Dr Neil Maclean

Senior Lecturer

Room 231
A26 RC Mills Building
+61 2 9351 2931

I completed an honours degree in Anthropology from Monash University in 1977 and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Adelaide in 1985. Fieldwork with the Maring of the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea has focused on themes of the local relationship to the cash economy, the post-colonial nation state, and a developing, if contradiction ridden, national cultural field. These ethnographic themes have entailed the development of a strong historical anthropological orientation with an insistence that the trajectories of contemporary Papua New Guinea cannot be understood without a historiography of the colonial legacy - pursued through archival work in the National archives of both Australia and Papua New Guinea. A strong bias towards critical theory with a foundation in Marxism has informed both my historical orientation but also a strong sense that the dynamics of the present can only be understood in terms of an orientation towards the future. My work on money and education., and current writing on the politics of space, has this integral relation between an historical and a future orientation. It has also motivated my current involvement in a multi-disciplinary project on hope through which I intend to extend work on the history of money in PNG and reflect on the current crisis of the state form there.
I am director of the new Development Studies Masters program a the University of Sydney. Increasingly the issues raised by the current perception of Papua New Guinea as a state in crisis, and the high policy profile of debates about the market and civil society are inflecting my writing on Papua New Guinea. In a recent paper on ‘Globalisation and Bridewealth Rhetoric’ I reflected on the relationship between relational forms of the person and political agency and dominant development characterization of both civil society and the state in Papua New Guinea as failed.
I am currently Editor of Oceania, and engaged with my colleagues working with that regional ethnography on a project of producing a critical anthology from the history of the journal with a view to identifying its legacy in the regional development of the discipline. Finally as a kind of antidote to an unalloyed diet of critical theory I have a long-standing interest in ethnographic film and huge admiration for the legacy of Jean Rouch and John Marshall.

Oceania Web Page:
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/oceania/oceania1.htm