This article draws on a turn of events in the speaker’s long association with Papua New Guinea in the Pacific. Pacific Island academics have made it clear that anthropologists should be explicit about ‘knowledge exchange’. Knowledge transfers take innumerable forms; in the case of the anthropologist, however, it often seems that expert knowledge is more taken than given. Thinking comparatively about academic practice, is there any future for potential ‘exchanges’ as forms of interdisciplinarity, say, or of argument between points of view? The article takes the concept of an academic argument to ask about its counterparts in non-academic milieux of knowledge-making in one part of the Pacific.

本文基于演讲者与太平洋巴布亚新几内亚的长期联系中发生的事件。太平洋岛上的学者已经明确指出，人类学家应该对“知识交流”明确。知识转移采取无数形式；但是，就人类学家而言，专家知识似乎往往比给出的知识要多。通过对学术实践的比较思考，是否存在潜在的“交流”，例如跨学科形式或观点之间的争论？本文采用学术论证的概念，询问太平洋地区一部分非学术知识创造环境中的对应论点。