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.