Don't Make Me Over: Coming of age as an anthropologist in New Guinea

DON’T MAKE ME OVER

Coming of age as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea

By

Nancy Sullivan

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Don’t Make Me Over

Copyright © 2012 by Nancy Sullivan

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Many of the names of characters in this memoir have been changed.

Adult Reading Material

Chapter 1

The media age has arrived in Papua New Guinea, and with it come new parenting challenges. I consider myself lucky because, as an American, and an anthropologist, I bring a special skill set to the challenge. Even then, the complications of raising adopted Papua New Guinean kids from different languages and culture groups, who have come to my care at different ages, and doing this in coordination with my Bougainvillean husband and our adult Sepik and Madang kids, is daunting. Individualism, hyper-sexualization, consumerism, self-objectification, materialism, and alienation---these are all concepts that have just yesterday arrived at the PNG border, and we’re already giving them the best seat in the front room. PNG is a country of 850 or more language-culture groups, and although the distinctions can be minute between neighbors, there are very different ideas about self and gender and childhood in different regions of the country. Bougainville, for example, where my husband Jacob originates, is culturally part of the Solomon Islands, and shares chiefly systems and matrilineality with a lot of the Melanesian islands. This makes it very different from the Sepik River region where my son Chris comes from; his people have elaborate male initiation ceremonies and were, until recently, headhunters.

My family lives in the north coast town of Madang, which is another culture altogether and contrasts markedly with the Highlands, where I first lived in PNG. Madang people are laid back and forgiving, whereas highlanders are famously prickly, defensive and bellicose. You can see how a single national identity is a problem. Imagine this diversity overlaid with all the new values that arrive in modernity’s Trojan horse, and you begin to see the predicament.  In towns across the country families much like my own are forging separate cultural backgrounds into single household routines, innovating family rituals that look and feel nothing like what came before. In most cases with an expatriate spouse the guiding template becomes Australia, England, China or some other country’s idea of a modern family. But mainly because I’m an anthropologist and professionally mandated to assimilate rather than colonize, I am trying to create something very different, something more plural for my household. None of that is made any easier by the media messages we receive from that cyber central place called the global village.

I’m not saying that parenting is any easier in another country. I have to assume by the sheer volume of what I receive in PNG, as a fraction of the whole, that it’s just as complicated. What we don’t have any more, though, is what used to be there when I was a child, an authoritative sister speaking from the world of cultural relativism. Remember Margaret Mead’s Redbook column and the pithy on-point righteousness? It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly. Or the astute observation: Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've been put it in an impossible situation.

What we have instead today, for ‘the woman juggling family, career and her own needs’ are Redbook articles like Why Are Men Immature? and Why the Heck Do Men Laugh at That?(Men crack up at the grossest, stupidest, most immature stuff. ….A proud connoisseur of slapstick and other manly yuk yuks, explains.) When did women dumb down to this? When did this sort of advice take the place of anthropology? It is anthropology’s fault for talking like a ponce with a pole up its backside, yes--but what happened to the readers of real social commentary?

Part of my problem is the very fact that I live outside the loop, where bandwidths are so narrow that surfing the web costs more than pumping petrol to your car. I just cannot be a part of more sophisticated discussions from this distance. But there is also a problem with the field of popularized scholarship---science for the masses. We used to have real polymaths writing for us, people who spoke with genuine intelligence and clarity about new ideas in science, especially social science. The Balkanization of scholarship has silenced a lot of that sweeping authority that we could rely on from Margaret Mead, Dr. Spock and their contemporaries, although some fields, like neuroscience, neuropsychology, physics and biology have been reclaiming ground in the world of popular science. We know quite a bit more about the brain, endocrinology, the science of sexuality and such (and by ‘we’ I mean anyone with access to English-language magazines, news programs, web sites and Amazon.com).

Ironically, the last few decades has seen the promise of social science interdisciplinary fall a little flat, if only because of logistical difficulties. It’s a lot harder today to be a geologist/biologist/environmental scientist and an anthropologist, or a physical anthropologist/psychologist/development theorist than it may have been in the past. There’s just not enough time to get multiple degrees and then have a think about how to integrate all the new data. More often one field gets subsumed by the expertise of another, so that an article on conversation theory by a behavioral psychologist does injustice to the linguistic anthropology being done elsewhere, or misrepresents the most advanced sociology of the day. The point is, anthropology is losing the battle of interdisciplinarity, and it needs to step forward in the popular imagination. 

There’s been some borrowing of the term ‘ethnographic’ from anthropology to bolster the qualitative research reputations of other fields, like marketing and business management. In these contexts, the term doesn’t really refer to the ethnographic method, which is explicit in its aim to participating as well as observing a culture (in the sense that Bronislaw Malinowski intended). On loan to other fields, the term really refers to close-grained observations that would seek to capture a ‘thicker’ description of events, in the sense of Clifford Geertz’s thick description—which, along with Malinowski’s method, I discuss below). Thus we have the ethnography of an event, like the Cannes Film Festival, or an ethnographic case study of a small business.

