About Dr Neil Maclean
Fieldwork with the Maring of the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea has focused on themes of the local relationship to the cash economy, the post-colonial nation state, and a developing, if contradiction ridden, national cultural field.
These ethnographic themes have entailed the development of a strong historical anthropological orientation with an insistence that the trajectories of contemporary Papua New Guinea cannot be understood without a historiography of the colonial legacy - pursued through archival work in the National archives of both Australia and Papua New Guinea. A strong bias towards critical theory with a foundation in Marxism has informed both Dr Maclean's historical orientation but also a strong sense that the dynamics of the present can only be understood in terms of an orientation towards the future. His work on money and education, and current writing on the politics of space, has this integral relation between an historical and a future orientation. It has also motivated his current involvement in a multi-disciplinary project on hope through which he intends to extend work on the history of money in PNG and reflect on the current crisis of the state form there.
As a kind of antidote to an unalloyed diet of critical theory Dr Maclean has a long-standing interest in ethnographic film and huge admiration for the legacy of Jean Rouch and John Marshall.
Dr Maclean is Director of the Development Studies Masters program at U Sydney and Editor of Oceania.