Topics in the Contemporary Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. xii, 216 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5666-3.
This unique new book is a comparative study of customary land owners in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Timor-Leste. It is composed of eight chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. Timor-Leste is the focus of chapters 2, 6, and 7. Chapter 2 discusses rural farming and its meaning to local people. Chapter 6 examines how Timorese create and maintain connections to kin and land in the city, and how these practices interact with land-titling projects in urban areas. Chapter 7 covers the case of urban migrants who use the language of citizenship in the state to resist being evicted from land they do not have formal title to.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on Papua New Guinea. Chapter 3 focuses on villagers on the Rai coast of Papua New Guinea fighting to end the disposal of mine waste into the sea. Chapter 4 describes the complex court case which has developed over customary ownership of the land on which the PMIZ, a tuna cannery and processing facility, is located. Chapter 5 examines how concepts of development and subsistence have been changed by the presence of the cannery.
Stead claims that the same underlying political dynamic exists in Timor-Leste and PNG: a conflict between the customary ways of life (farmers) and modernity (the state and capitalism). Customary people have rich and organic relationships rooted in the land while modern people live in abstract and disembodied institutions. As customary life ways become entangled in modern institutions, the “cartography of power” shifts, in that legitimacy once rooted in customary ways of life is devalued and modern regimes of recognition (such as maps and census books) gain an increasing hold on the imagination. This “entanglement” of custom and modernity opens up new possibilities for customary people, in that they can pursue claims against modernist institutions using the language of citizenship and rights, or draw legitimacy as indigenous people or landowners. But ultimately this shift in power and legitimacy makes customary people more vulnerable, because the new tools they gain to pursue political ends are ultimately weaker than those employed by modernist institutions.
The clash of customary people and modernity features widely in centuries of social thought. In the past thirty years many thinkers have resisted seeing indigenous peoples and settler institutions as ontologically distinct (to use one of Stead’s phrases), insisting instead on their long history of interconnection and interaction. Why, then, does Stead revitalize a binary that most experts now consider empirically inadequate and theoretically flawed? I found it most helpful to read this book through the lens of sociological theory, such as that of Jurgen Habermas. Stead’s “custom” is not a romantic ecoprimitivism. Rather, it seems similar to Habermas’s account of lifeworld means of reproduction, while Stead’s “modernity” seems similar to a systemic organization of action guided by steering media. Her goal here, it seems, is to shed new light on state-landowner dynamics by interrogating the modalities in which these interactions occur. This analytic could be used to examine how landowners relate to each other in “modern” (i.e., abstract bureaucratized) ways, as in the court case described in chapter 4. We could also theoretically examine how people in “modern” institutions such as the state have lifeworld/customary modes of interaction, although Stead never describes this. We might say, however, that much of the literature in the anthropology of the corporation is precisely of this sort. As a result her theoretical focus offers intriguing possibilities.
The greatest contribution of Stead’s book is the new emphasis it puts on state-landowner relations. Experts of PNG land politics tend to be rather cynical, skeptical of what John Burton called “avatar narratives” of virtuous, helpless indigenes and evil, omnipotent corporations. Instead, they point to the agency and sometimes-malevolence of landowners, as evinced in the Bougainville conflict or the benefits package received by landowners at the Lihir gold mine. But these successes were quite some time ago and Stead points out, rightly, that landowners in PNG today are increasingly powerless in the face of the state and developers. Stead’s clear-eyed analysis is a breath of fresh air in this regard.
That said, the book does have some weaknesses. Because it is spread so widely over two countries and many case studies, the substantive chapters were a bit thin. For instance, although Stead often asserts that farmers live lives deeply connected to kin and land, there are only a few descriptions of farming or gardening in the book, and not very much in terms of kinship, births, deaths, exchange, and the other sorts of things that anthropologists such as myself would like to see to get a more in-depth sense of the specifics of how embodiment and custom work in practice. Also, given the long history of terms like custom and modernity I think the book might have benefitted slightly from a deeper and more sympathetic engagement with previous literature. In this way, we might have been able to understand a bit more how Stead’s framework relates to those of past authors.
But overall these minor quibbles are not meant to detract from the book’s value and originality. It is a fresh take on the many forms of dispossession and inequality occurring in the Asia Pacific today. It is clearly written, theoretically ambitious, and empirically wide-ranging. I recommend the book to others and hope to see more writing by this author soon.
Alex Golub
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, USA