Table of Contents
At Independence in 1975 the famously diverse peoples of Papua New Guinea (PNG) became citizens of a country without any particular sense of national identity apart from an unevenly shared colonial history. Creating such an identity was one of the tasks the state felt obliged to shoulder from the beginning, and adopting the language of tradition was one means of doing so. While there is a rhetoric of localised ‘custom’ (kastam) in popular discourse, the state takes care to package its version of tradition as a bundle of values specific to no particular place but putatively shared by all. Dubbed the ‘Melanesian Way’ (Narokobi 1980), this generic tradition forms the basis of a post-colonial ideology that seeks to consolidate or overlook differences in the interests of creating a national culture (Philibert 1986, Otto 1997).[1]
Much has been written about the formation of national cultures in the Pacific (for example: Keesing 1989; LiPuma 1995; Wanek 1996: 111–33), and I do not intend to add to this literature here. Instead, I am more interested in examining what happens when the state’s ideas about tradition enter into policy and its implementation. In particular, I wish to show how the articulation of the ideology of tradition with local practices turns on the twin issues of legibility and recognition, and how this conjunction plays out in the formation of local identities.
In his book, Seeing Like a State, Scott (1998) argues that a precondition for the implementation of state plans is the establishment of what he calls ‘legibility’. Legibility enables systematic state intervention in the affairs of its citizens, and creating legibility entails state simplifications of social practices in the form of a standard grid whereby these can be recorded and monitored. Originating from above and from the centre, legibility requires the invention of units — citizens, trees, houses, villages, and so on — that are rendered visible in the interests of control. The reciprocal of legibility from the point of view of those affected by state projects is recognition. Recognition turns upon the ways in which a state’s citizens make themselves visible to the state in a way that gives them some purchase on the state’s decisions and operations.
With the issues of legibility and recognition in mind, I begin this paper with a brief account of tradition as formulated in PNG national discourse, drawing attention to certain of its more important ideological characteristics. I move from this to a consideration of the ways in which official tradition takes shape as policy with regard to the resource development projects that have become such a prominent feature of recent PNG history. I then turn to the examination of the dynamics of legibility and recognition in the context of a particular mining project and how these figure in the production of new identities. Finally, I conclude with a short survey of what we know about similar processes elsewhere before offering some observations on what this tells us about the role of state-formulated tradition as a guide to determining rights in land for the purpose of concluding mining agreements.
Whatever PNG lacked by way of common tradition at Independence was more than made up by an enthusiasm for development (developmen) in all regions of the country, and many of the new state’s claims to legitimacy were based on promises that all Papua New Guineans could expect development to come their way. If one were to ask where the Melanesian Way led, the answer would be, to development, but on authentic Papua New Guinean terms. While short on specifics, the notion of a Melanesian path to development did more than simply espouse an essentialised identity based on values of community and the continued viability of tradition: it claimed modernity as a Melanesian project. Thus the end of Australian rule did not mean the end of the prospects of development that had figured so prominently in Australia’s own justification of its tenure in PNG, and dreams awakened in the colonial era would not vanish, even if the colonialists did.
In attempting to reconcile generic notions of tradition with modernist hopes,[2] the ideology of the Melanesian Way also grappled with one of the worries that preoccupied planners and politicians in the state’s early days, namely, the tension between egalitarian goals and the reality that development often produces inequality. A solution adopted by the Constitutional Planning Committee was to turn the platitudes of the Melanesian Way into policy guidelines in the formulation of the ‘Eight Aims’ (or Eight Point Plan). Widely publicised (for example, Somare 1974) and incorporated into the Constitution, the Eight Aims set forth principles meant to guide development through the use of ‘Papua New Guinean methods’. Espousing a populist egalitarian ethos, the document calls for
more equal distribution of economic benefits, including movement toward equalisation of incomes among people and toward equalisation of services among different areas of the country … [and] an emphasis on small-scale artisan, service, and business activity, relying where possible on typically Papua New Guinean forms of organization (CPC 1974 cited in Fitzpatrick 1980: 203).
Critics have been quick to point out the romanticised myths underlying this ideology (Filer 1990: 9), and many have noted its tendency to mask growing inequalities between rural people and the national elite (Fitzpatrick 1980: 202ff). It is, however, fair to say that the early post-Independence era was marked by an attempt to realise the romantic ideal by implementing these principles in terms of a ‘small is beautiful’ development policy.
Under the aegis of this commitment to agrarian populism, the state launched a series of schemes promoting rural smallholder production. Such policies did little to generate the revenues needed to finance government programs, however, and a World Bank report in the late 1970s laid the groundwork for a major shift towards capital-intensive enclave projects to develop the country's mineral resources. From the beginning of the 1980s onwards, the state’s development strategy mandated the inauguration of numerous mining projects that were to become the mainstay of the national economy.[3]