But what really irks anthropologists today is when people with wholly unrelated expertise publish popular articles under a banner of anthropology, as if this were a concept, like existentialism, and not a real discipline. An existential view of subway advertising is something I’d like to read from either a marketing guru or a philosopher; but I don’t understand why physiologists and historians can pitch a concept as anthropological merely because it pertains to human experience. There’s a whole subfield of pop science out there that subsumes the term anthropology to everything from watered down sociobiology, zoology and, heaven help us, behavior modification theory. Am I mistaken, or isn’t Konrad Lorenz dead? Granted, the image of forensic anthropology has been burnished by television lately, which sort of raises our scientific respectability and makes us look cool again. But then there are screenwriting hiccups, which can only be the result of this vacuum in the popular science media.

The other route taken by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar is to ethnographically decode the way science itself is made, as in their 1979 Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton). In this case neuroendocrinology at the Salk Institute.. The nature of the business itself, they tell us, renders innovative thinking and discovery impossible. Only the hypotheses and data sets that confirm accepted understandings of reality ever get funded, published or disseminated. Surprise.

I’m told there is a recently cancelled American show called Lie to Me with Tim Roth playing a psychologist who has, for some reason, conducted anthropological fieldwork in New Guinea, and become a master of facial microexpressions. This sounds like a story writer somewhere took Anthro 101 in college and read Geertz’s wonderful passages in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973, Basic Books) that describe how a wink in one culture is not the same signal as it would be in another, or even in another context of the same culture. But forgive me---how does this mutate into a belief that anthropology is about mastering the ‘core’ human expressions—that is, the real truth behind everyone’s masks? Does Tim Roth’s character have some special understanding of basic facial expressions gleaned from studying ‘primitives’ in New Guinea? Are we to assume that all the ‘modern’ criminals being interrogated in the program are simply availing different variations of facial guile to cover up their really New Guinean feelings?

What also irks about this premise (and it’s just an example, I haven’t even seen the show) is that there used to be, indeed, a school of anthropology that posited a finite toolkit of expressive possibilities, not just for individuals but more for cultures as a whole. This was called Culture and Personality Studies, and it emerged from an early Franz Boasian strategy of typing different Native American societies as, for example, Apollonian, or Dionysian, and so forth. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (of whom I will talk more later) were roped into this for a moment, before it became seriously discredited. But this was---let’s not forget—roughly 80 years ago! Is it possible to draft a story concept today for a TV show that follows a school psychologist who is unaware of the controversies surrounding intelligence testing?

There has been for some time a subfield of anthropology that covers the subject of expression and emotion. It’s called ethnopsychology, and one of the best known books in its library is by Catherine A. Lutz, called Unnatural Emotions, Everyday sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their challenge to western theory (1988, University of Chicago). Lutz studied on a Micronesian atoll and described some important differences between how the islanders register emotions that we all assume to be universal, like hate, love, fear. Not only are they experienced differently in different cultures, it seems, but they’re expressed differently too. You know that moment when someone laughs at a sad story? We normally assume, as westerners, that this is but a callous expression of nerves or self-consciousness. When this happens all the time in a community entirely different from your own, it’s time to ask more questions.

The neurologist and author, Oliver Sachs, had just published his extremely popular The Man who Mistook his Wife for A Hat (1985, Summit Books) when Lutz’s book came out. There was a moment when these scientists could have made beautiful music together on the fine lines that might be drawn between neurological and sociocultural constraints to behavior, something both general and specialized readers would enjoy (at least I would). I say this largely because we know from Sach’s 1996 book, The Island of the Colorblind (1996, Knopf) that Sachs also worked on an island in Micronesia. They might have made an interesting TED talk, were that possible back then. But Sach’s books have always been rigorously uninformed by cultural anthropology, unfortunately. He certainly likes to consider his data a contribution to the field, especially in light of the 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars (1995, Knopf). But his findings are rarely informed by the writings of anthropologists themselves, and tend to make pithy cultural observations that support the conclusions that neurology predetermines personality. Sadly, this is far from what Lutz’s work is about.

One more quick story, another oft-repeated case in point. Michelle and Renato Rosaldo worked amongst the Ilongot headhunters in the Philippines, where Michelle's work focused on the cultural construction of Ilongot emotions (Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life, 1980, Cambridge) and more succinctly, Toward an anthropology of self and feeling In Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. (R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine, eds, 1984, Cambridge). Michelle’s book describes gender differences related to the positive cultural value placed on adventure, travel, and knowledge of the external world. Ilongot men, more than women, were able to travel widely and came back home to share their experiences. The provincialism of women, she said, was what gave them lower status, not their politico-economic inferiority. She also wrote about how headhunting violence did not produce the expected kind guilt and shame in Illongot men, and they justified their acts as a form of angry retribution. One death would inspire another. Her husband, Renato, studied the headhunting practices themselves (Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History, 1980, Stamford). It was on a return trip to the field with their sons, in 1981, while the family walked along a mountain ridge, that Michelle suddenly fell to her death. It was then, Renato writes, that he fully understood the way grief inspires rage. He raged against his wife for leaving him and his sons, and the experience later allowed him to produced his important article Grief and a Headhunter's Rage, in the 2004 book, Violence in war and peace (edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe I. Bourgois, Wiley-Blackwell, 20-04).

