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The Red and the Black: Bougainvillean Perceptions of Other Papua New Guineans
... There also seems to be a great consciousness of matrilineality and the importance of women, especially, perhaps as a way of contrasting Bougainville with other areas of Papua New Guinea where patriliny is practised and women seem to be denigrated. It may be that in this post-Crisis period, matriliny will emerge as a significant component of difference, as 'blackness' and 'non-violence' did in an earlier period [Nash and Ogan 1990]. ...
... I t is widely accepted that a pan-Bougainville identity has emerged in the past 100 years. 1 Some observers refer to it as Bougainvillean ethnicity, on the basis that it has become a political identity, associated with secessionist demands. The views of many observers on the development of this identity are summarised by Nash and Ogan who note that '… events of the 20th century -particularly plantation colonialism which was succeeded by modern industrialised neo-colonialism as represented by the copper mine -helped to create a pan-Bougainvillean sense of identity where none had existed before' [Ogan 1992, summarising Nash andOgan 1990]. ...
... The relatively small size of the groups and their recent history of migration in the period just before the colonial era began may have contributed to a sense of identity based on distinctiveness from members of neighbouring groups speaking different languages. It has been suggested that Nasioi speakers differentiate Torau speakers on the basis of language [Nash and Ogan 1990]. ...
... The introduction of capitalist social relations had a similar impact on Bougainville. A distinct pan-Bougainville identity developed during the 19 th and 20 th centuries as Bougainvilleans interacted more intensively with "other" Papua New Guineans in the colonial plantation economy (Nash and Ogan 1990). The very dark skin color of most Bougainvilleans became the key marker of this distinctive ethnic identity, with the quintessential "other" being the comparatively light skinned PNG highlanders who were referred to, pejoratively, as "redskins" (Nash and Ogan 1990). ...
... A distinct pan-Bougainville identity developed during the 19 th and 20 th centuries as Bougainvilleans interacted more intensively with "other" Papua New Guineans in the colonial plantation economy (Nash and Ogan 1990). The very dark skin color of most Bougainvilleans became the key marker of this distinctive ethnic identity, with the quintessential "other" being the comparatively light skinned PNG highlanders who were referred to, pejoratively, as "redskins" (Nash and Ogan 1990). Similarly on Guadalcanal, island-scale ethnic identities emerged in the milieu of the plantation economy from the early 20 th century and solidified in the context of post-World War Two migration, especially of Malaitans, to Honiara and to the peri-urban and rural areas to its west and, particularly, its east (Allen 2013a). ...
In recent decades the western Pacific has been the site of considerable violent conflict and instability. The region has played host to a ten-year secessionist struggle on Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a five-year low-level civil war in neighbouring Solomon Islands, a resurgence of localised armed conflict in parts of the PNG Highlands, and a number of less serious episodes of social unrest in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. These conflicts, along with those in Indonesia on the region’s western edge and in Fiji at its eastern fringe, have given rise to depictions of the region as an ‘arc of instability’ inhabited by states at various stages of ‘failure’.
Meanwhile, sovereignty, in the sense of constitutional independence and recognition by other states in the international Westphalian system of nation-states, remains much contested in various parts of contemporary Oceania (Firth 1989; Levine 2012). Indeed, the region hosts a bewildering range of “asymmetrical” autonomy arrangements, almost all of which have been negotiated between metropolitan powers and their former colonial territories, reflecting both the extent to which island jurisdictions have provided “rich breeding grounds for unique adaptations of governance” (Baldacchino and Milne 2009:5) and the highly negotiated, contingent and relational nature of sovereignty practices in the contemporary world (Martin 2014).
In the case of the western Pacific, the culture area known as Melanesia, the quest for full sovereignty, or independence, has been most striking in the Indonesian province of West Papua and in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia. The on-going, and, at times, violent struggles for independence in these two cases have been, in large measure, struggles for ethnic liberation; and could, therefore, be seen as manifestations of a classic form of identity-based nationalism in the context of anti-colonial struggle.
However, important as these two cases are, the focus of this chapter is not upon the international/Westphalian dimensions of sovereignty. Nor is it concerned with the evolving relations between former colonial territories and the metropolitan powers with which they remain constitutionally connected. Rather the geographical focus is upon post-colonial Melanesia and the conceptual focus is upon sovereignty defined in terms of the state’s supreme authority over the entirety of its national territory; or, in other words, on “internal” as opposed to “external” sovereignty (Gregory et al. 2009: 706).
