Life Last Fortnight

Posted on by Rex
PNG Independence Day in 1975, via the National Archive of Australia.

Time got away from me last week… here’s what I’ve been up to.

  • It is necessary to understand tea and (most importantly) have a preference about it when asked by someone who is serving it to you. Very important for dealing with our Five Eyes colleagues (I’m looking at you, Oz). So I thought this tea infographic would help. In fact, I can’t decipher it at all. My struggle to understand tea continues.
  • Is it just me or is the accent on words like ‘affluent’ and ‘rhetoric’ moving to the middle syllable and not the initial one?
  • When I was doing my Ph.D. fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, I had a very small amount of music. One of the CDs I had was a collection of Cole Porter’s greatest hits. It included a very hot cover of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” by Dinah Washington. I finally realized that I could look up the album it was from. Dinah Jams (a live set in from LA in 1954) is now one of my favorite albums.
  • A good overview of the California Ranch, the style of house I grew up in.
  • I recently became intrigued by the work of phenomenologist Gabor Csepregi. When I tried googling him, unfortunately, I could only get results on the olympic swimmer of the same name. It took me a while to realize that they were the same person! Csepregi’s personal story is incredible, including using his swimming powers to flee the Societ Bloc by crossing the Adriatic, discovering his long lost love, unexpectedly encountering his old coach at a local pool, and transforming from athlete to coach/phenomenologist to academic administrator. Amazing.
  • Congratulations to my colleague Jerry Jacka on his new article about Porgera in Cultural Anthropology! That’s a must read for me.
  • Happy birthday to Papua New Guinea, which celebrated independence day!
  • I really enjoyed “Wait For Your Laugh”, the documentary about singer and comedian Rose Marie. Not only was she a great talent, she has an incredible life story. Highly recommended if you grew up watching the Dick Van Dyke Show, or are interested in mob history.

That’s all for now. Take care!

Published by Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is a political anthropologist who studies kinship, customary land tenure, and the mining and petroleum industry in Papua New Guinea. He also studies the video game World of Warcraft, and is an advocate for open access scholarly communications. His book "Leviathans at the Gold Mine" was published by Duke University Press.