​I'm a cultural anthropologist with an interest in the deep interconnections between peoples' sense of place, their landscape, history, and personal identity.
 

With these interests in mind, I conducted three years of research in Wamira, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea (1976–78, 1981–82). Later I spent a total of a year and a half in French Polynesia (1994, 1995, 1998, 2001), as well as short visits there in 2010, 2012, 2014.

 

I was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle, for thirty years. After retiring in 2016, I moved back to Philadelphia, where I had been a graduate student, receiving my PhD at Bryn Mawr College in 1980.

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The photographs on this website were taken during my research in Wamira. My research focused on how people in Wamira express their emotions, desires, and social relationships through food. Outsiders might describe Wamirans as being “obsessed” with food, with who owns how many pigs, who grows the best taro, who contributes what to a feast, and yet constantly saying they have "no food." By living in Wamira and sharing in the lives of the villagers, I found a much more interesting and complex reality.

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For people in Wamira, “famine” is not about physical hunger, but about managing social and emotional needs. Food becomes a language for communicating and mediating relationships—between men and women, kin and rivals, and social desire and restraint. Through their legends, like the story about Tamodukorokoro, the monster who could have brought them an abundance of food had they not driven him away, Wamirans express the tension between desire and fear that shape their everyday world.

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These photographs provide a visual record of daily life in Wamira at a time (late 70s and early 80s) when Wamirans did not have cameras. My photos offer a visual complement to my written scholarship, as a record of lived experience and cultural exchange between anthropologist and community.

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I'm the author of Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society (1986, 1993) and Tahiti Beyond the Postcard: Power, Place, and Everyday Life (2011). I am also co-author of Pacific Voices: Keeping Our Cultures Alive (2005) and the author of numerous journal articles.