This form of sovereignty has been, and continues to be, deeply problematic across post-colonial Melanesia where ethno-nationalist, or “micro-nationalist” (May 1982), agendas have loomed large in the panoply of political struggles, often of a violent nature, that have challenged the authority and legitimacy of the central state since the early days of colonial incursion. In this sense, then, my focus in this chapter is upon what we might call sub-national challenges to the territorial sovereignty of the post-colonial state in Melanesia and their intersections with ethnic identity and violent conflict. I will take as my primary focus the region known to geographers as the Solomons chain of islands consisting of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and the independent nation-state of Solomon Islands. These islands have played host to the two most serious armed conflicts that the western Pacific has witnessed since the Second World War, conflicts in which the scale of the island, as a sub-national level of governance (i.e. province), became a powerful, albeit problematic, platform for the mobilisation of ethnic identities in the pursuit of political objectives.
... The introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism had similar effects on Bougainville. Despite its internal ethnolinguistic and cultural diversity, a distinct pan-Bougainville identity developed during the 19th and 20th centuries as Bougainvilleans interacted more intensively with "other" Papua New Guineans in the colonial plantation economy, both on Bougainville and in other parts of PNG (Nash & Ogan, 1990). The very dark skin color of most Bougainvilleans became the key marker of this distinctive ethnic identity, with the quintessential "other" being the comparatively light skinned PNG highlanders whom were referred to, pejoratively, as "redskins" (Nash & Ogan, 1990). ...
... Despite its internal ethnolinguistic and cultural diversity, a distinct pan-Bougainville identity developed during the 19th and 20th centuries as Bougainvilleans interacted more intensively with "other" Papua New Guineans in the colonial plantation economy, both on Bougainville and in other parts of PNG (Nash & Ogan, 1990). The very dark skin color of most Bougainvilleans became the key marker of this distinctive ethnic identity, with the quintessential "other" being the comparatively light skinned PNG highlanders whom were referred to, pejoratively, as "redskins" (Nash & Ogan, 1990). ...
Set against the backdrop of past, contemporary and possible future mining-related violence on islands in the western Pacific, this article explores how scholarship on the politics of scale, as well as strands of the burgeoning island studies literature, might sharpen our understanding of the political economic and violent effects of extractive resource enclaves in Island Melanesia. Drawing upon field research in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, I argue that just as Melanesian islands were produced as a scale of struggle in the context of the introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism, so too have they emerged as a critical, albeit problematic, scale of struggle in contemporary contestations around extractive resource capitalism under the current round of globalisation and accumulation by dispossession. I suggest that this politics of scale lens enriches our understanding of how “islandness” can be an important variable in social and political economic processes. When the politics of scale is imbricated with the well-established idea of the island as the paradigmatic setting for territorialising projects, including the nation-state and sub-national jurisdictions, islandness emerges as a potentially powerful variable in the political economic struggles that attend extractive resource enclaves. I also highlight, in the cases considered here, how islands can become containers for internal socio-spatial contradictions that can be animated by extractive enclaves and can contribute to the island scale becoming violent and “ungovernable”. The article advances recent efforts to bring the island studies literature into closer conversation with political and economic geography.
... In addition, LGL has directly employed two expatriate anthropologists within its Community Liaison Department and established a Cultural Information Office that employs a Lihirian graduate anthropologist. a distinct sense of ethnic difference which is in some respects a crude extension of the distinction between 'landowners' and 'non-landowners' (Bainton 2009; see also Nash and Ogan 1990). To some degree, the efflorescence of kastom is also contingent on these changes. ...
... It is widespread but sparsely distributed from the coast to the mountains. H. sanfordi is an important totem in many Bougainvillean cultures (Oliver 1968, Nash & Ogan 1990, Hage 2004. Rapoisi society is divided into matrilineal moieties represented by the sea eagle ('kerakera') and Blyth's Hornbill Rhyticeros plicatus ('bohuhu'), within which multiple subclans are identified by other bird totems. ...
We present the results of a bird survey undertaken in the Aiope (Sarime) River basin in the Kunua District of north-west Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, during October–November 2019. Birds were surveyed across an elevational gradient of nearly 1,800 m, from the coast at the mouth of the Aiope River to the catchment headwaters in the north-west Emperor Range. Seventy-nine bird species were recorded, including three-quarters of Bougainville's resident land and freshwater avifauna (76/102 species) and a high proportion of its island-endemic and Solomons-endemic taxa (genera, species and subspecies). Resident avifauna include three species listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List—Sanford's Sea Eagle Haliaeetus sanfordi, Fearful Owl Nesasio solomonensis and (provisionally) Yellow-legged Pigeon Columba pallidiceps—nine Near Threatened species and two species that are protected under Papua New Guinean law. Forest supports 84% of the recorded resident bird species, most of which are forest-dependent, including all island-endemic taxa and all species of conservation concern apart from the Near Threatened Woodford's Rail Nesoclopeus woodfordi. Forest extent and condition improved with increasing elevation along the surveyed route; upper hill zone forest provides a narrow band of suitable habitat for a suite of lowland and hill forest species that were locally formerly more common across a broader altitudinal range. Elevational range extensions are reported for six species, and the vocalisations of Solomons Frogmouth Rigidipenna inexpectata are described from Bougainville for the first time.
