Showing 3 results

archival descriptions
Mervyn Meggitt's Enga (Papua New Guinea) field materials
Print preview View:

Mervyn Meggitt's Enga (Papua New Guinea) field materials

  • AU ANUA 581
  • Series
  • c1960

There are two sets of material ( 2 items) in the collection including:
(i) a ringbinder primarily containing a set of genealogical diagrams, and,
(ii) a set of worksheets primarily containing survey plots of garden land use and ownership

There is little or no descriptive documentation attached to either set of records. As far as is known, Meggitt never published the results of this land survey.
The garden land use and ownership survey was conducted in July-September 1960, with tabulation in 1961 (Meggitt 1978: 109-109, and monthly dating on the worksheets).
The survey covers gardens of the Kara clan (at least, and possibly others) at Sari, a location near Wabag, in what was then called the Upper Lai Census Division 12, Enga Province. The genealogical data also appears to be mainly of members of the Kara clan, and was collected and added to between the 1950s and c.1987.
Sari was Meggitt’s main field site between at least 1955 and the 1980s (Meggitt 1957: 161, and personal communication with P Wohlt, who visited Meggitt there in the 1980s-, and T Hays.

NB. These materials, as far as it known, are the only surviving raw field data from Meggitt’s Enga studies, as he destroyed the other materials before his death.

Meggitt, M J, 1957. “House building among the Mae Enga, Western Highlands, Territory of New Guinea”. Oceania, 27(3), 161-176.

Meggitt, M J, 1978. “Reflections occasioned by continuing anthropological field research among the Enga of Papua New Guinea”. In: Foster, G M. Scudder, T., Colson, E., and Kemper, R.V. ed. Long-term field research in social anthropology. New York, Academic Press, 107-125.