Professor, Department of Anthropology
Pacific Islands Focus
Phone: (541) 346-5110
email: abiersac@uoregon.edu
Aletta Biersack is a cultural anthropologist specializing in Pacific basin peoples with a focus on historical anthropology, the anthropology of gender, kinship, local-level dynamics, and change. Her present research concerns relationships between and among Christianity, colonialism, culture, and development in a gold mining region of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. She is the editor of Papuan Borderlands, (University of Michigan Press, 1995), the anthology Clio in Oceania (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), and has published numerous articles on the Ipili of Papua New Guinea and the Tonga in Polynesia. Presently she is continuing research on religion, kinship, mining, and change in Porgera and Paiela.