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This article examines the emergent field of media archaeology as offering a materialist approach to new media and specifically the Internet, constituting a 'travelling discipline' or 'indiscipline' rather than a new disciplinary paradigm. Following the lead of Siegfried Zielinski (2006) it provides less an archaeology than an 'anarachaeology' of media archaeology, understanding this term in political as well as methodological terms. To do so it charts a trajectory through some of the sources of media archaeology, and its key theoretical articulations in the work of Zielinski and Friedrich Introduction: Situating Media ArchaeologyThis article aims to survey the emergent field and sets of methods of media archaeology with at least two key hypotheses. The first is that media archaeology can be better thought of, following Zielinski, in terms of 'anarchaeology', a rupture within contemporary media theories and histories, rather than a new discipline. Secondly that one of the key values of media archaeology is its insistence on the materiality, and material ecologies of media objects, systems and processes, contrary to the still lingering tendency to view informational technologies and processes in disembodied and immaterial terms. This is distinct from phenomenological approaches centred on an assumed human body and sensorium (see Hansen, 2006). Instead it consists of an attention to the material ecologies of human, non-human and machinic entities, the inorganic, organic and, as we shall see, geological strata that underlie technical media systems and networks, but which are frequently ignored in conventional media studies. Media archaeology is also distinct from AngloAmerican approaches to digital media that tend to be empirical, social scientific epistemologies based on qualitative and quantitative research in which data sets are analysed as traces of user practices such as linking or tagging, for example, or form the basis for digital mapping techniques such as social network analysis (SNA). While empiricism shares with media archaeology, and media materialism more generally, an interest in media objects, it constructs these objects epistemologically in terms of data and information, software and platforms, or in other words as objects of knowledge, bracketing off any non-informational aspects of their physicality. From a media archaeological perspective then, social scientific empiricism is not empirical enough, and needs to get closer to the materiality of objects such as chips, circuit boards and fiber optic cables,

Early in the morning of 4 February 1998 police raided the old, abandoned parliament building in downtown Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Adjacent to the central business district, where high-rise buildings had mushroomed during the decade, the dilapidated building had in recent years been the subject of calls for preservation as a national monument. Its exterior was crumbling and overgrown with weeds, its interior long since looted of anything indicative of its former dignity. It had become the habitat of squatters, whose presence had provoked complaints from the downtown business community for some time. Now, suddenly, they were evicted, in an operation the police had code-named "Enough Is Enough," though it was never made clear who gave the order. Senior staff at the National Museum, who had been prominent advocates of the building's preservation, denied rumors that they were behind the eviction (PC, 4, 5 Feb 1998). A few days previously the police had raided the Baruni dump, a ru b b i s h tip on the "back road" that connected Port Moresby's northwest suburbs to the downtown area circuitously thro u g h a relatively uninhabited stre t c h of land to the coast west of the city. The "back road" (officially known as Baruni Road; map 1) has long had a reputation for armed holdups and the perpetrators in recent times were popularly said to come from the ranks of the squatters at the dump, who scoured their habitat constantly for materials to build shelters, sell at the roadside, or turn to other subsistence purposes. The police found some stolen vehicles hidden behind the dump, and while the raid on the dump community itself disclosed no stolen property, the stolen vehicles were used as justification for the eviction of the dump squatters and the torching of their makeshift shelters in

One of the outcomes of judgmental administrative attitudes toward indigenous praxis in colonial Papua New Guinea was a convention that an antagonistic relationship existed between European law and ‘native custom‘. By the end of the colonial period the defence of ‘custom’ had become part of an anti‐colonial polemic among indigenous intellectuals and politicians. The Village Court system was established in this rhetorical climate. Its mission, reinforced in legislation, included the favouring of ‘custom’ in the dispensation of justice. Subsequent academic and journalistic commentaries on the development of the Village Court system have perpetuated a binary notion of the relationship between law and custom, whether portraying it as antagonistic or articulatory. This article focuses on a single case from a Port Moresby village court, involving an accusation of attempted sorcery. The case raises questions not only about the validity of the discursive law/custom dichotomy but about the notion of custom itself in the context of the dispensation of justice in contemporary Papua New Guinea. It is suggested that in village court praxis, the notion of custom serves the exploitation of village court officers as cheap labour in the justice system.

The Motu and the Hula, two south coast Papua New Guinea societies, are linguistically related, have similar social organisation and were economically linked before European colonisation. They were both introduced to Christianity by the London Missionary Society in the late 19th century, and each appeared to incorporate the new religion into their social life and thought quickly and unproblematically. More than a century later, however, generalities about the similar adoption of Christianity by the Motu and the Hula are no longer possible. Nor are generalities about the engagement with Christianity within one or the other group, as individual Motu and Hula villages have unique histories. In this regard, while Christianity has now arguably become part of putative tradition among the Motu, some Hula are experiencing conflict between Christianity and their sense of tradition. In particular, while in the Motu village of Pari Christian virtues are appealed to as part of Pari's conception of itself as a ‘traditional’ Motu village, the situation in the Hula village of Irupara is more or less the contrary. Many people in Irupara are now lamenting ‘tradition’ as something lost, a forgotten essence destroyed or replaced by Christianity. Based on fieldwork in both villages, this paper discusses some differences in their engagement with Christianity and compares contemporary perceptions of religion, tradition and identity in both societies, informing a commentary on notions of tradition and anthropological representations of the Melanesian experience of Christianity.