My current research - funded by a postdoctoral grant from the Danish Council of Independent Research (FKK) - is to study cultural change in Papua New Guinea (Melanesia) by studying counting practices in both the census and in national elections. The exercise of power of the modern state counts people as individuals, which is expressed in these two forms of events. As it is, there is little research about how this way of counting has influenced cultural systems of indigenous populations, where the state is a colonial introduction. Neither is there research about how indigenous systems of counting and categorisation affect the way, censuses or democratic elections are carried out. It is expected that the events will show the clash of conflicting forms of counting of people and social relations, which will help me understand cultural change, and the way state institutions work under different cultural conditions. Thus, these events will provide a privileged viewpoint to understand cultural change, where the systems of the modern state are confronted by indigenous forms of counting.

This research builds on my PhD thesis, which investigated perceptions of the state in Papua New Guinea. As a globalised political system, people everywhere have been forced to relate to the state in one way or the other. In Papua New Guinea it builds on a colonial administration that has introduced new arenas for competition, new resources and new political positions. The elected politicians and the appointed officials of the state practice their obligations and privileges in ways that respond on the one hand to the expectations of their constituencies and the village politics of their homes. On the other hand, they are also committed to wider political arenas and manage the state based both on experience from their own social upbringing and their education.

Concretely I have followed the changes in claims to legitimacy by political leaders - both elected, bureaucratically appointed and those with inherited positions. A key event has been the parliamentary election in 2007. This allowed me to investigate people's direct participation in the practices laid out by the state, what counted to them as political legitimacy, and what role they imagined the state to play in their lives.