... 149 To some authors, dealing with the Panguna mining project in fact created Bougainvillean identity and nationalism. 150 In retrospect, neither security nor business actors understood that security provision had to meet the challenges of locally owned and locally driven processes. Ideally, in Bougainville the escalation of grievances into open conflict and war could have been avoided by strategies of sustainable development from the perspective of indigenous resource managers known as the Sandline Affair. ...
... Pre-existing tensions surrounding the presence of outsiders working on plantations and in administrative roles in Bougainville during the period after World War II were compounded when mining operations started in that region in the early 1970s. The presence of thousands of outside labourers, termed 'redskins' by local Bougainvilleans due to their comparatively light skin colour, was a major contributing factor that led to widespread dissatisfaction around the operation of the mine (Nash and Ogan 1990; also Chapter 12, this volume). By contrast, the Misima gold mine in 2 ...
... While under nominal German colonial control from 1884 to 1915, the first administrative centre was only established in 1905, and Australia took control from 1914 to 1975. Under colonialism, interactions with people from elsewhere in PNG contributed to a pan-Bougainvillean identity, with the dark skin colour of most Bougainvilleans as the primary marker ( Nash and Ogan 1990). Identity politicisation occurred after World War II, when: because of the natural affluence of their village life and the coverage of the [Bougainville] district by Christian missions (mainly Catholic and non-Australian), the administration neglected to play a conspicuous role in development almost until copper was discovered. ...
... In addition, LGL has directly employed two expatriate anthropologists within its Community Liaison Department and established a Cultural Information Office that employs a Lihirian graduate anthropologist. a distinct sense of ethnic difference which is in some respects a crude extension of the distinction between 'landowners' and 'non-landowners' (Bainton 2009; see also Nash and Ogan 1990). To some degree, the efflorescence of kastom is also contingent on these changes. ...
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.
... Only Fiji could plausibly lay historical claim to have been a "natural" geographic and cultural unit -though certainly lacking precolonial political unity -but the indigenous Fijian illusion of cultural uniformity is ruptured by twin legacies of colonialism: a multi-ethnic populace, and, less obvious but at least as significant in the current crisis, the "collaborative objectification" 4 is "the source of the principal arguments over legitimacy" in postcolonial Pacific states, and that the burning question is whether control over land, goods and even people should "remain in the hands of local authorities who fiercely defend their autonomy" or be assumed by "state institutions that favor the national perspective over regional particularities" (1998:381). Increasingly, however, the latent opposition of local and national in Melanesian states is mediated via emergent regional identifications, such as to island, province or ethnic group, which are experienced as homegrown and more responsive to reciprocal obligations than the arbitrary or absent state (e.g., Jorgensen 1996;Nash and Ogan 1990). Jeffrey Clark speculates with respect to Papua New Guinea that "What could appear ... are postmodern nationalisms which are local and regional in terms of ethnicity and membership" and differ "totally" from the nations which emerged historically in Europe and the Americas (1997:70, 80, 89). ...
... 21 For many islanders, there has been little substantive difference between these phases in Bougainville's political history, with the rulers in Port Moresby, PNG's national capital, being viewed every bit as foreign as their European predecessors. 22 Despite a 'state' presence of one kind or another since the initial German incursion, local social and normative orders have proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of larger processes of colonial and post-colonial change. Bonds of kinship, language, customary belief systems and ties to ancestral land, remain an important basis for local allegiances. ...
Against the generally disappointing outcomes of international police reform in fragile settings, this article examines a New Zealand-supported community policing programme in post-conflict Bougainville. While the programme's engagement with the regular police organization has struggled for traction, support provided to an innovative and socially embedded policing initiative has produced promising results. The reasons behind these divergent outcomes and their implications for international policing are explored in the context of Bougainville's recent history, including the legacies of conflict and the new vision of hybrid policing in the post-conflict political settlement.
... In addition, most of the mine's employees were drawn from PNG instead of from Bougainville, even as unemployment among the local population remained steep. Bougainville's people and politicians started blaming the 'redskins' with the mine for destroying the environment and bringing violence, inequality and criminality to Bougainville (Howley 2002:33), the land of the 'blackskins' as Bougainvilleans started to call themselves (Nash and Ogan 1990). ...
... In this letter, Musingku also claimed links to Queen Elizabeth II, setting the scene for his later appropriation of royal titles. In spite of U-Vistract's claims to tradition, statehood, and customary financial mechanisms, these were widely understood to have no substance in Bougainvillean history (Nash and Ogan 1990). Every Bougainvillean I have spoken to regards these claims as ridiculous and without customary foundation. ...
