Dreams, madness, and fairy tales in New Britain

This book studies everyday forms of creativity. Comparing ethnography from three rural areas in New Britain (Papua New Guinea), it analyses popular visions of utopia and dystopia. Distrustful of government promises of development and church expositions of Heaven and Hell, villagers cultivate their own clandestine versions of hope and alternative futures as a way of subverting existing governmental structures, pastoral technologies and the hegemony of an emerging educated middle class. Through tales, villagers explore other versions of modernity. They imagine other ways to be Melanesian and other ways to be White. Villagers' merging of Western and local cultures can sometimes be startling. Yet, it is never a random or haphazard integration, but part of local attempts to refigure the possibilities of social change, including how subjects and subjectivities are formed. Today, villagers will incorporate radios, telephones, photos, cameras and televisions with customary means of knowledge-making. Traditionally, innovation was linked to solitude, singularity, transgression, madness, dreams, bush spirits and the dead, but these creative forms of alterity have been increasingly Westernized. Nowadays, madness involves speaking English and possession by the Holy Spirit rather than contact with the dead. New fictional narratives are also part of this transformation of the collective social imaginary. Combining customary fictional genres with Western fairy tales, these new stories highlight the dangers of beautiful Western objects and hospitable White people who, surprisingly, have many Melanesian characteristics. Dreams, Madness, and Fairy Tales in New Britain shows how the uneven, unfinshed processes of modernization are articulated in caricatures of monstrosity and hope. --Book Jacket.