Victoria Stead

Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development: Other Paths for Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is going through a crisis: A concentration on conventional approaches to development, including an unsustainable reliance on mining, forestry, and foreign aid, has contributed to the countrys slow decline since independence in 1975. Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development attempts to address problems and gaps in the literature on development and develop a new qualitative conception of community sustainability informed by substantial and innovative research in Papua New Guinea. In this context, sustainability is conceived in terms that include not just practices tied to economic development. It also informs questions of wellbeing and social integration, community-building, social support, and infrastructure renewal. In short, the concern with sustainability here entails undertaking an analysis of how communities are sustained through time, how they cohere and change, rather than being constrained within discourses and models of development. From another angle, this project presents an account of community sustainability detached from instrumental concerns with economic development. Contributors address questions such as: What are the stories and histories through which people respond to their nations development? What is the everyday social environment of groups living in highly diverse areas (migrant settlements, urban villages, remote communities)? They seek to contribute to a creative and dynamic grass-roots response to the demands of everyday life and local-global pressures. While the overdeveloped world faces an intersecting crisis created by global climate change and financial instability, Papua New Guinea, with all its difficulties, still has the basis for responding to this manifold predicament. Its secret lies in what has been seen as its weakness: underdeveloped economies and communities, where people still maintain sustainable relations to each other and the natural world.

Recognition, power and coloniality

ABSTRACT Recognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Writing particularly in response to North American settler colonialism, they argue that the politics of recognition has functioned, not to ameliorate colonialism’s negative effects, but to reproduce them. We seek here to respond to the important provocation posed by Simpson and Coulthard’s scholarship, and to extend their critiques into new geographic and empirical terrains. Specifically, we draw on the notion of coloniality to establish a comparative frame that can bring both settler and non-settler postcolonial contexts into dialogue. Doing so highlights a multiplicity of forms of recognition relationships, as well as of sites and structures of power beyond the settler state. It also illuminates a complex, unstable middle ground that can exist between recognition and its absence, which provides a productive ground from which to engage with the possibilities of being against, or beyond, recognition.

Violent histories and the ambivalences of recognition in postcolonial Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT On the 23 July 2009, in a ceremony at the Bomana War Cemetery near Papua New Guinea’s capital city Port Moresby, 86-year-old Wesley Akove was awarded the first of a series of ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel commemorative medallions’ given by the Australian government to PNG civilians who had assisted Australian troops during the Second World War. If the awarding of Mr Akove’s medallion is in many ways an archetypal enactment of the ‘politics of recognition’, consideration of three other instances of encounter between Orokaiva people in PNG’s Oro Province and Australian colonial forces disrupt the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel trope on which this recognition ritual hinges. These encounters include the wartime executions of Orokaiva men by Australian forces, recent protests by landowners along the Kokoda Track and the murder of two European gold miners at the beginning of the twentieth century by Orokaiva warriors. Considered together, narratives about these encounters speak to an asymmetrical field of power in which Australia acts to control the terms and temporalities of the recognition it offers to wartime carriers and their descendants, enacting particular, contingent forms of relationality in ways that reproduce colonial hierarchies.

Greeting the State: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity on Papua New Guinea’s Rai Coast

In May 2010, a delegation of Papua New Guinean politicians travelled to a remote village on the country’s north 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 speaks to the need to approach the 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. Rather, customary and modern forms of social relations exist in dynamic and ambivalent entanglements, pulled into contingent and differently weighted configurations by actors in local places.

History as resource: moral reckonings with place and with the wartime past in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Located in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu Station is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of 21 local Orokaiva men convicted – by the Australian administration – of treason during the Second World War. Eight years after the executions, the nearby Mount Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu. Today the place remains uninhabited but laden with memory and meaning, a site of ambivalent moral reckonings both with the colonial past and with the postcolonial present. These moral reckonings, in turn, intersect with peoples’ experiences of, and hope for, ‘development’. In Oro Province, history is becoming a resource – not unlike gold, or the oil palm plantations that extend across the landscape – which might attract outsiders, and with them forms of wealth and possibilities for realising the good life. Accordingly, Higaturu landowners work to attract outsiders to the site of the eruption and the hangings. At the same time, however, they worry that the outsiders they attract – including anthropologists – will exploit and profit from their history in the ways that so many outsiders have profited from the Provinces other resources. Commercial considerations inform these hopes and worries, but the mobilisation of history-as-resource also speaks to other concerns, including about the relationships of insiders and outsiders across time, and the proper attributions of guilt, responsibility, and entitlement within colonial and postcolonial landscapes of remembrance.

Moral horizons of land and place

ABSTRACT A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.

Doing ‘social cohesion’: Cultural policy and practice in outer metropolitan Melbourne

The emergence of ‘social cohesion’ as a policy concept in various Western states has been widely understood as part of a backlash against multiculturalism. This article applies an anthropological lens to the implementation of an Australian project to engage young people in order to ‘strengthen social cohesion’ in outer metropolitan Melbourne. Ethnographic analysis of the project lends empirical support to key critiques of the social cohesion paradigm, including the deployment of ‘community’ as a technology of cultural governance, the obscuring of socio-economic conditions and issues of social justice, and the foreclosing of any understanding of conflict as a potential social good. Some of the tensions evident in the project, however, are reflective not of recent shifts but rather of long-running dynamics in the governance of cultural difference. Thus, the article argues, narratives of a ‘multiculturalism backlash’ capture significant changes but also risk obscuring critical continuities in the exercise of governmentality.

Belonging in Oceania: Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications

Book review of Belonging in Oceania: Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications by Elfriede Hermann, Wolfgang Kempf and Toon van Meijl.

Light intervention: Lessons from Bougainville, by Anthony J. Regan

and the Philippines (one chapter). Buddhist countries of mainland Southeast Asia were not represented at all, but the book cover was of a Banyan tree tied with cloth offerings in Thailand. This photograph is evocative of the notion of ‘sacred forests’, which the editors soundly critique in their introduction chapter. Yet this notion was not discussed by most of the substantive chapters and did not provide a strong link between them. The editors’ statement that the romanticised ideal of the sacred forest is now uncommon in scholarly debate and used more by ‘community and environmental activists’ (p. 7), suggests that their quest ‘to go beyond this idea of the sacred forest’ (p. 10) is positioning the book as primarily as means to bring insights from social analysis to resource managers and policymakers. These comments partly reflect a common challenge for interdisciplinary work in that it faces a diversified audience with varied disciplinary assumptions and concerns. Overall, this collection will stand on the strength of its impressive interdisciplinarity and collaborative effort, which will offer a solid resource and research model for scholars of the region as well as for resource managers and development practitioners.