preferences, important issues in life, included two scales of Schuessler's Social Life Feeling Scales (Doubt about Self Determination and Disillusionment with Government), attitudes towards logging activities and general feelings about the interview as such. After all questions were read, background information on the generated alters was collected by asking for alter's name, lineage, gender, residence, education, frequency and closeness of contact, relation and age.
As the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby is a partner of the APFT project, they helped with the selection of five experienced anthropology students, who worked as Interviewers: Stanley Jotham, Jack Beu, Iain Leklek, Baulon Maibala and Alois Kuaso - all five made this research happen.
Having only male Interviewers at hand, it seemed questionable whether any problems could be encountered with interviewing women. I assumed that a possible interference could occur because of the presence of men. That was not the case, though. The sample is evenly distributed (51,5% men and 48,5% women).
Would it be possible to collect data in single sessions or would people insist on a group situation? Respondents were asked to describe their relationship to any mentioned alter on a 7-point-scale, ranking from very good to very bad. It can be assumed that somebody's willingness to evaluate a relationship as bad could be influenced by the presence of his friends and family nearby. On the other hand, I did not want people to feel uncomfortable. It was more important to get as many people as possible involved in the research. So I told the Interviewers not to force anybody who preferred being asked in his usual surrounding and not to chase any spectators away. Instead they should politely ask whether the respondent could imagine to be asked alone, if he or she reacted refusing or insecure, further attempts were stopped. In 65,5% of all cases a single isolated situation could be created.
Something that was expected beforehand actually could be found in the field: Age as a variable is rather invalid. 52,3% of the respondents do not know the year of their birth. Although only 22% of the people did not attend any school at all, the overall educational system in the area is rather poor, with teachers frequently being absent and 81,1% of the people having been to those local schools between 1 and 5 years only. On the other hand, I find it encouraging to notice that roughly half of the population does know their exact age. With the general living conditions improving in Papua New Guinea the majority of people - unless they live in very isolated and remote places should be able to tell their age in the near future.
The interviewers collected the data that was generated by the name generators in a set of forms (matrices) attached to the end of each questionnaire. The interviewers had to ask for people's local name, their christian name (given by them by the missionaries after being baptized), and their father's name. When entering the alter names into a separate database, it pretty soon became difficult to distinguish between the various local names, where there was even amongst the people often no consensus about a way to spell these names. Some of these cases could be resolved easily by simply reading the name aloud. In various cases, however, people even gave different versions of what a particular alter's name or father's name was. These confusions could only partly be solved in the field. Roughly five percent of the generated alter therefore, could be referring to the same person.
Less problematic was the section about ownership and access to selected household items and appliances. The question, however, is what kind of social reality this collection of data actually represents. It became apparent during the stay, that there are by no means 13 Generators in the village. There are one or two, depending on what people you ask. I rather believe one, for I never could find out where the second would be. Time was to short to investigate this problem deeper. Some items have individual owners (e.g. the bank account). Others are quite obvious owned by several people. With near certainty that is true for the car and the generator. On the other hand, the table and thus the data expresses the access that people have to certain items. They may not own them alone, but in the context of the village they actually can exert rights and can make use of certain valuable and expensive items.
The vast majority of people has none to very limited access to the household items (of Questions 35.1-9.) As a conclusion the measurement of wealth resp. prosperity only worked limited. The lists of items should have included more basic things, that express better or more appropriate a differentiation in wealth. For example, shoes or a second pair of trousers (usually worn for the sunday's church service). In summary, the major problem of the village setting actually is low income, unreliable or only spontaneous sources of income, a general lack of even basic technologies, a general lack of know-how and maintenance skills for basic technologies. There is some indication for a gender orientated distribution of items in a particular case: Bank accounts seem to be rather owned by men than women:
Not knowing exactly how many people would be illiterate, the wisest idea seemed to be to use a scale, that could be shown to the respondent and on which he picked the appropriate item. Andrews and Whitey (Social indicators of well-being: Americans' perceptions of life quality. New York 1976) had used successfully a seven grade "smiley-scale" to cope with that problem. This seemed intuitive enough to use in pre-test as well. The answers, however, are unevenly distributed among the possible items. One always finds a cluster on items 1 and 2, rarely the negative extremes. I therefore would be rather cautious claiming that the problem of finding an appropriate and working scale succeeded. The "sad" face not only expresses sadness, but could also be understood as angry expression.
The name generators turned out to be productive, although it cannot be excluded that the decrease in names in the end is due to exhaustion of the respondents. Different procedures (essentially a reverse order of generators) could deliver more data to answer this observation.
This hypertext project presents the data of KTAPC in three parts: The
first part (June 1998) consists of frequencies counts, presented in tables
and charts. Part two will deal with relationships between variables and
a description of the demographic structure. It publication is scheduled
for July 1998. Part three finally is the dense description of the social
structure with the help of the instruments network analysis offers (see
as an overview: Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis,
Methods and Applications, Cambridge 1994).
Oliver Kortendick, Knowledge Transmission and Political Communication - The anatomy of a village in North-West Papua New Guinea, http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Sonja/Oliver/Papuafrequencies/deckblatt.htm, Canterbury 1998
Copyright: Oliver Kortendick 1998. You may not use or cite this work without written permission by the author (oliver.kortendick@epost.de).
This research was partially financed by the European Commission/DGVIII.