Transforming Place, Time and Person?: Mobile Telephones and Changing Moral Economies in the Western Pacific

The chapters in this volume traverse the countries of Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu and relate questions about the political economy and regulatory regimes of companies like Digicel and Vodafone in these three states to the embodied experiences of consumers: young and old, rural and urban, female and male. They are consummately connected (excuse the bad pun). I will focus on three dimensions of this connection by looking at the way in which these chapters reveal how mobile phones have transformed the experience of place, time and person, and how they are situated in changing moral economies.