The point here is that one anthropologist can write about the range of expressive behaviors elicited by certain emotions, and convey the distance between human societies in the process. Another finds himself feeling something much the way his informants do, and then realizes that there is something in common about the emotion despite differences in how it is expressed. Lie to Me? Everyone is lying to you. Only a program that reworks hackneyed essentialism about human nature is committing an unpardonable untruth.

It was Bronislaw Malinowksi (1884-1942) who laid the ground rules for an ethnographic method. After being stranded in the Trobriand Islands of New Guinea from 1914-5, and then 1917-8, the Pole made long term fieldwork de rigueur for twentieth century anthropology. He actually laid out the method in the introduction of his first of (unbelievably) seven large volumes produced from that fieldwork, called Argonauts of the Western Pacific (…an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, 1922, Routledge and Kegan Paul). Get off the verandah, he more or less said, and live and observe a culture, try to capture a ‘participant observational’ point of view. A lot of anthropology students prefer to remember the diary his wife published posthumously, with its sometimes quotidian comments (Went into the bush. For a moment I was frightened. Had to compose myself. Tried to look into my own heart, 'What is my inner life?’), and often egotistical and boorish ones like: As for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog. My personal favorite reminds me not a little of myself on a very bad day, covered in mosquito bites and thirsty for a carbonated drink: On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to 'Exterminate the brutes.' (He might as well have stayed at my house.)

Today some of the best anthropology does not even have to include fieldwork per se. In the age of second lives and cyber sociality, excellent studies of these ‘cultures’ have been produced by anthropologists much more plugged in than anyone I know. Tom Boellstorff wrote Coming of Age in Second Life (2008, Princeton) with deliberate winks at his older more embodied predecessors, like Mead and Malinowski).

Take Sebastian Seung’s Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, (2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which pretty much speaks for itself in the title. We are but a map of our neurons, nothing more or less. In an Observer interview, Seung tells us,

The brain is behind the really big questions we have. Who am I, what is my identity? What is that based on? If memories are encoded in connectomes, your personality might be in your connectome. If that's the case, that's the basis of your uniqueness as a person. That's why I have this slogan: You are your connectome. (Ian Sample, 10 June 2012)

Sam Harris’s Free Will (2012, Free Press) like The Moral Landscape (2010, Free Press) before it is another triumph of neurology over culture, and tells us that our brains really do delude us into believing we have free will, when in fact we don’t. We may think we make moral choices, but we flatter ourselves. And yet somehow Harris stops short of nihilism and explains that rather than give up, we need to reprise out understandings of retributive justice. If our decisions really do come from some prior biological determinant to free will, we should reconsider punishment as we know it. Consider that we have less control over our value judgments and are directed neurologically first, then we can hardly blame the individual who gets the wrong signals. Blame their brain. And yet what shapes these brains? Is there not a feedback loop from the environment? If so, is this not culture?

Although there is a steady output of these books, and a healthy market for them (to which my Amazon account will account)---books like Susan Greenfield’s Private Life of the Brain: Emotions, Consciousness, and the Secret of the Self (2001, Wiley), Albert J. Linden’s Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams and God (2008, Belknap)---this past year has been a watershed moment for popular neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, with article appearing in popular science journals everywhere, and big books by David Eagleman like Icognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2012, Vintage 2012), and Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal: The Revolution of the New Unconscious and What It Teaches Us About Ourselves (2012, Alan Lane) by (imagine this) a physicist and writing partner of Stephen Hawkings. It almost seems, if you pardon my saying so, like the hard scientists are creating a lucrative publishing niche on their own, rather than fulfilling a public service. Don’t get me wrong, I love this stuff. But I also feel professionally threatened. It overwhelms all popularizations of anthropology, and it is our field, not any reams of Skinner box data, that makes for good stories. We really have to pick up the slack.

There are biological parameters to cultural diversity. But we know enough to declare biology is not destiny for a gender, and that natal culture is not destiny for anyone these days. But this is why the excellent new work on neuroscience and neurophysiology and psychology are great companions for anthropology. That wafer thin barrier between what is learned and what is inherited, between culture and nature, or environment and inheritance, is exactly where both fields come together. The most finely tuned ethnographic data and the most advanced neuroscience should be in a room talking to each other all the time. Indeed, that is what good anthropology and good neuroscience always have done, just not face-to-face. A lot of the questions both fields might answer have been hijacked by those weird self-help/spirituality/self-actualization books. My field is in desperate need of a talk show guru.

But to me, I find anthropology has a lot to do with chaos theory and Indeterminacy. It sits in a position of metaphysical libertarianism, always eager to meet an exception to the rule, a counter-intuitive or non-positivist explanation. It’s a lot like good parenting.

I have just read a review of Sam Harris’s Free Will by the physicist Victor Stenger that applauds Harris’s conclusions and even tries to make room for the new biological determinism in his own field of physics.

