Lihir back on track
by Alex
After earlier issues with a temporary closure it looks like “Lihir is back on track”:http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,23636,23131449-14334,00.html
After earlier issues with a temporary closure it looks like “Lihir is back on track”:http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,23636,23131449-14334,00.html
I knew about the “ASOPA website”;http://www.asopa.com.au/ for some time, but didn’t know there was a “blog”:http://asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/ as well. Awesome.
Another illegal miner has been shot in Porgera — there is coverage at “The National”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/010208/Nation%205.htm and “The Age”:http://news.theage.com.au/illegal-miner-shot-dead-in-png/20080102-1jun.html
Just in case you missed it, while I was away PNG has faced one of its most major natural disasters in years: “tropical cyclone Guba”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=amp_W1VamMGs&refer=australia
In other news “macroeconomic indicators continue to look good”:http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/11/19/afx4353296.html
Here’s a PNG story that has been making headlines recently, “malaria climbs into highlands PNG”:http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/09/asia/AS-GEN-Bali-Climate-Quiet-Scourge.php. Mostly its a write up of some PNGIMR research. I appreciate the fact that it lacks the usual “ooohh ahhh they’re cannibals” extremism that too often populates news stories about PNG. It even gets myths of malaria right — in Porgera people thought that if you went down to the low altitude areas (the _wapi_) you’d get sick and become a sorcerer with incredibly long fingernails. So there you go.
I have always known, deep in my heart, that John Burton had the heart and soul of a blogger. But his recent blog, despite the occasional entry that is “incomprehensible”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/29/frightenstein-drives-stake-into-sinking-atolls/#more-529 (at least to those of us who are not aging commonwealthers) are “furniture chewing”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/26/cross-cultural-misunderstanding-and-4wds/ at “its very best”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/31/hacks-move-decimal-point-again/.
Here are some links about the First Contact trilogy that I may use later on this semester:
“An obituary of Robin Anderson”:http://www.aftrs.edu.au/index.cfm?objectid=D2EB0A32-D0B7-4CD6-F92A1DC2894B1500
“Degrees of Otherness: A Close Reading of First Contact”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/var.1994.10.2.55?journalCode=var — from Visual Anthropology Review
Its official — “Barrick is buying into Kainantu”:http://www.barrick.com/News/PressReleases/2007/BarricktoAcquireHighlyProspectivePropertiesinPNG/default.aspx.
There a “new joint venture between Triple Plate and Barrick”:http://www.rttnews.com/sp/breakingnews.asp?date=10/22/2007&item=16
It looks like “Oil Search is going with Exxon”:http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKSYD9861820071023 on the LNG project.
ANU’s Artisinal mining research center has “online papers”:http://www.asmasiapacific.org/documentsview.aspx
“Papua New Guinea delegation donates gold for rebuilding Temple”:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3457263,00.html
The new issue of Ethnography has a “special section on middle managers in global firms”:http://eth.sagepub.com/content/vol8/issue3/ including an article by John Hassard.
Oops. InterOil shares drop 25% as “Elk 2 comes up dry”:http://communities.canada.com/nationalpost/blogs/tradingdesk/archive/2007/10/03/interoil-shares-fall-on-suspension-of-elk-2-well.aspx
Two books on the state end of the tripod:
“State Formation and Political Legitimacy”:http://books.google.com/books?id=mgDBG5zu1xYC&pg=PA85&dq=ideology+and+the+formation+of+early+states&sig=Vj2weuV1Rp-ZhFPTfGgDquwqm8A#PPP1,M1
“Ideology and the formation of early states”:http://books.google.com/books?id=rtwxaNSsMbUC&pg=PP1&dq=ideology+and+the+formation+of+early+states&sig=jyyxLii9wt9lbA3TjgsRHHB_V0w#PPR5,M1
A fat book on “The Origins of the European Economy”:http://www.amazon.com/Origins-European-Economy-Communications-Commerce/dp/0521661021/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product/105-4927962-4957223
The CFP for the “International Journal of Role Playing”:http://play.blogs.com/rp/ …
…And the mysterious “journalhosting.org”:http://journalhosting.org/
Two pieces of PNG-related news today that may have escaped the normal radar. First, “Laurie Critchley has finished a documentary on Dan Leahy’s wives”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv–radio/a-tale-of-papuan-polygamy/2007/09/25/1190486315171.html which would make a _great_ edition to my First Contact course — can anyone tape this for me?
Second, “there’s a new racquet club in town”:http://www.openpr.com/news/29147/Papua-New-Guinea-welcomes-the-Airways-Health-and-Racquet-Club.html: Will the Aviat be overthrown, or is Jackson’s too far away from Town to lure people out? Only time will tell….
UPDATE: Here’s the URL for the “Leahy family documentary”:http://www.abc.net.au/dynasties/special.htm
Check out this “phat new issue of Anthropological Forum”:http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/spissue/canf-si.asp! Gratz to all contributors — it looks like it will be fantastic.
Some news on mining in PNG:
“Yandera prospect looks good”:http://www.wabusinessnews.com.au/en-story/1/56861/Marnego-forecasts-Yandera-production-by-2011 — they’re forecasting production in 2011.
“Harmony is looking for cash for Hidden Valley”:http://www.mineweb.net/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page504?oid=27296&sn=Detail
and last but not least: “China National Petroleum Corporation is eyeing Oil Search”:http://www.forbes.com/markets/2007/09/17/cnpc-oil-search-markets-equity-cx_jc_0917markets04.html
Kaloo-kalay! The PNGIMR has, bless their hearts, “digitized back issues of the PNG Medical Journal”:http://www.pngimr.org.pg/medicaljournals.htm! A high-quality, hard-to-find journal is now available and open to all. Good job PNIMR!!
