Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

Probably the most important thing I learned from this trip to Papua New Guinea was how to use my cellphone.

In 2007, my last trip to PNG, I had an American cellphone that didn’t work in PNG and mobiles (as everyone except Americans call them) weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. This time, however, it as a different story. My usual MO in life — learned from one too many computer role playing games, I reckon — is to minimax: learn thoroughly and completely the things that I have to know and do my best to completely ignore everything else. This was true of my cellphone as well: after a bike accident in 2005 I found myself in the emergency room with no way to contact my wife. When I recovered, we both agreed that this was not something that should happen again. I got a cellphone, figured out how to use it to call my wife, and then did my best not to learn anything more about it. When I arrived in PNG in 2009 I found that everyone — as in ‘my sister in the village’ everyone – had cellphones, and that my fieldwork required me to call people constantly. As a result the mobile became central to what I did, so I decided to figure out how it worked.

I knew that my phone had tons of features that I had never used before that I really should have known how to use — at least to avoid the awkward situation of being unable to text back Kerim in the middle of AAAs — but what as really gratifying was to learn all the functions it had as a tool I didn’t know about, or turned out to be much more useful than I thought. Everyone who already knows how cellphones work, please feel free to stop reading now.

At the most general level, phones are tremendous time sinks which can be used to fritter away spare minutes. In the context of my work life, this was a major reason I decided it would be better if I didn’t figure out how to customize my wallpaper. But in the context of corporate fieldwork, which often involves spare minutes sitting in foyers with nothing to do, screwing around with your cellphone is a welcome diversion. If I were doing ‘village’ type fieldwork, these types of spare minutes would be filled with other things — I mean really, when you’re in the field, nothing is a ‘spare minute’. But for office fieldwork, yeah, its nice to have that escape.

More specifically, I think this is the trip where I finally wrapped my head around the idea that a mobile phone is something that you can both stuff in your pocket and shoehorn a ton of applications in. Mine has an alarm clock (good for travelers), my sisters has a flashlight (superb idea for developing countries). Why haven’t they engineered a church key into the back of mine yet? Then it would be truly complete.

Of all of the tools shoehorn onto the cellphone, the camera is the one I get the most use out of. I lived through the Great Blog Explosion of ’03 suffering through the endless procession of auto-documenting bloggers posting images of their lunch and their friends feeling that this was a tie sink I definitely did not want to get into. But in the context of fieldwork an endless procession of images of your lunch and friends is exactly what you want. Having something at hand lowers the barriers to taking pictures dramatically, reduces the need to carry around a separate camera (and batteries), and in may situations can cue a whole series of positives social interactions, which is anthropologese for ‘when you’re board, you can start taking photos of your friends, all your friends start taking photos of you and everyone else, and everyone has a good time’. Then the next time you are board you bluetooth that good stuff back to your computer and have fun with your family looking at the photos and tagging them up and suddenly you find yourself developing a pretty decent photoarchive/census of your village. Yeah cellphone!

Of course I am hopelessly behind the times — even as I write this the cellphone is ceasing to exist, replaced by multiple new devices which represent strange convergences of the iPod, Blackberry, and game console. But I think for now I like the idea of staying on the low end of the market. My rudimentary understanding of the ‘handheld device’ market is that it is becoming more and more an ‘all your eggs in one basket’ sort of approach. For fieldwork — at least in PNG, where theft/lost of shiny consumer electronics is a real concern — I much prefer a ‘big metal in the center’ approach: a big fat basket in a secure location, backed up regularly, into which you put all your eggs; a panoply of several smaller, cheaper devices that are raskol-donatable when push comes to shove (or just one low-range mobile); and a second serviceable low-end computer like an ASUS eee PC or one of those cheapo mini laptops which can be used to take fieldnotes if you are traveling away from your base for a couple of days, or if your main computer has a mishap. I guess another way of saying this is that you need only three devices of decreasing power and complexity: a big fat computer, a smaller backup/travelling computer, and a handheld device.

A second thing I learned in the field this time, connected to these thoughts on taking technology to the field, is this: take many flash drives. Many, many flashdrives. Back up your data on them, put them in a plastic bag, and then bury them in a location only you know. That, my friend, is the way to backup your data. Of course, you will still probably need a big terabyte drive if you are doing videos, photos, and audio. But you know what? BURY THAT ONE TOO. Then make a third copy of your data. Put it in on a flash drive. Make a small slit in the fleshy part of your back, insert the flash drive, and then stitch it back up again to make sure you have copy of your data on you at all times. No just kidding. Just keep the third copy of your data in your pocket when you walk around.

(Thing I learned 2.5: If you have to chose only 1 network, go with BMobile — Digicell has no coverage in Porgera (enormously important to you, I’m sure), and this way you don’t pay outrageous interchange fees to ring landlines.)

Here is a third, and more embarrassing, admission to make about something I learned in Papua New Guinea: if you plan to interview some of the richest and most powerful businessmen in the country, be sure to bring a pair of long trousers. I have no idea why this did not occur to me sooner, but for some reason I thought I could just waltz into these lushly appointed corporate offices in my shorts without my shirt tucked in wearing a baseball cap with the flag of Papua New Guinea emblazoned on it and get taken seriously as a researcher. What was I thinking? I conduct my research in PNG wearing what I usually wear everyday in Hawai’i: a button down shirt (not tucked in), cargo shorts, and L.L. Bean chaco-style sandals. The big difference between PNG and Hawai’i is, frankly, that in Hawai’i I wear long trousers to class and shave on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, whereas in PNG I shave regularly but don’t wear long trousers. I realize now that dressing like this was a mistake — while this look is pretty standard for some segments of the white anglophone expatriates crowd, in a corporate context it just seems bizarre. Much of the first five minutes of my visit to an office involves doing a certain amount of Goffmanian impression management to let people know that I’m to be taken seriously. Usually the balding, multi-syllabic speech about social network analysis — what I have glossed in my fieldnotes as ‘professor face’ — gets the job done pretty quickly. In fact towards the end of my fieldwork I found I had to tone it down to keep from scaring people away. Office wear in PNG is pretty much the same in Hawai’i — except even muted aloha shirts are not really done by expats, although PNGian seem to go for them. In retrospect what I should have done was gone for a look that I think of as ‘associate dean at a fundraiser’: Green UH polo shirt with logo on breast, tucked into khaki slacks, brown belt with blackberry holstered, and like friggin’ Rockports or something.

In the event, the only long trousers I have are a pair of black jeans and some blue Dickies for visiting Porgera, which look a little more ‘mailman’ than they do ‘executive’. This is ok in the context of mining companies, where even corporate headquarters have prominently placed fire extinguishers, men in reflective/protective gear enter and leave regularly, and little clocks record with pride how long it has been since any of the secretaries has suffered from a Lost Time Injury. But in certain prominent law offices whose indirect lighting, art premier-adorned walls, and acres of casually spacious office at the top of pricey office high-rises, showing up looking like you’ve come from the assay lab is just tacky.

Fourth thing I learned in Papua New Guinea: I respect Ben Stiller’s oeuvre. After condescendingly assuming that Stiller-branded broad comedy was beneath me in the past four months I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by how much I like his work. Some of this — Tropic Thunder and I think its called Keeping The Faith (which for idiosyncratic reasons my wife and I both loved) — I saw in the states, but a lot of his other movies are popular in PNG and I’ve liked what I’ve seen here as well. Of course I’ve also become totally fixated on You Don’t Mess With The Zohan as well, so maybe I’m just going soft-headed.