[W]e now can say with considerable confidence that the universe is not a Newtonian world machine. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics showed that, deep down, nature is fundamentally indeterministic. But does quantum indeterminacy play an important role in the brain, and thus open a way for free will? Probably not, and here's why. The moving parts of the brain are heavy by microscopic standards and move around at relatively high speeds because the brain is hot. Furthermore, the distances involved are large by these same microscopic standards.

That is to say quantum indeterminancy does not affect the brain. But that is not my argument at all. And Stenger is actually making the same point by another means, saying that even if unconscious factors are determining our behavior it is still the combined conscious and unconscious organism that is our ‘self.’ The result is that the self cannot be determined by biology. On the micro level we may be Newtonian and deterministic, but on the macro level, on the level of individual and collective, we are always subject to a Heisenberg Principal.

I just want to reclaim, for a moment, what we talk about when we mean ‘self’, because although neuroscientists and physicists certainly have their definition of it, the field of anthropology can be said to specialize in the many definitions of ‘personhood’. The premise has been there since the beginning of the field itself: how does a culture define a person?

A whole generation of anthropologists followed Margaret Mead into the field.  Whereas her focus had always been how children in New Guinean are socialised into a culture, the next wave asked questions about identity and personhood. It’s really a slippery subject, especially in an era of rapid social change. How do people become ‘modern’?  How does unfamiliar but necessary information become internalized? You may think these are questions related primarily to capitalism and a cash economy, and they are. Indeed, what I do as an anthropologist in PNG is to ask them every day, as the director of a company that conducts social impact assessments and project evaluations for development. My company is made up of Papua New Guinean ethnographers who work all over the country at the interface of some new institution, technology or infrastructure. We conduct fieldwork on the social and cultural, which is to say the ideological and the economic, effects of one or another development project. But to be sure, the questions of sociocultural change that persistently interest me have to do with new communications technologies. What do all these new media mean to Papua New Guineans? My vested interest in this, of course, is my kids.

My granddaughter Nancy is ten years old and sits behind me in a small office room within my flat in Madang. I have rolled back my chair from the desk and switched on the TV that’s attached to a wall on my left, just to scroll the channels for a bit before getting back to work. Like a cigarette break without smoke. We have the national network, EMTV, which downlinks a lot of basic fare from Channel 9 Australia, and our cable gives us BBC news, Cinemax, some sports and few other bits and pieces (including Filipino, Indonesian, Indian and Chinese stations). The kids don’t get a lot of American TV, and they never see international music videos, only Papua New Guinean ones on the local Channel, which explains what happened next. Nancy’s sitting on a carved Sepik stool behind me resting her head on my armrest. I flip through an Asian entertainment news segment where the announcer stands before a projection of a woman in an enormous hat and sunglasses and begins Lady Gaga… just as I switch past. Nancy sits up saying, Lady Gaga! Go back! Go Back! but when we do, she’s gone, and Nancy is bereft. She tells me, swooning, hand on chest, "Mi laik dai long lukim Lady Gaga!" which translates as I would die to see Lady Gaga!

Suddenly Nancy, a Sepik River child raised in town, who speaks Pidgin, some English, and some of both her parents’ local vernaculars, who shares a bicycle with her brother, has one Barbie doll but little other Mattel merchandise, has become a groupie. A Gaga groupie.

I’m immediately reminded of Peggy Orenstein’s book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter (2011, Harper), which I’ve only just read. Another anthropologist recommended it to me. It led me to other works in the concerned parent/child psychologist genre, like Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls (1995, Riverhead) and Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities by Ken Corbett (2009, Yale). Nancy’s drama queen moment isn’t really an example of what Orenstein talks about, the influence of a near-tsunami of pink merchandize on young girls’ lives today. In fact, Nancy’s exposure to girly merchandise, and the promotion of all-pink clothing from toddler onesies through to junior high jeans, is very limited; it pretty much aligns with the introduction of this stuff into Papua New Guinea itself, largely through the growth of Asian bulk stores and supermarkets. But very much like Orenstein’s daughter in the US, Nancy’s consumer options are overwhelmed by the ‘princessification’ of girlhood here. If there is a wall of headbands and scrunchies at the chemist’s shop, they’re all of them pink now, and gauzy. If there are ‘girl’ themed beach blankets for sale, they have a Disney Princess on them. With Chinese lettering. It’s not that Barbies and Toddlers in Tiaras have hit Papua New Guinea, but that their cheap replicas from Indonesia and China have dropped like a bomb into our midst.

More than Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (2002, Perennial) or Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue (2010, Random House), both of which are seminal reports on exactly how we get inculcated by media, Orenstein’s book is really her way of asking, ‘What ever happened to those better choices feminism promised us?’ What happened to ‘girls can be anything, do anything’? This is the question I want answered. Today’s consumer landscape seems to have transformed feminism into a democracy of the youth and beauty cult. It suggests that the old aspirations no longer apply---those days when we told girls they could be mathematicians, and fire fighters and astronauts---are over, and they’ve been replaced by a lowering of the bar for what is a princess or a diva or a celebrity child. Whereas I may have grown up with a proud refusal of the tiara in assertion of my other assets, as well as depressed recognition that I’d never make the grade anyway; now young girls are all democratically allowed to be beauty queens—they need only buy the bejeweled eyeglasses. They may want to have it all, as their mothers once did, but this really reduces itself to a high paying job, beautiful children, and a handsome prince.

