Having head and showing knowledge : language shift, Christianity and notions of self in a Papua New Guinean village

• In the swampy jungles of northern Papua New Guinea lies an isolated little villagepopulated by about 100 people called Gapun. The majority of the villagers of Gapun are biormultilingual, but their mother tongue is a vernacular language which they call Taiap.Taiap is a Papuan language unique to these villagers, and valued by them as a marker ofidentity and for its ties with the land. Since the late 1970s, however, children growing up inGapun have not been acquiring the village vernacular. Instead, these children all speak onlyTok Pisin, which is the most widely spoken language in Papua New Guinea.This study is an anthropological investigation of why the villagers of Gapun areabandoning their language in favor of Tok Pisin. The study attempts to demonstrate theways in which a people’s ideas about language, children, change, and the nature of self structureand are structured through the way those people talk to one another in mundane, dayto-day interactions. The major point of this thesis is that the ideas that the villagers of Gapunhave about themselves and their world have generated a dynamic beyond their control orconsciousness, and that this dynamic is leading them to shift languages without understandingwhy this is happening and without wanting to. This point is argued through a detailedanalysis of language socialization patterns, of the villagers' understandings of Christianityand white people, and of their ideas about self-assertion, sociability and conflict avoidance.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialantropologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Anthropology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Socialantropologi

Etnografi

Papua

Nya Guinea

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