(for the record, this is what all the fuss is about):
Dissertation Outline for
Making The Ipili Feasible: Imagining ‘Global’ and ‘Local’ Actors
at the Porgera Gold Mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea
by Alex Golub
This dissertation concerns the Ipili speaking people of Porgera valley, Papua New Guinea. In 1939 The Ipili were discovered by the Australian administration of Papua New Guinea and small-scale gold mining began in the valley shortly thereafter. In 1990, Porgera became home to the third largest goldmine in the world, which is operated by the Canadian mining transnational Placer Dome. Royalties and other revenues from the mine are key to the financial stability of the Papua New Guinean state. The Ipili have obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions from both the government and Placer Dome in exchange for their willingness to host the mine on their land.
How, this dissertation asks, did stakeholders in the mine work together to create the complex social, economic, and political circumstances required to keep a large-scale mechanized gold mine operative in a remote geographical area? Just as mineral resources are ‘feasible’ if they meet complex logistical and financial requirements, this dissertation argues that Ipili identity itself has also been made ‘feasible’. On the one hand, representations of Ipili people and life in Porgera have been created and circulate in such a way that the moral and legal requirements of Ipili assent to the mine’s presence are met. On the other hand, the creation of these representations has, unexpectedly, given Ipili true agency to pursue their own agenda at a national level – they have become ‘feasible’ (in the sense of efficacious) political actors in the national level, and have become some of the most successful indigenous people in the world at extracting concessions from industry and government. In sum, the goal of the dissertation is to tie a semiotic account of the creation of representations of ‘local’ and ‘global’ actors to a political-economic account of power politics within a contemporary Pacific nation.
The dissertation is organized in a roughly chronological fashion. The first substantive chapter focuses on the early history of Porgera, and the development of a set of political and institutional arrangements that lead to the creation of the Porgera Gold mine in 1990. The dissertation then goes on to examine the historical consciousness of Ipili people – their own culturally specific understandings of mining, their contact with the outside world, and their role in it. Two chapters then examine how notions of being Ipili circulate. One chapter examines the way that people living in Porgera claim to have local Ipili identity in order to gain access to a variety of goods and services. The next examines how governmental and policy elites in the national capital of Port Moresby imagine ‘traditional Papua New Guinea culture’. The final chapter draws on what has come before to provide a close examination of a prolonged set of negotiations between Ipili leaders and mine representatives. This detailed ethnographic case demonstrates the dynamics of Porgera today and, in doing so, closes the dissertation.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Overview of dissertation and its main arguments. Description of the fieldwork site and the problems involved. Discussion of the framework used in the analysis to follow, organized as a series of literature reviews: Language, politics, and performance in the Pacific, indigenous identity and the law, mining and resource issues, the literature on ‘alternate modernities’, the ‘indigenization of modernity’ and globalization
2. The History of Feasibility
A history of the valley focused on the history of the representation of a) the Ipili as an ethnic group and b) the Porgera Intrusive Complex (i.e. the ore body). This is presented as an argument against James Scott’s work on ‘seeing like a state’. A history of how whites have come to know the Ipili.
3. The Original Affluent Society: An Organization of Predatory Expansion
A discussion of Ipili conceptions of whites and their historical consciousness as a recently contacted people. History of millenarianism, Christianity, and mining. A discussion of how Ipili perceive whites – sometimes more accurately than we perceive ourselves. A history of how Porgerans have come to know whites.
4. Being Ipili in Porgera
One of the main chapters of the dissertation, which examines the politics and dynamics of claims to Ipili identities in the Valley today. Case studies will include: personal disputes between Ipili in relocation settlements, claims of damaged land made to mine employees, claims to royalty payments made to the government, and claims to be recognized as ‘leaders’ made in attempts to participate in negotiations.
5. Policy and Ambiguity
An analysis of how local landowners are viewed in Port Moresby. Government legislation and policy. How white and coastal industry executives imagine ‘traditional land tenure’. A discussion of the history of anthropological approaches to residence and descent and how these apply to policy. A discussion of how, in light of the rest of the dissertation, the assumptions used in decisions at the national level are not only inaccurate but dysfunctional.
6. The Yakatabari Negotiations
This final section tracks an 18-month long negotiation between Mine employees and Ipili leaders. This detailed case study will employ the material that has come before in the chapter in order to provide a concrete example of the fundamental issues of the dissertation as they played out in one particular situation.
7. Conclusion
Discussion of main themes of the dissertation and recapitulation of its arguments.