My little Sepik tomboy? Here in PNG the ten years that Nancy has been alive also track a certain ‘modernization’ of childhood for kids in town. We have private schools in our little town, children carry cel phones, and they sing to pop music on the radio that does not come exclusively, as it used to, from the local PNG recording studios. What worries me is that she enters this realm of possibilities just when those possibilities are shutting down. For me, as an American growing up in the sixties and seventies, it seemed girls could do anything. For Nancy, though, it seems she can be a fashion model. She can be a fairy princess. She can be soap opera actress. She can be a village wife. She does not want to be Pippi Longstocking or Amelia Earheardt because they’re not out there to be selected anymore. Her mother and father grew up in remote villages where there were no TVs, phones, electric lights or spangled hair bands, and what they find appealing about the wealth of merchandise now available in town is that it offers their children more of a western lifestyle than anything they had. It’s development of sort. For children.

How could the promise of modernity collapse into this all-too-familiar drill? At 10? Could Nancy really be a ‘tween’ of the global marketing trends? It was just yesterday when she had her head shaved for lice and wanted to wear a scarf for weeks afterwards. It took one trip to her father’s village where a lot of the girls shave their heads routinely, to shake her of that kind of vanity. I was relieved, because one of my major concerns is that my grandchildren, by virtue of living with me and living in town, will become what Papua New Guineans call ‘giaman wait man’---fake white people. They’ll be too gaga for Gaga to want sago grubs and a fishing pole any longer. They’ll be disengaged from a place, a village, a setting of traditional culture.

But I would never suggest that Papua New Guinea childhood was ever so perfect before. It was free, resourceful, highly independent of parental controls in many cases, but also filled with dangers and corporeal punishment and pain. I don’t need to remind anyone of that. Growing Up in New Guinea (1930, Blue Ribbon) was Mead’s examination of childhood in Manus Province, New Guinea, written for a general audience with deliberate comparisons to American models. For the most part, the Manusians come off pretty badly. Well, at least the men do.

They are fond of young children and enjoy teaching them, but refuse to take any responsibility for them. They are taught to control their bodies but not their appetites, to have steady hands but careless tongues. It is impossible to dose them with medicine for all their lives they have spat out anything which they disliked. They have never learned to submit to authority, to be influenced by any adult except their beloved but not too respected fathers. In their enforced servitude to their older brothers and uncles, they find neither satisfaction nor pride. They develop from overbearing, undisciplined children, into quarrelsome, overbearing adults who make the lagoon ring with their fits of rage. (2001 [1930]: 154)

But if I were to summarize the differences between New Guinea and western childhoods, I would say that PNG kids are not raised to be weaned by age 18. They’re not going anywhere; at least traditionally they weren’t. They are meant to learn sharing, reciprocity, dependence, giving and taking from their earliest days. The fact that they do nowadays go to University and take wage earning jobs away from the village is the source of some friction in every community. But PNG kids are also much more self-reliant that western ones, largely because that’s what it takes in a subsistence economy. They’re given much more responsibility from their early years, and they feel that obligation toward the family, clan and tribe throughout childhood. This is the eternal problem of expatriate employers in PNG who used to have their village-based employees pooling paychecks so that one or another might put a down-payment on a car. Now they’re more likely to be hit up for a loan because the pay packet was sent across the country to a natal village somewhere.

Really, a lot of the clichés about nonwestern society pertain. Children respect their elders, who, in turn, get better with age, not marginalized. Older children raise younger siblings, and everyone shares the daily chores (within respective gender roles). Women co-parent freely, relieving each other of burdens and sometimes gifting children to barren relatives, or special uncles. There are special relationships between married women and their brothers, to whom a husband is indebted; and the woman’s children have special affection and obligations toward their mother’s brothers. Men ‘buy’ wives with bridewealth, and so they feel entitled to bash them when they’re angry. But offspring still compete for favors, and men still love their wives. Marriages bring two families together in multiple sets of material and social obligations, so there’s very little divorce, even for the most battered of wives.

But I am also constantly impressed with the exceptions to these general patterns. Taute Wape fathers in the West Sepik cradle their infants all day long and take them to the garden when they need to be nursed, as Bill Mitchell first told us in 1978 (in a wonderful memoir, The Bamboo Fire: An anthropologist in New Guinea, Norton and Co); I can attest to the fact that it still happens today. Boys are valued, yes, but girls are also cherished. Even in the most gender antagonistic parts of the Highlands daughters are materially valuable because they attract bridewealth. Holly Wardlow’s 2006 Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society (California) does a terrific job of explaining how these women, when abused or neglected, sometimes take back the fertility for which they are so prized by selling sex. They’re no shrinking violets, either, the way they incorporate the market economy unto themselves because they’re so often restricted from its other freedoms. A highlands turning point came a few years ago when a young girl, obviously prized by her parents, studying to be a doctor in the capital, was selected to be a compensation bride to her father’s tribal elders. She took him to court and won, instantiating female autonomy in the courts for one of the first times. (It wasn’t long ago when women were added to loan applications in the highlands as collateral).

