Willem Church
Willem Church is an anthropologist and researcher in the BirthRites Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. His research bridges socio-cultural and evolutionary anthropology, examining how social groups reproduce and constitute themselves in relation to cultural identity and collective action. Combining ethnography with computational modelling, he explores the micro-level dynamics of social (re)organisation and its population-level consequences. He completed his doctorate at the University of Lucerne, for which he received the Hank Nelson Memorial Prize and the Frobenius Research Promotion Prize.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6657-9519
Ink and Land »
Documenting Factionalism around a Prospective Mine in Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Willem Church
Publication date: 2025
Ink and Land is an ethnographic account of political and legal struggles over landownership in Papua New Guinea, in which competing factions seek recognition as customary landowners of Wafi-Golpu, a major prospective copper-gold mine. Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories, court documents and fifteen months of fieldwork, the book examines how different groups attempt to harness resource extraction for their benefit and how, in doing so, they reshape their social worlds through the medium of affidavits, court declarations and incorporation certificates. To analyse this process, the book advances the concept of antagonistic documentality—a form of conflict in which parties engage in conflicting world-building projects through and about documents and, in doing so, create an order of paper that outlasts the disputes themselves. Through this detailed case study, Ink and Land reveals how legal and bureaucratic battles over resource extraction in Papua New Guinea formalise factionalism, consolidate elite control over new sources of wealth, and redefine the nature of groups and landownership. By focusing on conflict over documents as a process of social transformation, the book offers fresh insights into the politics of land, law and resource extraction in the contemporary Pacific.
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