One of the ironies of the Untou solution is that it is more likely to meet the needs of some claimants for recognition than it is to ensure a secure contractual environment for the mine: far from recognising something one might be tempted to call ‘customary land law’, it tacitly endorses the creation of politicised identities and attendant drawing of factional lines. This is ultimately the unintended outcome of policies conceived in the light of the ideology of the Melanesian Way. As a version of the Melanesian Way writ small, the search for ‘traditional landowners’ imagines a depoliticised world in which disagreements about mining entitlements have already been settled in advance through the customary usages of the ancestors.
Whether as national ideology or as doctrine governing mining agreements, such ideas have a distinctly mythical quality.[13] Components of this myth are the notion that the various parties entering into such arrangements do so with a minimal disruption of local cultural and social forms. But the state’s commitment to customary tenure is framed in terms of the state’s own ideas of what customary tenure looks like. This is the presumption of clanship — the idea that land is traditionally held by descent groups identified as clans — and this is the crucial part of the template that renders local land tenure legible (Filer 1997: 165; Gabut 2000). Finding landowners thus becomes a matter of finding clans. For local people success in the mining game depends upon transforming the fluid history of occupation in Nenataman into legal recognition of legitimate customary title. This is an exercise in the creation of legal fictions fulfilling the state’s need to delineate landowners for the purposes of concluding mining agreements, and a solution hinges upon formulating identities in a way that satisfies the state’s interests in legibility by making clans that the state can ‘find’.
In Nenataman local people invented clans — indeed, they invented several varieties of them — in a way calculated to match the expectations of the government and the mine developer, albeit in ways far removed from traditional ideas about the relation between land rights and collective identities. But the Nenataman case is not an isolated anomaly, as a reading of other instances in similar circumstances reveals (see Golub, this volume).
Official preferences for defining land rights through clanship show a remarkable ability to elicit local responses that produce landowning clans on demand. For example, among the Onabasulu of Mount Bosavi, Ernst found that previously fluid identities had been crystallised in objectified ‘clans’ tailored to the needs of the state and multinationals engaged in resource development. Designed to position their members advantageously vis-à-vis rival claimants to benefits arising from the Kutubu oil project, these clans are ‘largely an artifact of a certificate-based incorporation process’ and do not predate the era of petroleum development (Ernst 1999: 88). Writing of the Foi, who are also candidates for benefits arising from the Kutubu oil project, Weiner discusses the effects of the same incorporation process:
The Foi were … forced to adhere to the convention of incorporation in order to be in a position to deal with both the government and Chevron Niugini. The effect of this is to rigidify the boundaries of a social entity whose most centrally important feature was its porousness and flexibility (Weiner 1998: 10–1).
Such processes are even more striking in cases where there is no system of traditional descent groupings of any kind. For example, from within the Nena project impact area, the Sawiyanoo of the Left May River traditionally have no clans, lineages, or other such groups (Guddemi 1997: 634). Yet Guddemi reports that among the Sawiyanoo a flexible land tenure system built around a diverse range of cognatic and other relations has been reframed in less than a decade in terms of principles of patrilineal descent: in response to mineral exploration, rival claimants have produced new kinds of arguments about land and are generating ad hoc patrilineages in the process (ibid: 636). While he is careful not to suggest that such views are illegitimate, Guddemi points out that the emphasis on patrilineality represents a hardening of lines and a closing off of a spectrum of claims that were customarily recognised in the pre-mining era, and he argues that a key role in this shift is played by government officers whose preference for patrilineal descent is all too evident. In the words of one man, ‘I used to run around on the land of my wives, but I stopped doing that when the government explained that it was rubbish’ (ibid: 640). So it is that while there have been no formal negotiations concerning mining and land rights in the Left May, the Sawiyanoo formulation has changed ‘as official ideologies begin to intervene in the ways land is used and thought about’ (ibid: 641).[14] The competition to have one’s claims to potentially lucrative compensation arrangements recognised has tipped the scales in favour of the creation of corporate descent groups where none had existed before.
Further afield, Hviding (1993) describes a system of ‘representational kinship’ concocted by New Georgians around Marovo Lagoon in negotiations with a mineral exploration company. Consciously departing from their flexible pattern of land rights through ‘highly pluriform principles’ (ibid: 803), local people produced simplified models of descent-based landownership in the interests of facilitating recognition of their claims (see also McDougall 2005). Similarly, Burt (1994) reports that among the Kwara'ae of Malaita, local people found themselves under strong pressure to formulate land tenure in terms of membership in unilineal descent groups, despite a fundamentally cognatic kinship orientation. Although no mining activity was at issue in this case, it seems clear that in the Solomons too, governments prefer clans.
In these and similar cases it seems evident that the state-mandated machinery of legibility calls into being what one might call ‘special purpose clans’. Yet surely there is something strange in all this. Much of what we know from detailed land tenure studies in Melanesia suggests that an untidy jumble of multiple overlapping claims is at least as common as clearly demarcated clan estates with similarly unambiguous lists of members (Lawrence 1967; Ogan 1971; Burt 1994). Despite this, I would argue that the state favours an image of clan-based tenure because such a view combines the ideological virtues of the Melanesian Way with the attractions of a lawyerly desire for clarity. As part of the matrix of legibility, the presumption of clanship embodies a fantasy of a world in which once-and-for-all determinations of rights and commitments are possible without the need for continual readjustments to shifting political alignments.
It is not hard to understand the appeal of such an imagined world, particularly in view of PNG’s rocky history of landowner-developer relations in the mining sector. But the presumption of clanship and its simplifications have not always made things easier, as witnessed by the daunting problems of distribution at Kutubu (Weiner 1998), Hides/Gobe (Kameata 2000; Marco 2000) or Porgera (Biersack 1999: 276–7).