We are playing football: seeing the game on Panapompom, PNG

This article is about football, played by men from Panapompom in Papua New Guinea’s Milne Bayprovince. Football is problematic not because it is culturally appropriated or modified, but ratherbecause Panapompom desired accurately to reproduce the appearance of the international game. Assuch it questions conventional frames of reference. An interpretation in terms of culture obscuresPanapompom interests in football: its globally recognizable character. It mattered profoundly thatPanapompom people playedfootball. Yet framing football as a universal sporting institution is equallyinadequate, erasing the specific political project that was embedded in the game. Displacing theinterpretative framings, I argue that football itself provides a context in which Panapompom peoplecan judge themselves in relation to others, who are defined in terms of colonial and postcolonialdiscourses on ‘development’. Taking football as a contextualizing image, Panapompom peopleappear in distinctive ways in the field of relationships that it defines