Abstract
Gwou’ulu villagers rarely use the telephonic components of their phones. Few, if any, telephone calls involve small talk or, more broadly, conversations about everyday events, e.g. children’s experiences in boarding schools. However, when Gwou’ulu villagers do use smartphones as telephones, often in response to “emergencies” such as an illness or a death, they explicitly use them to strengthen kin networks by abridging geographical distance and the damage time and resources takes to cross geographical distance, privately, without smartphones (Fig. 5.1).
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Notes
- 1.
The Seif Ples domestic violence hotline (132) can be reached and called for free. This hotline was not yet available at the time of my fieldwork.
- 2.
The length of the mourning period is assessed on a case to case basis. Generally, the older the deceased and the more suspicious the death, the longer the mourning period, thus allowing for greater numbers of people to attend the wake in order to show no ill will to the family. For example, for a young child who died from measles the mourning period would be around three days, while the mourning period for a middle-aged man who died of “uncertain causes” (such as a heart attack) would likely last for seven days.
- 3.
Relatives residing elsewhere, abroad or in Provinces other than Malaita or Guadalcanal, are frequently exempt from attendance. The logistical difficulties are deemed too significant to be overcome.
- 4.
Based on other villagers’ accounts this is incorrect. The attack happened in 2006, not in 2010.
- 5.
Drawing on conflict mapping programmes that use mobile phones to trace outbreaks of violence, mobile phones are being used for tracking anti-witchcraft violence in PNG to provide basic information about witchcraft-related violence (Logan and Gibbs 2015).
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Hobbis, G. (2020). Digitizing Social Networks. In: The Digitizing Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34929-5_5
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