Introduction: The Politics of Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea

This collection of articles seeks to demonstrate that the concept of order - the intensive and extensive coordination of human action across space and time - is useful for answering some of the most pressing theoretical and practical questions in contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG) today. Building on existing work in this field [Benda-Beckmann, K., and F. Pirie. 2007. Introduction. In Order and Disorder: Anthropological Perspectives, 1-15. New York: Berghahn Books] in this special issue we ask: How do people create enduring, stable, and routinised life in contemporary Melanesia today? We position our work as the next step in a growing movement to study contemporary institutions in PNG as order-making projects, rather than attempting to divide them into legitimate projects like government' and false or ineffective ones like cargo cults'.