Mobs and the public sphere in PNG

When work piles up, I blog. But today I spoke to Dhawal Patel, whose family business offices burned to the ground Sunday night here in Madang, where neither of two fire trucks were operating and it took 45 minutes (although that was pretty good, considering) for the airport fire squad to arrive, by which time the flames barred their positioning in the best spot, but they eventually controlled the fire from spreading to the workshop of lumber and the marine depot beyond—where so much bottled and liquid gas would have set of a real lightshow. No comment on the fire services (although I heard at Chamber of Commerce today that the fire station had the money recently to rebuild their roof but not enough to rehaul their engines)---but Dhawal told me about the neighborhood response, if that’s what we can call it. Pillage mentality. Not only did people jump in to loot the crumbling building before the flames were quenched, but whole phalanxes of young men arrived when Dhawal and family showed up and started to rob their personal possessions. They stole his shoes ad his mobile hone from his hand. Started to beat him up, attack the family. When Dhawal’s young wife drove up, she was attacked by all these men trying to get into her car. People came over from Admin compound, the nearest settlement---just to get a piece of it.  As they were scrambling for TVs and office goods Dhawal could see a security guard in the next block relaxing with a cigarette like nothing in the least was wrong. Now I have a lot of questions about why this happens in PNG all the time. Stories about plane crash victims being robbed of their watches even as they writhe in last gasps, and (I am not lying) a friend of mine who lay in a Hagen intersection after a terrible car wreck and watched people running off with her dismembered leg. The mob mentality is a fact here. I learned this years ago in Goroka when I came out of a building to find my little Suzuki had rolled back in its parking space and bumped a big coffee truck. In all my doofasy innocence, following classic urban American protocol, I began to apologize to the truck driver, as though he understand that an apology was his cue to say Forget it! In the highlands, though, the expression requires concurrence. It’s his cue to agree and even raise the ante, especially as a straggling crowd assembles, and you’re standing across from a young white missus in one of those thin cotton blouses that could be described as transparent (as she thanks all god for her sports bra), who refuses to follow the script and keeps apologizing. Finally my pal John Doa showed up and took control, barking that the coffee truck was clearly parked too close to my car and the blame lay squarely in his camp---to which, the mutliheaded public beast backed down, dis-assembled, and we all walked calmly to the police station to report the incident (for lack of reaching any other détente). Afterwards John turned to me and said Don’t ever apologize again! The fact was, I had triggered a mob consensus where everyone could not but agree with me and their next step had to be violent. Now I think about today’s mob pillaging at Dhawal’s office fire and I think it is also related to the custom of self-abnegation and self-punishment that comes from shame in the highlands: my husband runs away so I cut off a finger or burn my house down (lest people blame me---now they can only pity me). Then there’s the coastal/island tradition of in-laws pillaging a widow’s home, as a way of taking back what’s theirs and really exacerbating the woman’s pain. Lest anyone NOT feel sorry for her, we’ll make it worse. Now she’s broke and homeless. And of course the mob mentality that has been burning women as witches here forever, and has begun to include HIV positive people as hit-list threats. There is some difference between the community self-serving motives in these kinds of heinous crimes and the opportunistic impulse of pillaging a fire, accident or crime victim. And I also believe there is an inverse relationship in this to the kind of atomized apathy you find in western cities---where neighbours don’t report a rape outside their window or walk past tragedy on the sidewalks. But this pillaging of a horrible loss----people walking in and actually making a terrible fire worse by looting---is like community participation in a last act of destruction. I don’t believe it was personalized, and that these people disliked the Patels in any way, but something caused them to do anything but come to their aid. The event was a disaster, and people compounded it. As if no one could imaging turning it around, or bringing it back from the brink. A calamity cannot be staunched, it must be see through like a dramatic arc. Improvisation in big events doesn’t seem to have a place or precedent, so people just become stock players, they stop being the best friend or good neighbour of two hours ago and become the mob.

So as I spent today mulling over all this. And in the afternoon I'm making a few business calls and thinking of why I love the public sphere so much in PNG---despite the horrors of mob mentality. The de-personalisation of commercial/bureaucratic interactions, where you never find a prickly or testy correspondent (although this does happen in the highlands where people are quick to take offense), means that you can actually talk someone through a misunderstanding on the phone here (they rarely take a company line and will hear a fresh argument), and when they have done something wrong they can and will admit it, given the right( Goffman-esque) conversational cues. I sometimes stand in line at the bank or on telephone hold and check myself for rolling eyes and tsking to myself because I know this is a New Yorker response that hasn’t been drummed out of me, the pro forma contentiousness of the customer or client in any western bureaucratic situation. But if I allow myself this petty fury then I risk dumbfounding the teller and or receptionist when my turn comes, because they’re entirely unprepared for hostility. People don’t allow irritants to irritate, and that’s a blessing, a wonderfully freeing and pleasant mantle thrown over everything done in public, from the most familiar to the most formal. You’re allowed to be friendly here. It’s expected. No whingeing thank you, no umbrage or entitlement or huffiness. No face-offs and playing hand-ball with strangers in conversation, where (as in NYC) you’re constantly double-guessing someone’s sense of humour (are you having me on?? Like Ricky Gervais: Are you ’avin a laff?) or recalibrating your manner to accommodate someone’s especially sour or cynical manner. So tiresome.

Which is why people take their mobile hones so seriously here. All those phone protocols now introduced to ‘polite society’ in the west (where Turn of your phones! Is a poster everywhere now), however rarely theyre abided by (and however much they now cause new arguments in public about who is or is not following the rules), cannot gain much hold here. The phone rings and people have to answer it. They don’t turn off their mobile, they interrupt a face to face conservation to launch into a second one in their hand. There are few “Catch you---call you back” moments, and people are so dedicated to their interpersonal relations that they divide the immediate and the telephonic responsibilities equally. I like it inAustralia or elsewhere now when people jointly raise eyes at the person shouting a business deal by phone while on line for coffee, or barking demands to someone right next to you on the bus. I love that New Yorkers walk around with hand-free phone rigs and seem to be well dressed schizophrenics on the sidewalks—because everyone can laugh together at the absurdity. But a few days ago I was at the Holiday Inn in POM, outside in the new patio restaurant, where an old friend came up and we started to reunion, when his mate came over and was briefly introduced, before my friend got a mobile call and, without apology, sat sideways to dedicate himself to the caller, and then his friend got a call, and did the same, and for a good ten minutes I sat waiting for tea and marveling that neither lunch mate thought they were in the least rude by leaving me all alone in their loud chatter. No rush, no urgency, no worries. I liked that. It was funny, and it wasn’t rude intentionally, they just took for granted I could wait for them to finish. And that I wouldn’t get huffy.

[Photos here by Susan Salinger]