Crowds, Affect, and the Mediation of Emergent Collectivities: A Student Strike in Papua New Guinea as an Order-Making Project

Abstract

ABSTRACTFrom the institutional perspective of a university, student strikes mark a time of heightened disorder. In this contribution, I turn this perspective around and analyse a student strike at the University of Goroka in the Papua New Guinea highlands as an order-making project instead. The observed student strike established an alternative regime among students, which was reinforced through a sense of having achieved a superior sophistication of order through the effective, and affective, alignment of minds and bodies into a single entity. Placing the achievement of collective unity in relation to what appears as Melanesian notions of order on one hand, and recent re-evaluations of the psychology of crowds within anthropology and sociology on the other hand, I explore conceptual connections in the work of ‘mediation’ between order making in Melanesia and contemporary (critiques of) affect theory.