Pacific Realities: Changing Perspectives on Resilience and Resistance 9781789200416

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Pacific Realities

Pacific Perspectives

Studies of the European Society for Oceanists

Series Editor: Edvard Hviding, University of Bergen Oceania is of enduring contemporary significance in global trajectories of history, politics, economy and ecology, and has remained influential for diverse approaches to studying and understanding human life worlds. The books published in this series explore Oceanic values and imaginations, documenting the unique position of the Pacific region – its cultural and linguistic diversity, its ecological and geographical distinctness, and always fascinating experiments with social formations. This series thus conveys the political, economic and moral alternatives that Oceania offers the contemporary world. Volume 1

The Ethnographic Experiment A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908 Edited by Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg Volume 2

Pacific Futures Projects, Politics and Interests Edited by Will Rollason Volume 3

Belonging in Oceania Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications Edited by Elfriede Hermann, Wolfgang Kempf and Toon van Meijl

Volume 4

Living Kinship in the Pacific Edited by Christina Toren and Simonne Pauwels Volume 5

In the Absence of the Gift New Forms of Value and Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Community Anders Emil Rasmussen Volume 6

Pacific Realities Changing Perspectives on Resilience and Resistance Edited by Laurent Dousset and Mélissa Nayral

Pacific Realities Changing Perspectives on Resilience and Resistance ♦l♦

Edited by Laurent Dousset and Mélissa Nayral

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Laurent Dousset and Mélissa Nayral All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dousset, Laurent, editor. | Nayral, Mélissa, editor. Title: Pacific realities : changing perspectives on resilience and resistance / edited by Laurent Dousset and Mélissa Nayral. Description: First edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: Pacific perspectives : studies of the European society for oceanists ; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018018533 (print) | LCCN 2018035080 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789200416 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789200409 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Glocalization--Pacific Area--Case studies. | Globalization--Social aspects--Pacific Area--Case studies. | Pacific Area--Social conditions--21st century--Case studies. Classification: LCC JZ1318 (ebook) | LCC JZ1318 .P3144 2019 (print) | DDC 303.48/21823--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018533 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library



ISBN 978-1-78920-040-9 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-041-6 ebook

Contents ♦l♦

List of Illustrations Introduction Resistance and Resilience Laurent Dousset and Mélissa Nayral

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1 A Story in and on Signs Making Resistance and Acquiescence Legible as Forms of Resilience Yasmine Musharbash

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2 Global Models and Local Management of Land Ownership in Rapa (French Polynesia) Christian Ghasarian

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3 Between Vulnerability, Resilience and Resistance Fiji Islander Women Activists and the Ethno-Nationalist Political Crises in 2000 Sina Emde

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4 Resisting UN Ideals to Make Men and Women Equal in Politics When a Humanist Concern Turns into Arithmetic in Ouvea (New Caledonia) Mélissa Nayral

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5 Independence from Independence History, Landownership and Politics in South Malekula, Vanuatu Laurent Dousset

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6 The Reasonableness of Leaders and the Gaming of Mining Incomes in Papua New Guinea John Burton

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vi  Contents

Afterword 151 Values in Flux – Reflections on Resilience and Change in Melanesia Martha Macintyre Index

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Illustrations ♦l♦

Figures Figure 1.1 Original NTER Sign

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Figure 1.2 Key NTER Sign location on roads leading to Yuendumu

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Figure 1.3 Kevin Rudd Kuna Rurrpa

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Figure 1.4 Welcome to Yuendumu

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Figure 1.5 Example of AAPA sign

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Figure 1.6 Early Sacred Site sign

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Figure 1.7 Warlpiri detour

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Figure 2.1 While waiting for the boat from Tahiti

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Figure 2.2 Council of Elders (Conseil des Sages) 53 Figure 2.3 Collective fishing

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Figure 2.4 Sharing of the fish among the population

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Figure 5.1 Father Gérard Leymang’s grave in Lamap, next to his clan house

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Figure 5.2 The remnants of the old French colonial school of Lamap

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Figure 5.3 The remnants of what was to become the University of Lamap Cité Nouvelle

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Figure 5.4 A Navsagh company certificate of membership

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Figure 5.5 Monument erected for the launching of Lamap Cité Nouvelle

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Maps Map 2.1 French Polynesia

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Map 2.2 The island of Rapa

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Map 4.1 The island of Ouvea

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viii  Illustrations

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Table Table 6.1 Population of 156 villages in nine CMCA regions downstream of the Ok Tedi mine

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Introduction

Resistance and Resilience ♦l♦

Laurent Dousset and Mélissa Nayral

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hroughout the Pacific region, people are faced with changes in economic, political, religious, cultural and ecological domains. These changes are often described in the light of confrontations between local and national-global spheres in which different, and also divergent, histories and historicities, political and legal structures and perspectives, as well as value systems, meet in conflicting or even incompatible ways. On the one hand, these changes appear as the encounter between a significant cultural and linguistic diversity – also deemed customary or traditional modes of being – and more dominant and homogenizing global forces, be they material or immaterial. On the other, these processes are also viewed in terms of the glocal or as contributing to glocalization (Robertson 1995), when individuals and groups increasingly espouse multi-layered forms of identity in which so-called global modes of thinking and doing are embedded in renewed perceptions of local and regional specificities. In both these perspectives, recent history is seen as a process of competition and struggle, emerging with colonization when people increasingly experienced the presence and impact of more or less imposed and exogenous structures and institutions through concepts such as Christianity, nation-state, democracy, constitution, development, capitalism or neoliberalism. Local understandings of such concepts and processes involve reconfiguration and standardization of hierarchies, values, rights and obligations and are often interpreted as a loss of cultural or ethnic specificity. In many

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cases, this confrontation is locally enacted or mediated by the presence of the state and its apparatuses – administrative institutions, non-governmental organizations and developmental and economic initiatives – which create opportunities for some people while disempowering others. Concepts such as ‘transculturation’ (Ortiz 1995 [1940]) or ‘structures of conjuncture’ (Sahlins 1981) are relevant in this realm. In many cases, these have been measured by investigating the field of (symbolic) representation, with particular emphasis on depicting the complex relationships between Christianization and local belief systems (e.g. Barker 1990, Robbins 2004) or between the social values inherent in local economies and those of the global market (e.g. Gudeman 1986), to mention just those two areas of anthropological interests. However, groups and individuals do not systematically, deliberately and compulsively struggle to connect or reconcile these two levels of reality, the local and the global. Indigenous peoples have also developed other means to achieve, pursue and reproduce their material and immaterial conditions of existence, in particular through what could be called forms of resistance and resilience which either cross the local-global divide or resourcefully reinterpret it for their own and purportedly local benefits. In this book, we therefore aim to go beyond the ‘local-global’ dichotomy and investigate phenomena from a somewhat different but complementary perspective. We suggest that glocalization remains a useful analytical concept as long as its local and global constituents are not systematically and hermetically opposed. An important domain in which this can be observed, as Emde’s and Nayral’s chapters in this volume illustrate, are the endeavours in the field of women’s rights, which can be made without denying traditional or cultural values and institutions. We thus focus on communities’ and individuals’ own agencies and perceptions of what it means to resist forms of change or to regain the practice of power. However, we also suggest the need to challenge the opposition between local value systems and externally acquired means of action in order to understand the contemporary Pacific. Whatever their definitions – and we will return to these below – forms of resistance and resilience reflect processes in which the material and immaterial means of action, conventionally deemed to be either local or global, are not the core of social constraints. They seem in fact to be secondary in understanding social dynamics. It is not so much the interplay between the local and the global as constituted blocs that we believe to be relevant, but the multi-dimensional dialectics integrating both as objectified means of action that hold our attention. The initial idea for this book emerged during an ESfO (European Society for Oceanists) event on political anthropology in Bergen in 2012. Our aim was to discuss various approaches through case studies covering

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Introduction  3

different regions of the Pacific. Tackling topics and regions as diverse as gender and politics in New Caledonia, historicity and utopian thinking in Vanuatu, iconographic forms of resistance in Australia, villagers’ quest for just redistribution of royalties in Papua New Guinea or the means of integrating while simultaneously rejecting the state in French Polynesia, this book is an investigation into the ways in which groups and individuals can develop specific strategies in response to external legal, political, economic and social systems and their forms of standardization. It analyses both the pressures and the transformations these so-called exogenous systems can engender for local sociocultural structures and practices, as well as underlining the necessity of investigating local divisions that emerge through these processes. Thus, in so doing, we also question the immaterial and material means through which the labile limit between the exogenous and the endogenous is continually thought out and modelled. On the other hand, since the rationale underpinning processes of distinction between the exogenous and the endogenous is increasingly becoming a locus for peoples’ renewed self-definition, the volume above all proposes a revisiting of the concepts of resistance and resilience themselves. Hereby, it avoids concentrating on the local-global perspective as the sole analytical tool of contemporary political and economic struggles. Before we discuss these attempts and their implications further, we need to frame the meanings of these concepts as conveyed in the social sciences and humanities and beyond.

