PAULA BROWN GLICK

Paula Brown Glick has devoted most of her career to the study of the PNG Highlands, and particularly Chimbu, and she has published prolifically in books, articles in highly respected journals, and book chapters for more than forty years. Her 1978 monograph, Highland Peoples of New Guinea, is the first comparative discussion of these highlands cultures. Thanks to her, the Chimbu have become one of the best-documented highlands peoples. “To the Simbu People,” the dedication in Beyond a Mountain Valley: The Simbu of Papua New Guinea (her book on the ethnohistory of the Chimbu published in 1995), makes clear that she would like her work to be of value to the Chimbu themselves.

Her works are widely consulted and cited and she continues to be productive in her retirement. She is among a handful of the most eminent living researchers who have worked in the highlands, and in our view she is the consummate ethnographer. The richness and quality of the data gathered on a very wide range of topics is such that I (Mac Marshall) have been able to draw on them for my own purposes in examining the impact of the introduction of alcoholic beverages on conflict and violence in PNG—everything from domestic violence to tribal fighting. The fieldwork that she carried out with geographer Harold Brookfield is an example of highly successful interdisciplinary cooperation, resulting in two monographs: Chimbu Land and Society (1959) and Struggle for Land, Agriculture and Group Territories among the Chimbu of the New Guinea Highlands (1963). That Paula is esteemed by her many students and colleagues is shown by the recent festschrift in her name, entitled Work in Progress: Essays in New Guinea Highlands Ethnography in Honour of Paula Brown Glick, edited by Hal Levine and Anton Ploeg (1996).

Paula has been very active in attendance at ASAO meetings over the years, also as a discussant, and she has organized several sessions (including a proposed session for the 1999 meeting, announced above). Papers from the session she organized in 1995 are now in press as a special issue of Anthropological Forum, entitled “Change and Conflict in Papua New Guinea Land and Resource Rights.” Her direct involvement in ASAO, her encouragement of her colleagues, and her personal warmth have made her vast knowledge of Papua New Guinea and its transformations easily accessible to younger generations of scholars and graduate students in a way that otherwise might not have happened.

Finally, as any of us who have drawn on her work can attest, the quality of Paula’s scholarship is impeccable. She is thorough, exacting, modest about what she does and doesn’t know, empathic with “her people,” and politically concerned. She is a model of what a good anthropologist should be . . .

Mac Marshall, University of Iowa; Kathryn Creely, University of California, San Diego; Anton Ploeg, University of Utrect (April 1998 Newsletter)