Publisher's Synopsis
While Papua New Guinea's resident white population has been severely reduced due to postcolonial white flight, the whiteman remains a significant racial and cultural other here-not only as an archetype of power and wealth in the modern arena, but also as a foil for people's evaluations of themselves within vernacular frames of meaning. As Ira Bashkow explains, ideas of self versus other need not always be anti-humanistic or deprecatory, but can be a creative and potentially constructive part of all cultures.
A brilliant analysis of whiteness and race in a non-Western society, The Meaning of Whitemen turns traditional ethnography to the purpose of understanding how others see us.