| Sumario: | Once "unmistakably remote even by Papua New Guinea standards" (Weiner 2002:33), Jimmy described how Chevron Niugini's discovery of oil west of Lake Kutubu in 1989 had occasioned a significant change for the Foi and their southwest neighbours, the Fasu: 'everything suddenly became defined in terms of whether a local clan was or was not a "landowner" within the petroleum development license area (PDL-2)' ( I ibid i .:34). This love of language was Jimmy's intellectual passion too, developing an "anthropology of language" (in preference to "linguistic anthropology" [Weiner 1995:33]), beginning with highly original ethnographic expositions of Foi poetry in I The Empty Place i (1991; see also Weiner and Niles 2015). Jimmy's avowed objective in this I oeuvre i was to build "social literacy" in his readership and in a manner that reflected the primacy of anthropology as a clarifying lens (see Hitchcock and Weiner 2014; Weiner 2000, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2008, 2011; Weiner and Goldman 2009). Weiner's emotional engagement with the Foi is apparent in his description of their sung poetry and the paths and places (Weiner 1991), flows and deliberate interruptions (Weiner 1988:9), that their myth and sung poetry reflect. A CONJUNCTURAL FIELD In a 2002 paper, Jimmy discussed how his position in relation to his long-term Papua New Guinea fieldwork had begun to change, noting that 'external changes in the world of one's host configures one's perceptions and forces one into these different subject and analytic positions' (Weiner 2002:33).
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