Asia-Pacific Environment Monograph 15. Acton, Australia: ANU Press, 2021. xix, 359 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, maps, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$65.00, paper. ISBN 9781760464486.
Despite what we may think, the absence or presence of the state is never absolute in natural resource extraction settings. Rather, as Nicholas Bainton and Emilia E. Skrzypek correctly point out, they are two mutually constitutive moments which intertwine over time and in different sections of society.
This comprehensive volume is intended to be a significant collection of ethnographic material for conceptualizing and studying the state “from the advantageous perspective of extractive contexts” (xvii). The case studies cover mainly Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australia. The editors’ aim is to compare “the role of the extractive industries in the development of these nation states and their identity; state sovereignty over mineral resources; and the experiences and expectations of customary landowners” (3). The last chapter on New Caledonia, on the other hand, serves as a test of whether the notion of “absent presence,” the focus of this volume, can be also applied in other jurisdictions.
The editors’ reference to the tragicomedy Waiting for Godot is very well suited for explaining the concept of absent presence. Just like Godot is the figure upon which the characters’ spatio-temporality depends (standing still in one place waiting for him although he never shows up), so the state is the figure the extractive context depends on: being everywhere and nowhere, it orchestrates extractive processes from behind the scenes.
With this Beckettian parallelism Bainton and Skrzypek encourage us to reject the assumption that, in the extractive contexts of PNG and Australia, the state is simply absent. Indeed, the concept of absent presence challenges the classical rhetoric that finds the cause of the state’s failures in its ineffectiveness or weakness: these features “can also be reconceptualised and experienced as a form of presence, what we term ‘absent presence’” (25). One of the intentions linking the various contributions is precisely to underline how “experienced absences tend to reinforce particular ideas of the state, signalling the interplay between the ideological and the material qualities of the state” (2).
The specificity of this volume is that the essays are constructed on the basis of how the state is perceived, experienced, and encountered by local communities and mining companies. It is not how the state sees its citizens that Michael Main focuses on in chapter 5, but instead how citizens see the state. For the Huli, he explains, the idea of the state becomes concrete with the arrival of the PNGLNG project, and is reinforced in the material absence of the state.
One of the main effects of the lack of interaction between local communities and the state is that the former strengthen their relationship with the mining companies. Often the state gap is filled by the corporation, which is forced to take on state roles and responsibilities (chapters 2, 4) or by local communities assuming social and health risks (chapters 5, 6). This is particularly the case for the Australian state, which appears ambiguous, sometimes taking other forms: police, pastoralists, and other citizens armed by it (chapter 8). In other cases, the state is selectively and strategically engaged for certain groups and not for others (chapters 7 and 8), or it is seen appearing and disappearing at different times in the evolution of mining projects (chapter 9).
The authors strongly emphasize the spatial and temporal dimensions that shape encounters with the state and, consequently, the need to historicize (chapter 3) and contextualize its absent presence. How citizens perceive and experience the presence and absence of government before and after the arrival of the mining industry provides insight into the nature of their feelings, expectations, and disillusionment. As outlined in chapter 9, concerning the Century zinc mine in Queensland, the Australian neoliberal state maintained the “malevolent absence” of the colonial state. But states are not equal; Bainton and Clevacher explain this in their last chapter on the sui generis case of New Caledonia, whose collegial government “cannot absent itself” (338) on account of its special form of governance.
In the panorama of mining studies, this volume joins others that focus on the political arena arising from mining projects in Melanesia (Colin Filer and Pierre-Yve Le Meur, Large-scale mines and local-level politics: Between New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea, ANU Press, 2017) and on “mining encounters” at large (Robert Jan Pijers and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Mining Encounters: Extractive Industries in an Overheated World, Pluto Press, 2018). That said, the strength and novelty of this book derive from the attention that is put specifically on the state and its effects.
Although the book benefits from an afterword that expands the picture with two other case studies contemporaneous with its writing, there is no real conclusion that incorporates the themes discussed or opens the debate to other geographical fields. When the reader reaches the end, she almost feels the need to draw the thread of the discourse by going back to the introduction which, on the contrary, is very rich and detailed and “stands on its own.” From a certain point of view, however, this non-final ending lays the groundwork for investigating numerous questions. One among others: Can the absent presence model also be applied to deep-sea mining in supra-national areas where by definition there is no single state but multiple ones?
Overall, I believe that this volume achieves one of the stated goals: to bring out “the incompleteness and uncertainty of the contemporary capitalist state” (5), providing new insights into the anthropology of the state.
Marta Gentilucci
University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan