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Journal of Material Culture
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‘Team Spirit’

The Pervasive Influence of Place-Generation in ‘Community Building’ Activities along the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea

James Leach

King's College, University of Cambridge, UK

This article focuses upon volleyball, the rhetoric of community building, and the potentially competitive nature of generative social relations. The setting for my discussion is the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. The article is also about places, and the deep and significant influence that both individual places, and indeed the imagination in relation to the potential of places, can play. It is an opening foray into the nature of various kinds of collaborative and institutional forms in Melanesia, showing, in this case, how the perception of a ‘community’ relies upon the active and generative differentiation of people and places. Through a mixture of narrative and analytic styles, personal anecdote, reported speech, published authority and descriptive evocation, I demonstrate that on the Rai Coast, landscape and place are not about what is ‘out there’ beyond people, but are sometimes about what is in people. As such, they are brought into people's projects, and action in relation to them shapes developments around the idea of ‘community’.

Key Words: cash crops • community • development • landscape • Papua New Guinea • place • sports • violence

Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1-2, 87-103 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1359183506063014
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