Dates: Jan 2014 - Dec 2014
Region: South Pacific
Theme: Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Heritage
Gold mining has taken place on the Lihir Islands in Papua New Guinea (PNG) since 1995. Traditional Lihir leaders argue that mining has had a detrimental effect on their indigenous language due to the in-migration of people from other parts of PNG, who speak the PNG official language of Tok Pisin amongst themselves and Lihir people, with whom they live and work. This research seeks to document and understand changes in the Lihir language by examining in-migration on Lihir and language practices in the Islands, through interviews and analyses of existing and new recordings of the Lihir language.
Publications
- The end of the beginning? Mining, sacred geographies, memory and performance in Lihir
- Stepping Stones Across the Lihir Islands: Developing Cultural Heritage Management in the Context of a Gold-Mining Operation
- Ethnomusicology and the Mining Industry: A Case Study from Lihir, Papua New Guinea.
- Coming out of the stone: dangerous heritage and the death of the Twinhox band
- Breaking the tikol?: Code-switching, cassette culture and a Lihirian song form
Associated CSRM Staff / Students
- Dr. Kirsty Gillespie
Project Aims
- Understand the perceived threat to the Lihir language by looking closely at the effect that mining has had on Lihir life.
- Document the viewpoints on the Lihir people, their descriptions of language change as they see it, their concerns for the future, but also their ideas on what they think should be done to address this perceived threat.
- Ultimately, through coming to an understanding of this language terrain through scholarly research, the project aims to contribute to the design of strategies for how to act upon language change in Lihir.
Project Partners
- The University of Queensland