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Lastly, I will analyze ethnographic data on mobile phone use in one peri-urban household. Next, I discuss attitudes about mobile phones expressed by peri-urban Murik that concern the legitimacy of the nation-state. I will then introduce the ethnographic setting, the city of Wewak, its peri-urban communities and a particular ethnic or tribal group, who call themselves Murik, that I will use as my exemplar in this article. Now, I want to argue that some of the most important contradictions of the postcolonial condition in peri-urban png adhere to mobile phones and mobile telephony, contradictions that call the legitimacy of the nation-state into question.ģI first discuss attitudes, positive and negative, that Papua New Guineans hold about their nation-state, by way of setting a broader framework for my ensuing discussion of mobile phones.
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That is, I develop a domestication thesis introduced in an earlier paper on mobile phones (Lipset 2013) in which I argued that while mobile telephony has enabled elements classically associated with modern personhood, such as space-time compression and the subject-centered voice, it has also enabled kinship solidarity and conflict expressed in pre-existing idioms and values. Meanwhile, as they do so, they make calls for legitimate purposes, purposes that help them attain particularistic goals and assert particularistic values, both old and new.ĢInstead of asking about the extent to which mobile phones transform society in this corner of the developing world by making it modern, or instead of focusing on how they are contributing to progress in any number of domains of social life, which is the orientation of a great deal of the research that has been done on the introduction of new social technology (Rashid and Elder, 2009: 2-3), this article explores what mobile phones reveals about the problem of legitimacy in a segment of peri-urban society in png. If the Habermasian “public sphere” pitted the voices of European society against the state, in png, the citizenry discuss the uses to which mobile phones are put not to only criticize the legitimacy of their postcolonial state, but also to complain about the moral failings of the nation. 2 That is to say, the notion of “public” is not sharply differentiated either from the state or the private domain. 1 In this article, I want to suggest that attitudes about and uses of mobile phones in urban Papua New Guinea ( png ) may be construed as a kind of a public sphere, albeit one whose moral space and discourse is characteristically Melanesian. In this era, unofficial, middle-class voices, in criticism of the failures and shortcomings of state authority, began to assert and advocate “public opinion” by which they sought to compel political change. 2 See Myerson 2001, on Heidegger, Habermas and mobile phones.ġ Habermas (1991) argued that a “bourgeois public sphere” emerged along with the rise of “network institutions” like newspapers, town squares and coffeehouses in early, modern cities in Britain and France.1 Habermas went on to note that the critical capacity of the “public sphere” subsequently deteriorate (.).