As Keith Hart (1986) articulated in his neat phrase ‘two sides of the coin’, money and the state are inextricably intertwined. However, academic discussions of the state tend to fall under the heading of ‘governance’, with implicit reference to democratic ideals, while money is regarded as ‘economics’, a field dominated by ideas of the market. In this paper, I use material from U-Vistract, a mass Ponzi scam to show how quasi-magical ideas of money and wealth have grown out of the disillusioning experience of the state in its failure to deliver ‘development’. These imaginings of prosperity entail a different kind of state, based on the moral reform of Christian citizens and political leaders and the reorientation of the banking system to deliver benefits to ordinary people. As the Royal Kingdom of Papala, U-Vistract sought to be seen to be like a Christian state and so deceived its investors into thinking that they were participating in a moral project that would allow them to redress the short-comings of the Papua New Guinean state. As the scam took on the appearance of the state, so the state came to be seen as a scam.
... In both the Bougainville and the western Solomons cases, a distinctive sense of pan-regional identity predated the resourceindustries which were to become bones of contention with the central government. Their respective identity narratives were shaped by similar colonial, plantation and missionary histories, and have been characterised by similar discourses of race and cultural difference (Nash and Ogan, 1990;Dureau, 1998;Regan, 2005). A further parallel between the two cases is that they both established, during the twilight of the colonial period, precedents for explicitly ethnic claims to ''sub-national political institutionmaking'' (Watts, 2004a, p. 73); and, in each instance, the control of resource-revenues was an integral part of the institutionmaking agenda, more so in the case of Bougainville. ...
This paper draws upon Michael Watts’s work on governable spaces and “economies of violence” in the Niger Delta (2004a,b,c) and Colin Filer’s concept of the “ideology of landownership” in Papua New Guinea (1997) to explore how resource capitalism has been at the heart of violent conflict in post-colonial Melanesia. This schema of the political ecology of violence is elucidated with reference to three governable spaces – landownership, indigeneity, and nationalism; four different resource–industrial complexes – mining, oil and gas, logging, and oil palm; and the region’s three most serious conflicts to date – the Bougainville conflict, the Solomon Islands ‘ethnic tension’, and on-going violence in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, particularly in Enga and Southern Highlands provinces. It is argued that in each of these places the story of violent conflict is ineluctably one of resource capitalism and its engagement with local socio-political contexts. In sharp contrast to the resource determinism, state-centrism and ahistoricism of much of the ‘resource conflict’ literature, attention to governmentality and scale highlights the highly contextual and contingent nature of resource-related violence in Melanesia. The diverse experiences of different regulatory approaches to the encounters between resource complexes and governable spaces across time and space are also examined, giving rise to policy implications for governing resource conflict in Melanesia.
... People had created a Bougainville ethnic identity that sustained collective cooperative efforts against outside forces, such as Papua New Guinea redskins and Australian whiteskins, which overwhelmed them. 43 The second main aspect of why and how the crisis was conceptualized and legitimized as a Holy War was the battle for control. With rhetorical references to God and Satan freely employed to describe the crisis, Bougainvillean leaders soon implied their "holy war" to resemble an Old Testament conflict between good and evil. ...
This chapter examines the religious dimension of a complex power struggle at Bougainville, a small island group in Papua New Guinea, and elaborates the double role of religion as empowerment and inspiration of resistance. From 1988 until the late 1990s, people on Bougainville Island were immersed in a vicious war that destroyed nearly all infrastructure and social services. Religion, particularly Catholicism, played a major role during and after the crisis. The Bougainville struggle for independence was conceptualized as a holy war, whereby God was called upon in “an ideology of resistance”. People believed that peace could be achieved through prayers, especially pleas directed to Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. Thus, Mary's power became intertwined with national identity constructions and attempts to realize a more just and responsible society at Bougainville. The Bougainville crisis demonstrates how nationalism, custom, and religion are intertwined and how they mutually enforced an ideology of warfare.
... However, the independence movement needed to downplay these differences and emphasise a distinctively pan-Bougainvillean identity. Emphasis was consistently placed on the supposedly more peaceful temperament and relative cultural advancement of Bougainvilleans compared to the more aggressive nature of other Papua New Guineans, a process that became crucial to the creation of a Bougainville ethnic identity (Nash and Ogan 1990). ...
The South Pacific region features enormous variation in state performance. While Polynesian nations such as Samoa have proved to be relatively successful post-colonial states, Melanesian countries like the Solomon Islands are increasingly categorised as 'weak', 'failing' or 'failed' states. Drawing on a range of comparative studies by economists and political scientists in recent years, this article argues that cross-country variation in ethnic diversity between much of Polynesia and Melanesia is a key factor in explaining differences in state performance across the South Pacific. It shows how different kinds of ethnic structure are associated with specific political and economic outcomes, including variation in political stability, economic development, and internal conflict from country to country. In so doing, it helps explain why some parts of the South Pacific appear to be failing while others are relative success stories - and why this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
... While PNG highlanders are classified as violent 'redskins', Bougainvilleans are termed as peaceful 'blackskins'. In fact, people have created a Bougainville ethnic identity that sustained collective cooperative efforts against outside forces, such as PNG 'redskins' and Australian 'whiteskins' (Nash 1990). ...
