Retelling Chambri Lives: Ontological Bricolage

Abstract

In this article, we provide an update on a combined biography of Chambri friends and acquaintances living in their Papua New Guinea home villages and beyond, a biography originally published in 1991 but based on 1987 field research. Incor- porating fieldwork extending over the subsequent twenty-eight years, we describe what has happened to some of those we came to know best. In so doing, we address twenty-first century anthropological questions concerning contemporary ontology(ies) and the nature of difference(s) by conveying how these Chambri have continued to seek personal and collective worth, while remaining caught up in an encroaching and shifting regional, national, as well as world system.