- Title
- From 'my story' to 'the story of myself': colonial transformations of personal narratives among the Motu-Koita of Papua New Guinea
- Creator
- Goddard, Michael
- Relation
- Telling Pacific Lives: Prisms of Process p. 35-50
- Relation
- http://epress.anu.edu.au/tpl_citation.html
- Publisher
- ANU E Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2008
- Description
- Since the late colonial period, there have been a significant number of publications which could be roughly classified as Melanesian autobiography. The majority of these have, in fact, been encouraged and commonly written down, edited and substantively organised, by European acquaintances of the subjects. I begin with a brief discussion of the Motu-Koita, their traditional mythopoeic worldview, and two examples of mentored narratives indicating a lack of autobiographical consciousness in the mid-colonial period. I then turn to the case of Bobby Gaigo, who represented Tatana, a Motu-Koita village, in land claims in the late colonial period and wrote a number of historical documents, including an autobiographical account. Finally I offer some comments on the development of a historical consciousness, in relation to autobiography. In what follows, I use an example of a brief autobiography which itself was produced with no direct encouragement from a European mentor. Rather, its generation can be understood in terms of the development of a historical consciousness through the praxis of its writer, who was a prominent advocate in his village’s legal claims to land around Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in the late colonial period.
- Subject
- Papua New Guinea; Melanesia; autobiographies; Motu-Koita; historical consciousness; colonies
- Identifier
- uon:6647
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804533
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781921313813
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