The Tides: Masculinity And Climate Change In Coastal Papua New Guinea

IN the wake of severe coastal erosion in 2007, views about rising sea-levels and climate change took on urgency among the Murik, a coastal people in Papua New Guinea. A theoretical question is raised by their discourse: how to conceptualize the relationship among multiple understandings of this event that would not silence local voices? Bakhtin's concepts of chronotopes and dialogue, referring to contested images of man in space and time, are used for this purpose. It is argued that, in this culture of climate change, chronotopes of modernity and global risk interrogated chronotopes of ancestral masculinity and doubt. Murik ethnography is adduced and analysed in support of this argument.

In the wake of severe coastal erosion in 2007, views about rising sea-levels and climate change took on urgency among the Murik, a coastal people in Papua New Guinea. A theoretical question is raised by their discourse: how to conceptualize the relationship among multiple understandings of this event that would not silence local voices? Bakhtin's concepts of chronotopes and dialogue, referring to contested images of man in space and time, are used for this purpose. It is argued that, in this culture of climate change, chronotopes of modernity and global risk interrogated chronotopes of ancestral masculinity and doubt. Murik ethnography is adduced and analysed in support of this argument.

 

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