New Actors, Historic Landscapes The Making of a Frontier Place in Papua New Guinea Tuomas Tammisto Research Series in Anthropology University of Helsinki Academic Dissertation Research Series in Anthropology University of Helsinki, Finland Distributed by Unigrafia asiakaspalvelu@unigrafia.fi http://shop.unigrafia.fi ISSN 1458-3186 ISBN 978-951-51-4026-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-951-51-4027-2 (PDF) Unigrafia 2018 Dedicated to the memory of Koska Lamail, Peter Vomne and Martina Gomeyan. Contents List of figures, maps and tables vii Acknowledgements viii 1. Introduction1 1.1 Wide Bay as a frontier and a lived environment3 1.2 Making people, places and environments: research questions and theoretical framework 11 1.3 Doing fieldwork in Wide Bay 28 Part I: Land and Locality 35 2. Gardens, plants and land: socially productive work and the media of relatedness 37 2.1 Main food crops: care, continuity and history 40 2.2 Clearing and dividing a garden 44 2.3 Gardens and land-use 48 2.4 Conclusions 54 3. Making temporal environments: work, places and history in the Mengen landscape 56 3.1 The Mengen tree calendar 58 3.2 Gardening & place making 61 3.3 Placed histories & relating to the land 66 3.4 Conclusions 70 Part II: Logging and Landowner Companies 77 4. Logging in Wide Bay 79 4.1 Historical and institutional background 81 4.2 Cape Orford Timber Rights Purchase 85 4.3 Proliferation of landowner companies in Wide Bay 90 4.4 Conclusions 95 5. “The company is just a name!”: constructing corporate entities in logging 98 5.1 The landowner company 102 5.2 Disputing clans 106 5.3 “The company is nothing but a name” 111 5.4 Conclusions 114 Part III: Oil-palm and Wage Labor 121 6. Enacting the absent state: state formation on the oil palm frontier 123 6.1 Plantations and state effects 124 6.2 History of plantations and wage labor 128 6.3 Self-made order 132 6.4 Conclusions 137 7. “Life in the village is free.”: labor and the poetics of place 140 7.1 Life on the plantation 141 7.2 Wok mani—wage labor 148 7.3 Converting labor into work 151 7.4 Conclusions 155 Part IV: Community Conservation 163 8. Conserving the forest, organizing people: conservationists as organic intellectuals 165 8.1 Community conservation in Wide Bay 167 8.2 Conservationists as organic intellectuals 170 8.3 “What is awareness?”: challenging the extractivist hegemony 175 8.4 Conclusions 179 9. “We sacrifice the forest to get development.”: conservation and commodification 183 9.1 Conservation, enclosure and territorialization 185 9.2 Commodifying conservation 187 v 9.3 Sharing the land or exchanging benefits? The politics of commodification 191 9.4 Conclusions 197 10. Conclusions 203 10.1 The making of people, places and social relations 204 10.2 The political ecology of value 209 10.3 Epilogue 213 11. Appendix 216 11.1 Garden succession, diversity & plots 216 11.2 Fractal imagery in Mengen ceremonial food distributions 220 11.3 Garden land survey 222 11.4 A clan history 226 Bibliography 229 List of figures 1 Mengen garden divisions and parts 45 2 Division of a garden 50 3 Transfer of gardening rights and distribution of plots 51 4 The index tree phases 58 5 Schematic representation of Mengen forest terminology 63 6 Balokoma and its subsidiaries 92 7 Wide Bay Mengen LOCs and villages 93 8 Nato Ltd. composition and dispute 102 9 Division of garden plots 216 10 Layout of garden with Plot 1. highlighted 218 11 Fractal imagery in Mengen food distributions 220 List of maps 1 Papua New Guinea and East New Britain Province5 2 Wide Bay8 3 Logging roads in Cape Orford in 2010s 88 4 Villages around the Cape Orford Timber Rights Purchase area 91 5 Gardens of the survey overlaid on an aerial photograph 225 6 Gardens of the survey around Toimtop village 225 List of tables 1 Timber Rights Purchases issued in ENBP (based on figures given in PNGFA 1998, 22) 82 2 Number of species and plants in the garden according to plot 217 3 Garden survey 224 vii Acknowledgements Rather than looking only at the product itself, political economists examine the social relations that were necessary to make that product. Similarly, people in Melanesia tend to emphasize and be sensitive to the social relations that are behind social products, be they people or things. This thesis would not have been possible without the help of a great number of people and the social relations that enabled me to work on it. I want to start by thanking the staff of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, where I began my studies as an undergraduate student and where I felt so at home that I decided to pursue graduate studies. During the courses of professor Jukka Siikala I became