Resistance or Resilience? If anthropological research has been familiar with the concept of resistance, at least since the late 1970s and 1980s (see Seymour 2006), that of resilience has been less explored. Let us first turn to resistance. ‘Resistance’ or ‘subaltern studies’, emerging among others during the anti-colonial and counter-culture movements and later inspired by Foucault’s (1975 and 1976) research on power and authority in and through prisons and the history of sexuality, have been concerned with the analysis of counter-hegemonic processes. Interestingly, resistance in these terms was not so much analysed as a social movement, but as individuals’ or small groups’ acts of disobedience or insubordination, in particular after Scott (1987) argued that resistance usually occurs in everyday, concealed forms. Cargo cults and millenarian movements (see Lindstrom 2004: 26), as well as the ‘invention of tradition’ (e.g. Keesing 1994) or cultural revitalizations (e.g. Fenelon and Hall 2008) have, in this context, also become different forms of resistance.

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However, as Seymour (2006) fittingly notes, the theoretical apparatus of subaltern studies has been precarious because of the very object of their research. If power and authority can only persist when their legitimation has been socialized and internalized by each individual, thus producing acceptance by those dominated (Gramsci’s cultural hegemony), then why should resistance emerge in the first place? As so often in anthropological theory, the solution lies in finding intelligible ways of bridging the gap between individuals’ motives, intentions and agencies, and sociocultural systems (see Strauss and Quinn 1997, in particular p. 256). Indeed, as Seymour (2006: 305) again underlines: ‘Explanations of resistance that focus only upon structures of political economy and dominant cultural discourses without theorizing how relationships of power are experienced, transmitted, and changed by individuals in their everyday practices, are both dissatisfying and inadequate’ (Seymour 2006: 305). We can nevertheless for the moment agree to understand resistance as deliberate acts of insubordination and defiance by individuals – who, if efficient, may aggregate into groups – towards established or emerging forms of domination. In this sense, as Abu-Lughod (1990: 42) puts it, we should use ‘resistance as a diagnostic of power’ and discard romantic and nostalgic views (also see Macintyre’s concluding chapter in this volume) which see resistance as an almost institutionalized means of the powerless or as a production of the culturally oppressed. As Burton’s chapter shows, what may appear as forms of resistance or resilience to potential political asymmetries from one perspective may indeed, from another, reveal themselves as loci of new economic inequalities. We need to return to Foucault here before moving on. Let us recall that for many of his readers (such as Abu-Lughod, 1990), The History of Sexuality (1976) marks the beginning of the author’s work on power and resistance. It is indeed in this volume that he wrote the famous sentence ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ (the original is ‘où il y a pouvoir, il y a résistance’, p. 125). To some extent, however, taking this quote out of Foucault’s wider intellectual project is misleading. For Foucault’s understanding of the notion of power (and through this of resistance) is one that departs from institutionalized forms of domination (see Canavêz and Miranda 2011). Power, he writes, is not something you can acquire, pilfer or share but reflects the interiority of complex social and historical situations (Foucault 1976: 123–24). As Foucault himself wrote about his own work (published under the figurehead of Maurice Florence in 1984), his aim was to engage in a history of the critique of thought and knowledge through the analysis of the conditions in which certain things or subjects become objectified and to explore how through this process they are deemed ‘true’ and become a substance of knowledge, that is, power. It is when things

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Introduction  5

or subjects become objects and thus the matter of knowledge that they constitute forms of domination. To better understand Foucault’s ambition, we need to recall that he situated his work within the domain of the philosophy and history of knowledge and that his understanding of the notions of ‘object’ and ‘thing’ or ‘subject’ is specific. Indeed, objects are the ideas, concepts or abstractions which describe things and subjects of the real world (see Marion 2010 for a general discussion). Power relationships in Foucault’s terms are the movements and processes that objectify certain phenomenological occurrences (‘things’ or ‘subjects’) in generic and socially determined classes of thought (‘objects’). Both power and resistance are, in Foucault’s terms, not so much the exertion of and opposition to violence and domination in physical or symbolic terms by particular individuals or groups that control (or not) material and immaterial resources. They are rather the historical and social processes that provide certain forms of knowledge with the quality of truth. In this sense, research inspired by Foucault on institutionalized forms of power and tangible expressions of resistance has to some extent misrepresented the author’s original ambition, disentangling power and resistance into separable and adverse social phenomena, neglecting the fact that both are simply temporally and spatially disparate aspects of the same process. Our earlier critique of the ways in which the local – positioned as an inherent form of resistance – and the global – simplified as expressions of power – have too often been divided into adverse or dialectical forces has to be considered in the same vein. Not surprisingly, the confusion between power in its tangible or institutionalized forms and power as a pervasive meaning defining process has to some degree been responsible – in particular from the 1980s onwards – for a certain disenchantment with the anthropology of resistance, subversion, dissidence or counter-discourse and counter-hegemony. Ortner (1995) in particular underlined the lack of ethnographic perspective in these approaches, which are missing what Geertz (1973) had called the necessary ‘thickness’ to produce understanding (p. 174), as well as the absence of any investigation of internal conflict in many resistance studies (p. 177). Her conclusions reflect the necessary precautions we have stressed when interpreting Foucault: ‘for the moment I think resistance, even as its most ambiguous, is a reasonably useful category, if only because it highlights the presence and play of power in most forms of relationship and activity’ (1995: 175). Indeed, a few pages later (p. 180) she reminds us that understanding resistance is essential in the analysis of people’s own forms of inequality and asymmetry (see Burton’s and Dousset’s chapters in this volume for examples). Before we discuss the notion of resilience and consider it in the light of what we have expressed so far with respect to resistance, let us recapitulate

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what has already been suggested. The notion of resistance has reflected various meanings and objects of study throughout the literature. Generally speaking, it has been understood as the symbolic and physical refusal and undermining of established forms of domination. Feminist anthropology and the (usually Marxist) study of subversive action are among the most important currents in this respect. When the concept is considered from these perspectives, we need to ask to what and by whom resistance takes place. However, if domination is socialized and legitimized by way of belief systems and social institutions, the very existence of resistance becomes a problem per se. It reveals itself to be either a place for questioning the relationship between the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ (or between practice and social institution), or it must be seen as inherently embedded within, and constitutive of, power itself. The former suggestion is construed from Seymour’s work (2006), whereas the latter refers back to Foucault’s. In any case, the analysis of forms of resistance cannot be insulated from that of ‘power’, be it as forms of domination or embedded in the autochthonous history of thought and truth, as per Foucault. In both perspectives, resistance proves to be a (or even the) dynamic and transformative process pertaining to the emergence or reproduction of power. We will return to these considerations after having explored the notion of resilience, since we believe it is the articulation of the two concepts that produces heuristic added value. The definition of resilience has involved even more complexities. 1 Originating in the physical sciences, it describes in rather general terms the capacity of a body to regain its original shape after external or internal physical impact or exertion of force. Resilience is here a property of matter and structure. The notion made its way into archaeology (see below), psy2 chology, the environmental sciences, geography and human geography where it has become a concept increasingly used to explain adaptations to changing urban and rural conditions, in particular when dealing with risks such as natural disasters. Contemporary usages of the concept in the social sciences and humanities emerged after the 1960s and early 1970s from the ecological sciences when Holling reintroduced it in his famous 1973 paper. Similar to its meaning in the physical sciences, Holling applied the notion to describe the ‘measure of the ability of [these] systems to absorb changes’ (1973: 17). Working on ‘interacting populations like predators and prey and their functional responses in relation to ecological stability theory’ (Folke 2006: 254), he realized that there were multiple states of stability as well as non-linear forms of functional responses. Ecological, and later socio-ecological, research has thereafter focused work on resilience following various perspectives (see Folke 2006 for an overview and discussion),

