On Humiliation and Class in Contemporary Papua New Guinea

Abstract

In this essay about contemporary Papua New Guinea, we consider Sahlins’ (1992) view that ‘[t]o “modernize,” the people must first learn to hate what they already have, what they have always considered their well-being. Beyond that, they have to despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt – and want, then, to be someone else’ (1992, p.24). We must, thus, examine whether the generation of a ‘global inferiority complex’ (1992, p.24) accompanies modernization, wherein a people must ‘pass through a certain cultural desert to reach the promised land of “modernization”: [wherein] they [must] … experience a certain humiliation’ (1992, p.23). In other words, we should consider whether humiliation, as this view suggests, is an ‘important stage of economic development’ (1992, p.24) such that a people must become ‘sufficiently disgusted with themselves’ (1992, p.24) to wish to become more like us.