Keeping the Network out of view: Mining, Distinctions and Exclusion in Melanesia

Abstract

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.

Social Reproduction and Ethnic Boundaries: Marriage Patterns Through Time and Space Among the Wampar, Papua New Guinea

“…The data is mainly based on anthropological fieldwork that Bettina Beer has conducted in the village of Gabsongkeg. She did fieldwork in Gabsongkeg in 1997Gabsongkeg in , 1999Gabsongkeg in /2000Gabsongkeg in , 2002Gabsongkeg in , 2003Gabsongkeg in /04, 2009Gabsongkeg in , and in 2013 Fischer had conducted fieldwork in Gabmadzung in 1965, and then in Gabsongkeg in 1971/72, 1976, 1988, 1990, 1993, 1999/2000, 2003/04 and 2009. In 2009/2010 Bacalzo and Tobias Schwörer did research in Dzifasing, and Heide Lienert, Christiana…”

Contesting the Goro Nickel Mining Project, New Caledonia: Indigenous Rights, Sustainable Development and the Land Issue

“…The province was also involved in supporting the establishment of local companies, particularly in the catering sector, through a development fund called PROMOSUD, which was a separate element in the model of participation. From a perspective akin to that described by Bainton (2009) in relation to the Lihir mine in Papua New Guinea, the aim of these arrangements was to provide an economic basis for the customary legitimacy of the municipality's tribus. The adoption of this approach made it possible to circumvent the fact that the mine is not situated on land recognised as customary by the state.…”

Large-Scale Mines and Local‑Level Politics

“…This underscores the capacity of actors to create new roles for themselves, instead of simply acting within the confines of a political structure that is already given as a fact of life. But it also tends to obscure the distinction between public and private domains of political action, because 'state actors' and 'company actors' get tangled up in a contest in which 'community representatives' dominate the distributional issue by sheer weight of numbers, and everyone accuses everyone else of attempting to manipulate the distribution of projectrelated costs and benefits to their own personal advantage (Filer 1998;Bainton 2009). The boundaries between 'politics' and 'economics' are also blurred as political orientations encompass the activities of local entrepreneurs Grochain 2013).…”