Frederick K. Errington

This project focuses on the controversial flow of lamb flaps (sheep belly) from New Zealand and Australia to Papua New Guinea (where they are consumed) and Fiji (where they are banned). This trade as an embodiment of first- and third-world differences. In the third-world contexts of weak and poor Melanesian countries many citizens/consumers are likely to be accurately viewed as appropriate and often willing targets by purveyors of what the first world views as inferior. Moreover, in completing an ethnographically grounded study of fatty meat—a sort of gastrology—I trace a commodity chain so as to address one of the more significant contemporary problems in social theory, namely the linkage of transnational studies with studies of local places.