Table of Contents
And this, for me, is the heart of the drama: I’m intensely aware you see that people are wrong to think of themselves as just one person. Each one of us is lots and lots of people. Any number, because of all the countless possibilities of being that exist within us. The person you are with me is quite different from the person you are with somebody else. But we go on thinking we’re exactly the same person for everybody, the person we think we are in our own mind and in everything we do. But this isn’t the case at all! It comes home to us best when by some ghastly mischance we are caught out in an untypical act. We suddenly find we are sort of dangling from a hook! I mean we can see that the act isn’t ‘us’, our whole self isn’t in it. And it would be a savage injustice to judge us on that act alone, never to let us off the hook, to hold us on to it, chain us up for our life on the strength of it for all to see, as if that one action summed up our whole existence! So now do you see how treacherous this girl is being? She caught me out in an unrecognisable situation, in a place where for her I should never have been and doing something which in her eyes I should not have been able to do; and now she insists on seeing this undreamed-of contingency as my reality, identifying me with a single fleeting shaming moment of my life (Pirandello 1995).
In Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author the characters in a nineteenth-century story of family conflict are cast out of their creator’s imagination and wander in search of an author who will allow them to complete the telling of their story. The bourgeois melodrama they embodied was exactly the sort of play that Pirandello was reacting against, but the deeply reflexive theatre that resulted when the family conversed with directors, actors, and each other about the nature of artistic production is a supreme example of Pirandello’s modernist art. In this space of meta-theatre he could explore the thematics which ‘tormented’ him:
The delusion of reciprocal understanding hopelessly based on the hollow abstraction of words; the multiple nature of every human personality, given all the possible ways of being inherent in each one of us; and finally the tragic built-in conflict between ever-moving, ever-changing life, and the immutability of form (Pirandello 1995: xvi).[1]
In this chapter I would like to explore Pirandello’s thematics in an arena far removed from the Italy of his day. I will examine identity and landownership at the Porgera gold mine in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and what lessons we might learn from it regarding registration schemes in Melanesia and, more broadly, ‘indigenous identity’ in general.
In PNG today it is a matter of settled legal and popular opinion that indigenous groups have special claims to the ownership of customary land (Rynkiewich 2001; Curtin et al. 2003; Weiner and Glaskin, this volume). This entitlement is both firm and abstract: firm in the sense that customary land is owned by customary groups, but abstract because the criteria for membership in landowning groups are often ambiguous. In cases of land registration for resource development, the boundaries of the land and the ethnonym of the collectivity said to ‘own’ it are often quite clear. What is controversial is who, in any given situation, gets to be a member of a landowning group. The dilemma of aspiring landowners is similar, then, to that of the characters in Pirandello’s play — both seek to be acknowledged by the director (here, the state) and, in doing so, get their turn on stage as a real character in PNG’s national drama.
In the past, policy makers and theorists have applied an optical metaphor to customary land registration. On this account, local identities pre-exist state interest in them, and identifying the members of a customary group can be done simply by ‘viewing’ ‘customary’ or ‘traditional’ or ‘group’ tenure (these are considered synonymous) and translating these arrangements into Western legal form. This is the approach, for instance, which underpins James Scott’s (1998) work Seeing Like A State, in which the state’s pathological misrecognition of pre-existing grass-roots life leads to technocratic tragedies which, he suggests, could be overcome through accurate discernment of conditions on the ground whose shape and form pre-exist its gaze. While his neoliberalism is politically orthogonal to Scott’s leftist populism, Hernando de Soto (2000) agrees with Scott that the failure of Third World countries to ‘escape the bell jar’ of economic stagnation and partake of First World economic prosperity can be traced to the government’s inability to recognise people’s grass-roots economic activity and the stable ‘extralegal social contracts’ they generate. A mixture of these approaches has informed policy work on land registration in PNG. Policy makers such as Tony Power and Jim Fingleton combine Scott’s fear of disempowerment through the individuation of tenure with de Soto’s enthusiasm for grass-roots entrepreneurship in a vision of ‘Melanesian capitalism’ inspired by Third-Worldism (Power 1996; Fingleton 2005; Chappell 2005; Golub 2006: 385–406).[2] In this instance, as in many others, registering customary landowners relies first on clear discernment of local situations and second on an accurate translation of them out of the realm of custom and into the realm of law. This ‘viewing and cataloging’ approach assumes that there are such things as customary groups. Such an assumption, as Pirandello might put it, hangs indigenous peoples upon a hook by fixating on only one aspect of what we shall see is a many-sided identity.
