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The compensation page: News narratives of public kinship in Papua New Guinea print journalism
- Author(s):
- Ryan Schram (see profile)
- Date:
- 2020
- Group(s):
- Anthropology, The social study of journalism
- Subject(s):
- Citizenship, Discourse analysis--Study and teaching, Mass media--Sociological aspects, Mass media--Study and teaching, Postcolonialism
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- compensation, news discourse, pidgins and creoles, reciprocity, Cultural anthropology, Discourse studies, Media sociology, Media studies
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/47zm-ak32
- Abstract:
- In Papua New Guinea (PNG), news media frequently report on events in which groups exchange gifts as compensation for alleged harms. In news narratives of this type, compensation is a metaphor for the contact between liberal and relational social orders. In this way, news media in PNG produces knowledge of what it means to be a citizen in a society defined by vast and profound diversity. Different versions of the basic formula for a compensation story each offer different models for how liberal and relational orders should interact, one stressing the logic of reciprocal debt and interdependence, and the other emphasizing the gift as a dematerialized symbol of commitment to civil order. Yet each variant implicates the other, and hence the status of the indigenous subject as a citizen of a postcolonial nation remains fundamentally ambiguous. Stories of a new type of compensation in national newspapers reveal that PNG and society and its media continue to work through the dilemmas of ethnographic citizenship in ever newer ways.
- Notes:
- This is an author accepted (postprint) manuscript accepted for publication in The Contemporary Pacific. The published version will appear in early 2022.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Status:
- Provisional
- Last Updated:
- 2 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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