Landowner Groups and the Codification of Custom in Papua New Guinea

Although it diverges markedly from the vision of the Melanesian Way elaborated in the 1975 constitution, large-scale resource extraction has in recent decades been championed as the key mechanism for development in Papua New Guinea. In this context, forms of “middle-way” land reform are advocated as means of rendering customary land tenure commensurable with the requirements of modern, capitalist practices of production and economic activity. Principal amongst these are Incorporated Land Groups (ILGs) and lease-lease-back arrangements. Ethnographic exploration of communities affected by the tuna industry in Madang Province shows how these land reforms transform structures and cartographies of power, privileging the agents of the state and global capital at the same time that they transform relations of power within communities. At the same time, however, forms of codification and the assertion of landowner identities allow communities to make claims against outside agents involved in resource extractive activity on their lands.

Customary Connection to Land and Practices of Resilience

An ethnography of Cacavei, a rural subsistence community in eastern Timor-Leste, provides a case study for theorizing customary connection to land. When the community was displaced during the period of Indonesian occupation, forms of customary connection to land—including ritual practice, gardening, burial, and story-telling—were a source of resilience in the face of enormous change and suffering. In Cacavei, and in other communities where customary forms of sociality endure, people and land are mutually constitutive. Customary sociality privileges embodied, face-to-face encounters, but in the emphasis placed on genealogical continuity across time it also accords importance to relationships with the dead, with spirits, and with the yet-unborn. Connection to land plays a key role in mediating the abstraction of physical death, with relations to ancestors and other disembodied kin embedded in the land itself, and thus given material form. The capacity to negotiate abstraction underpins the resilience and negotiability of customary systems.

Contesting Land, City, State, and Nation

This article considers contestations over land, state and nation in Aitarak Laran, an urban settlement in post-independence Timor-Leste. Since 2010 the settlement has been resisting eviction by the East Timorese state, which wishes to use the land it occupies to build a National Library and Cultural Centre. The contestation at Aitarak Laran reveals counter-posed imaginings of land as homeland, territory and property. In the settlement, the promises of independence—unity, equivalence, and inclusion within the sovereign nation-state—are at odds with residents’ experiences of what independence has in fact brought. Land, in its multiple imaginings, becomes a crucible upon which this painful disjuncture plays out. Reading Aitarak Laran as an instance of “right to the city” struggle, these tensions emerge as well not only in practice but also in theory, reflected particularly in the limitations and ambiguities of rights discourse.

Greeting the State

In 2010, a delegation of Papua New Guinean politicians travelled to a remote village called Bongu, on the northern Rai Coast, to receive a petition against proposed mine activity. The encounter between the politicians and the villagers who had invited them involved two very different articulations of power and authority, and two competing cartographies of centrality and marginality. The encounter demonstrated the need to approach concepts of custom and modernity not only as powerful discourses which are taken up and performed in local places, but also as analytical descriptors of actually existing patterns of practice and meaning which are structurally and ontological distinct. At the same time, however, analysis of the encounter between villagers and politicians makes clear that this structural difference cannot be written straightforwardly onto the social bodies of opposing collectivities. Entanglements are destabilising and risky, but also enable assertions of local autonomy and customary cartographies of power.

Introduction

In Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste there are ways of being and belonging—customary and modern—that are fundamentally different but nonetheless intertwined in dynamic entanglements. These entanglements are being catalyzed by processes of globalization, state- and nation-building, and development. Both Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste are countries where customary forms of connection to land are central to lives, cultures, and identities. Conceptually, the chapter maps key trajectories in scholarly treatments of custom and modernity in anthropology and related disciplines, including recent scholarship on “multiple modernities.” It proposes a theorization of custom and modernity as ontologically distinct forms of social relations that cut across the boundaries of delimited social groups and are drawn into dynamic and shifting configurations. It is in this entangled multiplicity that we can best see the complexity and flux of global processes of social change.

Conclusion

Mapping the destabilization of land and power in conditions of entanglement is a complex task. If there is a dominant tendency emerging out of entanglement and the destabilisation of structures of power, it is to the diminishing of local autonomy. Still, even in deeply unequal and hierarchical situations, Melanesians and others do speak to—and speak back to—an entangled world. For many, customary land is the place from which they speak. Moving beyond Melanesia and the Pacific, a metaphor of entanglement offers possibilities for thinking globally about the impacts and experiences of change, and the significance of forms of connection to land. A globalized world is an entangled world, in which all people and places are implicated. Globally, entanglements confront and disrupt the smooth workings of capital and the state system, fracturing taken-for-granted assumptions about what it means to be in the world, and offering powerful articulations of alterity.

Land Titling and State Building in Postconflict Timor-Leste

In Timor-Leste, forms and patterns of connection to land have been transformed by the impacts of Portuguese colonialism, Indonesian occupation, and civil conflict, all of which have generated widespread displacement. Multiple bases for land claims now exist, and this has been the catalyst for a land claims collection and land titling process in the post-independence era. Between 2008 and 2012 a project called Ita Nia Rai (Tetum: Our Land), funded by US aid agency USAID, collected land claims in urban and peri-urban areas as a precursor to issuing land titles. Land titling and cadastral mapping processes privilege an understanding of land as property. In Timor-Leste, the Ita Nia Rai process also assumes and reinforces an equivalence between urban and modern, and rural and customary. Four case-studies of informants involved in the land reform process, however, reveal urban and peri-urban spaces as sites of dynamic interplay between customary and modern practices.

Making Land Work?

In Papua New Guinea, a country rich in mineral and other natural resources, “development” has become largely inseparable from the extension of capitalist relations of production and exchange across land. This is a cultural process as well as an economic one, and it both materially undermines and ideologically devalues customary forms of subsistence production, as well as forms of informal sector economic activity. Ethnographic exploration of communities around the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone and the RD Tuna Cannery in Madang Province also reveal the functioning of “development” as a cultural, ideational and symbolically laden phenomenon. Specifically, the consumption of tinpis (Tok Pisin: tinned fish), functions ambivalently as a signifier both of status and of dispossession. If dominant development practices devalue customary land and customary forms of production, however, it also creates new opportunities for asserting new visions of development and of the good life.