By now there is a large literature on what we might call the ‘poetics of indigeneity’ in Southeast Asia (Li 2000), Amazonia (Carneiro da Cunha and Almeida 2000), Australia (Povinelli 2002), and Native North America (Nadasdy 2003) which strongly suggests that indigenous identities are not pre-existing and ‘found’ intact by Western legal regimes, but are complexly shaped by Western law’s elicitation of them (Weiner 2006). This shift from ‘viewing’ to ‘eliciting’ is partially due to an increasingly rich body of ethnographic data about both pre-contact social organisation and the land registration process itself. But it is also due to wider developments in political philosophy and socio-cultural theory. In political philosophy authors such as Patchen Markell (2003) have drawn on an Arendtian re-reading of Hegel to argue, contra earlier works on recognition (for example, Taylor 1992), that ‘identity can only be reliably known in retrospect’ (Markell 2003: 14) as the ‘results of action and speech in public’ (ibid: 13). As a result, Markell suggests it is inappropriate to speak of the ‘recognition’ of pre-existing identities and prefers instead a ‘politics of acknowledgment’ in which we pay attention to the mutual constitution of actors in moments of recognition. This means that we should not only examine the making of landowner identities, but also the concession of authoritativeness to certain disciplines (such as anthropology) and of wisdom (or the lack of it) to the small group of expatriates who have been so influential in the history of land policy in PNG.
In additional, advances in political science have converged with the development of a more ‘poetic and pragmatic’ turn in anthropology (Ortner 1984; Sansom 1985; Silverstein and Urban 1995; Wedeen 2003; Silverstein 2004).[3] This approach focuses less on a ‘museological’ description of the cultural inventory of distinct groups, and more on a ‘semiotic praxology’ (Silverstein 2003) in which ‘we now worry about how the image of a language or a culture are themselves constituted as meaningful realities within the scheme of normative subjectivity of a population’ (ibid: 116) such that ‘cultures’ are seen as an
emergent phenomenon of sociocultural process, unstable and sociohistorically contingent as they are themselves invoked by ‘the natives’ [indigenous or otherwise] as a contributory part — a moment — of a dialectical process of politicoeconomically and historically specific meaning making’ (ibid: 115).
In other words, both policy scientists and Pirandello increasingly see indigenous peoples (and everyone else) as living ‘ever-moving, ever-changing’ lives which are hung on the hook of the ‘immutable form’ of corporate land registration.
Local forms of sociality in PNG seem particularly suited to this method of analysis due to their tendency to lack clear corporate groups (Barnes 1962; Wagner 1974). Indeed, a focus on the lack of a clear demarcation of the identity of landowners of resource-rich areas of PNG is notable. At Tolukuma (Golub 2006: 399–402), Hides (ibid: 394–7), Mount Kare (Filer 1998: 161–6), Frieda (Jorgensen 2001), and Kutubu (Weiner 2001), politicking over who gets to be a landowner has prevented compensation from resource developments from reaching local people, and in some cases it has halted resource development altogether. A museological approach to viewing and registering supposedly static customary groups must explain this dynamism away as a ‘corruption’ of a state of pre-existing purity.
But in fact many fine ‘pragmatic-poetic’ ethnographies of PNG have been produced (Lederman 1986; Merlan and Rumsey 1991). Indeed, some of the most fruitful work produced by Melanesianists involves not merely describing Melanesian approaches to sociality, but adopting them as useful theoretical constructs — the concept of the ‘elicitation’ of landowner identities being a prime example. Despite the fact that these approaches explain, rather than explain away, the failure of museological approaches to registration, there has been little uptake of this work by policy scientists. In PNG, as in Australia, anthropologists continue to attempt to disabuse the policy community of their notions of static corporate groups existing ‘from time immemorial’ without reverting to analytically crude notions savagery, ‘Africanisation’, barbarism, ‘instability’, dysfunction, and so forth. The question then becomes: How, concretely, can one understand the translation of landowner identities into Western legal forms in a poetic-pragmatic mode rather than an optical and museological one? How do we capture the fact that indigenous cultures innovate and change over time, and that much of this change is elicited by an entity such as the state which demands that the object of its gaze remain static? The concept of the ‘invention’ of tradition, despite its attempted re-workings by many authors (Otto and Pedersen 2005), continues to carry the critical sting that its original framers (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) meant to deploy against British imperialist pretensions. As a result it is not only disempowering to indigenous people (Briggs 1996) but, more importantly, its use of the term ‘invention’ does a poor job of conceptualising the relationship between practice and structure that has been so fruitfully illuminated by the pragmatic-poetic turn in analysis.
