Weaving Biocultural Worlds: Embodied Collaboration and Revitalization in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea
American Anthropologist / The American Anthropologist
Published online on August 04, 2026
Abstract
["American Anthropologist, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis article theorizes weaving as an epistemological orientation and methodological practice for collaborative anthropology and Indigenous‐led conservation. Based on nearly two decades of partnership in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, between an Indigenous fisheries scientist and a settler anthropologist, we examine how biocultural revitalization is produced through embodied relational labor rather than technocratic governance. Focusing on the revitalization of Vala, an ancestral socio‐spiritual marine practice, alongside stone fish traps, community schools, and biocultural protocols, we argue that Indigenous conservation constitutes a form of sovereignty grounded in kinship, ritual authority, and multispecies relations. Weaving, we suggest, is not merely metaphorical but analytic: It names the labor through which knowledge, power, accountability, and care are interlaced over time, including moments of friction, unraveling, and repair. This perspective challenges dominant models of coproduction that presume consensus, scalability, or extractive research design. Instead, we conceptualize collaboration as kin making and ethical world building within landscapes shaped by colonial dispossession, environmental precarity, and legal pluralism. The article contributes to debates in political ecology, the anthropology of knowledge, and decolonial methodology by demonstrating how biocultural futures are not implemented but woven through enduring relations with land, sea, and ancestors.\n"]