But I want the impossible. I want my children to have the best of traditional childhood, all the freedom and the resourcefulness it engenders, combined with those heavily scrutinized bits of modern media that I have vetted for their consumption. Call me a dreamer.

Reading today about a new documentary called Sexy Baby, which features the story of a 12 year old girl who has crafted a hypersexualized facebook personae, I learn that she idolizes Lady Gaga for her goodness. She’s been an important influence, standing for acceptance and against bulling, symbolizing inclusiveness in a sea of intolerance. But even this message, necessarily, is conveyed through sex. As the young girl’s mother explains, Sex is the undercurrent of all aspects of pop culture, in terms of selling it and marketing it. You can have other messages, but ultimately, selling sexual imagery is still there. Does it minimize the good she’s doing? Not necessarily. But it’s important to understand and talk with your kids about how [Lady Gaga] is doing good things, but there’s this element of sexuality that you’re being impacted by.

Growing Up Gotti

Back in 2008 I started to see programming changes on the cable TV feed we get here in Madang, Papua New Guinea. There’s only one supplier, and it costs a fortune, but the company links us into BBC and Aljazeera news, as well as Australian stations, along with Chinese and Filipino and sometimes Indian programs. Most of the time this is all pretty idiosyncratic, with bright cartoons and dopey reality shows competing in the same time brackets with soap operas and Chinese-subtitled Italian movies. Some of the stream is so indecipherable to the littlest kids in my household that it really doesn’t need to be monitored. But the older kids, from age 10 onward, seem to get stuck into some awful stuff now and again, like Australia’s Next Top Model, and now Revenge—based in the ludicrously opulent South Hamptons where beautiful young adults are indolent superheroes. Imagine for a minute what these images might convey to someone like Samantha, a ten year old cousin from the village living with us this year: she came from fishing by canoe with her mother in the Sepik River every morning, no electricity, no running water, no shoes, to a mattress in a room with a bureau, a school uniform and pencil box, but also this constant stream of aspirational messages. Television means something different to every culture, and what producers make is not what viewers receive of course. It’s unpredictable. Media theorists tell us American producers make stories about national crises and shame, a lot of scripted group therapy sessions. Australian shows are more about national virtues and ideal lifestyles. There’s a lot of press in Australia right now about the reality talent show, The Voice, and how it heralds the return of feel-good TV. I suppose so (we don’t receive it here in Madang). But that hardly explains why competitive cooking shows and The Weakest Link are also hugely popular---and we do get these shows on our channels. And this is just Australia, mind you. I’m at a loss to understand the significance of The Real Housewives franchise, and all those shows I can only read about: Fear Factor, My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, What Not to Wear, Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood, lizora: Life in the Fab Lane, Brat Camp, Half Pint Brawlers, and more.

At the time, 2008, I started to blog about this:

Sandwiched between The Family Guy and Life With Bonnie we now receive Season Two of the Old Westbury Long Island classic, Growing Up Gotti--direct from the hearth and home of America's favorite mob family, where Mum is a Donatella Versace doppelganger and an expert at the very same brand of passive- aggressive tough love that Ms Mead recognized in Pere Village, Manus. Go figger. From the faux-Gothic McMansions of Longailan to the kit houses of Madang, now we can downlink our similarities in pottymouthing parenting, represented by Victoria Gotti, gold lame, polished chrome surfaces and silicon injections. Today’s ethnographic look at subcultural parenting can be seen by a whole new generation of Papua New Guineans, long famous for their brand of tough love: where every tot is raised by a village, collectively swaddled and punished, and given adult responsibilities like spear-fishing, hunting, and gardening, so early that they know the meaning of productivity as well as freedom before they hit puberty. Now our happy island can enjoy weekly installments of their American counterparts in Old Westbury, where we share Carmine’s pain because his Uncle’s bought him an all-terrain vehicle he can’t ride off the estate, and Frank’s worry that a birthday party book the best nightclub.

Reading back from 2012 at the material I collected about Growing Up Gotti, I’m surprised by the press release for it. Apparently this show was not about the offspring of an infamous mobster, but it explores the everyday lives Victoria, an aspiring writer who has received humanitarian awards for her work on women's health issues; Frank, who has written a diet book and is fond of cooking; John, an honor student who is interested in studying law; and Carmine is a baseball player and wishes to be either a music executive or a writer. What’s the point of masking our prurient interest in a mobster’s offspring? We learn these loveable rapscallions love their Mum (how Italian!). And she loves them back---with lavish gifts and vacations and nightclub parties. For our sake, all the banter is subtitled, in thug-speak: Dis betta be good...Humor me and pretend youse are men for a moment...Lemmetellya samting....Dats phat!...whaddayamann?

