Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xviii, 253 pp. (Figure, map, B&W photos.) US$99.99, cloth. ISBN 978-3-319-51075-0.
In precolonial Murik cosmology, Yabar were powerful ancestor spirits capable of changing the environment and persons. Today, Yabar has become a vernacular term for a modernity “indifferent to race or cultural background” and part of a bureaucratic market economy in which people and environment are “subject to massive moral and technological transformations” (x). Lipset’s thesis is that such ideas as Yabar are part of a dialogue of masculine alienation from modernity and Murik culture, a dual alienation, and that masculinity was already an alienated subject position in the Murik archaic.
In his introduction, “Masculinity, Modernity, Papua New Guinea,” Lipset takes exception to R.W. Connell’s “hegemonic models” framework which, while recognizing that masculine discourse and practices may be plural in the global margins of modernity, assigns hegemonic masculinity to those in charge of the global order and overlooks the fact that masculinity can be a subject of its own signification and not only an object of global discourse (“Globalization, Imperialism, and Masculinities,” in Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, eds. Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and R.W. Connell, Sage, 2005, 90–112). Lipset does not at this point acknowledge a literature that has long shown Papua New Guineans making or attempting to make modernity their own. Jarringly, he asserts that inequality, “while obviously important in Latin America and elsewhere” (2), does not exhaust what it means to be a man and cites works on the anthropology of masculinities in Japan and Uganda to make his point. It is only after outlining his approaches to the ethnography of postcolonial modernities (parochial, diverse, and shifting modernities as well as universalizing), alienation (both generative and debilitating), and dialogism (a Bakhtinian focus on dialogue in which non-state modes of expression … challenge the power and values of authority), that Lipset looks at masculine alienation in Papua New Guinea. After declaring that the “literature of modernity in PNG,” with rare exception, does not put masculine alienation at the centre of analysis, he references works on PNG men expressing their masculinities and challenging hegemonic forces.
The first part of Yabar focuses on the dialogics of Murik masculine alienation, with chapters on courtship, marijuana, and mobile phones. Drawing on courtship narratives, Lipset contrasts young men’s “Homeric” courtship with a modern romantic chronotype, demonstrating Murik men’s estrangement from modernity and their modernity without romance. Murik courtship and marriage have shifted little and are Homeric in the sense that just as the events and experiences Odysseus went through did not change him, the abstractions and subjectivity of modernity in PNG have not resulted in significant Murik individualism (33–34).
While modernity subtracts value from the Murik economy and does little to induce youth into its labour force, marijuana trafficking has introduced a morally anomalous good into Murik society. It is neither traditionally traded nor legal in the modern economy. Marijuana use has become “a category marker between male youth who are churchgoers and youth who aren’t” (66). It may stand for the estrangement of Murik youth from the two economies that comprise modernity in PNG (62). But the idea of a commodity that yields personal pleasure and a secular form of agency (performance enhancer) hints at an emerging modernist subject-centred voice, albeit an alienated one (75).
Chapter 4 looks at mobile phone use in a peri-urban setting. The adoption of mobile phones resembles courtship and marijuana in its double alienation and double-edged moral status: they are used by peri-urban Murik for culturally defined purposes at the same time as their use encourages individualism and mistrust in and of modernity (79). Calls enable kinship-based networks to micro-coordinate daily life (83), but also serve immoral purposes, enabling men and women to have mobile phone “friends” (85), thereby coming between husbands and wives and causing antagonism and mistrust in archaic relations as well as the nation-state that has freed their voices (96–97).
In the second half of Yabar, Lipset argues further that men are alienated from modernity and from archaic Murik culture. Adopting the Lacanian trope of the empty signifier, a phallus symbolic, Lipset analyzes a new piece of Murik folk theatre that has as its centrepiece the masked figure of a beautiful woman. While grade-taking in the Male Cult masking ceremonies once involved older cult members having intercourse with candidates’ wives as compensation, men began substituting money earned in the market economy. Lipset then turns to the Anthropocene and men’s dialogues about climate change and rising sea levels as yet another source of alienation and emasculation.
In his afterword, Lipset focuses on men’s dual alienation in other Pacific modernities. If I am disappointed, it is because I expected a fuller comparative approach between Lipset’s psychological perspectives and those of others studying masculinities in diverse settings, where exchange demands (e.g., inflated bride prices and—among Gende women—the expectation that they will repay the debts to achieve respect and, in some cases, the inequalities of extraction industries have harshly impacted men and women, old and young, and where what happens to men affects women and vice versa (as it does everywhere, of course). That Lipset would suggest, in his chapter on courtship, that the female arts students at the National Arts School in Port Moresby could, without consequence, retain their romantic ideas because they had no intention of returning home (32) ignores PNG realities where whether or not you are in town, your relatives and in-laws exact demands on you and in some cases contribute to the high rate of domestic violence among “elite” marriages.
Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi
Truman State University, Kirksville, USA