DrNeil Maclean

My research with the Maring of the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea has focused on themes of the local relationship to the cash economy, the post-colonial nation state, and a developing, if contradiction ridden, national cultural field. Within this field I have written specifically on gambling, money, markets, education, the politics of space and the mimetic dynamics of the colonial encounter, and local understandings of development. A sustained engagement with critical theory has informed these substantive concerns.

More recently I have begun working on anthropological perspectives on autism and on those diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Issues include:

• the implications of ethnographic and autoethnographic perspectives on a field empirically dominated by the experimental and the clinical;
• autism as a site of debate about empathy, imagination and play;
• disability and personhood;
• adult life-histories.

Engagement with the debates about empathy and imagination has also brought me back to the more general debates about the nature of participant observation as a method.