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Introduction  7

understanding the concept in general terms as encompassing two aspects: the capacity to absorb shocks and still maintain function, as well as that for renewal, re-organization and development. While these studies have to some degree been able to relativize the implicit or explicit assumption that the normal ‘state’ of systems is stability, and while they have introduced a proportion of dynamics and malleability, in resilience studies stability nevertheless remains the core of the problem. Be it in developmental approaches or perspectives that analyse social learning as a means to adaptation (Clark et al. 2001), resilience is a process in which stability is the expected outcome and where the former is the means through which the latter, be it reached in a singular or in multiple states, is regained. We may here recall similar and former approaches known in anthropology, such as Rappaport’s (1968) view of culture as an equilibrium-based system, or the many discussions and publications which attempted to define the ‘carrying 3 capacity’ for human groups. We shall return to some of the anthropological approaches later in this introduction. More recently, Keck and Sakdapolrak (2013) have reconsidered the literature making use of the notion of resilience in the social sciences. They remind us that there have been important warnings against an uncritical use of the concept in order to understand social phenomena (Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010), because it renaturalizes society in terms of a mechanical ecosystemic approach which imposes a vision of stability as being the historical purpose of social processes. Keck and Sakdapolrak however reject the warning and consider that ‘Social resilience retains the potential to be crafted into a coherent analytical framework that, on the one hand, is able to incorporate scientific knowledge from the tried and tested concept of vulnerability and, on the other hand, is forward-looking and opens up a fresh perspective on today’s challenges of global change’ (2013: 6). As we can read in these lines, their understanding of resilience is still heavily inspired by the ecological approach. This is reconfirmed through the usages these authors have identified and the definition (they call it ‘dimensions’ or ‘phases’ of research) they suggest for resilience. The first reflects the coping capacities of actors and systems in which resilience has something to do with persistability. This conception is directly inspired by the ecologist Holling’s (1973) initial suggestion according to which ecosystems reveal non-linear dynamics with multiple states of stability. In the social realm, this copying capacity is measured through the reactive or absorptive aptitudes people adopt to overcome immediate threats. As Keck and Sakdapolrak (2013: 10) write, ‘the rationale behind coping is the restoration of the present level of well-being directly after a critical event’. The second dimension of resilience that research reveals is the adaptive capacities of actors and systems, which include processes of ‘social

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learning’ from previous disasters. The core of this perspective remains that of equilibrium. However, what has become the focus is the notion of an ‘adaptive cycle’, geared towards incremental change (proactive and preventive measures), to conserve the current state of well-being. Finally, the last domain concerns actors’ and systems’ transformative capacities. This relates to people’s ability to draw resources and knowledge from the ‘wider socio-political arena (i.e. from governmental organizations and so-called civil society), to participate in decision-making processes, and to craft institutions that both improve their individual welfare and foster societal robustness toward future crises’ (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013: 11). While Keck and Sakdapolrak’s paper has the great advantage of summarizing and clarifying an important body of literature, the fundamental problem with resilience is not solved in their contribution. Indeed, equilibrium, camouflaged by the undefinable notion of ‘well-being’, remains at the core of the intellectual apparatus, relinquishing the possibility of processes of resilience not necessarily being adaptive or minimizing risk. Even when capacity for resilience is placed at the actor’s and thus the individual level, it is considered to act for the sake of the system as a whole. Indeed, in compliance with these perspectives – and comparable to what we have written above with respect to the relation between resistance and power – resilience is recurrently considered to be a property of systems themselves, related to how communities (be they human or animal) respond to disturbances such as natural catastrophes, migrations or displacements, dwindling resources, etc. But the system and its stability remain the main 4 issue of resilience research. If, as many authors suggest, resilience is about the reduction of vulnerabilities, it is obviously, we suggest, the vulnerability of those that dominate in a social context (‘a system’) that is at stake. In the Pacific and beyond, the notion has therefore also become part of the language of policymaking and is now commonly used by governmental and non-governmental institutions and organizations active in the domains of risk management, development and sustainability (for example, the Asian Development Bank 2013, Jha et al. 2013 for the World Bank and Australian AID). Building and evaluating the capacity for resilience in communities has become one of the measurements that may or not trigger economic and political support. In most of these approaches – and we will come back to this important point below – it is not particular or individual elements, practices or strategies that are considered resilient. Indeed, we have seen above that resilience is understood to be a property of a system. Some anthropologists, such as Read (2005), have recently followed similar paths, attempting to discuss the idea of ‘resilience and robustness of human systems’ in rather general and generic (aka holistic) terms.

Introduction  9

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This characteristic appears to be introducing a fundamental difference between the concept of resistance and that of resilience, as if they were counter-intuitive and antagonistic processes. While we have seen above that resistance implies individual practices aimed against an existing ‘system’, resilience, quite the opposite, is considered to refer to entire sets of complex relationships which attempt to reproduce the system or regain some kind of stability. Resistance drives for change. Resilience attempts to counterbalance change. But can we not think of forms of resistance that are resilient, or of processes of resilience that are also an expression of resistance? If the above has some validity, then the analysis of resistance and resilience, as well as of their relationship, intrinsically becomes a problem of distinguishing areas, perspectives and levels of inclusion or exclusion: one of context and scale of reference, of level of practices, and of the rationale of motives and their potential consequences. When resistance and resilience refer to the same scale or level of inclusion, they appear as two sides of the same coin, as Musharbash’s chapter shows. In other circumstances, for example when we consider emerging economic or political inequalities among fellow residents in local communities, such as in Dousset’s and Burton’s chapters, forms of resistance and attempts at or processes of resilience may operate, and even act against each other, on different levels of reference (also Macintyre’s chapter). It is this complex interplay between scales of resistance and scales of resilience, and their complementarity or antagonism, which the chapters of the present volume explore. But let us return to the notion of resilience and further explore how it has been used as a heuristic or conceptual tool in other disciplines in order to better define the scales of applicability we have just mentioned.

Resilience as a Heuristic or Conceptual Tool In archaeology, the concept of resilience was supposedly introduced by Redman (2005: 72, see also Redman and Kinzing 2003): ‘[R]esilience theory seeks to understand the source and role of change – particularly the kinds of change that are transforming – in systems that are adaptive’. The authors thus retain the main underlying features of resilience present in the ecological disciplines, but provide it with more open and dynamic characteristics. Predominantly interested again in ecological adaptation, the author identifies four key features underlying his assumptions: Change is neither continuous and gradual nor consistently chaotic. Rather, it is episodic with periods of slow accumulation of ‘natural capital’, punctuated by sudden releases and reorganizations of those legacies.

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… spatial and temporal attributes are neither uniform nor scale invariant; rather, patterns and processes are patchy and discontinuous at all scales. … ecosystems do not have a single equilibrium with homeostatic controls; rather, multiple equilibria commonly define functionally different states. … policies and management that apply fixed rules for achieving constant yields, independent of scale and changing context, lead to systems that increasingly lose resilience – that is, to systems that suddenly break down in the face of disturbances that previously could be absorbed.

Change is not an even, nor a completely uncontrollable, process but is rather patchy and discontinuous. While so-called systems do not have a state of equilibrium, the latter remains a central notion. Additionally, external intervention is seen to disrupt capacities for resilience. In this environmental and archaeological perspective of resilience, we rediscover the old functionalist and holistic approaches of former anthropological schools: the system is more than the sum of its elements (or individuals) and stands in a state of equilibrium. It is ‘coherent’, proceeds through internally motivated changes or adaptations and is enclosed within itself. Hence external interventions can break down the equilibrium of the entire system as well as its capacity to remain what it is ‘supposed to be’: resilient (see for example Koffi et al. 2014). In other words, as long as the system is ‘intact’ and out of external actors’ reach, resilience to impending changes dissolves the notion of change itself. Obviously aware of this intrinsic contradiction, Redman explains that ‘In contrast to the 1970s-style systems theory …, resilience theory emphasizes the inevitability of both stability and transformation. Neither stability nor transformation is assumed to be the norm; rather, systems are seen as moving between the two in what has been termed an adaptive cycle’ (2005: 72, original emphasis). Similar problems emerge when the concept of resilience is applied in the economic and political sciences, even though some writers have attempted to rescale the notion of resilience away from a system perspective and more towards individuals’ and communities’ capacities to withstand societal and ecological shocks (Cantoni and Lallau 2010). Alexander (2012), for example, revisits the model of the ‘collapse of complex societies’ proposed by the historian and anthropologist Tainter (1988). The latter suggested that societies become more complex as they solve problems, but that, eventually, the advantages or benefits derived from this increased complexity become equivalent to the resources needed to actually keep the system in place. Therefore, the complexity gained through problem-solving increases (and not decreases) the need for energy and resources, which in the long run leads to a society’s collapse.

