Paper short abstract:

This paper will consider the local effect and experience of material culture field research with indigenous cultural experts. The material focus will be on fibre skirts from southeast coast Papua New Guinea.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will consider the local effect and experience of material culture field research with indigenous cultural experts. The material focus will be on fibre skirts from southeast coast Papua New Guinea. The people of this area experienced rapid social change with missionary and later colonial entanglements beginning in the 1870s to becoming, part of, an independent nation a century later. For this reason, people living today can recall when the people in their village started to wear western-style clothes or when they collectively lost the knowledge of which plant could be used to make a certain blue or when the first school was built. The researcher's own background as both Papuan and outsider casts an idiosyncratic light upon these research engagements.