The people of the Lihir Islands in Papua New Guinea have long held visions of a prosperous new future, often referred to by local leaders as the 'Lihir Destiny'. When large-scale gold mining activities commenced on the main island of Lihir in 1995, many hoped that this new world had finally arrived. The Lihir Destiny provides a nuanced account of the social structural and cultural transformations engendered by large-scale resource extraction. Tracing the history of Lihirian engagement with outside forces, from the colonial period through to recent mining activities, this book brings new light to bear on the bigger question of what 'development' means in contemporary Melanesia. The Lihir Destiny explores how Lihirian leaders devised future plans for a cultural revolution based upon the maximisation of mining activities and the influential philosophies of the Personal Viability movement. However, reaching the 'Lihir Destiny' is no simple affair, and many Lihirians find themselves negotiating divergent formulations of culture, sociality and economic engagement. The Lihir Destiny will appeal to readers interested in the social impacts of large-scale resource development, the processes of cultural continuity and change and the ways in which modernity is configured in local terms.
Mining communities are the subject of a rich tradition of ethnographic study. As the major industry and employer in any region where they are located, mining operations provide a physical, social and economic focal point for the anthropologist. Approaches to the subject have varied greatly. From June Nash's (1993) study of a Bolivian mining community, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us, to Michael Taussig's polemical and literary reflections on capitalism, greed and exploitation in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980) and My Cocaine Museum (2004), there has been close scrutiny of the complex inter-relationships between mines, their owners (whether individuals or corporations), and the people who live around them or work in them. The search for mineral wealth has long been associated with colonisation, economic exploitation and economic transformation. In contemporary Papua New Guinea, large-scale mining has become the most significant export industry, generating income for government and for the people whose lands are affected. Extractive industry is now viewed as the main means of economic development. Controversies over the environmental degradation and social disruptions generated by mining operations have hardly dampened the enthusiasm for mining. International companies continue to explore and take out leases, the government continues to facilitate their activities, and in most places local people welcome the associated prospect of 'development'. Lihir has been no exception. My own association with Lihirians and the Lihir gold mine began just before the construction phase, in 1995. At that time the excitement was almost palpable, as people contemplated the wealth that they were sure would be generated by the project. Over the following nine years I worked as a consultant, monitoring the social changes that occurred and recording the local responses to environmental change and degradation. As I observed many of the dramatic confrontations and the innovative strategies that Lihirians adopted in their dealings with the mining company, I often wished that I could find a graduate student who would be able to engage with these changes in the sort of concerted, day-to-day, ethnographic research that is characteristic of our discipline. Nick Bainton became that ethnographer. Participant observation has had a bad press over the last two decades – decried as oxymoronic, partial and ideologically suspect – but it has survived this intellectual buffeting. This book is testament to its continued strength as a methodology, and to the ways that direct observation of events, conversations with a variety of people, and reflection upon change over time enriches interpretative endeavours. The author's participation — in the training for 'Personal Viability', in feast preparations, and in the everyday lives of the villagers with whom he lived — generates insights and descriptions that are unavailable to a casual observer. The book is a revised version of a doctoral thesis. It incorporates archival and historical research, and engages with debates about the ways that contemporary Melanesians construct models of their identity and culture as they embrace modernity. It tells a story of the complicated making of the 'roads' that Lihirians have taken as they strive to reach their 'destiny'. It also reveals the tensions generated, within the local community and between Lihirians and others, as they struggle to gain control over the processes of change and the wealth generated by the mine. The social and economic changes ushered in by the mining project on Lihir have been profound. They are readily observable. When I first arrived, I was struck by the relative poverty of people there. Many children still went naked, women's clothing was usually a drab length of cloth, houses were invariably made of bush materials, and there was a meagre strip of dirt road linking a few villages. The airstrip was tiny and involved the rather tricky piloting manoeuvre of landing a small plane on an uphill slope. Now there is an airport that regularly ferries hundreds of workers to and from the island; children wear shorts and sneakers, or frilly dresses from the large Filipino-owned supermarket. Where there was an overgrown and abandoned plantation there is now a township. A well-equipped modern hospital serves the local community as well as the mining company's employees. But as Nick Bainton demonstrates in this study, the material changes have brought with them new distinctions, new inequalities, and conflicts that were previously absent. The abundance of introduced goods, the enthusiastic embrace of modernity, and associated power struggles do not mean that customs have been abandoned or that Lihirians have 'lost' their cultural traditions, their sense of their uniqueness, or their dreams of the future. Custom, like everything else on Lihir, has been transformed. This book documents and analyses the complex interactions between local people, migrants, foreign workers and mine managers, and the ways that new values associated with a monetary economy are established. It stands as a fine contribution to the anthropology of mining communities.
