Culture, Place, and Nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. xv, 224 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, illustrations.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 9780295747606.
This excellent book joins a raft of ethnographic publications from the cohort of contemporaries who all did their first fieldwork from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s in the mining areas of Papua New Guinea, returning frequently up to the present. Perhaps not since the 1960s has there been such a surge of reflection, from different angles, on connected topics in Papua New Guinea. Probably never has there been a generation of anthropologists able, thanks to the intensity of modern travel and augmented by the global spread of mobile telephony, to maintain close touch with their host communities over decades.
The author, Jamon Halvaksz, lists over 50 local “friends and host families,” showing how the days of “my (anonymous) informant” are well and truly over. Many were and are clearly deep thinkers in their own right. Halvaksz was also able to draw on the thoughts of N. Mitio, on the academic staff of the local university at the time of publication (disclosure: Mr. Mitio and I were colleagues over a number of years, most recently liaising over election observations in 2017). These factors make this a truly modern, and highly participatory, ethnography.
Halvaksz has looked at the interweaving of place and people (“placepersons”) in two Biangai villages near Wau, Morobe Province. The Winima people are landowners at the nearby Hidden Valley mine and receive resource rents. The people of Elauru are not mine landowners and sustain themselves through garden work, unless they have left to live in Wau town, as members of both villages have increasingly done in recent years.
The theme connecting Halvaksz’s work with others in his cohort group is not mining at all, though. Rather, it is the construction of worldviews and interpersonal relationships in the many different locations the authors chose for fieldwork. The extra ingredient of a resource project at each place probably adds only one thing: it allows at least some people to carry through with what might otherwise be unformed ideas, “speeding up” cultural processes so that they can be seen more readily.
The author starts with twenty pages (chapter 2) on Biangai kinship, which is a rare effort these days. As I found myself, there is no chance of skipping this among the Biangai. The key is how connections to place are combined with connections to kin to “make” people: “If Biangai persons are made through their relations to place, it is because places too share maternal and paternal connections across an extensive network of kin” (55).
A critical concept is that of solorik/solonarik. A person’s solonarik is essentially unique, such that an individual is connected to one or many solorik groups on the basis of “shared substance” (58). Shared substance in this case means that any genealogical connection can be used to connect to a solorik and the land it is associated with.
The importance of attaching people to land is seen in the common practice of giving a child to be raised by a parent’s sibling to “look after” the land that the parent is (for the time being) not attending to themself (60).
Space precludes extended commentary on the middle chapters (all good), but I must mention chapter 6, “Whose closure?,” which presents a new way of looking at what happens when foreign miners, notably the big companies of the colonial period like New Guinea Goldfields, depart Wau and mines close. In a vivid expression of the Biangai imaginary, a villager mimics a chicken, likening the lot of the Biangai to the bird scratching in the dirt. “Us landowners become like chickens, scratching and scratching,” he says, and everyone laughs. What is poignant is that he was actually treading the saw timber floorboards of a former New Guinea Goldfields staff house, rebuilt in the village after the company stopped its mining operations in the 1980s. He was doing so in 2005, a few weeks after the latest mining company had signed the agreement with local landowners that would launch construction of the Hidden Valley gold mine. The pantomime was about what would happen when Hidden Valley, in its turn, would eventually close: back to scratching in the dirt again, of course.
The author rounds off Biangai land customs in chapter 7, “Belonging.” A host couple ask him towards the end of his stay, “Where are you really from? Where does your family belong?” and muse over the fate of future generations of Biangai if young people go on marrying into other villages, creating, in the Biangai way, ever-proliferating connections to land in other places. Where would they belong?
The author finishes on a note of humanism (placepersonism?). What if the sundering of people and places that mining causes could be replaced by what these and other peoples in Oceania suggest to us: that relating people and places in the way the Biangai do is a more hopeful way of relating to the world?
John Burton
The University of Queensland, Brisbane