Negotiating Individualist and Collectivist Futures: Emerging Subjectivities and Social Forms in Papua New Guinean High Schools

Abstract

This article explains the academic disengagement of a critical mass of high school students in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, as resulting in part from emerging personal subjectivities and new social networks. Based on a year of ethnographic research in 1994–95, the article describes the authority these young people attributed to their own perceptions of the limited opportunity structures facing them and to the idealized village‐based egalitarian student identity being circulated through peer networks. As such, it illuminates the educational implications of youth culture, and demonstrates how local and global processes are mediated through the social fields of high schools.