An absent presence : encountering the state through natural resource extraction in Papua New Guinea and Australia / Nicholas Bainton and Emilia E. Skrzypek -- Categorical dissonance : experiencing Gavman at the Frieda River Project in Papua New Guinea / Emilia E. Skrzypek -- 'Restraint without control" : law and order in Porgera and Enga Privince, 1950-2015 / Alex Golub -- Being like a state : how large-scale mining companies assume government roles in Papua New Guinea / Nicholas Bainton and Martha Macintyre -- Absence as immoral act : the PNG_LNG Project and the impact of an absent state / Michael Main -- In between presence and absence : ambiguous encounters of the state in unconventional gas developments in Queensland, Australia / Martin Espig -- The state's selective absence : extractive capitalism, mining juniors and indigenous interests in the Northern Territory / Sarah Holcombe -- Broken promise men : the malevolent absence of the state at the McArthur River Mine, Northern Territory / Gareth Lewis -- The state's stakes at the Century Mine, 1992-2012 / Jo-Anne Everingham, David Trigger and Julie Keenan -- The state that cannot absent itself: New Caledonia as opposed to Papua New Guinea and Australia / John Burton and Claire Levacher -- Afterforward : States of uncertainty / Nicholas Bainton, John R. Owen and Emilia E. Skrzypek.
As we move further into the twenty-first century, we are witnessing both the global extensification and local intensification of inequality. Unequal Lives deals with the particular dilemmas of inequality in the Western Pacific. The authors focus on four dimensions of inequality: the familiar triad of gender, race and class, and the often-neglected dimension of generation. Grounded in meticulous long-term ethnographic enquiry and deep awareness of the historical contingency of these configurations of inequality, this volume illustrates the multidimensional, multiscale and epistemic nature of contemporary inequality. This collection is a major contribution to academic and political debates about the perverse effects of inequality, which now ranks among the greatest challenges of our time. The inspiration for this volume derives from the breadth and depth of Martha Macintyre's remarkable scholarship. The contributors celebrate Macintyre's groundbreaking work, which exemplifies the explanatory power, ethical force and pragmatism that ensures the relevance of anthropological research to the lives of others and to understanding the global condition.
AbstractLarge-scale resource extraction projects often create obstacles for the protection, maintenance, and inheritance of indigenous cultural heritage. In this article we detail some of the challenges and opportunities arising from our collaborative partnership with the community of the Lihir Islands in Papua New Guinea, which is seeking to establish, inform, and resource a formal cultural heritage management program in the context of a large-scale gold-mining operation. The general approach to this collaborative venture involves the application of a specific development tool, the Stepping Stones for Cultural Heritage program. This consultative process is innovative in both Melanesia and the context of resource extraction, but also more generally within the field of cultural heritage. We describe the outcomes of this process and some of the initial pilot projects, one of which was based on the recording of traditional Lihirian songs. We also argue that while the mine places greater pressure upon Lihirian cultural heritage, it also presents Lihirians with the opportunity to realize a vision of their cultural future that is beyond the reach of many other indigenous communities.
Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book's key concept, "mortuary dialogue," describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific
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