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Introduction  11

Alexander suggests that there is another social model available, one that aims at ‘resilience through simplification’ (2012: 2). He also considers that ‘problems that exist for any given society are often a value-laden function of their perspective or goals, not externally imposed challenges that arise independently’ (2012: 10). In other words, and we believe this to be a central point, ‘problems are not objective phenomena that exist independently of humankind’, but are ‘the product of a particular worldview’ (2012: 10) and, we are inclined to add, particular social and historical contexts. We believe Alexander’s contribution to be important here because he departs from the adaptive processes and cycles at which resilience is supposedly aimed. For archaeologists, ecologists, environmentalists or economists, resilience is a system’s capacity to evolve following a fairly universal axiom: the maximization of ecological and economic efficiency as defined by economic rationalities. Alexander, however, introduces a relative or cultural perspective and brings resilience closer to actual social processes and actors. Aims, motives, practices or means are value-laden in such a way that forms and processes of resilience cannot be expected to systematically lead to an increased efficiency as defined by models thought to be ‘objective’ or ‘rational’. The relativity of motives and processes of resilience as described by Alexander also draws the notion much closer to that of resistance, as already alluded to above. Indeed, if the capacity of resilience is considered in the light of particular hierarchies of social values, we must also grant that, depending on whose perspective we are observing, resistance is a form of resilience and resilience is the capacity for resistance. It is all, we suggest again, a question of perspective, a matter of scale.

The Problem of Scales In the anthropological literature as well, many uses of the notion of resilience are in one way or another tied to the systemic aspects of the relation between the social and the environmental and thus do not systematically distance themselves from the ecological, geographic and archaeological approaches mentioned earlier. Miller and Davidson-Hunt (2013), for example, suggest that ‘resilience is inherent to living landscapes and the place of human beings as one agent among many’. Resilience is here again the adaptive capacity of a system as a whole, in which ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ aspects of existence are not as such distinguishable (see Descola 2005) and worldviews not necessarily human-centred (see Viveiros des Castro 2012), to regain some sort of internal equilibrium. A somewhat different but still systemic angle, also bringing resilience closer to resistance, is adopted by Smith (1994) when discussing

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the relationship between ethnic group and nation. For this author, resilience denotes the resurgence of a nationalistic consciousness and self-identification: The twentieth century, and more specifically its latter half, has seen an unexpected revitalization of ethnic ties, and an unforeseen resilience of nations and ‘nation-states’: unexpected, because statesmen, social scientists and many educated people were convinced that nationalism was a spent force after the horrors of two world wars, and that humanity had outstripped ethnic (or ‘tribal’) ties in an era of regionalism and increasing global interdependence…; unforeseen, because that same global interdependence appeared to be eroding the bases of the nation-state and leading humanity towards a genuine cosmopolitanism. (Smith 1994: 721–22)

To escape the systemized perception of resilience and resistance described earlier, which has been able to advance our understanding very little other than to suggest that somehow societies obviously live in their environment with some form of durability (or not), we need to clarify the problem of scale, as well as the multi-dimensional aspects of both concepts. Several distinctions need to be underlined here: who is talking (scale of reference), what is he or she talking about (scale of practice), and why is he or she talking (scale of motives)? What we would like to propose with the first question, ‘who is talking?’, is the rather simple fact that both resistance and resilience are not only analytical concepts, even though as we have seen their definition continues to entail certain difficulties. They can also reflect emic practices conceptualized by Indigenous peoples themselves as well as by regional, national or interna5 tional organizations speaking in their names. Who is to decide if a practice is resistant or resilient? If we orient the perspective towards Indigenous means which we end up translating as forms of resistance or resilience, then the latter are not only revealed to be conceptual tools, but also possess a heuristic aspect that needs to be isolated and distinguished. An intuitive temptation is to interpret resistance as reflecting emic dispositions, while looking at resilience as a more analytical and theoretical (and exogenous) concept. However, as we mentioned above (in the case of ‘invention of tradition’, for example) and as the chapters of the volume will illustrate (in particular Ghasarian or Dousset), if we depart from a system-driven approach and concentrate more on endogenous processes, then resilience also reflects forms of representations and value systems which are the pragmatic, motivated and conscious aims of Indigenous practices themselves. Efficiency and adaptation are here not necessarily the untold goal. In these cases, the characteristics we have proposed to describe resistance are not idiosyncratic and could just as well portray resilience.

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Introduction  13

The second important question, ‘what is he or she talking about?’, points to the multiple spheres of resistance and resilience. As we have mentioned in the first part of this introduction, the case studies in this volume illustrate that the means and aims of both processes are not necessarily locatable at either the local or global level, nor do they describe the local level as a coherent and uniform body of representations and practices. For example, the people of Rapa, an island in French Polynesia, do not think twice about integrating elements of the state apparatus in order to resist its hegemonic pressures (Ghasarian’s chapter). Similarly, Kanak women deputies in Ouvea, New Caledonia, deliberately use customary practices when acting on the local council (Nayral’s chapter). Envisioning a futuristic and global city is the means through which inhabitants of South Malekula in Vanuatu have attempted to resist what they consider hegemonic pressures and to imagine a different collective future (Dousset’s chapter). Aboriginal people of the Central Deserts in Australia have resisted the semantics of foreign imagery in producing responses based on material of identical quality and comparable semiotics as that of the state itself (Musharbash’s chapter). The means available to resist or to become resilient are therefore not necessarily of the same scale or scope as the values towards which resistance is directed or at which resilience is aimed. Resilience is here not tied merely to a delimitable ‘system’: the means of action are sourced beyond the local sphere. Furthermore, resistance and attempts at resilience can involve values or people that stand in multiple levels of relationships, sometimes complementary, at others oppositional. These attempts can be internally addressed, for example in the case of Malekula (Dousset) where both resistance and resilience become ways of engaging in narratives of self-definition. They can (in some cases additionally) be externally addressed, for example the Warlpiri people who resist external state representations (Musharbash), the Rapa people who resist the hegemony of the state apparatus (Ghasarian), or Papua New Guinea villagers who have to deal with and accept internal hierarchies to address external pressures and opportunities (Burton). Or they can be transversal, where criteria other than locality or shared history, such as gender and equality (Emde) or gender and political engagement and commitment (Nayral), are the domains involved. Finally, we need to ask, ‘why are they talking?’, or what are the aims of local forms of resistance and efforts at resilience? Is resilience a condition, a situation, or is it a social, cultural and political projection? None of the case studies in this book discuss resilience or resistance as efforts limited to reconstructing past states of being or social structure as such. However, what are at stake are the various projections into the future, projections that are informed by the multiple historical references available. The Kanak

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thinker Tjibaou’s phrase ‘our identity is ahead of us’ (Tjibaou 1985 in Togna 1995: 141) illustrates this imperative. Forms of resistance lie within movements of resilience, and forms of resilience are available to people in the shape of creative means to envisage or reproduce distinguishable identities, be they local, glocal or global.

Chapter by Chapter Christian Ghasarian’s chapter takes us to French Polynesia and, in particular, to the isolated island of Rapa. He analyses the ways and means through which the inhabitants of Rapa have resisted hegemonic control of their island despite the legalistic and colonial attempts of the French political and legislative system to transform collective belongings and ownership into private ownership. The Rapa example demonstrates that resistance, to maintain or gain some form of resilience, does not necessarily have to be limited to endogenous means but can draw on a plurality of references and resources. Thus, as we suggested above, it bridges the local-global dichotomy when it comes to empowering local communities. For the forms of resistance Rapa people have developed in this realm have not circumvented the integration of external means, some of them even intrinsic to the colonial powers. While the island’s inhabitants have created new institutions or adapted traditional decision-taking means to the colonial and post-colonial context, they have also quite consciously reinterpreted these in specific ways and supplemented them with traditional conceptions from the island itself. The author shows how local resistance to globalizing forces – a resistance that periodically exhibits itself in movements of resilience – has been made easier by the island’s extreme isolation and its distance from decisional centres. Distance and the insufficient infrastructure, considered to have negative impacts in some aspects, have also provided the people of Rapa with time: time to negotiate and imagine a resistance to the colonial powers while profiting from some of their benefits. Here elements of global culture are not systematically rejected. The extensive kinship networks and obligations that tie Rapa people to each other have allowed for extensive movement between the political centres and the island: material and immaterial movement that, for example, has made access to education or health care easier. In his chapter, Laurent Dousset analyses the utopian and partly imposed project of building a futuristic metropolis on the island of Malekula in Vanuatu in the light of the historical changes and migratory movements the community has experienced in the last 100 years. If resilience can be understood as the sociocultural and political project people imagine and want to engage with themselves, then every historical period (pre-colonial,

