Don Gardner

Universität Luzern/Australian National University

The idea of a "resource curse," whereby resource abundance generates social inequality and injustice, has caused much discussion in academic and political circles. Today, with "corporate social responsibility", it is also of concern to transnational corporations (TNCs). While the precise mechanisms underlying the resource curse are controversial, there is no doubt that extractive industries have been associated with socially significant inequality at local, regional, national and international levels. This association gives rise to vexing moral issues and to political questions that challenge policy-makers, for it exists alongside the economic necessity to increase mineral production, as world demand increases. This association is also apparent to holder of the view, strongly held in some circles, that TNCs, far from being a problem, could be a key part of the solution to poverty. This general state of affairs poses significant analytical questions to contemporary anthropology and its foundational commitment to ethnographic detail, even in the most conjunctural of local settings. The proliferating linkages entailed by globalization have produced conjunctures that make it ever more apparent that capital is global, while resources, labour power and the administrative institutions that regulate them are not. At the same time, ethnographic analysis of these conjunctures—more or less as a matter of postmodernist principle—has favoured mid-level theory and a moral critique of capitalism’s adverse effects. The proposed research seeks to engage all these issues, in a concrete regional setting, through a deep, longitudinal study of the socio-cultural processes that, in conjunction with existing circumstances, lead to the development of local level inequalities under the effects of contrasting large-scale, capital projects. Through comparison of two contrasting projects, unfolding in almost identical cultural settings, the research aims to make possible a) the analysis of the factors tending to produce transgenerationally consistent inequalities of power and wealth; b) a principled and explicit consideration of the sorts of historical factors productive of such inequalities. Papua New Guinea is characterised by its prominence in rankings both of mineral wealth and of intra‐national inequality. This fact embarrasses its government and concerns NGOs and the multilateral organisations upon which the state still depends. The proposed research is aimed at uncovering the causal nexus that comprises those linkages in a localised social setting, among the Wampar of the Morobe Province, where both a large gold and copper mine and a timber biomass energy project are planned. Building on decades of ethnographic research among the Wampar, our research aims to identify the micro-level interactions that define the networks constituting local, district and regional sociality. By tracing the processes of differentiation as they relate to these interactions, we aim to understand the development of inequalities that tend to become inter‐generationally reproduced, out of a field of sociality in which they were once unknown. In addition, the project aims to contribute to recent efforts to establish an anthropology of corporate forms by showing how asymmetric linkages—across what were formerly largely separate social fields—are involved in the encompassment and reconfiguration of local cultures by wider national and international institutions. That such encompassment occurs and is consequential for future trajectories, is undeniable; how it achieves its effects in terms that are relevant to the scale of a human life, in a setting like Morobe Province, is less clear. The task of clarifying such processes is at the heart of the proposed research.