Mobail: Moral Ambivalence and the Domestication of Mobile Telephones in Peri-Urban Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Preliminary ethnographic data about the evaluation and use of mobile phones by low-income, peri-urban Papua New Guineans are analysed. These data do not affirm a modernist narrative that privileges discontinuity, dislocation and progress. They do not show a reduction of collective forms of sociality and agency in favor of ego-centric networks that disembed space and time from localities, alleviate poverty, and so on. Mobile phones neither dissolve the old nor constitute the moral world anew. Instead, their use in and effects on Papua New Guinea appear to be more complicated. By enabling voices to communicate over increased space and time, they make the person both more and less part of society. That is to say, they are used to fulfill collectivist values in ways that separate self from other. One significant purpose for which they are used thus exemplifies pre-existing meanings of kinship in everyday life. They also elicit a new self-reflexive voice, as well as an ongoing critique of postcolonial society. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.