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Introduction  15

colonial and post-colonial) conveys its own processes of resilience and engenders its own forms of resistance. In his analysis, resilience and resistance are antagonistic and complementary at the same time, both being elements of social dialectics and dynamics, particularly in contexts in which people envisage contemporary being. He argues that in these terms both resilience and resistance are therefore inherently relative to each other. Those who in certain historical contexts and material conditions aim at resilience consider themselves to be authentic, to be aiming to discover the historical and cultural truth and to be envisioning a sustainable future. Opposing this hegemonic attitude, others necessarily engage in attitudes and actions of resistance. Perceptions and interpretations of the past, and the type of historicity that people espouse also define people’s will and capacity to be either resilient or resistant. These processes are the tangible components of multiple ways of envisioning the future of collective being. Yasmine Musharbash investigates in her chapter Australian Aboriginal people’s reactions to the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, called the ‘Intervention’. One of the consequences of the intervention was the erection of signs prohibiting alcohol and pornographic material on Aboriginal lands. The author investigates these signs and Aboriginal reactions to them which she qualifies as mimetic strategies. Analysing various forms of material responses, such as graffiti on signs or the erection of new signs, the chapter illustrates how actions of resistance do not necessarily target the entire system of representation attempting to impose itself on local communities but resist their material forms of communication. The Warlpiri people of the Australian Central Deserts have imagined ways of replying and resisting with the very means and words of the intrusion they are contesting. Mélissa Nayral explores the effects of the implementation of the French Parity law on men-women relationships in Kanak New Caledonia, analysing the arrival of women deputies on the council of Ouvea Island. This law, which was first elaborated in and for the context of metropolitan France in 2000, had significant consequences on the composition of the New Caledonian political scene from its first year of implementation two years later. In fact, in spite of a significant and acknowledged involvement in past political activism, there had never been any Kanak women on candidate lists or, if there were any, they were not high enough on them to be elected. With this law, the state made it compulsory to have an equal number of men and women on each list, hence allowing many Kanak women into this arena. The case she considers shows that being a Kanak woman involved in local politics is in itself a demonstration of resilience as, for the Kanak, politics is traditionally for men only, despite the views of opponents and more global recommendations aiming at equality between the sexes. More

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specifically, it analyses what the status of woman deputy entails when it comes to gender standards and social hierarchies and how being a woman deputy can turn out to be both an act of resistance (to a more traditional hierarchy where men are clearly above women) and a process of resilience leading to a future situation in which men and women are to be equal in politics. Her analysis illustrates the embeddedness of these two notions as well as perhaps their complementarity, for at times resistance seems to be a condition of resilience. In fact, she also argues that the definition of these concepts is very much a matter of perspective as a single situation can sometimes be interpreted in terms of both resistance and resilience. Sina Emde analyses in her chapter the discourses and agencies deployed in a complex political domain: that of women’s rights during and after the coup in Fiji. The coup’s aim was to install a vision and an ideology of ethno-nationalism which would elaborate on so-called traditional power hierarchies and thus exclude from consideration and decision-taking processes entire social groups, such as the Indo-Fijians or activist groups in the realm of human or women’s rights. From a general perspective, the state’s aim, or at least the aim of those who instigated and supported the coup, was to gain a nation-wide resilience re-establishing what they believed to be traditional forms of power and structure. The analysis illustrates the fact that forms of resistance and processes of resilience are not limited to the confrontation between local value systems and imposed global ones. It also shows how resistance transcends established communities to embrace dispersed principles which integrate aspects of international values into local lifeways. Indeed, women’s rights movements are heavily inspired by global processes with respect to notions of equality, while nation-states attempt to reintegrate differences thought to be based on traditional power structures. Forms of resistance and resilience are here multi-scaled and moving both ways, from the local to the national or global and vice versa. In his chapter, John Burton summarizes resilience as the quality of being able to maintain a distinct ethnicity in the face of externally imposed change. He reminds us, however, to question the ideological position according to which processes of resilience intrinsically produce positive outcomes. As he shows, in the context of extractive industries, social mapping is carried out to determine the key stakeholders and guarantee justified and appropriate distribution of compensation or royalties. Discussing these processes in three mining complexes (Ok Tedi, Porgera and Hidden Valley), Burton demonstrates that, far from being what had been thought of as processes for equity and justice, superficially conducted determinations and negotiations and the biases introduced in these settlements by key indigenous actors themselves are at the origin of inequalities, injustices and conflicts. Local communities, he concludes, are therefore faced with three

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Introduction  17

possible scenarios. First, the fact of not having leaders, key persons, puts the community in danger of being left out by the state apparatus. Second, having an overtly aggressive leader in a community’s external dealings puts the community in danger of conflict with neighbouring groups. In the light of these problems, Burton writes, villagers are willing to take a third option and put up with the excessive demands of these key persons who can embody their capacity for resistance and resilience. Martha Macintyre’s contribution is a chapter in its own right, but also an epilogue and a conclusion at the same time. While returning to the various chapters of this book and recalling her own observations and analyses in Papua New Guinea, she convincingly argues for precaution when engaging with the notions of resistance and resilience. The danger and the temptation are to perceive these concepts through a nostalgic lens, a lens in which the persistence of so-called traditional aspects of life are interpreted as forms of resistance or as processes of resilience in order to return to a largely imaginary and holistic past: nostalgia for the tropics, Trouillot’s ‘savage slot’. As she writes, ‘what endures can entail the agency of the nostalgic colonised seeking to reclaim an imagined, integrated past whose desires for holism are often as romantic as those of anthropologists or tourists’. Depicting and valuing the persistence of cultural features or the resilience to regain them is ‘a way of holding fast to essentialist primordialism’, she continues. Indeed, as several chapters of this book show, what is considered a resilient process for certain people may trigger actions of resistance by others, such as the ‘cultural’ persistence of forms of masculine domination and violence towards women. As we have seen, the concept of resilience is now being used in many scientific disciplines and fields. Its domains of application have significantly increased since its initial use in the physical sciences. The definition is being extended to designate the most varied practices and the notion has come to reflect polymorphic and multi-dimensional processes describing in very general terms the capacity of a body, be it conceived of as social or physical, to regain a state of equilibrium after undergoing internal or external impact, dysfunction or trauma. The notion of impact, which some authors prefer to that of ‘stress’, ‘crisis’ or ‘trauma’, is inherently linked to the notion of resilience itself. Many authors argue that its definition must include exposure to a context of adversity in relation to a threat or significant stress, be it individual or collective, social or symbolic (Gilligan 2000, McCubbin 2001, Théorêt 2005), to which resistance has been insufficient or ineffective. Another criterion used to identify processes of resilience is the observation of a ‘positive’ adaptation and reaction to the experienced impact, a process often labelled as one of resistance. According to this perspective,

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resilience does not imply oblivion or omission but rather reflects the will to overcome trauma and engage with the present and the future in an active manner (Koffi 2010). The chapters of this volume each illustrate these processes in their own particular way. However, if the concept of resilience is to survive in the anthropological literature, then it must incorporate the fact that the ‘system’ or the ‘stability’ it refers to and the ‘holism’ it seems to articulate need to be understood as diverse endogenous and exogenous representations that may or may not trigger and legitimize certain social values and strategies for some, but that also henceforth engender forms of resistance by others. Resilience is a property of matter, as physical science claims, but the matter in which anthropology and the social sciences more generally are interested is diverse and multiple, multi-layered and contextual, never completely systemic and never really holistic. Thus, if resistance is a diagnostic of power, resilience is a diagnostic of endogenously or exogenously imagined ‘systems’. Together, they constitute the means through which futures are imagined from subjectively reinterpreted pasts. Laurent Dousset is Professor at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and member of the CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania, Marseilles). He has carried out research in Aboriginal Australia, in particular in the Western Desert area, investigating kinship, social organization, discourses about first contact situations and social transformations as well as working in the domain of legal anthropology. Since 2010 he has also worked in Vanuatu on the relationship between local and national structures and institutions of power. He has also developed several IT knowledge systems for the social sciences. Among his books are Assimilating Identities: Social Networks and the Diffusion of Sections (Oceania Monographs, 2005), Mythes, missiles et cannibales: Le récit d’un premier contact en Australie (Société des Océanistes, 2011) and The Scope of Anthropology (with S. Tcherkézoff, Berghahn, 2012), as well as a recent biography of an Australian Aboriginal woman, Pictures of My Memory (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016). Mélissa Nayral holds a PhD in anthropology from the French University of Aix-Marseille. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania, Marseilles) and teaches anthropology at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University. Her particular interests are New Caledonia (Ouvea and the Northern Province in particular) and its population, more specifically the Kanak people, and the political practices taking place in this unique on-going decolonization process. The research she has conducted so far is linked to political anthropology and deals with

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Introduction  19

governance, controversies, polemics, decision-making processes, articulation between the Republican institutions and chiefdoms, the emergence of new elites, and gender. She is also interested in the practices of ethnography and has recently conducted research on land governance issues and sense of place in a local Natural Park in New Caledonia as well as a comparative study of the politics in marine governance issues in several French overseas territories (La Réunion, New Caledonia, Mayotte and La Guadeloupe).