More promising seems an approach which sees custom as a ‘modality of action rather than persistence of the concrete and material substance’ (Merlan 1995: 164). Like Markell, Merlan and Sansom suggest focusing on the process, rather than the content, of translation, and echoing Markell, urge us to see this process as one of the reflexive, mutual constitution of indigenous group and state (see also Merlan 2006). In this chapter I will focus on the creation of an official schedule of the Ipili owners of the Porgera gold mine in Enga Province, PNG. This involved the translation of customary forms of sociality into a legal system of corporate clans. I will describe this not as a process of ‘invention’ but one of ‘forging’, and I will argue that the trope best used to understand Ipili flexibility and willingness to innovate is not ‘instability’ or ‘barbarism’ but ‘modernity.’ The larger import of this example, I argue, is that modernity might profitably be used as a trope to describe the phenomenon of indigenous accommodation to land registration schemes more generally.
I use ‘modernity’ in the sense of a distinctive mode of historical consciousness. It is, as Habermas put it, a ‘reflective treatment of traditions that have lost their quasi-natural status’ (1987: 2). Modernity ‘cannot and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself’ (ibid: 7). The modern world is thus ‘distinguished from the old by the fact that it opens itself to the future, the epochal new beginning is rendered constant with each moment that gives birth to the new’ (ibid: 6). Seeing modernity as an openness to the new allows us to develop an account which ‘dissociates modernity from its modern European origins and stylises it into a spatio-temporally neutral model’ which might be applied to a variety of groups (ibid).
In addition to Habermas, I also draw on Sahlins’ recent (1992, 2000a, 2000b) writing on developman, which has also been an inspiration for much of the recent literature on ‘local’ or ‘alternate’ modernities. I diverge from these approaches because I feel that they treat modernity museologically, as a process in which individual items move are either removed from, or incorporated into, an inventory of cultural traits.[4] Bruce Knauft, for instance, defines modernity as ‘images and institutions associated with Western-style progress and development in a contemporary world’ (2002: 18), while the contributors to a recent volume on Modernities in Melanesia (Robbins and Wardlow 2005) focus on modernity as being identical with Christianity, humiliation, and so forth.
To me the true insight of Sahlins’ work is that ‘tradition’ is a distinctive mode of appropriating novelty — a process rather than an inventory to be preserved.
[It] is not the dead hand of the past. On the contrary, ‘tradition’ is precisely the way people always cope with circumstances not of their doing and beyond their control, whether acts of nature or of other peoples. Hence tradition has changed in the past, and, by encompassing the goods and relations of the market in its own terms, it would continue to do so (Sahlins 2000a: 21).
Sahlins’ understanding of tradition allows us to understand how the creation of landowner identities in the context of land registration can be understood as both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ when examined from the viewpoint of process.
Finally, I will argue that Ipili identities were ‘forged’, taking my cue from Daniel Miller’s use of the term in his ethnography of modernity in Trinidad.
In the first place forged is intended to connote the process by which intractable materials are, in the forge, turned into something new, useful, solid and fine. But the term forged is also a verb pertaining to the act of forgery as an act of faking (Miller 1994: 321).
Miller’s wonderful evocation of the ambiguity of this word here captures the way in which Ipili seized the moment of novelty introduced by mining and attempted to remake themselves in light of the mine’s elicitation of their identity in a way that was both ‘modern’ and ‘customary’. It is to this regime of identification that I now turn.
