Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea [Paperback]

Foster shows us how seemingly banal activities like making a phone call, chewing betel nut, watching a Coke commercial may give important insights into the ways in which the nation is constructed, materialized or contested. Orvar L?fgren, author of On Holiday: A History of Vacationing

Why, in the current era of globalization, does nationality remain an important dimension of personal and collective identities? In Materializing the Nation, Robert J. Foster argues that the contested process of nation making in Papua New Guinea unfolds not only through organized politics but also through mundane engagements with commodities and mass media. He offers a thoughtful critique of recent approaches to nationalism and consumption and an ethnographic perspective on constructs of the nation found in official policy documents, letters to the editor, school textbooks, song lyrics, advertisements, and other materials. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the links among nationalism, consumption, and media, in Melanesia and elsewhere.

An ethnographic exploration of everyday nation making in Papua New Guinea.

Robert J. Foster is Professor of Anthropology and Mercer Brugler Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Rochester. He is author ofSocial Reproduction and History in MelanesiaandCoca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guineaand editor ofNation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia.

Preliminary Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Everyday Nation Making: The Case of Papua New Guinea
1. Take Care of Public Telephones: Moral Education and Nation-State Formation
2. Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money: Finance and Fetishism in Melanesia
3. Print Advertisements and Nation Making
4. Commercial Mass Media: Notes on Agency, Bodies, and Commodity Consumption
5. The Commercial Construction of 'New' Nations
6. News of tló+