Bargains with modernity in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere

Abstract

Current ideas of alternative or multiple modernities promise to overcome Eurocentric assumptions about personhood and culture as well as gross binary oppositions between global and local, the West and the Rest. They rightly direct attention to the complex imbrication and dialectical refashioning of indigenous and exogenous practices, that is, to contingent social processes with unpredictable outcomes. Does pluralizing Modernity then serve primarily to designate hybrid possibilities and historical particularities? Or can the idea of plural modernities be specified so as to make it useful for purposes of comparative ethnography? This article understands modernity to entail contests over faceless commitments, that is, the trust of people in anonymous others (experts), symbolic tokens (money), and abstract systems (technical knowledge) (Giddens, 1990). It uses ethnographic examples from Papua New Guinea to look at how trust relations — basic to the extended time—space distanciation associated with modernity — develop and fail to develop around encounters with novel forms of economy and polity. The article argues that an ethnographic focus on trust relations offers one framework for a compartive study of modernities.

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