The Ipili are an ethnic group located in the Porgera ‘district’ in the far west of Enga Province in the highlands of PNG (Biersack 1980).[5] Since contact with the Australian Administration in the late 1930s, Porgera’s gold deposits have been central to Ipili history as well as to the wider fate of PNG as an independent nation. PNG relies on taxes and royalties from extractive industry for a substantial proportion of its budget (Banks 2001), and the Porgera gold mine, operated by the Vancouver-based transnational Placer Dome,[6] became a major source of revenues in 1992 (its second year of production), when it produced 1,485,077 ounces of gold, making it the third most productive gold mine in the world (Jackson and Banks 2002). The Porgera mine continues to be a national priority today, even as it matures.
The Porgera mine is unusual not just because of the size of its operations, but because of the impact that it has had on the valley where it is located (Banks 1997; Filer 1999; Golub 2001, 2006; Jacka 2003). While people outside the valley often damage the road and power supply into Porgera, and migrants threaten the valley’s stability (Patterson 2006), the mine does not have the landowner identification problems faced by other resource developments. Although Porgera is ridden with conflict, social inequity, civil unrest, and a fair amount of resentment for the company, there has been little or no questioning regarding who the ‘real landowners’ of Porgera are. A ‘successful registration’ of landowners is one of the reasons for Porgera’s success relative to other mines. How, then, did this registration occur?
Throughout the 1980s Placer Dome compensated individual Ipili on a case-by-case basis for land damaged by exploration work. However, in the late 1980s, when Porgera proved to be a feasible site for a mine, Placer Dome was obliged to convert its existing exploration licence into a Special Mining Lease. Under the Mining Act, it is the National Government which has the power to issue such a lease, but in order for the lease to be issued the company must sign a compensation agreement with the customary landowners. As it turned out, the mine also required land on which Ipili people were currently living, and an agreement specifying where and how they were to be relocated also became necessary. Finally, for complex political reasons, Ipili landowners, the Provincial Government and the National Government also signed agreements with each other specifying their duties and obligations to each other after the lease was issued. In sum, in order for the mine to open it was necessary that the government and company negotiate, not just with Ipili people, but with ‘the Ipili’ as a collectivity.
Negotiations with all of the 3,000 or so inhabitants of the future mining lease were obviously impractical, and so government officials used a mechanism of agency described in PNG’s Land Act whereby Ipili people chose ‘agents’ to represent them in negotiations. This produced a pool of 300 or so agents, a group composed essentially of the most prominent persons from each of the extended households in the Special Mining Lease area. This number was still too large, however, and so these agents delegated their agency to a set of 23 ‘agents of agents’ or ‘super agents’. These people formed the Landowner Negotiating Committee, and it was they who provided legitimate consent to the creation of a mine by putting their signatures (or thumb-prints) on official agreements with the company and the government.
This structure of delegation matches the segmented lineage system which the Porgera Land Study found to be present in Ipili custom. According to this study, land in Porgera is owned by seven landowning clans. Each clan is composed of one or more ‘sub-clans.’ There were found to be a total of 23 sub-clans within the Special Mining Lease. These sub-clans are themselves composed of a number of ‘house lines’ (an English gloss of the Tok Pisin haus lain) which took the form of extended families. Land was similarly divided: extended families live on individual plots which are parts of larger named territories which are owned by sub-clans, which are themselves part of even larger named units which are owned by clans (GoPNG 1987a).
The result was a happy coincidence — the social structure of the Ipili ‘discovered’ by outsiders fitted very neatly into a hierarchical Western model of organisation. Thus the land study and system of delegation in Porgera represents a clear example of a museological method of landowner registration, because this Western organisational system is congruent with the segmentary lineage system of Ipili clans. Each level of social segmentation has its own representative who delegates power to the agent representing a higher-level segment of the clan until one reaches the 23 ‘apical’ negotiators of the Landowner Negotiating Committee. This committee speaks for all 23 clans and thus the entire ethnic group.
At first glance, then, the success of Porgera’s land registration regime seems to be an example that could be used to bolster a ‘view and translate’ approach to registration. However, a close analysis of the land study and the meetings that produced it will demonstrate that the seven-clan system was forged in the course of the events of the late 1980s. The seven-clan system is not ‘untrue’ to Ipili sociality because Ipili ways of being, like Pirandello’s characters, have several potential ways of appearing. What made Porgera’s system of land registration resilient, I will argue, is that Ipili had the choice of how they were to be apprehended. But before I explain how Ipili identity was ‘hung upon a hook’ in the late 1980s, we must first examine the many-sided nature of Ipili sociality.