Abstract:
This thesis is about the staff and students at the University of Goroka in Papua New Guinea,
and how they perceive and experience wealth, a concept that ties “how we make claims on
the future in the present” to the past, through a moral economy (Foster 2018:19). For
students, their status at the university and their future potential to become wage earners are
for the most part contingent on their relationships with relatives and financial sponsors from
the past and present. They imagine futures based on the obligation to reciprocate to those
people who helped them get to that position. I draw on three months of participant
observation and fieldwork at the University of Goroka, 16 semi-structured interviews, and 32
survey responses to address how staff and students experience and perceive wealth.
Education is viewed as the gateway to success for students and staff at the University
of Goroka. This message is directed at individuals who are encouraged to think that they can
gain wealth and status, and become agents for the development of PNG, as well as at
communities who receive benefits back from their “investments” in students. Drawing on my
interviews and interactions with students and staff about the topic of wealth, I argue that they
operate in a moral economy where people as agents act on a history of relationships which
provide the bases for future relationships. They believe that being at a university should
reflect their own moralities, which are based on the idea of reciprocity, and making sure that
their success as students is shared.
Underlying all these experiences and perceptions were culturally specific ideas about
morality, personhood, and agency. Ideas about wealth are related to personhood, as staff and
students are in relations of reciprocity with other persons. Out of this data, I suggest that four
main themes emerge about how staff and students view themselves as people and agents and
how they express wealth; how they view the concepts of wealth and modernity; how the
relationships from the past bind students, and people more generally, to the relationships in
their futures; and how people moralise the use of wealth on broader scales.