The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Islands Perspectives ed. by Robert J Foster and Heather A Horst, and: Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town by Anthony J Pickles (review)

In thinking about social and economic change in the Pacific, we keep returning to the analytic categories Marshall Sahlins presented in “The Economics of Develop-man in the Pacific” (Res, 1992, 21:12–20). There, he distinguished between “developman” and “development.” Although prompted by an encroaching Western, capitalist economy, these modes of change differ in their historical trajectories. Developman can be a long-lived process in which people innovate with novel resources to become more of who they already are—in which contenders court allies and confound adversaries during increasingly intensified social and ritual events. Development is a modernist process in which people strive with novel resources to become other than who they already are—in which “each person takes the betterment of himself as his life project” (13). If developman does shift into development, Sahlins argued, it is prompted by the “humiliation” of seeming backward.

That said, some people may wish for both developman and development. Such is suggested in Robert Foster and Heather Horst’s edited collection about cell phone use in the Pacific Islands (Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and Fiji) and Anthony Pickles’ monograph about gambling with cards and slot machines (pokies) in Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highland town of Goroka. The authors make clear that cell phones, cards, and pokies have become vehicles of personal enhancement among people seeking to remain socially moored and respectful of “traditional” obligations, as well as striving to overcome the not-so-hidden injuries of a postcolonial class system. Through these novel devices, and usually with pleasure if not exuberance, they strive for efficacy as contemporary Pacific Islanders.

Contributors to Foster and Horst’s volume are concerned with the “socio-material network” (14), frequently part of a moral economy, created by increasingly ubiquitous mobile phones. Each contributor has (somewhat diverse) ideas about what the phones might accomplish for the benefit (or not) of those differently located people who have been increasingly and undeniably compelled by them.

David Lipset, in “A Handset Dangling in a Doorway: Mobile Phone Sharing in a Rural Sepik Village (Papua New Guinea),” focuses on mobile phone communication among Murik Lake people, both in their home villages and in the town of Wewak. Central to this communication was a handset left dangling in a village doorway—a rare place with adequate reception. Through this device, information was conveyed about the comings and goings of kin and other persons of interest, including Lipset himself. This handset was, indeed, part of a moral economy. It facilitated “perpetual connectivity” (27) and, despite private ownership, was shared in gift-like fashion.

Holly Wardlow, in “hiv, Phone Friends and Affective Technology in Papua New Guinea,” concentrates on the use of mobile phones among women, especially hiv-positive women, living in the Tari area of Papua New Guinea’s Highlands. Isolated in a virilocal society, women used mobile phones to maintain contact with female kin. Moreover, contact with other women, kin or not, was particularly welcome for hiv-positive women who found themselves isolated, if not ostracized. These women called “unknown numbers, often at night when feeling abandoned, lonely, worried or desperate about where the next day’s food, water or firewood might come from” (47). In this manner, phone friends could become “intimate strangers” (40).

Dan Jorgensen, in “Toby and ‘the Mobile System’: Apocalypse and Salvation in Papua New Guinea’s Wireless Network,” discusses Digicel’s rapid domination of the Papua New Guinea market, which has facilitated easy phone access for a...