Article on the Ipili in the Ottowa Citizen
by Alex
The Ottowa Citizen has published a “lengthy article on the Ipili and Placer”:http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=26bacccd-fa28-4f96-b067-a436b6a6d881 by Kelly Patterson. Patterson spent a LOT of time emailing me about the article and I’m quoted extensively in it. She’s also interviewed my colleagues Jerry Jacka and Glenn Banks. It is a little strange seeing one’s words reproduced on the page, but I guess that turn about is fair play and as an anthropologist I’m the last person who should complain about how strange it is being reported upon! The article is quite long and does an excellent job of summing up what has become an incredibly complex and emotional topic, for which Patterson deserves credit. I am sure that it will not please everyone, and that several of the groups party to Porgeran politics will feel that they have not been sympathetically rendered, and that others got off too light. But this is just the way things go in the valley.
I’d recommend the article to friends and family interested in learning a little bit more about some of the issues involved in my fieldsite.
[...] Fellow Savage Mind, Alex Golub, was interviewed extensively for this excellent article in the Ottawa Citizen about conflict between a Canadian mining company and the local population in Papua New Guinea (where Alex did his fieldwork): And so the stage was set for the tragedy that is Porgera: On the one side, hundreds of people who feel they have every right to scavenge for gold on Mount Waruwari, based on kinship ties, their bond to the land, their gold-panning past or tribal compensation customs. [...]
[...] So while I think that Kelly Patterson’s article does a better job of sounding out the complexities of the mine’s entanglement with Porgera, I like CorpWatch’s report just because it is ethnographically richer—there are pictures of Nelson, transcriptions of interviews, etc. Check it out. [...]