This book analyses the dual alienations of a coastal group rural men the Murik of Papua New
Guinea. David Lipset argues that Murik men engage in a Bakhtinian dialogue: voicing their
alienation from both their own indigenous masculinity as well as from the postcolonial
modernity in which they find themselves adrift. Lipset analyses young men's elusive expressions
of desire in courtship narratives marijuana discourse and mobile phone use-in which
generational tensions play out together with their disaffection from the state. He also borrows
from Lacanian psychoanalysis in discussing how men's dialogue of dual alienation appears in
folk theater in material substitutions-most notably in the replacement of outrigger canoes by
fiberglass boats-as well as in rising sea-levels and the looming possibility of resettlement.
