ABOUT

​Professor Emerita, University of Washington

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Dr. Miriam (Mimi) Kahn is a cultural anthropologist whose research explores the deep interconnections between sense of place, cultural history, and personal identity. A Professor Emerita at the University of Washington, Seattle, she conducted extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (1976–78, 1981–82) and in French Polynesia (1994, 1995, 1998, 2001).

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The photographs featured on this website are drawn exclusively from her fieldwork in the coastal village of Wamira, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, where she lived for two and a half years. Her research examined how people in Wamira express their emotions, desires, and social relationships through food. While outsiders might describe Wamirans as being “obsessed” with food—knowing who owns how many pigs, who grows the best taro, who contributes what to a feast, and continually saying that they have "no food"—Dr. Kahn learned to see a much more 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 of communicating relationships—between men and women, kin and rivals, desire and restraint. Through cultural myths and stories, such as that of Tamodukorokoro, the monster who could have brought them abundance had they not driven him away, Wamirans express the tension between desire and fear that shape their everyday world.

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The photographs on this website provide a visual record of daily life in Wamira at a time (late 70s and early 80s) when cameras were not available to Wamiran people. The photos offer a visual complement to her written scholarship... as a record of lived experience and cultural exchange between anthropologist and community.

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Dr. Kahn is 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). She is also co-author of Pacific Voices: Keeping Our Cultures Alive (2005); and the author of numerous journal articles.