The Smoking Gun website ran a parody web site of the show called Blowing Up Gotti, which highlighted actual stills from a prison CCTV of family visits, with Dapper Don John holding court in his orange jumpsuit. When it comes to watching the Gottis squabble, we prefer to pop in surveillance videotapes made during a two-day family visit to the Illinois penitentiary John Gotti called home…

Episodes include (and here the website parodies actual taped conversations):

John Gotti criticizes daughter Victoria's handling of a problem her son encountered at school. Seems that after a classmate slurred Little John--accusing the kid (imagine!) of being a tyro wiseguy-- Victoria had a polite conversation with the kid's other to express her displeasure. Which was the wrong way to handle things, according to the imprisoned killer, who equates such civility to acting like a rat or a Jew. Instead, Gotti tells his daughter she should have instilled fear into the young troublemaker's mother by invoking her notorious daddy and threatening to--at least--cut the boy's tongue out. Along the way we are reminded, Being a nigger is embarrassment, being John Gotti's grandson is an honor.

This was 2008, and at the time I knew that I was writing to a largely overseas audience. Just prior to the advent of social media in PNG, when he internet access became affordable for people in town, I would have assumed very few Papua New Guineans would get my jokes. And yet I must have had some in mind when I kept blogging on the subject using more local examples, also in 2008:

I keep hearing an ad on the radio these days selling some kind of noodle or imported rice. Can’t remember the product, but the mother character is thrilled to serve it to her family because, in her words, she no longer has to persuade the little ones to finish their food-- ‘or even the big one!’ I love this, because I hate this, because it’s a perfect example of cultural frisson, PNG’s version of someone else’s idea. What ad exec thought Papua New Guineans are picky eaters? It’s not like selling ice cream to Eskimos, but it is inappropriate in a much more subtle, more insidious way. What PNG housewife has to convince her husband or kids to finish their food? Take a stroll through the markets of my town Madang, for example, and consumer choice doesn’t exactly scream at you. Corn Flakes, Paul’s Milk, three kinds of rice, four kinds of tinned mackerel. Remember, this is the land of big is better--- where You look fat! is a genuine compliment. Picky eater? That’s like trying to find a Woody Allen fan in a place where packaging still has a second life as fancy dress accessory –where coffee filters, baggies and everything cardboard gets painstakingly re-cycled. Oh Mum, please, not vermicelli again! --Okay, it does happen, maybe, amongst the most cosmopolitan of Port Moresby Papua New Guineans in the fifteen minutes after they return from a holiday in Brisbane, but we are still, bless us, a country without distinctions between cappuccino and café au lait, between white and pink diamonds, or Fifty Cent and Kanye West. Picky eating? Someone in Australia believes this to be a universal, biological imperative of childhood, rather than the first small steps on a march toward anorexia, bulimia and collagen addictions.

OK, then yesterday: I’m driving along the main street in Madang and three PMV trucks chockablock full of what look to be Kainantu Eastern Highlanders covered in black soot and holding bows and arrows come rolling in the opposite direction, toward town, without chants or noise of any kind. Is it a death? No, because they’re wearing black ash not white clay. More likely a show of force of some kind, parading through town to make a point to someone or some people, but what or whom I will never know. They’re updating the traditional highlands threat gesture of ‘this means war!’ but doing it almost perfunctorily, as if without conviction. At first, I’d had this wild thought that I was in Hagen again, or that these blokes took the wrong turn off the highlands highway (‘Hey where are we? This isn’t Kundiawa!’) I love the fact that Madang people are walking carelessly, barely giving them second looks, along the sides of the road. So what, crazy highlanders.

Now I re-read these blogs and realize that Papua New Guineans have been sharing these frictive perceptions for as long as I have. If it all bothers me, because I know the source of these imported ideas (like having culinary choices as a child, like turning teenagers into little mobsters) they don’t. These features of modernity arrive without italics or inverted commas, as if they were sensibilities to strive for, to adopt as part of a new modern self.

As with new media elsewhere in the developing world, some of this information is too esoteric to be influential, much less become psycho-socially damaging. I do not become Filipino, for example, by watching Pinoy TV, or chic but unfriendly by watching French films. For the media savvy westerner, there’s always a way to hold these images at arm’s length, and many would argue (as I have in the past) that the thin edge of the global reach is not as easily seduced as we sometimes believe. But I’m still a parent, and not so sure about my kids, or even my village-born PNG husband. Or, for that matter, the new wave educated urban Papua New Guineans who crowd into facebook discussions these days. These people take their media very seriously, whether its complete commitment to the Wiggles or a near-hysterical need to censor negativity on the social media (a bizarre form of collective censorship that seems to have erupted in popular PNG discussion groups).

The twenty-five year span that I have lived in PNG just about covers the birth and infancy of televisual media in PNG, although radio preceded it and was always more widespread. Talk Back radio is as important today as it was when I first arrived, too, with the charming and avuncular Tongan-Papua New Guinean host, Roger Hao’ofa, still spinning his favorite Dusty Springfield tunes during the breaks.

