I wish to conclude by making the following observations:
customary law cannot be made into justiciable law without turning it into something altogether non-customary;
the landholding clan, at least in regions like the Kutubu oil project area, is neither solidary, corporate, nor bound by collective sentiment;
but I agree with the architects of PNG post-Independence land reform that the relation to land is central to the PNG person’s being and social identity.
As is the case with the Nuer, social units, though phrased in the language of consanguineal kinship, are also equi-primordially territorial relations. But land is only one part of what a local clan exists to ‘control’, or to put it another way, the allocation of rights to land is only one of the social conditions through which the clan is elicited as a social entity — for the most part, rhetorically. Yet this is what is required from an ILG by the local ‘External Affairs’ requirements of the resource companies, which tend to phrase their concern for achieving a manageable local decision-making process in terms of clear guidelines for the allocation of authority over land matters.
Wagner (1988: 60) has characterised the so-called solidariness of Daribi social units in the following way:
Vengeance raids, nasty fights over a pig or domestic situation, and factional standoffs are not so much accidents of the critical social structure as social structuring within the larger accident of the critical social mass. They carry the same weight as social norms and rules or family-values, only in a different mood. The social charter of the Sogo people is the fight of their split from Noru; that of Weriai is the fight of its fissioning from Iogobo, and so forth. Fights, in this context, are the elementary structures of kinship.
Bamford (1998: 30), writing about Kamea inheritance through clans, makes a similar and more general statement:
Land, paternal names, and modes of ritual competence are all transmitted through men, typically from a father to his son. Yet it is important to note that gaining access to these and other resources is not an automatic concomitant of patrifiliation — instead, it is constitutive of it.
Smith (1974: 43) observed much earlier that:
Evans-Pritchard’s distinction between the types of corporateness of local and lineage units among the Nuer implies a recognition of distinctions between the ideological and organizational aspects of social units, and as such, between corporateness evidenced by group action, and corporateness postulated as such.
And Evans-Pritchard (1940) originally observed that:
Nuer lineages are not corporate localized communities, though they are frequently associated with territorial units, and those members of a lineage who live in an area associated with it see themselves as a residential group, and the value or concept of lineage thus functions through the political system.
Finally, if we are to take the critique of the self-evidence of internal and external relations seriously, then neither can we long sustain the fiction that CNGL is radically external to the land groups themselves. Through its own attempts at educating landowners about the relevant PNG legislation, its own acts on behalf of the State in registering the ILGs in the first place, and its commitment to monitoring, evaluating and maintaining the ILG system in ‘good repair’, the company is a critical force for the transformation of group dynamics in the oil project area. The anthropological study of indigenous culture and society in a resource extraction environment cannot limit itself to the indigenous people as such. A complex, non-local ‘culture’ comprising government, resource companies, and local landowners is developing in every mining enclave in PNG, and this non-local and non-traditional culture deserves monitoring in its own right. In order to reveal this culture as an object of anthropological scrutiny, it will be necessary to view the PNG ‘clan’ not chiefly as an age-old and resilient feature of ‘traditional’ society but also as a strategically elicited form of social and political self-presentation in the highly charged intercultural encounters of PNG’s resource sectors.