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This book is primarily about Lihirian responses to large-scale resource development. In the process of writing this book, from its original genesis through to its current form, I have been engaged with Lihirian lives and resource development in several different ways. As such the list of people who have helped me along the way is that much longer. This book originated as my doctoral thesis at the University of Melbourne. My first 18 months of research in Lihir was made possible through financial support from the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies. Thanks to the National Research Institute for organising visas and research permits in Papua New Guinea. Throughout my candidature, Monica Minnegal, Peter Dwyer and Mary Patterson provided academic support, constantly challenging me to further develop my ideas and to ask more questions. I owe a great intellectual debt to Martha Macintyre who supervised my doctoral research. Her work in Lihir opened many opportunities for me and has strongly influenced my belief in the need for a genuinely engaged anthropology. Over the years Martha has generously shared her ideas, and provided continuing encouragement and friendship. Ways of transporting goods and people from place to place will be much easier. Each family will have a car of its own. Lihir is going to be full of raskols [petty criminals]. I think in the future many young men and old men will leave their hausboi [men's house] and live only in their high quality permanent buildings. They will find life easier and forget their traditional ways of life. Ways of education will be much different from Although Papua New Guinean students are educated for the first three years in the vernacular, English is the official language used for the remainder of their education. In many cases, the national lingua franca Tok Pisin is more commonly used and more readily grasped. Tok Pisin and Lihirian terms are italicised and listed in separate glossaries. to the performance of mortuary rituals that involve large-scale ceremonial feasting and exchange. In recent years, Lihirian kastom has grown significantly, partly reflecting the capacity of the ceremonial economy to absorb new objects and forms of wealth, while resisting the absorption of values and practices associated with them in the global capitalist economy. But this efflorescence is also due to a mass appeal to kastom for social stability which, like the earlier World systems theory has found new life in grander theories of globalisation which assert that the global envelops the local, creating similarity in the place of alterity. The significant issue in this book is the construction of particularity in the face of apparently homogenising and universalising forces. The discourse of globalisation is often uninformative because of an over-emphasis on global homogeneity. Too often it is assumed that the globalising capitalist economy obliterates local economies, only to remake them in its own reflection. However, as we can see from the students' stories, rega...

The concept of a 'just transition' to a low-carbon economy is firmly embedded in mainstream global discourses about mitigating climate change. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's political economy elaborated in The Great Transformation, we interrogate the idea of a just transition and place it within its historical context. We address a major contradiction at the core of global energy transition debates: the rapid shift to low-carbon energy-systems will require increased extraction of minerals and metals.In doing so, we argue that extractive industries are energy and carbon-intensive, and will enlarge and intensify social and ecological injustice. Our findings reveal the importance of understanding how the idea of a just transition is used, and by who, and the type of justice that underpins this concept. We demonstrate the need to ground just transition policies and programmes in a notion of justice as fairness.

This paper examines the ‘property effects’ surrounding competition over access to mining benefits in Papua New Guinea. Under conditions of rapid social change engendered by large scale resource extraction, Lihirian islanders have increasingly recalibrated their social networks, manifest through shifting notions of sociality and obligation, and ownership strategies that seek to limit other people's claims to wealth. These local changes are paralleled by larger and more paradoxical processes: although the state uses the mining project to consolidate itself, Lihirians have consistently challenged the state through their attempts to appropriate the mine for their own ends. By keeping the multiple layers of their social networks out of view, Lihirians deny the connections that can provide others with access to benefits. In considering the strategic responses to the inequalities, discontents and inconsistencies of life in modern Papua New Guinea, it becomes apparent that questions of property are simultaneously questions about identity and belonging.

The changing nature of Lihirian masculinity in the context of large‐scale resource development is characterised by ingenuity, disjuncture and struggles for legitimacy. In this paper, I consider the various ways Lihirian masculinity is challenged and shaped by exogenous influences, how Lihirians appropriate particular aspects of modernity for their own purposes, and the ways in which certain Lihirian men have attempted to redefine masculine ideals according to neoliberal democratic values in their quest to modernise Lihir. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in the Lihir Islands between 2003 and 2007.