Hope on remand

This article looks at life on remand in a Papua New Guinean prison. It examines the hopefulness of those inmates waiting for court and legal judgment. Their situation is explored through an engagement with the analysis offered by the New Melanesian Ethnography and the emergent field of hope studies. In particular, attention falls on the concept of hope as a method of knowledge and mode of action. The argument is elaborated and redefined by relocating the idiom of hopeful moments in the terrains of dreaming and gambling, a common move among remand prisoners. The article is meant as a contribution to legal anthropology, the anthropology of knowledge, and the ethnography of Melanesia.