This book analyses the dual alienations of a coastal group rural men, the Murik of Papua New Guinea. David Lipset argues that Murik men engage in a Bakhtinian dialogue: voicing their alienation from both their own, indigenous masculinity, as well as from the postcolonial modernity in which they find themselves adrift. Lipset analyses young mens elusive expressions of desire in courtship narratives, marijuana discourse, and mobile phone usein which generational tensions play out together with their disaffection from the state. He also borrows from Lacanian psychoanalysis in discussing how mens dialogue of dual alienation appears in folk theater, in material substitutionsmost notably, in the replacement of outrigger canoes by fiberglass boatsas well as in rising sea-levels, and the looming possibility of resettlement.
1. Introduction: Modernity, Masculinity, Papua New Guinea.- 2. Desire in
Young Mens Courtship Stories.- 3. Marijuana, Youth, and Society.- 4. Mobile
Telephony in a Peri-urban Setting.- 5. Folk Theater and the Signifier.-
6.
Money and other Signifiers.- 7. In the Anthropocene.- Afterword: Dual
Alienation in other Pacific Modernities.
David Lipset is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA. He has done long-term fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. His previous books include Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist and Mangrove Man: Dialogics of Culture in the Sepik Estuary.