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Australasia and the Pacific Islands, Book Reviews
Volume 90 – No. 2

ALCHEMY IN THE RAIN FOREST: Politics, Ecology, and Resilience in a New Guinea Mining Area | By Jerry K. Jacka

New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. xii, 283 pp. (Tables, figures, maps.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6011-7.


Social studies of mining in Papua New Guinea must invariably deal with the existence of insiders and outsiders. Despite Porgera mine, a world-class gold mine, being situated within the cultural landscape of the Ipili of Porgera Valley, the mining wealth is narrowly distributed to specific clans, and promised development has failed to materialize. Environmental anthropologist Jerry K. Jacka’s book Alchemy in the Rainforest charts the Porgeran community’s methods of grappling with the results of the inside-outside divide. The particular Porgeran community Jacka developed a relationship with sits outside the landowning elite of the Porgera mine’s Special Mining Lease, and thus is excluded from the main benefit streams of the mine. These people, while seeing the immense wealth come out of the mountain of their ancestors, are on the periphery. The book focusses on their ontologies, political ecology, resilience, and the concept of alchemy.
Jacka’s book is essentially about how the Porgeran communities show resilience in two respects relating to resource development and land. All things in the Porgera Valley come back to these two elements. Mining resource development has transformed the communities in the hinterland of the mine significantly and possibly irretrievably. The first section examines the creation of the resource frontier through the colonial intrusion into the Porgera Valley, initially by Australian gold explorers and missionaries and the localised responses to this resource frontier. In the case of the Ipili speakers of the Porgera Valley, they situated the white colonists in their cosmology, as tawe wandikali, or sky people. This absorbing was a critical resilience mechanism, as it slowed the pace of cultural and societal change for the Porgerans. Similarly, Porgerans situated the presence of the exploited resource—gold—within their creation myths.
The second section locates the resource frontier within the three aspects of Ipili/Porgeran social and cultural landscape: Land, Yu; People, Wandakali; and Spirits, Yama. These chapters are the ethnographic heart of the book. Jacka’s exploration of the cultural importance of altitude and land use in the Porgera Valley context provides the backbone for the book. Three altitudinal spheres divide the valley: below 1600 metres are the lowland forests, wapi, where malevolent spirits and malaria prevent settlement; between 1600 and 2200 metres we find the andakama, the domestic settlement sphere; and above 2200 metres is the aiyandaka, a place of benevolent spirits. Traditional rituals and myths contribute to a system of land management and soil fertility centred on the concept of ipane (grease) that lubricates the land, spirits, and community relationships. The topographical divisions are breached by roadside settlements built up on the traditionally sparsely populated customary hunting lands in aiyandaka, overexploiting the fragile high-altitude ecosystem. Jacka studies the exploited ecosystems in chapter 6 through analysis of economic trees and resources in both primary and secondary forests. Jacka discloses that restrictions imposed by customary landowners on forest resource usage and violence have seen an increase in forest cover between 2002 and 2013 despite increasing population.
Woven throughout the book is personal commentary and stories of Jacka’s experience of Porgeran culture, spirits, and politics. Jacka’s relationships with Porgerans are at times cut short prematurely by the widespread tribal violence that now seems intractable. Where previously tribal wars were a method of maintaining the wider social order through longer-term redistribution of wealth via compensation payments and clan intermarriage, war is now used to generate short-term wealth as a response to exclusion from mining benefit streams.
The book sits within a recent renaissance of research on resource-affected communities in PNG, including Jacka’s contemporary Alex Golub’s Leviathans at the Gold Mine (Duke University Press, 2014). Jacka’s analysis sits firmly with the community, and from that position examines the complexities of Porgera mine’s impact. The book only briefly situates Porgera in its national context. Possibly drawing out the comparison with local responses to mining at Ok Tedi and Lihir would have created a richer contrast and highlighted the volatile political and community situation in the Porgera Valley. However, the narrow focus allows for more space to examine at length the fascinating resource management practices, community resilience, and spirit world of the Porgera Valley.


Phillipa Jenkins
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

pp. 417-419

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