The role of religion in generating violent conflict and peace is a major topic in public, political and scholarly debates. However, despite a burgeoning field of literature, this relationship remains inadequately explained. In general, social and religious studies tend to focus on macro-analyses, resulting in essentialist and even ethnocentric notions of religion, violent conflict and peace. By using the Bougainville crisis as a case study, this article argues that as long as we disregard people's ‘lived religion’, local realities remain intangible and, furthermore, no insight is gained into the actual processes by which religion may generate conflict and peace. In particular, I show how the Bougainville crisis was conceptualised as a Holy War, revealing how Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, inspired people to fight against oppression and for peace at the same time.
... When Ok Tedi became the place without work and the roadside villages filled with pasendias, it emphasised a sense of Wopkaimin identity and they became more active in defence of their interests and ancestral domain. Class formation was complicated by ethnicity, a pattern which also occurred in association with the Bougainville mining project (Hyndman 1991;Nash and Ogan 1990;Wesley-Smith and Ogan 1992). Bombakan grew into a major new Wopkaimin hamlet used by many families as an alternative to Woktemwanin. ...
Autonomy provides a framework that allows for regions within countries to exercise self-government beyond the extent available to other sub-state units. This book presents detailed case studies of thirteen such autonomies from around the world, in which noted experts on each outline the constitutional, legal and institutional frameworks as well as how these arrangements have worked in practice to protect minority rights and prevent secession of the territories in question. The volume's editors draw on the case studies to provide a comparative analysis of how autonomy works and the political and institutional conditions under which it is likely to become a workable arrangement for management of the differences that brought it into being.
Transitional justice scholars and practitioners often suggest that silence about the violent past in public discourse indicates a denial of what happened during recent civil violence. Many therefore advocate a significant role for education in post-conflict transitional justice processes. Specifically, they encourage the writing and teaching of history, including explicit coverage of the prior violence, as an academic discipline. The idea is that history education can correct important misconceptions about the conflict and its origins and help students find comfort with opposing perspectives on the events. However, having conducted a multi-sited, ethnographic, and interpretivist research project at secondary boarding schools in Melanesia's two post-conflict settings (Bougainville and Solomon Islands) I find this view of silence and its remedy not only a poor fit with Melanesian approaches to reconciliation, but a narrow foundation from which to understand schooling as a mechanism of transitional justice. I argue that Bougainvilleans and Solomon Islanders look back on their violent pasts through the prism of their relationships to others, and that schooling gives them ample scope to develop and practice that relationship to the past, even in the new connections they form with their colleagues and peers. I establish that their place-based forms of transitional justice, that is to say indigenous ideas about justice incorporating customary, foreign and even colonial influences, revolve around reconciliation processes that generally require individuals to refuse to discuss the violent past with others. Then I apply two concepts concentrated on the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life to the integrated boarding schools I studied. One is Michel de Certeau's notion of the everyday and the other, cultural production, comes from critical ethnographies of schooling. I explain how refusals to discuss the violent past helped the teachers and students form meaningful relationships across their differences, including the differences at issue during the two civil conflicts. However, because of their interactions in everyday life at school, the teachers and students also developed ideas about real culture in which they constructed a particular vision of their constituent cultures. This vision left them susceptible to the sorts of land and identity politics that led to the civil conflicts and to perceiving an unequal relationship between the village and town as part of their national identities. Thus in this thesis I suggest how an ex-militant in Solomon Islands, George Gray, could describe his former school mates as his enemy friends. Given that place-based transitional justice can deny the stories of Bougainvillean and Solomon Islander women, I suggest that classical transitional justice theory may have some limited value for these women if it is responsive to their social lives. Overall, however, I question the utility of history taught as an academic discipline for post-colonial contexts like Bougainville and Solomon Islands. Instead, I suggest that if transitional justice scholars and practitioners understand formal education in the context of legacies of colonisation, then they might find scope to address those legacies, as well as the violent past, with locally meaningful versions of social studies education.
This chapter applies the book’s spatial sensibility to provide a fresh perspective on the Bougainville conflict and the role that the Panguna mine played in it. I emphasise the ways in which the mine exacerbated pre-existing patterns of socio-economic inequality and relative deprivation that were framed by Bougainville’s islandness. The institutional arrangements in place at the time were, ultimately, unable to contain the intense politics of scale unleashed by the impacts of the mine, giving rise to a violent uprising by a younger generation of Panguna landowners and the mobilisation of an island-scale Bougainvillean identity in a secessionist conflict with the PNG state. However, tensions within the island problematised collective action at the scale of the island, resulting in significant conflict between different groups on Bougainville.
