Asia-Pacific Environment Monographs. Canberra: ANU Press, 2022. ix, 199 pp. (Tables, maps, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$55.00, cloth; free ebook. ISBN 9781760465186.
Seven senior scholars of Melanesia, each with multiple returns to their ethnographic research sites, provide fine-grained analyses of rare depth and breadth of knowledge concerning issues captured in the book’s title: capital, inequality, and rural Papua New Guinea (PNG). Capital is here the wealth brought by foreign extractive industries, referred to locally and herein, as the kampani. Local development is imagined as the coming of the kampani, and over decades, “development” has become an imaginary laden with desire, yearning, hopes, and dreams wrapped in belief that when it comes, the kampani will lift local communities up and out of their relative deprivation: they will live the “good life,” clean, prosperous, free of want.
In chapter 1, editors Bettina Beer and Tobias Schwoerer present a comprehensive review of studies in social inequality and task their collaborators with the problem of identifying how capital-intensive extractive industries generate social inequalities or magnify existing inequalities (or both). Given that these industries “extract” wealth from the land, land is the only highly valued resource developers desire and that local communities can offer.
Customary land tenure in PNG has always been a source of tension and conflict, never definitive in perpetuity but rather open to negotiation and compromises on origins, histories of migration, settlement, kinship, and descent. For the kampani such uncertainties cost time, money, and diminished profits. Based on his research with the Wampar in Morobe Province, Schwoerer’s chapter 2 unpacks the government-promoted integrated land group (ILG) program, a complex and expensive plan for the commodification of customary land. The ILG process dispenses with customary clan usufruct rights for legalized ownership. Schwoerer delves deeply into the ILG program: the time, literacy, money, and access to political networks required to codify clan boundaries, determine clan member-owners of said bounded property, and get through the land registry. The ILG program is portrayed by government as a means to protect one’s land holdings, and to get rich from renting land to a kampani. The process itself wallows in inequalities that favour educated elites.
In chapter 3, Willem Church distinguishes between social inequalities existing in anticipation of a kampani coming, and those “novel inequalities once extraction begins” (65). Since the 1970s, the much-expected Walfi-Golpu gold mining project stalled due to unsettled customary land rights and changed owners frequently. Those whose lands and lives would be impacted by the mining project needed community representatives to negotiate “mining-related benefits” (MRBs) (64). Based on archival research covering 40 years of customary land disputes, plus his ethnographic work in the area, Church asks how an individual becomes a representative of his community, and how the process of choosing a representative might shape future inequality. Local leaders are male—educated, literate, with extensive social networks and access to money—who compete with one another to win preferential access to MRBs. Driven by conflict, factions coalesce into socio-political stratified units, some of which will reap benefits while others will not. Church presents a complex answer, but social stratification is evident as factions achieve their goals while others have their hopes dashed.
While leaders of factions compete among themselves, in chapter 4, Monica Minnegal and Peter Dwyer present a different leader in Bob, whose 40-year career as a broker waxed and waned. Bob’s intent was to negotiate with the LNG kampani to accrue MRBs for local land owners, the Febi and the Kubo. Brokers inhabit liminal spaces, cross boundaries, make connections, and seek out the powerful. Bob sought to obtain MRBs for land owners as a percentage of the wealth generated by the LNG project. Respected at home as someone who could get benefits, he also represented himself to the kampani as working to ensure the best outcome for them. Bob built a reputation as someone ”who got things done” (109), who had community welfare at heart. But when the LNG finally began shipping product, confusion about land ownership meant royalties did not get distributed. Bob’s star began to fade as his efforts came to nought. A new leader began to rise with the help of new technologies and well-placed Facebook entries. Eventually, Bob departed for the capital city. Like all analyses in this volume, Bob’s story is a powerful exemplar of the complex and competing motives at play, and the inequalities of wealth, education, and access to power.
As Beer points out in chapter 5, evidence of upward mobility is everywhere in PNG towns and cities, in ubiquitous ads for desirable commodities. But in a money economy, concepts of reciprocity historically based in sharing and equivalence deteriorate into greediness and injustice. Pursuing a trail of “who shares what with whom,” Beer tracks the effects of money on the Wampar ancestral ethic of reciprocity. This is a fine analysis of how access to money in a market economy transforms sociality. Clearly, the roots of hierarchy are embedded in the lived history of colonialism, missionization, and geographic differences. Despite birthday parties and fundraisers to “give back” to the community, inequalities and relative deprivation increasingly affect individual life chances.
However, as discussed by Bruce Knauft in chapter 7, the absence of foreign industry means communities feel left out and abandoned, their desire and hopes for a better life forsaken. Knauft examines how the mismatch between a belief in a resource project and the reality of it not materializing leads to “fomenting and escalating contention, inequality and misery” (157). This is a “problem of cultural political economy…including ideas, beliefs and values of modernity and progress against which local, regional and national realities becomes icons of failure and testaments to continued lack of development” (157). The absence of a development project that will never come (not every community sits atop a gold mine), is an absence that impacts people and stokes their sense of “large scale inequality and the subjective experience of gnawing inequity” (159).
Finally, in chapter 7, Glenn Banks reflects on the preceding chapters and concludes that, although prevalent in global capitalism, social inequalities in Melanesia do not rise and fall consequent of state policies and institutions that, in PNG, touch lightly on people’s lives for good or ill. I highly recommend this exquisite work of collaboration and insight realized through long-term ethnographic research.
Naomi M. McPherson
University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Kelowna