Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
109
communal morality) carry their own set of
moral values and standards of behaviour.
Masahiro
Umezaki’s
chapter
examines the informal and formal
economic activities of highland migrants in
Moresby. His aim is to understand
migrants’ survival strategies in town. He
concludes that households engaged in the
informal economic sector have a higher
income level than households where
residents are employed in the formal
sector. Umezaki writes that people in both
the informal and formal economies still
maintain kinship relationships and depend
on these for food and other resources.
Keith Barber also looks at the
livelihood of migrants in Moresby,
specifically the 33 per cent of unemployed
residents. Like Umezaki, Barber shows
that it is not as individuals that people in
Moresby survive, but as members of
households, and as networks of households
within which formal and informal incomes
are shared. Kinship patterns and village
modes of organisation continue in the
urban context.
Lastly, Denis Crowdy writes about
musicians performing in Moresby hotels
and clubs. Crowdy shows how musicians
manage their access to the ‘infrastructure’
of performance, which includes transport
and borrowing equipment and musical
instruments. Like Umezaki and Barber, he
focuses on the importance of informal
social networks for a person’s livelihood.
Villagers and the City successfully
demonstrates the diversity of peoples’
experiences living in Moresby. However,
as all the contributions, except Crowdy’s,
focus on the experiences of PNG migrants,
one of the volume’s gaps is the experience
of people born and who have grown up in
Moresby; the urban dwellers who have
diminished relationships with village
people and their lifestyles. This gap
particularly stands out as Goddard himself
notes in the Introduction that many
Moresby residents who are villagers living
in the city, referred to as migrants, are not
migrants at all, but were born and have
grown up in Moresby and therefore have a
very different experience of urban living.
Additionally, while the chapters in
the volume all consider important and
interesting urban issues such as work in the
informal
and
formal
economies,
transforming
kinship
relationships,
managing money in the city, urban
households, and negotiating tensions and
differences between town and village, a
greater analysis of the ‘city’ itself would
have increased the volume’s contribution
to the emerging anthropology of urban
Melanesia.
The strength of this volume therefore
is its contribution to the limited literature
available on Moresby; the questions it
inspires for further research on Melanesian
cities, and the interest it ignites for an
engagement with an anthropological
analysis of the Melanesian city itself.
Daniela Kraemer
University of Toronto
Marcio
Goldman
(2013).
How
Democracy Works. An Ethnographic
Theory of Politics
. Canon Pyon: Lightning
Sources.
Marcio Goldman’s book does not make an
easy read, which in this case positively
testifies to a complex and very well written
book. Originally published in Portuguese
