Provinces of Papua New Guinea

Kassie Tulenko In Kulick’s article “Anger, Gender, Language Shift And The Politics Of Revelation In a Papa New Guinean Village” he focuses on a synchronic view of culture and language in Papa New Guinea to argue for broader diachronic shifts. Kulick describes two languages, Tok Pisin and Taiap, and speakers’ use of code switching between these languages to index gender, intelligence, and sociability. The men use the formal language, Tok Pisin, which indexes education, Christianity, and progress…

When most people find out that my mom grew up in Papua New Guinea, an Oceanian country above Australia, they look confused. I imagine a thought similar to a famous Mean Girls quote pops into their head: “If your mom’s from Papua New Guinea, why is she white?” But of course, you can’t just ask people why they’re white. So, to lessen their confusion, I immediately explain how my grandpa, Robert “Robin” Thurman, and his wife, Ruth, moved to PNG with their two daughters to work as missionaries.…

Forty-eight years ago today, in the year of 1969, the people of Papua New Guinea were still using stone tools. Whereas, families in the U.S. were watching on television as their countryman were landing on the moon. There has to be a reason for the people of Papua New Guinea using stone tools in the modern age, while countries like the U.S. are more advanced in technology and this country hasn’t been around as long as countries in Europe and Africa. Geography is the reason of the inequality…

Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies has gone repeatedly explaining many reasons as to why places like Eurasia and New Guinea developed so differently. The argument of chapter ten is that the shape and major axes of continents affect the distribution of crops and domesticated animals. The continents that Diamond uses is Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia. With Africa and the Americas both have their major axis that are longitude (north to south) while…

faster that most places. Agriculture Depending on where you are in the world and the climate you have, affects the crops you are able to grow and how helpful it is, therefore affecting how fast you’re civilization can develope. In a place like papa new guinea there climate is very wet and though they have big lush forests the food availability is low. The people rely on sago trees which take a lot of people, and time to harvest, sago is also low in protein and can’t be stored for long. Their…

Guns, Germs and Steel Essay Do you ever wonder why certain places of the world starve every day, but places like the United States have advanced technology and so much food to spare? The answer lies in geography. Geography is the key factor in how a civilization can advance or why is cannot, this being demonstrated flawlessly by its dictation of agriculture ( what crops people can grow ), domesticated animals ( what animals are domesticable ), disease and genetic immunization ( who is…

Why is it that Europeans are developing new technology every day while the people of Papua New Guinea are still using stone tools? Many people believe that the majority of inequality is determined by race, religion, or intelligence, but it’s actually determined by geography. For civilizations to be equal, they would need to have the same advantages as everyone else does and have the same skills and technology at the same time. When a civilization has a fitting climate for growing crops and…

have their own advantages, but with animals also came the exposure to diseases which built immunity for those who lived in geographical locations where there were domesticated animals. Those without these geographical advantages, places like Papua New Guinea and what used to be the Incas were effectively powerless, allowing the Spanish to appropriate their resources and become the most powerful country in the world. While diseases such as smallpox were the largest advantage Eurasian countries…

In the episode, “Out of Eden,” Diamond mentioned some educational facts about the civilization that inhabits New Guinea. There was one question he asked that I thought was interesting. Why did New Guineans not prosper as well as other civilizations? He mentioned it had a lot to do with farming. I believe this was a downfall for them. Harvesting wheat was easier and faster. Unfortunately, New Guineans were harvesting wild sago, which was harder to harvest because it involved chopping down trees.…

Incan population died after first contact with the Spanish? Or that while America successfully sent men to land on the moon, Papua New Guinea was still forced to use stone tools? The world is unequal and the seeds were planted in geographical resources. These uneven geographical resources doomed some cultures to failure, but some to stardom. For example, Papua New Guinea was too wet to grow efficient crops crops, had no domesticable animals and because of that were stuck in the stone age until…