Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Dedication -- Series Editor Preface -- Preface -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1: Introduction: Masculinity, Modernity, Papua New Guinea -- Masculinities -- Modernities -- Alienation -- Dialogism -- Masculine Alienation in Papua New Guinea -- Masculine Alienation Among the Murik -- The Chapters -- Notes -- Part I: Dialogics of Masculine Alienation -- Chapter 2: Desire in Young Men's Courtship Stories -- Love and Modernity? -- Two Chronotopes of Love -- Marriage in Murik Society -- Desire in the Chronotope of Homeric Courtship -- "I Met Her Myself" -- "She Had Nothing" -- "I Didn't Know the Girl" -- Modernity Without Romance -- Notes -- Chapter 3: Marijuana, Youth and Society -- Tobacco, Good and Bad -- Traffic -- Consumption Discourse -- Consumption Discourse in a Case of Domestic Violence -- Marijuana and the Postcolonial State -- Conclusion: Marijuana, Modernity and Alienation -- Notes -- Chapter 4: Mobile Telephony in a Peri-urban Setting -- Mobile Telephones in Modern PNG -- Alienation in a Peri-urban Modernity -- Remind Him of the Almonds! -- Mobile Phones and Masculine Alienation -- "What's Up?": Mobile Phones and the Modern Subject -- Conclusion: Mobile Telephones as Modernity in PNG -- Notes -- Part II: In the Time and Space of the Other -- Chapter 5: Folk Theater and the Signifier -- A Murik Pygmalion -- The Lacanian Signifier -- Pygmalion's Statue, the Murik Steersman and the Lacanian Signifier -- The Murik Phallus, A Brief History -- Illusions in a Lacanian Mirror -- Who was the author of Woyon's Mother? -- A Theater of Alienation -- Pygmalion's Desire in the Postcolonial Moment -- Notes -- Chapter 6: Money and Other Signifiers -- Mobility and Moral Order -- The Postcolonial Gaingiin Society -- "The Snake Caught Me!" -- A Coconut Taboo -- The Metaphor of Money -- Yabar and Other Signifiers of Murik Modernity -- Notes.

This was the first modern ethnography of the Murik, a relatively large and important community settled on the Sepik River estuary in Papua New Guinea, and the only book of a non-Western culture drawing on the conceptual framework of the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Murik men, who exercise political power, conceptualize women as the source of nurture, generosity and love. This conceptualization creates for men a kind of existential problem, and their claim to sustain and reproduce society requires them to appropriate the nurturant qualities of women. So they must, in some sense, model certain aspects of themselves after women. A 'maternal schema' or poetics of the female body', therefore underlines the sociocultural patterns of these societies. This schema expresses itself in a range of societal domains: in kinship relations, life-cycle rituals, the men's cults, and in disputes and processes of conflict resolution. The issues discussed tie in with some of the major contemporary debates in the social sciences: the relationship between ideas of male and female power