Papua New Guineans have proven to be adept at fulfilling the expectations of legibility, and seem quite capable of inventing clans if they turn out not to have any to begin with. While such expedients can give rise to tensions with potentially explosive results, as I have suggested in the case of Nenataman, it must be admitted that dissension over the distribution of mining benefits can arise in any number of ways. Unsystematic tracking of the PNG mining scene suggests to me that those left out of formal settlements seem to have a way of making their needs felt (for example, Mount Kare), and are often capable of pursuing alternate avenues of redress. Likewise, Golub (this volume) argues that insisting too doggedly on fidelity to traditional organisational forms may, at Porgera at any rate, miss the point, since the real problem may be how to forge an effective bridge between the needs of local people and developers (see also Goldman, this volume). Taking such factors into consideration suggests that invented clans may be serviceable as an element in a kind of organisational Pidgin for PNG’s mining industry. It does, however, seem prudent to caution against forgetting that such exercises may produce bridges that are too rickety and jerry-rigged to bear much weight, particularly if the cost of cutting a deal is the creation of a pool of dissatisfied neighbours who are unlikely to view their exclusion as legitimate. Invoking notions of tradition or custom will carry little weight if we lose sight of the fact that clan-finding is often ineluctably bound to clan-making.

In an important paper hearkening back to the days of anthropological debates on loose structure, Roy Wagner challenged the notion that there are social groups in any meaningful sense in the New Guinea Highlands.^[15] Instead, he argued that local people use names as a form of social creativity to generate sociality, shifting their application as circumstances warrant. He also said that:

Insofar as he is right, we can count on two things: it will always prove possible to find clans (or other such groups) if one tries hard enough, particularly if local people have a stake in making this possible; and such entities are likely to prove less stable and substantial than government officials (or mining executives) might like. Reconfiguring identities may turn out to be more traditional than we are likely to credit, but this lesson should not be misread: as the history of Nenataman demonstrates, traditional times were times in which identities, communities and whole populations came and went with breathtaking rapidity. This is scant comfort for those who hope that looking to the past will resolve disputes about who is entitled to what, for nobody knows better than Melanesians that the past is almost infinitely arguable. To the extent that local people are able to achieve recognition by fabricating new versions of who they are, the Melanesian Way may indeed be alive and well, but in a way guaranteed to raise questions, rather than settle them.