C u l t u r e , M i n d , a n d S o c i e t y Yabar The Alienations of Murik Men in a Papua New Guinea Modernity David Lipset Culture, Mind, and Society Series Editor Peter G. Stromberg Anthropology Department University of Tulsa Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA Aim of the Series The Society for Psychological Anthropology—a section of the American Anthropology Association—and Palgrave Macmillan are dedicated to publishing innovative research that illuminates the workings of the human mind within the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape thought, emotion, and experience. As anthropologists seek to bridge gaps between ideation and emotion or agency and structure and as psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical anthropologists search for ways to engage with cultural meaning and difference, this interdisciplinary terrain is more active than ever. Editorial Board Eileen Anderson-Fye, Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University Jennifer Cole, Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago Linda Garro, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles Daniel T. Linger, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz Rebecca Lester, Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis Tanya Luhrmann, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University Catherine Lutz, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Peggy Miller, Departments of Psychology and Speech Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Robert Paul, Department of Anthropology, Emory University Antonius C. G. M.Robben, Department of Anthropology, Utrecht University, Netherlands Bradd Shore, Department of Anthropology, Emory University Jason Throop, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles Carol Worthman, Department of Anthropology, Emory University More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14947 David Lipset Yabar The Alienations of Murik Men in a Papua New Guinea Modernity David Lipset University of Minnesota Twin Cities St Paul, Minnesota, USA Culture, Mind, and Society ISBN 978-3-319-51075-0 ISBN 978-3-319-51076-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51076-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930805 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Murik men’s carvings at a sale for tourists. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Diana, the huntress S e P erieS ditor reface Psychological anthropologists study a wide spectrum of human activity: child development, illness and healing, ritual and religion, personality and political and economic systems, just to name a few. In fact, as a dis- cipline that seeks to understand the interconnections between persons and culture, it would be difficult to come up with examples of human behavior that are outside the purview of psychological anthropology. Yet beneath this substantive diversity lies a common commitment. The prac- titioners of psychological anthropology seek to understand social activity in ways that are fitted to the mental and physical dimensions of human beings. Psychological anthropologists may focus on emotions or human biology, on language or art or dreams, but they rarely stray far from the attempt to understand the possibilities and the limitations on the ground of human persons. Professor David Lipset describes men of the Murik Lakes region of Papua New Guinea, who find themselves caught in a sort of cultural limbo, suspended between their older ways and the wider world of a mod- ern nation-state, a global economy and accelerating climate change. In particular, Dr. Lipset looks at the challenges of realizing masculinity in an environment in which neither precolonial culture nor modernity possesses an indisputable authority. In this cultural cacophony, men find themselves alienated not only from their social world but from their very selves. Yet— and in contrast to many studies of the march of modernity—Dr. Lipset does not depict his subjects as scrambling to adapt to a new hegemony. vii viii SERIES EDITOR PREFACE In rich detail, he describes a number of social realms characterized by a multiplicity of cultural possibilities. While these possibilities leave no comfortable resting place, at the same time they provide opportunities for expression, dialogue and humanity. Peter Stromberg P reface By way of introducing the topic of this book, I want to begin with a word about the meaning of its title and my relationship to it. As an American cul- tural and psychological anthropologist who is interested in various aspects of the relationship of tribal men to modernity, I have been doing fieldwork on this issue in Papua New Guinea (PNG) since I was a young man in the early 1980s. My research has primarily focused on men and masculinity among the Murik Lakes people, a rural society of coastal fisherfolk and traders who have been living with economic, religious and sociopoliti- cal change since early twentieth century. Now from what I have come to gather, the yabar were venerated and feared as their most powerful ances- tor-spirits in their precolonial Murik cosmology. Of all of the many ances- tors in that archaic world, the yabar were attributed the greatest capacity to change the environment and persons. For example, two of them trav- elled widely in the coastal region, presenting people with outrigger-c anoe technology, scattering mangrove propagules and leaving relics of their escapades along the coast. In Murik society even today, yabar-spirits use magic to make people terminally ill or just to cause a nagging cold. Today, many Murik call white people yabar goan and gnasen, the “sons and daughters of yabar-spirits.” I had always assumed that the extension of the term originated as a kind of a first-contact, millenarian association of Western wealth and agency with the ancestors of the kind that has been reported elsewhere in PNG and throughout the Pacific region. But upon occasion, I also heard rural Murik referring to middle-class Papua New Guineans as children of “yabar.” During a casual conversation about the moral qualities of life in town in 2013, a senior widower offered up a ix x PREFACE rather unexceptional contrast, which nevertheless startled me for his use of the term yabar in noun form. Although it was late in the morning, Sailas had just gotten up, having spent the predawn hours out fishing in the bay in a little outrigger canoe his deceased wife had used. “You people,” he remarked, “who live in yabar are all right. You are paid salaries. We have to [do subsistence] work in order to eat.” Not until that moment had I drawn the obvious inference. If PNG nationals were no less “sons and daughters of yabar” than expatriate whites, then yabar had become a vernacular term for a “modernity” that was indifferent to race or cultural background. Yabar had become a vision of modernity that referred to a bureaucratic market economy in which paychecks and salaries were distributed every two weeks, as well as, more generally, to a time and space in which people and the environment were subject to massive moral and technological transformations. Of course, Sailas was also criticizing life in yabar on ethical grounds. It was for him an immoral economy, a time and space lacking in love, nurture and support. More specifically, it was a time and space of masculine alienation where Murik men lacked the desire that might once have been felt and expressed for them. The thesis of this book is that such ideas as “yabar” are part of a dia- logue of masculine alienation from modernity which preoccupies Murik men. However, I take this notion of “dialogue of alienation” a step or two further. That is to say, not only do Murik men speak of and act in terms of their disaffection from modernity in PNG, their estrangement also extends to their own culture, which I will call their “archaic.” Clearly, in Sailas’ comment, yabar no longer denotes the ancestors at all. The term has been emptied out of all its former cosmological meaning. In this sense, “yabar” expresses not a single but a dual alienation. I want to make a stronger point, however, which is that even before its contemporary expressions of deprivation, and so on, masculinity was already an alienated subject posi- tion in and from the Murik archaic. This argument arose from long-term fieldwork in dialogue with com- parative and theoretical analyses; I must also acknowledge, however, that the concept of alienation is one in which I have a bit of personal invest- ment. It is true that the Ashkenazi Jews from whom I descend found themselves on the margins of a Euro-American modernity to which they fled, while Murik men, like men throughout the developing world, find themselves on the edges of modernity, not because they were forced to relocate to them, but rather because the political, economic and cultural