This essay, which is accompanied by a collective online sketchbook on the American Anthropologist website, is about drawing as a research methodology. 1 Drawing, like writing, is a craft that can be learned. It is a radical social research method, recalling the lost, undisciplined roots of research into "folk, work, place" in Britain-roots that this essay explores through the Foundations of British Sociology: The Sociological Review Archive at Keele University (Keele University 2010). Too many scholars now research "materiality" as an armchair topic. Multimodality-a young, cross-disciplinary, and still unformed aggregation of research topics, designs, methods, and methodologies-is threatened by the haste to adopt ever-new technologies. Through "slowest" practice, we can begin to understand, first, how salvaged methodologies might transform current practices and, second, how human capacities are limited, channeled, and lost in the race to innovate. Through practicing and developing material methodology, researchers can reshape dominant theories of modernity, because how we make knowledge is critical for fashioning alternative pasts, presents, and futures.

In Oceania, Papua New Guinea (PNG) appears large in the consciousness of exploring social life through the notion of sociality. Scholarship within the Melanesian region employs sociality to interrogate forms of social life and the different ways research methods account for the understanding of interactions between individuals and communities. Yet for the three PNG authors this assumed coherency between epistemes and method highlighted specific conceptual challenges for us as researchers and participants. We identified with two conceptual notions: “pasin” and “luksave” as distinct Austronesian language ideas derived from Tok Pisin—a creolisation of English utilized as a lingua franca throughout the country. We explored the development of pasin and luksave and the ways the conceptual claims served a dual function of developing a methodological and epistemic pathway toward an ethical assurance of meaningful relationality. We extend on current understanding in two ways. Firstly employing the methodology of story as critique of research assumptions and secondly, extend on the process of story work to suggest storying as a novel but relatable research methodology. Storying such research experiences as both method and epistemic accountability, guided our responsibility toward the relationships we hold to people, community and knowledge. Pasin and luksave embed an emancipatory and de-colonial intent through the guise of oral stories. These intentions in our scholarship fostered a form of coherent expressions of research claim and method assumption and also raised questions for us regarding what decolonizing Papua New Guinea ought to consider. Our paper also highlights a reformulation of the different ways research considers Oceania in particular Melanesia and the Papua New Guinean research context.

If the settler never came and the (Australian) continent developed herself, what kinds of conversations would we consider? Perhaps, we would highlight the fact that the Country and Island landscape did not have an estimated number of languages but significantly more than the speculated 250 (or “over 300”, or “hundreds of”) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages across the island and continental landscape. It would be a given continuance that every year across the Country, and not just 2019 declared by the United Nations General assembly, as the year to celebrate the Indigenous languages. Perhaps the ways we define, discuss and distinguish these numerous, living languages would be very different from our current forensic approaches.

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