A quick thought on landowners
by Alex
I was in the shower this morning thinking about Dru Gladney’s writings on ethnic minorities in China and specifically why I hadn’t ever read any of them despite the fact (according to everyone I talk to) that I should have. There are many reasons I haven’t read Gladney’s work (other than the excellent edited volume ‘making majorities’) and it was then that a thought struck me — an idea that I’d chewed around the edges of but had never really been able to put explicitly. In China, non-Han ethnic groups are minorities in the classical sense — they are the ‘other’ against whom Han imagine themselves as the unmarked category. Ethnic identity in China is (I’m guessing, since I’ve never read anything about it) about the familiar process of boundary maintenance — delimiting majority ethnic identity vis-a-vis making other Others.
But not in Papua New Guinea. Landowners in Papua New Guinea — who we call ‘indigenous people’ even though this isn’t quite the right term — play a totally different role in Papua New. In Papua New Guinea, grass roots people are _central_ to national identity. Papua New Guineans — and especially the ones in Moresby — see rural Papua New Guineans as central to their identity, the true repository and custodian of what it means to be Papua New Guinean. This is the reason that people who were born in Moresby, were raised in New Ireland, and went to college in Queensland describe themselves as ‘from Laiagam’ — because that is where one of their parents were from and all Papua New Guineans are supposed to be ‘from a village’.
I know that this is an obvious thing to say to people who think about Papua New Guinea, but framing the issue in this way did help me get some intellectual work done — by being central rather than peripheral to national identity, rural Papua New Guineans figure quite differently in their national imagination than most other ‘indigenous people’. And the incredibly touchiness that urban Papua New Guineans have about landowners — the inability to forgive opportunism, the insistence that they must all love to farm and have no aspirations for development, they must all preserve kastom and tok ples — this can also be attributed to a sensitivity that is the result of the high moral and sentimental stakes which rural Papua New Guineans have to bear in the name of their fellow countrymen.
Does PNG have its own version of Thomas Kinkade, painting pictures for the urbanites of “a simpler time” when everyone still lived harmoniously in their villages?
That Thomas Kinkade comes from Placerville — which landscape functions for me _precisely_ in the manner his paintings function for the striving Babbitry of America’s suburbs — introduces an element of shame into my disgust at the facile.
What would be really interesting to find out would be what kind of pictorial representation would evoke village life to PNG viewers, whose own past tradition doesn’t include much if any pictorial art. What would be the style needed to do that kind of work? Kinkade’s style evokes Victorian schlock crossed with 1950s kitsch and a touch of those bizarre paintings on velvet. (Oh, and ideas about the “original artwork” that would have Walter Benjamin spinning in his grave. Aura, schmaura.) Both the Victorian era and the 1950s are famous for their social mythmaking — for constructing idyllic fictions of place and time.
I didn’t know that Kinkade came from Placerville — kind of a backdoor linking of the phenomenon of idealizing the village, on the one hand, and gold mining on the other.
Mega-points to SEB for drawing a link where I hadn’t seen one.
Speaking of velvet paintings, next time you’re in the glittering metropolis of Dedham (MA), check out the Museum of Bad Art: http://www.museumofbadart.org