I love The Contemporary Pacific, and I was glad to see that they have open access’d “a great issue of indigenous studies”:http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/cp/CP132.html. James Clifford, Geoff White, Ty Tengan, John Osorio, Teresia Teaiwa, etc. etc. Good stuff!
‘Tis the season for the Western Highlands and Enga cultural shows. The “BBC has some pictures”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6956504.stm.
This piece on “13th Mask Festival”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20070810/weekend01.htm at Rabaul touches briefly on one of my own interests — how Papua New Guineans understand their own ‘traditional culture’.
Sssshhh…. don’t tell Barrick, but “one of their employees is blogging”:http://davidwillms.blogspot.com/ about life in Porgera. This is great for me, since the group that I had least access to during my research in Porgera was expatriate miners. It makes for interesting reading about what a white miner thinks about the “crazies” that live “on the other side of the fence” at Porgera, something I don’t know much about since my specialty was living with said crazies. Williams is right that Porgerans consider white people chewing betelnut hilarious, but I am not sure about the two Ps he put in “Ippili” and the two Gs in “cigarette.”
I actually feel bad pointing up this blog. I have no idea what PJV’s policy on blogging is but I imagine that too much publicity will just get thing thing rolled up by management.
PNG is often described using ‘primitizing’ metaphors like ‘stone age’, ‘ancient’ and so forth. But it doesn’t get much more literal than this: “Ropens: Live Pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea”:http://www.ropens.com/.
The new “Sinivit gold mine”:http://www.newguineagold.ca/Sinivit.html in East New Britain is now online and their first gold pour is expected for May. For some photos of what the start of a gold mine looks like check out “the press release”:http://www.newguineagold.ca/PressReleases2007.html#apr30. This is Baining, Jane Fajans country but I have no idea what their social impact work was like or how community affairs is constructed or anything.
Looking at these pictures of systematic destruction of the natural environment it occurs to me how desensitized I’ve become to what mining does to the environment. It is sort of like the Rodney King effect — defense attorneys who defended policemen who beat up King had to decide how to deal with the explosive video tape of them beating him. The strategy — iirc — was not to avoid the tape, but to show it to the jury over and over and over again until it was no longer shocking to them. It is sort of amazing to see images of once-forested ridges stripped of all life and ready to get ground into bits and turned into shiny gold bars. Every fork and spoon in our house got dug out of the ground the exact same way. Except, of course, the plastic ones. But anyway.
Looks like Porgera has halted operations temporarily — more at “The Nation”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/042507/nation2.htm and “The Post”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20070427/business.htm
“Barrick has bought Emperor’s equity in Porgera”:http://www.canadianminingjournal.com/issues/ISArticle.asp?id=67959&issue=04222007 — which means its just them and in-country equity now in Porgera.
Every so often anthropologists are asked questions about historical linguistics — typically something like “The words X, Y, and Z in these two languages are spoken in different areas of world — proof of alien colonization, perhaps?!?!?” The answer is: of course not — the Mayan sysadmins who first seeded our green world of clocks with our kind scrambled our neuronal cortex in order to erase all such clues. C’mon folks — these guys were _professionals_. The other main answer to give people is some sense of what historical linguists do — for which I just want to bookmark here “How do linguists decide how languages are related”:http://www.zompist.com/lang9.html#10 as well as “Deriving Proto-world with tools you probably have at home”:http://www.zompist.com/proto.html and “How likely are chance resemblances between languages?”:http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm all of them over at Zompist.com. I first got on to these writings in the course of tracking down the relationship between “Quechua”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua and “Hutese”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huttese_language (the later is modeled on the former) and rather than googling around forever for them again I thought I’d make a note of them here as I’m currently attempting to explain to someone that there is no phylogenetic relationship between Berber and Hawaiian (other than the well-developed 19th century notions of a semitic origin for Polynesian people, some of which have sort of sunk into the culture around here).
Here’s an article from Islands Business on “Chinese in Papua New Guinea”:http://www.islandsbusiness.com/islands_business/index_dynamic/containerNameToReplace=MiddleMiddle/focusModuleID=17355/overideSkinName=issueArticle-full.tpl and how the long-time Chinese expat community and the growing PRC presence in PNG is playing in national politics.
David Martinez of “CorpWatch”:http://www.corpwatch.org/ has just finished an “article on the Porgera gold mine”:http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14381 which summarizes a longer report (I haven’t read the report yet — just the article on the website). I emailed him back and forth for a bit and I’m quoted a few times in the story. Its worth reading if you are interested in Porger and particularly how debates in the valley get picked up and circulated in international fora — check out the “cartoon”:http://www.corpwatch.org/img/original/Papua.jpg that came with the article. Is it just me or is the mountain gendered female in the picture? This fits in well with the idea of the exploitation of ‘mother earth’ familiar with first world activists but not with Ipili conceptions of Kupiane — the snake inside the mountain that makes the gold — being male. There are also a few other zingers in the piece that could have been fact checked: the tailing from the mine eventually make their way into the Gulf of Papua, not the Coral Sea as the article claims.
But these are small quibbles and the article at least shows great restraint given the lefty inclinations of CorpWatch. And indeed, since 2001, it has gotten harder and harder to pain the mine as a success story (as I did in my dissertation) in which mine and Ipili needs and demands were more or less in equilibrium. Mounting social pressure, shooting of illegal miners, and so forth have all taken their toll on life in the valley — or at least so it seems to me from this distance. Also I must say that I am sort of partial to this report because its _tene_ are my Waiwa brothers Nelson Akiko and William Gaupe and you _know_ I still represent for Waiwa.
So while I think that “Kelly Patterson’s article”:http://alex.golub.name/log/2006/06/04/article-on-the-ipili-in-the-ottowa-citizen/ 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.
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.