Environmental and Cultural Anthropologist.

Jamon Halvaksz

I am an academic anthropologist by training, a research and teaching professor by profession, and an activist at heart.   As an environmental and economic anthropologist, I am especially drawn to context of development and change where competing values of nature and resource management practices are at play.  Such occasions afford us the opportunity to both engage theoretical debates within anthropology and address issues of great importance to the affected communities.  I believe that ethnographic understandings of what is at stake can inform both policy and intellectual debates that are central to social and environmental sciences, and the lives of the people with whom we work.

While grounded in a commitment to long-term fieldwork among Biangai speakers along the Upper Bulolo River of Papua New Guinea, my research focuses on the historical and contemporary politics of nature in a context of competing resource management regimes.  My work thus far is directed toward interventions in contemporary theory and practice highlighting 1) indigenous ideas of place and development and 2) the neoliberal practices of extraction.  I am especially interested in the impact of climate change on extractive industries and rural-urban interrelationships.

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Link to my current Academic CV

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Selected Publications

Halvaksz, Jamon and Joshua Bell, eds. 2024. Naturalist Histories: Making Nature, Knowledge, and People in Oceania. HonoluluL University of Hawaii Press. (March 2024)

Halvaksz, Jamon. 2021. ‘Environmental Anthropology.’ In, The Sage Handbook of Cultural Anthropology. L. Pedersen and L. Clingett (eds.). Sage Publishing.

Halvaksz, Jamon. 2020. Gardens of Gold: Place-Making in Papua New Guinea. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 

 Halvaksz, Jamon. 2015 ‘Forests of Gold: From Mining to Logging (and Back Again).’ In, Forests of Oceania: Environmental Histories, Present Concerns and Future Possibilities. J. Bell, P. West, and C. Filer (eds). Australian National University Press.

Public Presentation on Youtube

Superheroes as Supermyths is a presentation given at the San Antonio Museum of Art on August 12, 2022 based upon my class The Anthropology of Superheroes