Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea

by Robert J. Foster

Overview

"Foster shows us how seemingly banal activities like making a phone call, chewing betel nut, watching a Coke commercial may give important insights into the ways in which the nation is constructed, materialized or contested."—Orvar Löfgren, author of On Holiday: A History of Vacationing

Why, in the current era of globalization, does nationality remain an important dimension of personal and collective identities? In Materializing the Nation, Robert J. Foster argues that the contested process of nation making in Papua New Guinea unfolds not only through organized politics but also through mundane engagements with commodities and mass media. He offers a thoughtful critique of recent approaches to nationalism and consumption and an ethnographic perspective on constructs of the nation found in official policy documents, letters to the editor, school textbooks, song lyrics, advertisements, and other materials. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the links among nationalism, consumption, and media, in Melanesia and elsewhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253013613
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	10/24/2002
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Robert J. Foster is Professor of Anthropology and Mercer Brugler Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Rochester. He is author of Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia and Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea and editor of Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia.

Read an Excerpt

Materializing the Nation

Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea

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By Robert J. Foster

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2002 Robert J. Foster
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34147-1

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CHAPTER 1

Take Care of Public Telephones Moral Education and Nation-State Formation

INTRODUCTION: MORAL EDUCATION AND NATION-STATE FORMATION

The title of this chapter came to me in the mail. It is one of several exhortations that served as cancellation marks on the envelopes of letters that I received from Papua New Guinea (PNG) during the late 1980s. Here are some of the others: Address Mail to Private Box No.—It Expedites Delivery; Good Scouts Make Better Men; Mekim Pren Wantaim Lo ("Law is Your Friend" in Tok Pisin); and Make National Law Week Work. The last two of these messages refer to what has become an annual occurrence in PNG, the proclamation and performance of National Law Week. Other messages circulated as cancellation marks during the initial National Law Week in 1984 included these: Help Maintain Law and Order; National Law Week is for Everyone; and National Law Week is for You. On the cover of the record of events and activities published the following year by the National Law Week Committee (Wallace 1985), there is a drawing of an envelope addressed to "All the people of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea"; the envelope's cancellation mark asserts: Your Family Needs Law and Order.

The admonitions issued by the Post and Telecommunications Corporation were only one element in a wide array of undertakings sponsored by the National Law Week Committee, a group composed of members of parliament, government officials, and university faculty. Commemorative postage stamps were planned; advertisements were taken out in the national daily newspaper and a jingle was composed for radio; public lectures and seminars were held at the main campus of the University of Papua New Guinea as well as at selected centers for extension studies; bumper stickers and street banners were distributed. Much of the committee's effort was concentrated on the captive population of school students in both urban and rural areas, upon whom were visited a variety of magistrates, legal officers, and law enforcement representatives, as well as a traveling theater group. Students from four national high schools publicly debated topics such as "In Papua New Guinea, there is too much law and too little order." In addition, grade school students in several provinces were enlisted in poster and essay competitions. Detainees at several corrective institutions also participated in the essay competition.

All of this coordinated activity unfolded amid proliferating newspaper accounts of increased violent crime in the national capital of Port Moresby, where the gang rape of a New Zealand woman and her daughter in October 1984 sparked mass protests of outrage. Reports of resurgent tribal fighting in the Highlands and the appearance of two major studies of the government's policy on law and order also contributed to the perception—shared by prominent politicians and ordinary residents—of rampant lawlessness and social disorder. Public pressure on the government continued to build at home and from abroad into 1985, the tenth anniversary of PNG's independence. In response to unabated concern over violent crime, the government declared a state of emergency in the National Capital District from 17 June to 4 November. The emergency provisions extended police powers; allowed the use of military personnel in policing; prohibited demonstrations; and imposed a curfew (see Morauta 1986a for details and discussion).

The purpose of National Law Week 1984 was expressed by Paias Wingti (quoted in Wallace 1985:1), then deputy prime minister and a patron of National Law Week, in a statement to the national parliament:

Our principal aim is to bring to grass root levels a greater understanding of "what the law is all about." For proper maintenance of law and order in the country, it is very important that the people are aware of their legal rights, their legal obligations to society, and that they obey and abide by the laws of the land.

In other words, the main thrust of our committee is to educate the people of this nation about what law and order can do for them providing they, the people, see "the law," as our slogan so clearly states, "as their friend."

In speaking so, Wingti did no more than highlight the agency of the state in a project of moral regulation, of rendering natural and taken for granted a set of particular and historical premises about social life (Corrigan and Sayer 1985:4). Durkheim's characterization of the state as "the organ of moral discipline" is relevant here (cited in Corrigan and Sayer 1985:5). For Durkheim, the state consists in "a group of individuals sui generis, within which representations and acts of volition involving the collectivity are worked out" (Giddens 1986:40). That is, the state produces and disseminates, in relatively self- conscious fashion, collective representations—images and ideals of the collectivity and of the persons who comprise the collectivity. Education, as Wingti noted, is the practical means by which the state promotes awareness ("a greater understanding") of the collective ideas and sentiments it defines.