Notes   1. There seems to be some discussion about the first usage of the notion of resilience or resiliency in the post-Latin era. This is not the place to enter into these considerations (but see Alexander 2013). Let us simply mention that Francis Bacon (1627) seems to have been one of the first to talk of the possible resilience of echoes in his study of sound.  2. In psychology, the notion was introduced in the Anglo-Saxon world by Emmy Werner through a study commenced in 1954 (Werner, Bierman and French 1971), analysing the capacity of abused and mistreated children in Hawaii to overcome their traumatisms (Werner and Smith 1982).   3. Rindos (1984), for example; but see a discussion of the difficulties in Brush (1975) and Dewar (1984) as well as below in this introduction.   4. Norberg and Cumming’s (2008) work confirms this holistic and deterministic-mechanical approach, understanding resilience as the quality and quantity of disturbance a system can absorb while remaining in an identical state.   5. For example, the UN programme for Development in Ecuador describes its initiative as ‘a partnership for resilient communities’ (http://equatorinitiative. org/index.php).

References Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women’, American Ethnologist 17(1): 41–55. Alexander, D.E. 2013. ‘Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction: an Etymological Journey’, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 1: 1257–84. Alexander, S. 2012. ‘Resilience through Simplification: Revisiting Tainter’s Theory of Collapse’, Simplicity Institute Report 12h, 2012: 1–20. Asian Development Bank. 2013. Moving from Risk to Resilience: Sustainable Urban Development in the Pacific. Manila: Asian Development Bank. Bacon, F. 1627. Sylva Sylvarum or a Natural History in Ten Centuries. London: W. Lee.

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Barker J. (ed.). 1990. Christianity in Oceania: Ethnographic Perspectives. Lanham, New York and London: University Press of America, ASAO Monograph No. 12. Brush, S.B. 1975. ‘The Concept of Carrying Capacity for Systems of Shifting Cultivation’, American Anthropologist 77(4): 799–811. Canavêz, F.and H. Miranda. 2011. ‘Sur la résistance chez Freud et Foucault’, Recherches en psychanalyse 2(12): 149–57. Cannon, T. and D. Müller-Mahn. 2010. ‘Vulnerability, Resilience and Development Discourses in Context of Climate Change’, Natural Hazards 55(3): 621–35. Cantoni, C. and B. Lallau. 2010. ‘La résilience des Turkana: une communauté de pasteurs kenyans à l’épreuve des incertitudes climatiques et politiques’, Développement durable et territoires (2)1: 1–19. Clark, W., J. Jager, J. van Eijndhoven and N. Dickson. 2001. Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks: A Comparative History of Social Responses to Climate Change, Ozone Depletion, and Acid Rain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Descola, Ph. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. Dewar, R.E. 1984. ‘Environmental Productivity, Population Regulation, and Carrying Capacity’, American Anthropologist 86(3): 601–14. Fenelon, J.V. and T.D. Hall. 2008. ‘Revitalization and Indigenous Resistance to Globalization and Neoliberalism’, American Behavioural Scientist 51(12): 1867–901. Folke, C. 2006. ‘Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social-ecological Systems Analyses’, Global Environmental Change 16: 253–67. Foucault, M. 1975. Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.  . 1976. Histoire de la sexualité. Paris: Gallimard.  . (signed as Maurice Florence). 1984. ‘Foucault’, in D. Huisman (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes. Paris: PUF, volume 1, pp. 942–44. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gilligan, R. 2000. ‘Adversity, Resilience and Young People: The Protective Value of Positive School and Spare Time Experiences’, Children and Society 14(1): 37–47. Gudeman, S. 1986. Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood. London: Routledge. Holling, C.S. 1961. ‘Principles of Insect Predation’, Annual Review of Entomology 6: 163–82.  . 1973. ‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4: 1–23. Jha, A.K., T.W. Minder and Z. Stanton-Geddes (eds). 2013. Building Urban Resilience: Principles, Tools and Practice. Washington, DC: The World Bank, Australian AID. Keck, M. and P. Sakdapolrak. 2013. ‘What is Social Resilience? Lessons Learned and Ways Forward’, Erdkunde 67(1): 5–19.

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Keesing, R.M. 1994. ‘Colonial and Counter-colonial Discourse in Melanesia’, Critique of anthropology 14(1): 41–58. Koffi, J.-M. 2010. ‘Qu’est ce que la résilience  ?’, in G. Gonnet and K.J.-M. (ed.), Résiliences, cicatrices, rébellion. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 95–147. Koffi, J.-M. and M. O. Kouamékan, J. Ballet, F.-R. Mathieu. 1994. ‘Résiliences et Équilibres En Côte d’Ivoire Post-Crise’, Ethique et Économiques 1(11): 29–43. Lindstrom, L. 2004. ‘Cargo Cult at the Third Millennium’, in H. Jebens (ed.), Cargo, Cult and Culture Critique. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 15–35. Marion, J.-L. 2010. Certitudes négatives. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle. McCubbin, L. 2001. ‘Challenges to the Definition of Resilience’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association (109th, San Francisco, CA, 24-28 August 2001). Miller, A. and I. Davidson-Hunt. 2013. ‘Agency and Resilience: Teachings of Pikangikum First Nation Elders, Northwestern Ontario’, Ecology and Society 18(3): http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05665-180309. Norberg, J. and G. Cumming. 2008. Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future. New York: Columbia University Press. Ortiz, F. 1995 [1940]. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ortner, S.B. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173–93. Rappaport, R.A. 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Read, D. 2005. ‘Some Observations on Resilience and Robustness in Human Systems’, Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal 36: 773–802. Redman, C.L. 2005. ‘Resilience Theory in Archaeology’, American Anthropologist 107(1): 70–77. Redman, C.L. and A. Kinzing. 2003. ‘Resilience and Past Landscapes: Resilience Theory, Society, and the Longue Durée’, Conservation Ecology 7(1), electronic document, http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss1/art14. Rindos, D. 1984. The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Cristianity + Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robertson, R. 1995. ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S.M. Lash and R. Robertson (eds), Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications, pp. 25–44. Sahlins, M. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor, MI: ASAO and University of Michigan Press.

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Scott, J.C. 1987. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Seymour, S. 2006. ‘Resistance’, Anthropological Theory 6(3): 303–21. Smith, A.D. 1994. ‘The Politics of Culture: Ethnicity and Nationalism’, in T. Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 706–33. Strauss, C. and N. Quinn. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tainter, J. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Théorêt, M. 2005. ‘La résilience, de l’observation du phénomène vers l’appropriation du concept par l’éducation’, Revue des sciences de l’éducation 31(3): 633–58. Togna, O. 1995. ‘Revaloriser notre culture’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes 100-101: 141–42. Viveiros De Castro, E. 2012. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Manchester: HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, HAU Master Series 1. Werner, E.E., J.M. Bierman and F.E. French. 1971. The Children of Kauai: A Longitudinal Study from the Prenatal Period to Age Ten. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Werner E.E. and R.S. Smith. 1982. Vulnerable but Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of Resilient Children and Youth. New York: McGraw-Hill.

1

A Story in and on Signs Making Resistance and Acquiescence Legible as Forms of Resilience ♦l♦

Yasmine Musharbash

I

n this chapter, I aim to consider resilience within the neo-colonial circumstances that Warlpiri people, the Australian Indigenous people I have been conducting research with since the mid-1990s, find themselves in today. I am interested in the meanings of resilience in Warlpiri people’s lives, what forms it may take, and whether and how it may be recognized by the anthropologist as well as by those against whom it may be practiced. Clearly, these are questions of considerable proportions and in order to keep focused, I will explore them here through one single case study: local responses (Warlpiri, non-Indigenous and wider Aboriginal) to road signage erected as part of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), a sweeping policy announced by the federal Australian government on 21 June 2007. I begin with a very brief history of the NTER generally, and the road signage in particular, before outlining examples of Warlpiri, non-Indigenous and wider Aboriginal responses to the signs. I analyse these in terms of the different kinds of resistance displayed, before recounting how the ‘Sign Saga’ unfolded in time. In my conclusion I contemplate what the presented forms of resistance can us tell about Warlpiri forms of resilience, leading me to ponder a final form of Warlpiri response to the NTER.

