David Lipset is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA. He has done long-term fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. His previous books include Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist and Mangrove Man: Dialogics of Culture in the Sepik Estuary. 

1. Introduction: Modernity, Masculinity, Papua New Guinea

Part I: Dialogics of Masculine Alienation 

2. Desire in Young Men's Courtship Stories

3. Marijuana, Youth, and Society

4. Mobile Telephony in a Peri-urban Setting

Part II: In the Time and Space of the Other

5. Folk Theater and the Signifier

6. Money and other Signifiers

7. In the Anthropocene

Afterword: Dual Alienation in other Pacific Modernities

This book analyses the dual alienations of a coastal group rural men, the Murik of Papua New Guinea. David Lipset argues that Murik men engage in a Bakhtinian dialogue: voicing their alienation from both their own, indigenous masculinity, as well as from the postcolonial modernity in which they find themselves adrift. Lipset analyses young men's elusive expressions of desire in courtship narratives, marijuana discourse, and mobile phone use-in which generational tensions play out together with their disaffection from the state. He also borrows from Lacanian psychoanalysis in discussing how men's dialogue of dual alienation appears in folk theater, in material substitutions-most notably, in the replacement of outrigger canoes by fiberglass boats-as well as in rising sea-levels, and the looming possibility of resettlement.