The original National Law Week was very much an attempt to educate people into a well-defined sense of collective and personal identity—indeed, to constitute these identities. Consider the twin slogans: National Law Week is for Everyone/National Law Week is for You. To accept these claims is to accept both that there is an "everyone," and that "you" are one of the everyones; the nation is defined at the same time as one is defined as a national citizen. The totality of which one is a member and one's identity as an individual imply each other. Thus, the numerous competitions and contests mounted during National Law Week functioned much like Foucault's examination to individualize and differentiate student-citizens while at the same time placing them within a whole field of contenders. In this way, too, the campaign for National Law Week illustrates well the coextensiveness of moral regulation and nation-state formation (Corrigan and Sayer 1985); for the successful naturalization of an individual's acquiescence in the "laws of the land" marks not only the effectiveness of state control, but also the internalization of a definite representation of one's self and one's relation to other selves. The apparent goal of the National Law Week Committee was to communicate and inculcate these representations as much as to secure outward compliance with the law.

In this chapter, I identify two of the ways in which the national citizen—and by implication, the nation—were created in and through the discourse of National Law Week. First, I examine campaign materials that formulate the "rights and obligations" of individuals toward each other. Second, I examine campaign materials that present ideals of socially approved behavior or propriety. My goal is to disclose how these discursive products import a particular definition of personhood into an alien social context and how different agents variously construe this importation in terms of an encounter between tradition and modernity. By exploring one exemplary discussion of betel nut chewing, I outline some of the paradoxes that such contested constructions pose for the state in regulating multivalent collective representations and practices. My goal in this regard is to demonstrate how the creation of a national citizen inevitably appeals to prevailing international definitions of civility.

RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS: INDIVIDUALS WITHIN THE COLLECTIVE INDIVIDUAL

One of the most pronounced themes of the 1984 National Law Week concerned respect for the law or "Obligations of Citizens and Others as Regards Law," the title of a public lecture presented by then ombudswoman Jean Kekedo. In her talk, Kekedo (quoted in Wallace 1985:13) urged that historic legal sensibilities, such as respect for leadership and proper legal authority, be used as the basis for developing similar sensibilities in changed circumstances:

We can use [these sensibilities] to also develop an appreciation of the obligations the citizen has in the modern community, and in the kind of democratic and ordered society we live in. We must end the remoteness of law from the people.

In other words, Kekedo stressed the continuity between the traditional and modern community.

By contrast, the remarks of then minister for justice, A. L. Bais, in his address on "What Benefits Are Gained by Proper Respect for the Law?", suggested that traditional sensibilities posed an obstacle to the rule of modern law: "They [children] are taught to obey customs of a traditional society but they are not taught to obey laws of the land." Bais argued that this deficiency in domestic education stemmed from the limited social applicability of traditional custom:

"They [children] are taught to respect the rights of their kinsmen but they are not taught to obey laws of the land...." Parents with strong traditional backgrounds did not teach the children that they should not steal from or assault strangers, he said. (Post-Courier, 7 September 1984)

In other words, Bais claimed that in order to become law-abiding citizens, children must be taught to interact with other people—stranger-citizens—in accordance with principles defined in terms other than those of kinship. What are these principles?

Elsewhere in his lecture, Bais claimed that democracy was the model chosen for the modernization of PNG because "it gives people the greatest amount of freedom for the development of individuals." The constitution of PNG, according to Bais, explicitly set out the rights and freedoms of individuals:

Legally there is no country in the world in which citizens and non-citizens have more safeguards to ensure that their freedoms are not curtailed: freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom from improper search and improper arrest and freedom from improper imprisonment or detention.

Other participants in National Law Week spoke of such freedoms as "fundamental rights" or "human rights," rights vested in all individuals by virtue of their humanity. Taken together, these rights and freedoms defined for one participant the liberty referred to by John E Kennedy in a statement used as part of a full-page newspaper ad for National Law Week: "Observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny."

The principles necessary to guide social interaction in the modern world therefore involve recognition of universal rights and obligations that attach to all individuals. In this sense, then, the modern world consists of a population of individuals essentially alike in their humanity, whereas the traditional world consists of a population of persons differentiated with regard to contingent local criteria such as kinship. What is the relationship between this conception of modern individuals and nation-state formation, especially given the manifest contradiction between the universalism of modern individualism and the sometimes strident particularism of nationalism?

