Wow. I’m super psyched to see the latest issue of “The Contemporary Pacific”:http://hawaii.edu/cpis/publications_5.html is out. It’s a special issue on ‘Melanesian Mining Modernities’ edited by my colleagues Paige West and Martha MacIntyre. The reason that I’m super-psyched is that one of my articles, “Who is the ‘original affluent society’?” is in it. The table of contents and abstracts are “available on Project Muse”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_pacific/toc/cp18.2.html and if you subscribe to Project Muse then you can also download them all, “including mine”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_pacific/v018/18.2golub01.pdf. The abstract for my paper — which I apparently wrote at some point, tho I have no memory of it now! — goes like this:

The idea of the “ecologically noble savage” once linked environmental activists and indigenous people. Today the concept is increasingly seen as problematic. In the Porgera district of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, Ipili people confront massive social change brought about by the presence of a large gold mine. This paper explores how Ipili people find some aspects of global consumer culture to offer utopian possibilities for change, while others present dystopic inversions of their own culture. In doing so, it compares Western attempts to understand Ipili as noble or ignoble savages with Ipili attempts to make sense of the material culture and mores of outsiders. It concludes that both Ipili and westerners have unsettling insights into each other’s culture.

Of course after I wrote this piece I immediately discovered Affluence and Cultural Survival ed. Richard Salisbury and Elisabeth Tooker, which I should have added to my biography. Also, although I cite it, I didn’t have a chance to read Ira Bashkow’s excellent new volume “The Meaning of Whtemen”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/185143.ctl, which I know of only in dissertation form. But anyone who has ever submitted anything to Contemporary Pacific knows that they do not just publish any old thing — I’m amazed at the rigor and scrutiny of the review process there and my article is much better (although much more exhausting to write!) because of it. They even let me use the phrase “Johannine phenomenology”! So if you are looking for state of the art ethnography on mining in Melanesia, look no further.