THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, 2006, 17(1), 47-69 The Articulation of Indigenous and Exogenous Orders in Highland New Guinea and Beyond Alan Rumsey Anthropology, RSPAS, Australian National University One of the leading challenges for contemporary anthropology is to try to contribute to an understanding of the interaction between indigenous and exogenous socio- cultural orders, especially at the frontiers of globalisation. Here I review three recent attempts to do so: (1) a model of structural transformation as developed by Marshall Sahlins; (2) a model of articulation as developed by James Clifford; (3) a model of ‘adoption’ proposed by Joel Robbins. As a test case for these models, I consider them in relation to some recent developments in local segmentary politics and verbal art in the Ku Waru region of Highland New Guinea. I show that all three models are in certain respects inadequate for understanding those developments, and offer some proposals as to what kinds of theory might be more adequate to the task. Introduction There is wide agreement nowadays that a basic requirement for anthropology is to be able to contribute to an understanding of what goes on at the interface between indigenous and exogenous socio-cultural orders, especially at the frontiers of globalisation and capitalist expansion (Moore 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1998; Englund and Leach 2000). Here I will discuss three recent attempts by anthropologists to develop more-or-less general models along those lines: first a model of transformation as developed by Marshall Sahlins in his work on structural history; second a model of articulation as developed by James Clifford out of the work of Stuart Hall; and third a model of ‘adoption’ proposed by Joel Robbins on the basis of his intensive field study of the taking-up and practice of Christianity by the Urapmin people of the Mountain Ok region of Papua New Guinea (PNG). As a kind of test case for these models I will then consider them in relation to some recent developments in local segmentary politics and verbal art in the Ku Waru region of PNG where I have done fieldwork over the past 25 years. I will show that all three of these models, while in some ways useful, are in certain respects inadequate for understanding those developments. I will then offer some proposals as to what kinds of theory might be more adequate to the task. Sahlins on structural transformation and ‘humiliation’ Marshall Sahlins is of course well known to anthropologists for, among other things, his work on what he calls ‘structural history’. Following upon his structuralist-inspired work in the 1970s on cultures as systems of categories whose values are determined by system-