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The NTER Just five months before the 2007 Australian federal election that saw the government change from Liberal (conservative) to Labour, Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough, under then Prime Minister John Howard, announced the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (colloquially called NTER or ‘The Intervention’), a draconian policy ostensibly addressing disadvantage in Aboriginal communities across the Northern 1 Territory. It was announced swiftly and unexpectedly, ostensibly as an immediate response to a report commissioned by the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, titled Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: ‘Little Children are Sacred’ (Wild and Anderson 2007). The latter is a careful and non-conclusive investigation into alleged child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities, and many, including the authors of the Little Children report (see contributions in Altman and Hinkson 2007), have argued that the report served as a smoke screen that made a host of provoking measures palatable to the populace in the name of ‘saving the children’ (not a single one of the recommendations 2 contained within the report were implemented under the NTER). Measures under NTER legislation include (but are not limited to): • Compulsory acquisition of [Aboriginal] townships through five-year leases; • Removal of customary law and cultural practice considerations from bail applications and sentencing within criminal proceedings; • Suspension of the permit system to common areas in Aboriginal communities; • Quarantining of fifty per cent of welfare benefits to all recipients in designated [Aboriginal] communities; • Deployment of additional police to affected communities; • New restrictions on alcohol; • Pornography filters on publicly funded computers. Responses to the Intervention across Northern Territory Aboriginal communities as well as across the anthropological domain have been varied and 3 often polarized and polarizing. Those opposing the NTER do not believe it can bring about the positives (protection of children, alleviation of violence) and understand the Intervention as a neo-liberal return to assimilation, a heavy-handed attempt to control and direct the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory towards conformity with ‘non-Aboriginal ways’ and away from the ideals of the era of self-determination (land rights, local government, grass-roots movements, and so forth). National as well as international organizations (like the UN and Amnesty International) criticized

A Story in and on Signs  25

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Australia for suspending the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 in order to implement the measures of the NTER legally. It came as a surprise to many, then, that incoming Labour Prime Minister 4 Kevin Rudd continued the NTER rather than abandoning it, and that indeed Labour introduced the prolongation of the NTER in 2012, when the legislation was replaced with the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2012. Since its inception, it is safe to say, the legislation has been controversial, splitting opinions, something also clear in the fact that Alice Springs-based Warlpiri politician Bess Price has been unabashedly pro-Intervention, while it would be fair to say that the Warlpiri people whom I work with overwhelmingly oppose the Intervention and the resultant legal and political standardizations in process of being implemented in their home settlements. In this chapter, I am concerned with their responses, and rather than interrogating these with regard to the entire sweep of measures, I focus on reactions to signs that, quite literally, stand for the Intervention.

The Intervention, Sign-Posted In Section 11, the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 states that: (1) While an area is a prescribed area [Aboriginal land under Native Title or Land Rights legislation as well as seventy-four Aboriginal settlements across the Northern Territory], the Commission must, if it is practicable to do so, take all such steps as are, in its opinion, necessary to cause to be posted and to be kept posted at: (a) the place where a customary access route enters the area; and (b) the customary departure locations for aircraft flying into the area; a notice: (c) stating that it is an offence to bring liquor into, to be in possession or control of liquor or to consume or sell liquor within the area; and (d) specifying the possible penalties for the offence.

What this meant, on the ground, was that seemingly overnight signs signalling the Intervention were installed with brilliant bureaucratic (in) efficiency; according to the Northern Territory Intervention Monitoring Report by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA): The installation of signage across the Territory detailing the restrictions associated with prescribed areas (alcohol and pornography) and the penalties that applied

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is currently being finalised by FaHCSIA Northern Territory State Office (NTSO). This has required obtaining expert mapping services, engaging and liaising with the contractor and subcontractors, providing expert Global Positioning System (GPS) 5 and training to ensure the installation requirements were met.

Many millions of dollars were poured into expert mapping services, contractors and subcontractors, GPS and installation training to ensure that the signs were spread across the Northern Territory in a manner lit6 erally signposting the top-down approach of the NTER. At every point where a road (or airstrip) enters Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory, a sign was erected. These signs, at the top, under the code of arms of the commonwealth and the words ‘An Australian Government Initiative’, read,

Figure 1.1 Original NTER Sign (https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/48856 [accessed 14 August 2014], photo courtesy of Julian Cleary).

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in bold letters, PRESCRIBED AREA (see Figure 1.1). Under NTER legislation, a prescribed area is any land in the Northern Territory to which Aboriginal people hold title, for example Aboriginal land, community living areas, and town camps. Following the warning that where the sign stands a ‘prescribed area’ begins, there are two notices, the first declaring NO LIQUOR and the second NO PORNOGRAPHY. The ‘no liquor’ notice has an additional drawing of a crossed out circle with two cans and a bottle. Each notice is followed by a list of penalties should either liquor or pornography be brought, possessed, consumed, supplied or sold within the prescribed 7 area. The penalties range from $1,100 to $74,800 and up to two years jail. The signs caused offence on (at least) three grounds: alcohol prohibition, pornography prohibition and their location.

Alcohol Prohibition The ‘government initiative’ of ‘no liquor’ duplicated, and simultaneously nullified, existing local rules. All central Australian (and many northern Australian) Aboriginal communities had in fact always been ‘dry’ communities; once they were self-governed they had sought and were granted local declarations under the Liquor Act detailing that they were a ‘dry’ area, meaning that general alcohol restrictions were in place long before the Intervention. This was signposted on ‘no grog’ signs at the entrance to each community and locally enforced. I have written elsewhere about Warlpiri outrage that the Intervention ignored their own community’s laws and overwrote them (Musharbash 2010). The Intervention implied, to the chagrin of ‘dry’ communities, that only now and only under government control were they ‘dry’, negating decades of (successful) local Aboriginal struggle against applications to the liquor licence board.

Pornography Prohibition The second notice, that pornography is forbidden in the prescribed area, was initially met with bewilderment as many Aboriginal people in remote communities previously had not ever even heard the term. What many people told me was that their only encounter with pornography itself was with what they knew was stuck to the walls of non-Indigenous contractors’ quarters. This notice about pornography, one can only assume, is in reference to the misappropriation of the Little Children are Sacred Report. Reactions to the pornography prohibition section of the sign are twofold; there is the affront firstly that pornography – associated in the main with non-Indigenous contractors – should be something that needs

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to be sign-posted, forbidden and punished on Aboriginal land and not on non-Indigenous land; and secondly, the perceived injury in the public association that the signs are understood to make between Aboriginal people, pornography and their land.

Location of Signs The affronts caused by the contents of the signs were significantly compounded by the choice of sign location. They were not erected at the entrance points to Aboriginal communities (as were, for example, the pre-Intervention ‘no grog’ signs announcing community rules) but, as per the legislation, at ‘the place where a customary access route enters the area’. With bureaucratic single-mindedness, following the letter of the Act, signs were erected at each and every point where a road leads into Aboriginal land. On the ground, this translates into seemingly random and arbitrary positioning as most of the Northern Territory is a mosaic in terms of land tenure with Aboriginal title and other title alternating, crisscrossed by roads snaking in and out of Aboriginal land (as for example, in the southern section of the Warlpiri lands shown in Figure 1.2). In the case of Yuendumu (the settlement where most of my research is based) and its vicinity, this meant that not only were signs erected at the entrance of Yuendumu from every road leading towards the settlement, but also at any point where such a road crosses from another into Aboriginal land, as indicated in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 Key NTER Sign location on roads leading to Yuendumu, indicated by blue stars (light grey = Aboriginal land, dark grey = pastoral). Map shows an area of roughly 300 by 200 kilometres (map created by the author).

