The tides: masculinity and climate change in coastal Papua New Guinea

Abstract

.. 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 literature about climate change, it has become a truism to rue the inequality of it all. Rather than the culpable, wealthy economies of the global North, populations who had nothing to do with producing it – people living in politically marginal, small island states and along coasts in the global South – are paying and will pay its price. 1 As a long-term fieldworker in coastal Papua New Guinea, my agenda here is partly motivated by this kind of ethical, if not eschatological, anxiety. However much climate change reduces one’s alterity in, as well as from, the space and time of the other, I remain fixed on that part of the emerging tragedy which Malinowskian relativism advocates: to grasp what it means to the people living on far shores such as these (Crate & Nutall 2009: 12). 2 A methodological problem then arises. If climate change has cultural dimensions, development of a conceptual strategy for thinking about how to fit together semantically, ontologically, or ideologically discrepant views of its constituent science may be of use. My solution to this latter issue derives from a self-evident inference, or at least one that becomes self-evident once stated. Climate change discourse makes claims about the consequences of industrial capitalism on processes of various kinds in nature. These claims may be more broadly viewed as representations of the effects of human agency on space and in time. In other words, this discourse may be seen as assertions about the decaying position of ‘man’ 3 in nature and society. In order to be able to discriminate multiple claims about this decay, I return to the idea of chronotope that I borrowed from Bakhtin (1981) as part of another project (Lipset 2004; 2007).