Advocates of a ‘view and translate’ approach might examine the material I have presented here and conclude from it simply that the Porgera Land Study was itself flawed, and that a less sloppy approach would have revealed the coherent corporate groups they expected. After even this brief presentation, however, I think it is clear that the incoherence of the land study and other works from this period are not the result of myopia, but rather of a process through which corporate entities like ‘clans’ creatively emerged in response to the land study’s elicitation of them. We have seen that the land study was indeed ‘forged’ — it is neither a direct translation of a pristine, timeless Ipili social structure, nor a travesty in which Ipili culture was misapprehended. The land study in Porgera was instead a creative augmentation of Ipili social organisation according to government requirements and Ipili predilections.

We see reflected in the land study not the lineages or segments of a clan with exclusive membership, but a world of malleable corporate identities that took shape around a few prominent ‘middle-men’ or tombene akali. They reflect the fact that everyone ‘on the ground’ in Porgera knew who had to sign to make an agreement feasible that would protect the mine and allow it to operate. The situation was like that which Evans-Pritchard (1940) describes in The Nuer, and even more like that which Pirandello (1995) creates in Six Characters in Search of an Author — not 23 sub-clans in search of an agent but 23 agents in search of a sub-clan. Like Pirandello’s cast, marooned on stage with no author to valorise or direct their action, the tomebene akali used their agency to become ‘agents’ through the forging of a newly corporate collective subjectivity that valorised their actions as its representatives. The remarkable reflexivity exhibited in these meetings — ‘our custom is X, so we will agree to Y’ — reveals an openness to the new and willingness to generate new normative frameworks which is, I have argued, quite modern. Porgera was successful because the people involved in the land registration process used the past less as a blueprint which dictated future behavior, and more as a resource in creatively coping with what was going to come. In the course of the land study, Ipili peoples managed to be both modern and traditional.

The land study was meant to be a document which settled once and for all who was and was not entitled to be considered a ‘landowner’ and an ‘agent’ in Porgera. What actually happened, however, was that the land charter became the raw material for a creative semiotics of landownership which enabled a wide variety of claims to be made, just as in the pre-colonial system already described. The result is what I have called ‘bounded arenas’ for contests of Ipili identity (Golub 2006). Interested parties range from Porgerans seeking to use their grass-roots security circles to become recognised and hence powerful agents to Australian mine representatives who strategically label claims of landowner identity true or false in order to widen or contract the field of the mine’s legitimate interlocutors. What exists in Porgera today is not a system of agents which replaced a system of agency, but a repertoire of agents and clans within which Ipili continue to exercise their agency. This environment is flexible in that it constrains the forms in which claims to identity must be articulated but does not determine the success of any particular claim. The land study was forged in the sense that it solidified a fluid and — in Levi-Strauss’s (1966) sense — ‘hot’ mass of sociality into a durable system of agents which provided a social context stable enough to host a gold mine. Thus, ironically, even though the land study got the sociology of Porgera wrong, in the end it allowed an Ipili mode of sociality to continue, albeit in transformed circumstances.

Many indigenous people who seek recognition from settler-dominated governments often feel like the son in Pirandello’s play, who says that ‘it isn’t possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace’. Ipili were lucky enough to undertake the registration process at a time when they themselves would decide what sort of reflection they would cast in the looking glass of official policy.

Any politician who has ever had to hammer out the details of a piece of legislation might well find that metaphors of forging come naturally to them. It would seem unnatural, however, for us say that Australia’s 1993 Native Title Act was ‘invented’ by the Australian Parliament since, as a quintessentially modern institution, liberal democracy generates new decisions on the basis of consensus formation arrived at through a deliberative process which responds to new situations with legislation which (ideally) expresses the will of its constituents. In this chapter I have suggested that we ought to understand indigenous communities in similar terms. Indigenous traditions are no more ‘invented’ than are parliamentary laws, and for the same reason. Ipili responses to the Porgera gold mine are, I have argued, just as novel as newly passed laws, and yet just as acceptably a product of their culture as laws are. In both cases, I have argued that this is because of a distinct process, adherence to which constitutes genuineness, rather than because of some specific content. Modernity is a mode of response to temporality rather than a set of things to confront.

For this reason I would go even further. For Europeans and members of their settler colonies, the act of forging oneself and one’s society can be unsettling. To a certain extent, James Clifford’s concern with the predicament of culture in ‘a truly global space of cultural connections and dissolutions’ where ‘local authenticities meet and merge in transient … settings’ (1998: 4) is merely one of the many concerns that Europeans have had in the face of a world where the authority of the past cannot be taken for granted. But this is ‘our’ problem, not ‘theirs’. As Marilyn Strathern has noted:

Indeed, I would argue that Melanesians are even more modern — more willing to attend to novelty and avoid stereotypic reproduction — than are European organisations and bureaucracies for whom stereotypic reproduction is a condition of existence.

We might hear in highlanders’ ‘expectation of the potential revelation’ of objects echoes of Baudelaire’s (1972: 402) painter of modern life who aims ‘to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distill the eternal from the transitory’. This is a view of highlanders who are not ‘alternately’ or ‘heterodoxically’ modern (Knauft 2002), but simply ‘modern’.

This image of the Melanesian-as-dandy may strike some as an overly-optimistic portrayal of the situation in Melanesia today, so it is important to note that the trope of modernity need not be merely celebratory. Indeed, as Colin Filer (1998) has pointed out, this level of Levi-Straussian ‘heat’ can lead to a fluidity of social relations that ‘menaces’ a resource industry predicated on the bureaucratic, stereotypical reproduction of action necessary to keep large resource extraction projects up and running. My point here is that we can understand this openness to innovation as a disposition to action which can have a variety of outcomes. Just because ‘menace’ is all about fluidity does not mean that all fluidity is menacing.

The Porgera case thus suggests that we should examine the way indigenous claims and Western legal forms are mutually constituted, and suggests that we direct our attention to the process of that constitution in which elaborating tradition (as much as legislation) is a reflexive process. As Merlan (2006: 101) points out, ‘the notion of the “mutual constitution” that reflexivity implies has long been one of the strongest potential alternatives to the concept of temporally deep continuity as the source of difference’. If this is the case, then we might in closing return to Patchen Markell’s ‘politics of acknowledgment’ — a sense that justice requires that ‘each of us bear our share of the burden and risk involved in the undertaking, open-ended, and sometimes maddeningly and sometimes joyously surprising activity of living and acting with people’ (Markell 2003: 7) rather than indulge in a comfortable assumption of ‘sovereign invulnerability to the open-endedness and contingency of the future we share with others’ (ibid: 15). For the final step of recognising the contingent nature of ‘their’ identity means a symmetrical recognition that ‘we’ do not know who we are until after the fact — and that ‘they’ may be the ones to tell us.