This paper is a review piece examining the main factors responsible for the civil war, lasting from 1988 to 1998, on Bougainville island, an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea. History, economy, and social aspects of the island – especially traditional society features, mining activities, the effects of colonization and industrialization – are highlighted. The aim of the article is to identify which factors best explain the outbreak of the conflict. The main assumption is that no single factor can explain the civil war, as these elements require a comprehensive analysis. The ‘resource curse’ theory, i.e. the presence of natural resources leading to economic failure, and the existence of ethnic cleavages, are proposed as explanations, although further factors must also taken into account. Finally, the analysis helps to contextualize the unfolding events in Bougainville and its path to democratization.
Our point of departure is the emerging critique of the problematic treatment of scale across various disciplinary engagements with hybridity. Adopting an overarching state-formation perspective, we extend this geographical critique by combining the sociospatial lenses of scale and territory in an analysis of one of the primary animators of political economic change and contestation in post-colonial Melanesia: extractive resource capitalism. Focusing on the Solomons Group of islands, we examine two spatial phenomena at the core of the contentious and frequently violent politics of extraction animating processes of state-formation in these settings: the social and historical production of islands as a scale/territory of violent struggle; and the emergence of the 'ideology of customary landownership' as a territorialising and exclusionary project that also has salient scalar dimensions. While these phenomena illustrate the inadequacy of hybridity's crude spatial ontology, they also demonstrate how hybridity perspectives can play a role in achieving 'thick description' of the complex interactions involved in spatialised political economic processes. We conclude by sketching out some agendas for research on the political economy of resource extraction-and, more broadly, state-formation-in the western Pacific that combine spatial perspectives with those of the critical hybridity literature across various social science fields.
In Melanesia, rates of HIV infection are among the highest in the Pacific and increasing rapidly, with grave humanitarian, development, and political implications. There is a great need for social research on HIV/AIDS in the region to provide better insights into the sensitive issues surrounding HIV transmission. This collection, the first book on HIV and AIDS in the Pacific region, gathers together stunning and original accounts of the often surprising ways that people make sense of the AIDS epidemic in various parts of Melanesia. The volume addresses substantive issues concerning AIDS and contemporary sexualities, relations of power, and moralities-themes that provide a powerful backdrop for twenty-first century understandings of the tensions between sexuality, religion, and politics in many parts of the world.
At present it is widely assumed that the socio-political organisation of Maori society is made up of four structural levels: the ‘extended family’, the ‘sub-tribe’, the ‘tribe’ and the ‘super-tribe’, each of which, in turn, corresponds with a certain type of Maori leader. It is rarely realised that a consensus about this framework for understanding Maori socio-political organisation did not emerge until the 1930s, approximately 150 years after colonial contact had begun. This raises the question to what extent the standard model of Maori socio-political organisation is based on the same a-historic and objectivist assumptions that were held around the turn of the century when it was developed. The extent to which these assumptions may have influenced the ethnohistorical and ethnographic analysis of Maori society in past and present also requires examination. It is argued that an essentialist model of Maori tribal organisation hampers the understanding of the dynamics of socio-political practices in Maori society.
Recent approaches to the ethnography of Papua New Guinea stress the historicity of local cultures and their encompassment in larger fields of relations. In this paper I consider the historical and cultural background to the emergence of the ‘Min’ as a novel ethnic designation among the Mountain Ok peoples of the Fly-Sepik headwaters. While Min identity draws much of its impetus from responses to mining operations and resistance to provincial governments, it is also clear that it grows out of a complex interaction between pre-existing cultural identities, a history of colonial administration and Christian evangelism. Emerging at the intersection of local and global processes, Min identity constitutes a regionalization of ethnicity which has led to agitation for the creation of a Min province, producing a movement that may outlive its immediate political aims.
This paper discusses the relevance and utility of the existing literature on business and peace for resolving armed conflicts related to natural resources. The paper argues that this scholarship is valuable in so far as it opens debate on the potential positive contributions of extractive companies to peacebuilding processes. However this scholarship primarily looks at areas affected by conflict to consider ways that companies with no previous connection to the area might establish a productive business. What is missing in this analysis is a critical engagement with the fact that resource companies are often heavily implicated in the causes of conflict, not just affected by the consequences. Drawing on a case study of Bougainville (Papua New Guinea), the paper highlights numerous roles for business in peacebuilding not previously identified in the business and peace literature. These contributions include very precise expectations for a company that was deeply entangled in the Bougainville conflict, yet wants to return to the island to resume mining. This finding has important implications for future research. In order to ensure the relevance of this scholarship to the extractive sector, there is a need to identify peacebuilding roles for an industry whose activities are often a key factor in the escalation of violence.
The grumbling dispute between the United States of America and Turkey. © 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.
