The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain

＂This is a groundbreaking ethnography: brilliantly conceived, clearly written and utterly convincing.＂ - Pacific Affairs

＂...one of its great strengths is Martin’s skill in bringing different voices to life on the page as people (mainly men) stake or rebuff claims for respect or support.＂ - Oceania

＂Readers of this anthropological study will most likely be familiar with discussions in the anthropology of Melanesia around individualism and other effects of the encroachment of global capitalism on rural communities. They will be pleasantly surprised by how elegantly and unpretentiously Martin tackles some of these issues, through an investigation of land and custom during the aftermath of an environmental disaster in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea...a wonderful study.＂ - Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.

Keir Martin is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and is the author of a number of academic and media publications on Papua New Guinea and the global economy. He was formerly a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and is a recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award for work likely to make an outstanding contribution to social anthropology.