Freeport and the States: Politics of Corporations and Contemporary Colonialism in West Papua

Abstract

Corporations often claim to be economic actors solely interested in capital accumulation. However, historical and anthropological scholarship has argued they have had outsized political roles, especially during high colonialism when transnational corporations such as the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company shaped colonial entities. This article explores the case of American mining company Freeport-McMoRan, which runs the world’s largest gold and copper mine in West Papua, and its entanglement with contemporary imperial and colonial projects in the region. Through the study of the company’s decisive role in the transfer of West Papua from the Dutch to Indonesia during the decolonization period of the 1960s, and in the formation of the postcolonial Indonesian state characterized by its militaristic and capitalistic stances, this article argues that Freeport’s operation in West Papua has been central to shaping U.S. imperial policy in Southeast Asia. The company’s relationship with the U.S. government and its contract of work with the Indonesian government reproduce an older form of state-corporation partnership called a charter, which grants a corporate body privileges associated with exploration, trade, and colonization. Combining a historical study of the political role of corporations across time and an ethnographic study of Freeport’s operation, this article rethinks the anthropological and historical study of transnational corporations and their roles in the contemporary politics of colonialism.

Ethnography after anthropology

“…Anthropology has long been interested in analyzing extraction as a cultural and social phenomenon, especially as a form of ongoing colonial exploitation (Ballard & Banks, 2003; Kusumaryati, 2021; Nash, 1979; Welker, 2014). Yet in one of its earliest appearances, the term “extractive ethnography” is used by Dent (2012, p. 670) to describe “ostensibly imperialist paradigms” of a “pith‐helmet style” of ethnography that was being rejected in the 1980s and 1990s.…”