Nancy Sullivan Ltd.

Nancy Sullivan Ltd. provides Ecotourism Consulting, Leadership Training Consulting and Social Science Consulting. We also prepare Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) and Rapid Rural Appraisals (RRAs) tailored to a client's needs, including economic, social, legal and project-specific investigations.

In addition, we offer a variety of anthropological workshops on NPG:

Anthropology for Development in Papua New Guinea

Sustainability is a social process. Development in PNG has a history of mismatched expectations. All too often it is led by calls for 'participation' and 'community consensus', without a clear understanding of how to achieve these goals. Foreign facilitators expect their efforts to be reproduced, and Papua New Guineans expect theirs to lead to comprehensive improvements.

But sustainability is a social process that requires collaboration. It avails sociocultural resources, at least, if not more than materials ones. Whether driven by a local or a foreign agenda, economic opportunity today consist of western capitalist structures adapted to this nonwestern setting. And they must be adapted to, combined with and 'naturalised' to preexisting systems. However deliberate, participatory and egalitarian the imported structures may be, they are nevertheless imported and no less exotic than chopsticks at a mumu in Papua New Guinea.

Sustainability of change requires more than a cursory understanding of cultural context. It requires an awareness of indigenous processes and the historical logic behind them. Anthropology, the study of culture, is about defining the vague, sometimes mystifying, differences of thought, interpretation and behavior that make something confounding to one society, utterly 'logical' to another.

Cross-cultural understanding is really trained common sense. The anthropologist's eye, focused on particular issues, is invaluable to the design and implementation of non-oppressive development projects. It is essential to building protocols and commercial relationships that not only work for the present, but will be reproduced over time in the future. Appropriate organisational structures are those reached by collaboration, rather than imposed by one party upon another. But collaboration requires a level of mutual understanding that cannot be acquired in casual interaction, or even in months of side-by-side participation. When a participant approaches a project for incomprehensible reasons, or subsumes project goals to pre-existing ones, there is no way to predict the course of a development project. Without fully understanding the preexisting structures, new protocols are unlikely to be grafted to old ones, and can easily be hijacked for other ends. The investment of time, interest and materials can suddenly, as if overnight, fall apart--often before there is even a whiff of trouble.

These workshops give participants a basic toolkit of information on Papua New Guinea. They are designed to help newcomers to the country bypass weeks, perhaps months, of frustration and confusion; and to insure time, labor, money, and the best intentions are not squandered on reinventing the wheel.

They are also intended to be adapted to client needs and time frames.
As an anthropologist, I am uniquely able to access pertinent archives and ethnographic materials and to construct the kind of framework for a project that will avoid even the unpredictable pitfalls of development.

All workshops include course materials and pertinent articles for each participant. In each, a lecture and class discussion is followed by construction of case studies and role playing exercises. My sessions are also, where necessary, assisted by select PNG Studies students of Divine Word University.

WORKSHOPS

Basic anthropology of PNG:

PNG prehistory
Coastal to highlands variations
Operational/utilitarian knowledge over esoteric information
Concepts of biology and medicine/Concepts of gender, manhood and womanhood
Bigmanship and chieftainship systems
Patrilineal/Matrilineal systems
Gender relations historically and at present
Tensions of the cash economy
Individualism and the consocial or 'tribal' identity
Payback and reciprocity on the individual level
Shame and self-punishment
Contemporary culture: pop music, film and TV

Conflict resolution:

Conflict resolutions strategies commonly applied in PNG are based on international models. The assumption is that such formulas can be amended to a local setting because the determinants to violence and conflict are essentially human, and universal. But anthropology qualifies this assumption: conflict in PNG arises either between clans, tribes and ethnic groups, or between local skateholders/resource owners and foreign parties, and it always involves some aspect of cross-cultural communication. There is a pressing need to formulate neutral terms, and neutral language for those terms, in all these contexts, and without ethnographic information about all parties involved, these become impossible. Concepts of shame, blame, compensation, retribution, symbolic concessions, sorcery, and debate protocols in different cultures will be reviewed. Participants will workshop a series of test cases that range from local-level disputes to conflicts involving international and local parties. Attention will be given to the level of the individual in PNG, as well, defining the elements that allow PNG participants, in particular, to walk away from a resolution with pride and satisfaction: with a 'bel kol.'

Women in development:

Gender divisions of labor vary throughout the world. Women play a central role in economic development, even if their social is not. Indeed, empowerment for women in PNG is not necessarily the object of feminist aspirations. Whereas in some places in the world, the introduction of a cash economy has signaled a diminished role for women in production, this is exactly the reverse in PNG. Women are increasingly important to household income generation. In turn, the traditional modes of 'masking' female contributions to production have eroded, and generated more gender friction than equality. Women are commonly perceived by men to have too much socioeconomic mobility.
In contrast to other countries, PNG women are the first beneficiaries of social change. But they are also, at the same time, subject to increasing abuse by their menfolk because of these changes, and this is a significant deterrent to women projecting their ambitions in the workforce. Fear of reprisals, and of being ostracized,
commonly keeps women from stepping forward.
How to negotiate these thorny issues--which posit men against women, progress versus tradition--is at the core of PNG development today.

PNG Modernity:

The inadequacy of materialist models: proletarian, entrepreneur and Big Man
'Cargo' thinking and its legacy
Indigenous power relations today
Consensus and its determinants
Gender relations in the cash economy
Access and authority on the ground
Wantokism: the redistribution of resources
Payback, reciprocity, and the logic of retribution
Reconciling western business logic to the exigencies of custom
Bigmanship strategies in business subsuming everyone's objectives to your own
The meaning of money: indigenous value systems and the cash economy
Foreign logic in everyday conversations: metaphors, rhetoric and cross-purposes
Contradictory values in today's marketplace: stakeholders, resource owners, donors, customers

PNG law for the layperson:

What is Customary Law?
Issues in Customary Land Tenure
Land tenure, criminal law and compensation in Custom
Legal pluralism and an overview of State law
The Constitution and Organic Laws
National Goals and Principles, the Legislature, the National Executive Council
Dispute Settlements and the Courts

Interpersonal cross-cultural relations:

What clues are you missing? How is development and/or workplace rhetoric being perceived?
You call a meeting on new organizational structures, but the older men decline to attend. Why?
Your project partner shaves his beard and hair off, when no one has died in his family. What is he saying?
A qualified female refuses a promotion; another female drops out of a project without explanation. What do you do?
A man chops off his finger and burns his house down after his wife runs away. Why?
Participants refuse to disagree. How to create open discussion?
Evasiveness: What does it imply about reciprocity and blame?
The clash of ideologies: how we know, what is objectivity, and what is relativity in PNG cultures

Ethnographic examinations of development projects:

Phases in the development cycle: Identification, Appraisal, Planning, Implementation, Operation and maintenance, Evaluation, Project extension into new phase or termination
Gendered effects of economic change
New power hierarchies
The dangers of calcifying bad habits, and reifying the wrong rules
Case studies of failed experiments: from India, Africa, South America; and from various locations in PNG

Workshops take the form of one day to one-week (of lectures, seminars, practicals), with morning and afternoon sessions, all materials included, for five or more participants, from K1000. Lectures on select topics of one to three hours can also be scheduled at a cost K500 and up. Assistance also available in designing educational materials for the workplace and/or village.