Ryan Schram Yawahigu ana amwahao Ol rot bilong laip bilong mi (or, Curriculum vitae)
James Slotta, Anarchy and the Art of Listening
[…] In his ethnography of a rural society of Papua New Guinea (PNG), James Slotta asks us to consider what politics looks like for people who think of their political agency firstly as a kind of listening. The villages of Yopno valley where Slotta carried out this research straddle the provinces of Morobe and Madang, and like many rural communities of PNG sit at the intersection of many different institutional networks which aim to uplift, reform, and regulate them, including the PNG state, transnational capital, Christian churches and education systems, and other kinds of development agencies. There are a lot of meetings. Seen in the light of a liberal imagination of politics, Yopno people are entitled to these meetings so that they can voice their opinions and speak up for their concerns. Slotta argues that when Yopno people instead patiently listen to sermons and lessons they in fact check the power others might use to control them. Yopno people practice ‘anarchic listening’ (18). This is a way of listening ‘that serves to advance listeners’ self-determination and their equality with others in the face of those who try to control or dominate them’ (ibid.). Through careful analysis of everyday events of communication (and listening) and through rigorous argument, Slotta brings Yopno ideologies of how listening works and what listening does into dialogue with a number of current and ongoing debates about democratic justice in political theory and the social sciences.