Today, though, only 2% of the population has internet access, which is more or less standard fare for developed countries. But mobile phones have become ubiquitous in towns, and nearly so along every major transport artery, which is where the towers are placed. In remote villages well beyond the mobile reception footprint, you will likely find people with phones charged by solar panels or a diesel generator just to listen to the radio. In some places there are designated hilltops or treetops called HelloGoodbye, or ID23 (referring to the recorded message ‘Phone Unavailable’), to which people walk for miles in order to make a call.

Foreign imagery has proliferated for decades in PNG, and it has penetrated towns and villages with repeated and consistent messages about modernity, or what everyone calls development. There is almost an imagined community within the developing world today, in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s seminal discussion of print media, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991), of people striving together for this single amorphous ideal. Perhaps not so much an imagined community as a deep horizontal comradeship. But it resembles the nationalizing properties of the advent of print media, when reading newspapers and novels became a simultaneous ‘mass ceremony’ everyone shared. Today, though the era of print capital has been overtaken by cyberspace, and while migrants and expatriates practice new forms of long distance nationalism, there are still pockets of print media primacy. It’s in these places, where Bibles and schoolbooks and newspapers predominate, that an imagined community of have-nots exists as a loose collective of aid beneficiaries. This is where mission merchandise, the odd magazine or bootleg cd, and the other detritus of urbanity have more impact than ever. People are not so much bound by these items to their makers or authors, but more to each other, in an awareness of their shared fringe status and the power differential it implies. We are all of us ‘developing’ and as such completely different from the ‘developed’ of the world. We are bound inexpressively by a collective obeisance to modernity. None of us in the ‘developing’ world have the kind of autonomy to pick and choose, deconstruct and reconstruct, modernity as it arrives on our shores.

Eva Wiseman writes a Life and Style column for The Guardian and the The Observer, and in a recent column she talked to a few experts and young British woman about body consciousness. (Uncomfortable in our skin: the body-image report The Observer, Sunday 10 June 2012.) Young women say they’re bombarded with television images that force them to think about their bodies.

"Supersize vs Superskinny, or How to Look Good Naked, or freaky ones like Half Ton Mum, or A Year to Save My Life. Everyone shouts out names – programmes about overhauling your body with diets, clothes or surgery. They have mixed messages, says Amber. On one hand they're saying 'love your body', then on the other 'fat's bad, the worst thing you could do is be obese'. The message 'be healthy and do exercise' is a bit different from 'be happy in your skin', isn't it?" The rhetoric of empowerment, here, actually disempowers. At one point in the column Wiseman very aptly compares the kind of hazing received by one British Reality TV star, considered unpardonably chubby by the press, as a form of public waterboarding.

Do we hate our bodies because of reality makeover TV? Susie Orbach describes how they often provide dysmorphic and distressed women the opportunity to compete over their body distress and win the prize of radical restructuring.

Wiseman repeats statistics she’s been told by Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson that indicate an alarming half of all 16- to 21-year-old women would consider cosmetic surgery and in the past 15 years eating disorders have doubled. Then she asks the psychotherapist and leading commentator on the subject why people feel so awful about their bodies when they know that beauty is only skin deep.

Because none of us lives in a vacuum, she said. Simply acknowledging the pressure doesn't eliminate it. We don't even know we hate our bodies because we take that for granted. She sighed. "When I wrote FiFi there was a pretty bad situation, she said, but the women of my generation have given birth to… this." To my generation – 60% of whom feel ashamed of how they look. But before anybody begins to deal with this, this crippling western-worldwide anxiety, it's important to try and work out why. How did we get here?

You wonder why I worry for my daughters? Precious few of us are lucky enough to be born the physical ‘ideals’ of our own culture, and so the battle for self-esteem is virtually universal. For my kids, the battle began yesterday, and I introduced them to it. Some would argue, as I certainly have in the past, that much of the foreign media spilling over from the ‘developed’ world is so fundamentally esoteric to most Papua New Guineans, that they just don’t digest it. It’s a blunt instrument, not a sharp one. Twenty years ago when I was studying indigenous filmmaking in PNG, I was a fan of the groundbreaking work of Eric Michaels, in indigenous Australian communities, because he wrote so cogently about exactly this: the illusion of epistemological hegemony by the west (e.g. 1986, Aboriginal Invention of Television: Central Australia 1982–86.Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies; and 1989, For A Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu, Art and Text, Melbourne). He was saying then that aboriginal communities didn’t relate to the daily serials like ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Home and Away’ and therefore weren’t driven to a metaphysical crisis by the values they purport. Aboriginal Australians preferred to see images of themselves, Michaels said. Indeed, it’s like saying I’ll become French by watching too much Goddard; there’s a condescension in thinking you’re the powerful influence over another culture. Michaels was saying, in describing his experience with Aboriginal media production, that culture is often much more durable than we imagine. It is, yes, in our heads: but just a neurologists keep telling us how hard-wired we are for something, the process of being subsumed by a worldview and value system is its own hard-wiring of the human mind. Let me tell you