Richard Handler (1988:7), following Dumont, has argued that ideologies of nationalism and individualism share the same "epistemology of 'entivity,'" the presupposition that entities can be bounded by attributes or characteristics that each "possesses." That is, both ideologies presuppose the existence of entities—individuals or nations—distinguishable by their uniquely possessed characteristics. Nationalism, from this perspective, posits the nation as a collective individual, an individuated being rather than a differentiated constituent of some encompassing order. The nation, in turn, is composed of similar individuated beings related to each other by their likeness, their shared possession of some certain characteristic or attribute. Each and every individual (an American) thus replicates the collective individual (America).

Whether or not these presuppositions are definitive and necessary features of nationalism and nationalist ideology is not my concern here (see Kapferer 1988). Rather, I want only to point out their operation, however muted, in the discursive context of National Law Week. At the same time that the National Law Week supporters issued calls for the recognition of rights common to all human beings, they emphasized the role of the national constitution and national law as the safeguard of these rights. In other words, the nation was constructed as a collection of individuals each of whose basic humanity is protected by a commonly held constitution or law. This common possession at once defines the nation as a community and distinguishes it from other national communities that possess other constitutions and laws. Indeed, as Bais's remarks show, nations can be compared with regard to the degree that their laws safeguard basic human rights. Accordingly, there is no contradiction between national law and human rights; on the contrary, the former is the guarantor of the latter.

NO SPITTING: PROPRIETY AND RESPECTABILITY

The definition of the nation as a collection of individuated beings with basic rights underpins certain diagnoses of the law and order problem in PNG as a problem of "uncaring attitudes." Consider this newspaper account of Paias Wingti's speech opening National Law Week in Port Moresby (Post-Courier, 11 September 1984):

There was an atmosphere of disquiet in the society because of the "lack of consideration for one's fellow man."

There was a natural tendency for people to throw bottles out of moving vehicles, damage trees, and public property, leave betelnut stains on the streets, and to light fires without thinking or caring, Mr. Wingti said.

Such an [sic] anti-social behavior was "seemingly endless."

"Such thoughtless behavior was so widespread that it could be called an epidemic of the uncaring mind," Mr. Wingti said.

Wingti went on to characterize this "epidemic" as the product of rapid social change and to attribute it to a movement away from the discipline of traditional societies. The problem here is not the inappropriateness of traditional values, as Minister for Justice Bais would have it, but rather the erosion of traditional values ("discipline") in the face of modernization. Nonetheless, the practical result is identical: people were incapable of recognizing their "fellow man" and thus interacting on the basis of fellowship. Consequently, Wingti argued, there was a need for teaching young people in particular to change their "uncaring attitudes."

Quite clearly, part of the mission of National Law Week was directed toward this task of moral education, of educating the public to an ideal of generalized caring. Among the advertisements taken out in the national daily newspaper (Post-Courier) in connection with the National Law Awareness Campaign were a series of notices informing readers of offenses punishable by fine. Many of these notices concerned traffic violations:

It Is an Offence to Exceed the Speed Limit, 50 kph in Towns or 65 kph Outside Towns.

But others specifically concerned the sort of antisocial behavior identified by Wingti:

It Is an Offence to Lean Out of the Car to Spit on the Road.

This latter message referred to the practice of staining the streets red with expectorated betel nut juice. Along with public drinking, such spitting and littering typify the sort of behavior indicative of disrespect for one's fellow citizen. Thus the 4 January 1986 issue of the weekly Times of Papua New Guinea contained two full-page-size handbills placed by the National Capital District Interim Commission. While one of the posters queried "Drinking in Public Places?", the other pointedly asked "Are You a Litter Bug?" "Litter bug" was defined as

one of those uncaring, untidy and bad mannered people who throw litter or spit betelnut on to the streets and not in a proper dustbin or litter bin.... Nobody likes litter bugs.

The discourse of basic individual rights slides easily into the discourse of propriety and socially acceptable behavior. "Respect for the laws of the country" and "respect for one's fellow citizens" become entangled in a discussion of respectability in general. To this extent, state agency in projects such as National Law Week not only communicates representations of generic human individuals, but also cultivates a whole set of behavioral expectations about how such individuals ought to act toward ("care for") each other; in short, a whole set of manners. State activity perforce functions to promote moral discipline by licensing "the range of what are the proper ways of public performance" (Corrigan 1981:327). That is, such state activity seeks to form national citizens by securing conformity to the permissible parameters of individual identity, parameters that define normal morality.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Materializing the Nation by Robert J. Foster. Copyright © 2002 Robert J. Foster. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Preliminary Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Everyday Nation Making: The Case of Papua New Guinea
1. Take Care of Public Telephones: Moral Education and Nation-State Formation
2. Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money: Finance and Fetishism in Melanesia
3. Print Advertisements and Nation Making
4. Commercial Mass Media: Notes on Agency, Bodies, and Commodity Consumption
5. The Commercial Construction of 'New' Nations
6. News of the World: Millenarian Christianity and the Olympic Torch Relay
7. Globalization: A Soft Drink Perspective
Notes
References
Index