Papua New Guinea is a relatively young country, with independence from colonial rule in 1975. As postcolonial PNG still struggles to free itself from its colonised history; the various dominant and disparaging anthropological discourses of tribal lifeworlds and island identity remain salient. This paper focuses on the efforts of a remote tribal community within Papua New Guinea, to mobilise themselves as performative subjects to challenge the various dominant ideas of development and youth cultural identity. A training program, though strategically named as SLIGA (Strategic Livelihood Income Generating Activity) was developed by the author together with the tribal Elders (Hausman and Hausmeri) and young people of the various clans of this tribe to challenge the various dominant ideas of development and youth cultural identity. SLIGA asserts its own internal viability as an interstitial space between tribal and modern worlds, between old knowledge and new – and offers a ground-up way of rethinking, redeveloping, and responding to the sticky materiality of local-global encounters, tribal identity and an emergent youth identity not alienated from place, history and the cultural-political. SLIGA works to bridging the gaps by acknowledging the wisdom of elders while recognizing and harnessing the potential of young people to contribute meaningfully to the intergenerational mode of knowledge making, integral to tribal lifeways and wellbeing.
