This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of ‘making great men.’ Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being ‘last place’ (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being ‘the greatest people’ of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to ‘be great’ reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a ‘suffering slot’, the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship.

中文翻译：

---

使巴鲁亚人再次伟大：从荣耀的伟人到现代受苦的人？

本文探讨了巴布亚新几内亚的原型“伟人”人民Baruya现在享有的声望和提倡的声誉，我最近是在Maurice Godelier的先前工作之后学习的。在罗宾斯和奥尔特纳（Robbins and Ortner）对人类学家对“遭受苦难的人”进行记录和移情的批评中，我建议“落伍”和“被遗忘”是Baruya社会生活的重要组成部分，它重新诠释了“造就伟人”的先前方式。 ' 巴鲁亚对物质和制度现代性的接触仍然非常有限。成为“最后的地方”的当地言论（拉斯普莱斯）与Baruya成为该地区“最伟大的人民”的假设和主张同时存在并不一致。Baruya无法通过战士，萨满教，食火锅狩猎和制盐等方式来复兴培养伟人的传统环境，而是转向了他们无法完全追求自己的男性气质和威望的现代性，这自相矛盾的是，现在它也属于开放领域女人。渴望与辉煌的过去建立连续性并离开它，Baruya的地方现代性本身限制了他们新塑造的对声望的渴望，并在此过程中极大地改变了性别关系。尽管具体不可能实现“伟大”，这增强了巴鲁亚关于忍受我们称之为“痛苦之隙”的印象，更大的问题是混凝土如何随着时间的流逝沉入社会文化的变化。对现代的追求与其更大的失败之间存在着紧张关系，从而导致了这一过程，从而促使人们重新唤起了道德，灵性乃至最终是高贵的长期价值观。