Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. xiv, 247 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5508-3.
Leviathans at the Gold Mine is an important contribution to anthropological discussions of mining, corporate social responsibility and indigenous identity. The book is based on Golub’s PhD research at the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Its value lies not so much in its originality, although it is indeed an original contribution to these debates. Rather, I am struck by Golub’s ability to follow long-running and complex discussions (both in anthropology and at Porgera) and to distil them into an elegantly simple analytical framework based on the theme of leviathans. Drawing out the resonances from the Hebrew Bible and Hobbes, Golub plays with the definition of “leviathan” as “the power of bureaucracy incarnate” and leviathan as a cosmological order. This allows him to show how both Porgera mine and the Ipili come into existence, and indeed co-produce each other, as leviathans. These entities are much less stable than they at first appear. As Golub puts it: “Both ‘the mine’ and ‘the Ipili’ then, share a common feature: at a distance they appear to be unproblematically existing actors, but the closer you come to them, the more their coherence and integrity begins to falter” (12).
The book’s first chapter describes the negotiations over a waste dump in order to “unpack the black box” of corporate entities such as the state, landowners, or the mine. Golub reveals the conflicting internal dynamics and political interests that lie within these ostensibly cohesive leviathans. From this example, Golub also demonstrates how issues can come to be discussed in terms of the personalities of these “personated” leviathans and how individuals (community affairs officers, landowners) can effectively become the leviathans that they represent. Indeed, they must be able to do so in order to be feasible actors.
The second chapter provides historical background that contextualizes the development of the mine and the reshaping of the land-owning communities. This discussion is developed further in the third chapter, which offers a satisfying account of “being Ipili in Porgera.” This is a useful discussion of kinship and landownership amongst a fluid and dynamic people whose lived reality does not readily conform to the bureaucratic expectations of settled indigenous communities with stable boundaries based on descent.
The fourth chapter draws out the implications of Golub’s analysis for understanding PNG as a nation, particularly moral debates about the development of the country that are grounded in ideas of an “innocent population” of “grassroots” villagers. Golub seeks to open up a dialogue that brings the many scholarly insights about Papua New Guinea into conversation with the contemporary moral imagination of the nation. His intention is to create more space for grassroots people to depart from expectations of primordial subsistence indigeneity and for urban Papua New Guineans to embrace more options for themselves as modern Melanesians. This is a project that I strongly support. Golub’s first step in it is to attempt a scholarly articulation of this Papua New Guinean moral imagination. He begins by sketching the developmental background to Papua New Guinea’s independence and the response of elite thinkers, such as the influential Bernard Narokobi. He then points to some of the deeper roots in Melanesian culture that he believes foreground contemporary ideologies of the grassroots and shape the strategies that Ipili and groups like them must deploy in order to be recognized as feasible development actors.
In a useful schema, Golub traces the moral imagination of PNG by examining the positive and negative valuations of five themes that are used to evaluate village and town life: Christianity, wantoks, law and order, culture and development. Strangely absent here is any mention of gender, despite this being a focus of much contemporary moral debate in PNG. While there are many alternative ways of framing these issues, for the most part, Golub provides a satisfying account of the modern social imaginary of PNG and explains how grassroots can fail to be feasible if their representation falls on the wrong side of the moral ledger.
Golub introduces his book with an apology for his focus on men’s lives, claiming that this is the result of the situation described, namely the male-dominated Yakatabari waste dump negotiations. However, as the book progresses, it becomes clear that women will not be discussed at all, nor is there any investigation of the “pervasive sexual inequality in Porgera” (124). I have not worked in a masculinist setting such as Porgera myself but I am aware of several (female) anthropologists who have written about the plight of women there. Perhaps this was not an option available to Golub himself. However, for a book that covers complex discussions of kinship, identity, and resource development so deftly, the absence of women’s voices from Golub’s account and the neglect of gender as a tool of enquiry is puzzling and disappointing. I am sure that I am not the only reader left wanting to hear more from Golub on how and why the practices of personation and the making of leviathans are gendered. Despite this significant omission, Leviathans at the Gold Mine is a very good book that is both succinct and fresh in addressing complex and long-debated issues of identity, cultural change, and resource development; and doing so from a solid ethnographic grounding. For these reasons the book will be a very useful teaching resource and its arguments about the creation of various corporate actors will be central to further debates about (and within) PNG.
John Cox
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
pp. 753-755