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Independent Declarations: Attributions of Peoplehood in News Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Ryan Schram
Ryan Schram*
Affiliation:
University of Sydney, Australia
*
Contact Ryan Schram at A02 – Social Sciences Building, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia (ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au).
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Abstract

Throughout the colonial and postcolonial history of Bougainville (North Solomons Province from 1975 to 2005, Autonomous Region of Bougainville thereafter) people have asserted their sovereignty against the Papua New Guinea (PNG) state in many different ways, from demands for land rights to unilateral declarations of independence. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arawa Bulletin, a community-owned nonprofit magazine, bore accidental witness to many of these struggles for recognition, including a clan’s dispute over public use of its land in 1987 and the outbreak of a secessionist war in 1989. News narratives from this period apply a strategy for attribution of people’s political claims in which provincial government officials are delegated a role as co-narrators of events. In the provincial officials’ narratives, popular sovereignty has two faces—primordial and civil—which only local government can harmonize. The elite model promotes institutional reform but erases alternative modes of political consciousness.

Type
Articles
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 2022 , pp. 287 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Semiosis Research Centre at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I gratefully acknowledge the comments by the editors and external referees of Signs and Society, as well as the assistance of Eleanor Kleiber of Hamilton Library at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and Cristela Garcia-Spitz of Geisel Library at University of California, San Diego.

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