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This dissertation is a study of uneducated young men ("youths") in urban Papua New Guinea (PNG). Seeking to move beyond analyses that focus upon the themes of rupture and alienation caused by socio-economic changes that impinge upon young men's abilities to mature and leave them "stuck" as youth, I deploy both historical and ethnographic data to examine how young men's lives have been shaped by, and how they in turn shape their lives in the wake of change. Part I of this dissertation explores how the masculine life course and men's aspirations were recast as local populations were incorporated into the nation state during the colonial era. In particular, I bring attention to the way in which becoming an educated person and living in town became key distinctions that structure post-colonial society. Part II of this dissertation draws upon 24 months of ethnographic research with men who experience the abjection of being forced out of school and turn to several activities: crime, rugby league football, and street sales. These activities provide men with parallel educational trajectories and the ability to claim a place in the city while aligning themselves with core masculine values. Although these activities appear to be a response to exclusion from formal wage labour opportunities, local views of money prevent such an interpretation. Money, I argue, is viewed as an inalienable object that men use as partible complements of their gendered substance, so stolen money or money from rugby ("easy money"), cannot be held, and is instead rapidly spent to re-enter circulation. Instead, men participate in crime and rugby to cultivate "fame," that is conceived of as the socio-spatial extension of the self through the circulation of "name" and "face." Although fame is so attractive to men that they may consciously try to prolong their status as youth as they continue to seek it out, this fame is fleeting, and depends upon forsaking social reproduction. "Street sales," in contrast, allow men to generate a special kind of wealth ("hard work money") that they can use for provisioning. Through "fathering," which is predicated upon the flow of material resources to their children, men pass on their name and face to their children. Through partible personhood men thereby transcend death and achieve enduring fame. Attending to men's practices illustrates how, while social change has made masculine social maturity increasingly disaggregated, men's core values and desires remain coherent over time, including the desire to cultivate the body, achieve fame, and reproduce themselves socially within a framework of partible personhood. Similarly, examining young men's actions illustrates how, while young men's lives are shaped and constrained by broader social processes, being a youth can also be examined as a socially productive period as well.