This book, the first themed volume in the series The Future of the Religious Past, elaborates the manifold and fascinating interconnections between power and religion. It carries forward the work of the series in bringing together scholars from many disciplines and countries to research forms of religion in a way unfettered by the idea that religion is solely or even primarily a matter of belief in specific tenets or intellectual systems-it is also a matter of multiple particulars in individual and social life, such as powers, things, gestures, and words.Dealing with the nexus of religion and power, the present volume radically undermines the idea that the political relevance of religion is a thing of the past. Its essays treat power as a central aspect of religion on many levels, from that of macro-politics through the links between religion and nationhood to the level of personal empowerment or its obverse, disempowerment.Power and religion are both omnipresent in human action and interaction. There is no human act that does not include some kind of faith in a positive outcome and no deed in which power does not play some role. People obviously can attempt to use religion as an instrument to enhance their power or improve their status, whether personally or at the level of the nationstate. Yet religion is in principle ambiguous in relation to power: It can disempower as well as empower, and it can even function as a critique of existing power relations. Moreover,there is the consolatory function of religion, offering ways of compensation, of healing, and of enduring feelings of powerlessness.Like the first volume in the series, Religion: Beyond a Concept, the essays in this volume strike a balance between broad analyses of the nature of religion and power in their modes of emergence today and specific case studies from anthropology, sociology, and the arts. It is noteworthy for the breadth of the material it treats and its reach outside the Christian West, while not taking anything in that Western tradition for granted, given the astonishing changes of supposedly familiar religious phenomena we are viewing in the contemporary world.
The scope for an anthropology of mining has been dramatically transformed since the review by Ricardo Godoy, published in this review journal in 1985. The minerals boom of the 1980s led to an aggressive expansion of mine development in greenfield areas, many of them the domains of indigenous communities. Under considerable pressure, the conventional binary contest between states and corporations over the benefits and impacts of mining has been widened to incorporate the representations of local communities, and broad but unstable mining communities now coalesce around individual projects. Focused primarily on projects in developing nations of the Asia-Pacific region, this review questions the often-monolithic characterizations of state, corporate, and community forms of agency and charts the debate among anthropologists involved in mining, variously as consultants, researchers, and advocates, about appropriate terms for their engagement.
The Wampar of Papua New Guinea are an ethnic group with contested boundaries and a strong ethnic identity and consciousness. Since their first contact with White missionaries, government officials and anthropologists, body images have changed and become more important. ‘Foreign' migrants from other PNG provinces are now coming in great numbers into Wampar territory, where they find wealthy Wampar make good marriage partners. From peaceful relations with ‘foreigners' in the 1960s and 1970s, the situation has changed to the extent that Wampar now have plans for driving men from other ethnic groups out of their territory. Within two generations, ideas of changeable cultural otherness have developed into stereotypes of unchangeable bodily differences. In this paper, I describe (1) changes in the perception of foreigners, and in the definition of ‘foreigner' itself, (2) body images of the Wampar, and (3) conditions for these changes.
A brief survey of cultural factors in Bougainville and Buka before the disruptions of mining development emphasizes the diversities associated with language, ecology and contact with other Melane- sians. Although certain themes (e. g., matrilineal descent) were common to all residents, variety existed as to the way in which these were played out in different communities. Despite modern rhetoric about Bougainvillean unity and political organization alleged to be rooted in the past, evidence suggests a considerable degree of political atomism, especially among the Nasioi so prominent in the current crisis. What needs further study is the extent to which the current situation represents continuity with the past as opposed to genuinely new developments.
The criteria for delineating "the New Guinea Highlands," a fundamental category in Melanesian anthropology, are variable, vague, and inconsistently applied, with the result that there is little clarity or agreement with regard to its characteristics and its membership. So far as the literature is concerned, "the New Guinea Highlands" is a fuzzy set. The common resort to notions of "cores," "margins," or "fringes" is an attempt to preserve an essentialist approach but inevitably leads to the same confusion. The continued use of "the Highlands" as an analytic or theoretical construct carries the costs of misleadingly implied homogeneity, with marginalization of "exceptions," ahistorical reification of social and cultural "traits," and deemphasis on linkages among communities. A plea is made here for a shift from studies of morphology to studies of process-from concerns with what people are to concerns with what people do.
This paper compares the experience of two main attempts to accommodate secessionist pressures in Bougainville, a sub-national island unit of Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1976 constitutionally based devolution was established on a largely uniform basis for Bougainville and PNG's 18 other provinces. A 2001 agreement to end a secessionist war has resulted in constitutionally guaranteed asymmetrical autonomy and a right to a deferred referendum on independence for Bougainville. The paper considers whether the Bougainville experience supports the view that autonomy creates pressure for secession and whether secessionist pressures might be accommodated by development of innovative economic policy and governance practices of the kind utilized by many other small non-sovereign island autonomies.