interested in the Pacific, the late professor Karen Armstong inspired me to look closely at politics in its various forms and the door of professor Sarah Green was always open for helpful discussions. Toomas Gross, Timo Kallinen and Katja Uusihakala taught me either as an undergraduate or in seminars. Arto Sarla’s help—starting from year one—in all administrative matters has been incredibly valuable—especially after consecutive reforms and cuts to education made everyone’s life at the university harder. A big thank you to Marie-Louise Karttunen, who proofread the manuscript. I thank the University of Helsinki for the SYLFF grant, which enabled me to conduct fieldwork as well as for the finishing grant that helped me to complete my thesis. In the course of the writing process, I have received help, comments and advice from Barbara Andersen, Steffen Dalsgaard, Matti Eräsaari, Colin Filer, Robin Hide, Dan Jorgensen, Marianna Keisalo, Andrew Lattas and Ryan Schramm, who also helped me with practical matters before I set out to do fieldwork in PNG. This thesis would not have been possible without the steadfast support of my supervisors Anu Lounela and professor Timo Kaartinen. A specialist in political ecology, Anu has helped me since I first started to think about my PhD project until the very end. Besides being an inspiring teacher, Timo employed me in his project ”Human ecology, land conversion and the global resource economy” funded by the Academy of Finland (grant 253680), which allowed me to focus on my research full time for three years. Always helpful, ready to comment and never imposing, he encouraged me to pursue my own interests. It is difficult to express my gratitude to them. Likewise, my MA supervisor Thomas Strong went over his head to help me conduct initial research in PNG and write my MA. My pre-examiners Keir Martin and Rupert Stasch critically examined my thesis and gave me valuable and insightful comments. A special thanks for them for their thorough work. I have been incredibly lucky to have started graduate studies with kind and brilliant peers, such as Tero Frestadius, Touko Martikainen, Jenni Mölkänen, Pekka Tuominen and Heikki Wilenius, with whom I have sat in reading groups and seminars as well as shared the ups and downs of graduate studies. The reading group in political ecology convened by Markus Kröger and Anu Lounela, and attended by Mira Käkönen, Jenni Mölkänen, Liina-Maija Qvist and Tero Toivonen lasted for several years and many of the ideas presented in this thesis stem from discussions we had. In the final years of writing up, Henni Alava, Tuomas Järvenpää, Sonal Makhija, Jenni Mölkänen, Liina-Maija viii Qvist, Heikki Wilenius and I formed a writing group, in which we commented on each others’ texts. The critical comments, good insights and the unconditional support I have received from the group members has been important in ways I fail to describe. Without them this thesis would be a shadow of what it is now, were I ever able to finish it. My deepest thanks to all of you. My parents Antero and Liisa and my siblings Jaakko and Kaarina have been ever supportive of me. Without them working on this thesis would have been much harder and duller. I have gotten vital emotional and intellectual support from friends like Henrik Hohteri, Jukka Pajarinen, Olli Hakkarainen, Tikli Oikarinen, Hilkka Peltola, Roni Saari, Jenni Sahramaa, Tyko Sillanpää and Kim Åke. And obviously Anni Mustonen, who has patiently watched this thesis progress (and especially not progress) for several years. Olette parhaita. The closer I come to Papua New Guinea, the larger my debts—intellectual and practical. In 2007, Damien Ase, Peter Bosip, George Laume, John Nilles and Almah Tararia helped me to come to Papua New Guinea and conduct research. In addition, they taught me a great deal about environmental issues in Papua New Guinea. Likewise, in Kokopo, Peter Tutuai, Linda and Michael Pasingan and the staff at ForCert and Wide Bay Conservation have gone to great lenghts in helping and teaching me. Without ForCert lending me their GPS when my own one broke, my land survey project would have stopped dead in its tracks. The Department of Lands and Physical Planning, the District Court of Kokopo and the Catholic Mission at Vunanpope all let me use their archives—my warmest thanks to all the staff members and especially to Puipui Tuna and Father Winnfried Holtz. Jim Robins at the National Research Institute helped me with research permission and visa matters several times. In Kokopo, I have often stayed with Elizabeth Tongne and her husband Kiap. They have shown me such kindness and warmth that I find it hard to express how grateful I am.