Wage‐labour and a double separation in Papua New Guinea and beyond

Abstract

AbstractIn this essay, I explore how the idea of wage‐labour is used to perform a double separation within and between persons. The first aspect of this separation is a separation of activities that are characterized as ‘labour’ from the person performing the activity thus characterized. This separation is the precondition for the second separation: namely a partial and often contested separation between the two parties to the contested wage‐labour transaction. Ethnographically, I explore how the idea of wage‐labour has been used to perform this double separation in Papua New Guinea in recent years. The analysis of these separations has a long pedigree in Western critical thought, the first being at the heart of Marx's conception of the worker as person in a capitalist political economy, for example. The second separation creates the possibility of momentary perspectives from which persons can present themselves increasingly as discrete individuals separate from the claims of others. Ethnographic analysis demonstrates how the category of ‘labour’ and related idioms create possibilities for the historically shifting emergence and dissolution of different idioms of the person in contemporary PNG, which is taken as a specific instance of an important global phenomenon.