Among the many consequences of colonisation in the Pacific were the twin processes of conjunction and separation of indigenous societies following the establishment of colonial boundaries. In the Solomon Islands, both occurred. Particularly in the northwest, earlier connections were reduced (although not eliminated) following the establishment of the British‐German boundary between the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) and German (later British) New Guinea. Other parts of the Solomons which had previously had less contact were conjoined into the BSIP, which later became the independent state of the Solomons Islands. I consider some of the outcomes of these processes for New Georgian (Western Solomons) notions of nationhood. I discuss the question of Western sentiments towards the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville, but focus primarily on New Georgian ambivalence towards union with other parts of the Solomons, particularly Malaita Province.
This article considers claims, in the wake of coups in Fiji and the Solomon Islands in 2000, that the Pacific region is experiencing‘African’-style difficulties. It argues that the Africanisation thesis is analytically weak, internally inconsistent and empirically flawed. Data covering GDP per capita, literacy, schooling and life expectancy are explored, as are indicators covering coups, insurgencies and military involvement in politics. Claimed similarities between the role played by‘ethnicity’ in driving conflict are considered, as are comparisons of the role played by the post-colonial state. In conclusion, the article looks at the underlying causes of conflict, and potential for future instability, in Melanesia
In this article I explore community ideas about mine closure as they are informed by history, memory, and imagined futures. I argue that, through their aesthetic qualities, practices such as mining remain persuasive long after their dissolution. Biangai‐speakers (Morobe province, Papua New Guinea) have worked for miners during colonial gold rushes since the mid‐1920s, and many more have tried their hands at artisanal mining along the Bulolo and its tributaries. Such events continue to inform aspirations for development and ideas about what development should look like. This article argues for attention to be paid to the appearances of the past in order to acknowledge the attractive hold that historical actions, events, practices, and so on, retain on post‐mining (and post‐development) communities. Such qualities of the past, distilled in the contours of the land and contemporary discourses about development, continue to motivate the folding of the past into present practices.
Résumé
L’auteur explore ici les idées sur la fermeture de mines, en tant qu’elles sont informées par l’histoire, la mémoire et un futur imaginé. Il avance qu’à travers leurs qualités esthétiques, des pratiques telles que l’exploitation minière restent présentes très longtemps après leur disparition. Les Biangai (dans la province de Morobe, en Papouasie‐Nouvelle‐Guinée) ont travaillé pour les compagnies minières pendant les ruées vers l’or de l’époque coloniale, à partir du milieu des années 1920, et se sont eux aussi essayés à une exploitation artisanale le long du Bulolo et de ses affluents. De tels événements contribuent à informer les aspirations au développement et les idées de ce que devrait être ce développement. Le présent article plaide pour que l’on accorde de l’attention aux apparences du passé, afin de tenir compte de l’attrait exercé par les actions, événements, pratiques historiques et autres sur les communautés post‐minières (et post‐développement). Ces qualités du passé, qui imprègnent les paysages et les discours contemporains sur le développement, favorisent une imbrication du passé dans les pratiques présentes.
From Said's Orientalism (1978), this article extracts a general model of the production of understandings of alien societies. The model points to aspects and manifestations of this production that have received less attention than those associated with Orientalism. After presenting some of these briefly, the article turns to the most neglected, the way that anthropologists have Occidentalized the West. This Occidentalism is likely to have important effects on anthropological understandings of alien societies. The article illustrates Occidentalism by examining the distinction between gift and commodity societies, and it concludes by considering some of the ways that anthropologists might reduce the twin risks of Occidentalism and Orientalism. [Occidentalism, Orientalism, Mauss, gifts, Western society]
Traditional knowledge of medicinal plant use in many regions of Papua New Guinea and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville is poorly described and rapidly disappearing. A program initiated by the University of Papua New Guinea to systematically document and preserve traditional knowledge of medicinal plant use was initiated with WHO help in 2001.
To document and compare medicinal plant use in the Siwai and Buin districts of the Island of Bougainville. Siwai and Buin districts represent two adjacent geographic regions of differing language traditions.
This report is a combination of two University of Papua New Guinea reports generated using a University of Papua New Guinea and Papua New Guinea Department of Health approved survey questionnaire "Information sheet on traditional herbal reparations and medicinal plants of Papua New Guinea".
Although Siwai and Buin districts are adjacent in Southern Bougainville, there is considerable variation in the specific plants used medicinally and the specific uses of those plants that are used commonly in the two regions. In addition, many of the plants used in the region are widely distributed species that are used medicinally in other settings. Nevertheless, the high endemicity of plants and the extraordinary cultural diversity in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville has yielded description of the medicinal use of many plants that have not previously been reported in the wider scientific literature.
Efforts to document and preserve traditional knowledge of plant use in Papua New Guinea have yielded important new records of plants with potential application in the provision of health care for a developing nation with an under developed Western style rural health care system. This report documents substantial commonality in the general modes of medicinal plant preparation and in the health care applications of plant use in the Siwai and Buin traditions, however, there was considerable difference noted in the particular uses of the specific plants used in one or another of the districts.
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.
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