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This means, for example, that when driving northwest from Yuendumu on the Tanami Road, as one passes out of the Mt Doreen pastoral lease back onto Aboriginal land, there is an Intervention sign. Then, as the road curves back across the pastoral lease, when it leaves the latter, there is another Intervention sign. This means that as well as all the Intervention signs at the points where different roads lead into Yuendumu, one also passes signs on the road to other settlements, at every point when the road crosses from pastoral into Aboriginal land, and if the road curves out and back in, sometimes within a couple of kilometres of the previous sign. On many occasions when I drove past such signs, I witnessed my Warlpiri passengers nod towards it, roll their eyes, sometimes comment on the insult of it. The strongest reaction I observed happened in response to what can only be called the most absurd sign location I encountered. At the time I was consulting for the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (AAPA), and the Aboriginal custodians and I were travelling along a very rough, narrow dirt track which clearly no one had been on in a long, long time. It was terribly overgrown, with grass as tall as a person and at times as tall as the Toyota in front of us, behind us, and to all sides, stretching to the horizon. It seemed we were driving through an endless see of grass, submerged in it, when all of a sudden, out of the interminable vista of nothing but tall grass and a bit of blue sky an Intervention sign materialized – marking the spot where we crossed from pastoral lease onto Aboriginal land. The sign was met with disbelief and outrage by the Warlpiri people in the car. What, people asked, was the point of erecting a sign here – far away from any main road or settlement on a tiny track barely travelled on, ever? Each sign, through its position, is a sign that Aboriginal land is now administrated through Canberra (Australia’s capital and seat of the Federal Government); each sign is a reminder of control lost as well as, by implication, a sign that the government has declared that land (and people) in need of being controlled. Each sign signals the Federal government overwriting the achievements of the era of self-determination (land rights, self-governance) in the name of ‘saving the children’; each sign is a reminder of consultations that did not take place. If nothing else, the signs signpost the unbridgeable schism that characterizes the NTER: the gulf between national political intention and local perception. The Northern Territory Emergency Response Evaluation Report 2011 states that ‘Many Indigenous people described the signs as a government 8 “shame job”’ (p.11) and I have here elaborated how aspects of the signs, namely, where a sign was erected and what was on these signs, offended Warlpiri and other Northern Territory Aboriginal people. I now turn to analysing reactions in and on the signs.

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Reactions in and on Signs The responses to Intervention signs in and on signs can be classified into three distinct kinds: things done to Intervention signs themselves; satirical signs erected in response to Intervention signs; and signs requested by Warlpiri people from the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority to signal entry restrictions to non-Indigenous people to sacred sites (as well as infringement fines). I discuss these in the suggested order and then analyse the responses with regard to what they unveil about forms of resistance.

Things done to Intervention Signs In the main, what I am referring to here are acts of either graffiti or painting over. There are many examples, both from Warlpiri country and across the Northern Territory, of such responses to Intervention signs. One of these (see Figure 1.3) I have written about before (Musharbash 2010); it is an Intervention sign on the Tanami Road, roughly halfway between Yuendumu and Alice Springs (the service centre for central Australian Aboriginal communities, about 300 kilometres to the southeast of Yuendumu). Someone added the graffiti ‘KEVIN Rudd Kuna Rurrpa’ onto this sign – calling Kevin Rudd (the new Labour Prime Minister, who continued the NTER) an ‘arsehole’ in Warlpiri. Other examples from across the Northern Territory are an Intervention sign painted over with the Aboriginal flag, and Intervention signs that

Figure 1.3 Kevin Rudd Kuna Rurrpa (photograph by the author).

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have ‘cruel’, ‘sorry’, or ‘fight racism’ and similar expressions of opposition to the NTER sprayed onto them.

Satirical Signs Another response to NTER signs is the local erection of ‘counter-signs’ containing satirical messages. Examples include signs that say ‘WELCOME TO YUENDUMU IF U WANT PORN go to CANBERRA’ (see Figure 1.4), and another that states ‘Welcome to Yuendumu, Pornography Drop off point’ with an arrow towards a forty-four gallon drum next to the sign. There is also a whole set of signs that appeared in Willowra, a neighbouring Warlpiri community 160 kilometres to the north; one reads ‘Please feel free 2 take over’ (next to the Welcome to Willowra Community sign); another says ‘Helipad’ on the oval alluding both to the involvement of the army in the NTER and the fact that community-owned spaces, such as the oval, under the NTER can be re-appropriated for other purposes, as is also implied in a sign declaring ‘Tank Angle Parking’ (in front of the 9 shop), and so forth. These signs are witty and tongue in cheek, sometimes scathing and all more or less directly targetting specific NTER issues that the person(s) erecting the sign are unhappy with. A more sophisticated example of this kind of ‘counter-sign’ was commissioned (erected and shown online) by the Roll Back the Intervention

Figure 1.4 Welcome to Yuendumu (image from http://blogs.crikey.com.au/ northern/2011/08/04/intervention-sign-wars-in-the-tanami-desert-part-1045/, photo courtesy of Liam Campbell).

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Action Group. Made in response to the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act (in order to be able to follow through with certain elements of the NTER legislation), this sign at first glance looks like the original Intervention sign; it has the same dimensions and colours, is made 10 out of the same material, and is professionally manufactured. However, instead of ‘An Australian Government Initiative’ at the top next to the code of arms, it says ‘Restore the Racial Discrimination Act Now’ and instead of the two sections about alcohol and pornography, it lists a number of anti-NTER demands: ‘no racism, no leases, no income management’ in place of the alcohol restrictions, and ‘bring back community councils, real jobs – real pay, bilingual education, fund a future for all communities’ where the pornography restrictions are located on the other signs. The drawing of forbidden bottles is replaced by a crossed out Basic Card (one of the Intervention’s measures, which entails the quarantining of fifty per cent of the fortnightly welfare money paid to Aboriginal recipients in the Northern Territory into Basic Cards, which can only be used in licensed stores towards sanctioned goods).

Sacred Site Signs In the past, I have worked as an employee of, and I continue to consult to, the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (or AAPA), an independent statutory organization established under the Northern Territory Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act, responsible for overseeing the protection of Aboriginal sacred sites on land and sea across the whole of Australia’s Northern Territory. Something I have found striking, and believe to be significant to understanding Warlpiri responses to the Intervention, was the exponential increase of Warlpiri requests for signs indicating the presence of a sacred site I observed from 2007 onwards (for an example of an AAPA sign, see Figure 1.5). AAPA sacred site signs have been erected – always only in response to custodians’ requests – for decades. Figure 1.6 shows one of the first of these erected in Warlpiri country. Most Warlpiri sacred sites do not have such signs erected for three reasons: 1. in the past, signs were usually only requested for sites which had internal restrictions, for example male-only sites; 2. many of these sites are far enough away from main roads and communities so that the risk of non-Indigenous people entering and/or damaging the sites was considered minimal and signs thus unnecessary; and

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Figure 1.5 Example of AAPA sign (photo courtesy of Joanne Thurman).

Figure 1.6 Early Sacred Site sign (photograph by the author).

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3. in many instances, custodians were concerned that erecting a sign would trigger non-Indigenous curiosity whereas without a sign the site was probably better protected, as its existence literally was not signposted. Since the Intervention has come into effect, such signs have been requested on a regular basis by custodians (please note the important difference between signs ‘requested’ and signs ‘erected’: custodians request many more signs to be erected than the AAPA can erect as both signs and per11 sonnel to erect signs are costly). It seems to me, and this was confirmed during my consultations with Warlpiri custodians for AAPA, that many requests for AAPA signs were due to two interlinked factors. Firstly, requests for sacred site signs reflected anxieties about the NTER’s compulsory five-year leases by the government over Aboriginal townships, and the ensuing proposal and relentless pursuit for forty to ninety-nine-year leases under the Stronger Futures Legislation (effectively, such long-term leases erase many of the established protocols of control over settlement land by traditional owners, and a number of consequences flow from this; not least, loss of control over access and the conversion of Aboriginal housing, previously local council-controlled, into individual leases with the government). And secondly, such requests constitute a response to increased site damages caused by Intervention personnel and contractors employed under the NTER, which were reported across the Northern Territory and 12 also experienced on the Warlpiri lands. Site protection signs are requested increasingly for sites within communities (townships or settlements), but also for sites near well-travelled roads and in the vicinity of communities; put differently, for sites to which the increasing numbers of non-Indigenous people present on Aboriginal communities through the Intervention have relatively easy access. Moreover, there is a significant parallel development: the signs themselves are requested to be erected at greater distances from the actual sacred site than before the NTER. For example, I registered a site some twenty-five kilometres away from Yuendumu. A small dirt track leads to this highly photogenic site, which is quite regularly visited by local non-Indigenous residents for picnics. The custodians stipulated that a sign signalling a sacred site should be erected at the beginning of the small dirt track as it forks off from a road leading from Yuendumu to the Tanami Road, approximately two kilometres from Yuendumu and more than twenty kilometres from the site. Custodians said they had no problem with local residents visiting the site but were concerned about contractors and other non-local non-Indigenous people roaming about their land and onto sacred sites.

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While in the past, sacred site signs were as a rule requested to protect the unknowing from entering what could be a dangerous site as well as custodians from the consequences should something happen either to such a person or to the site, today most requests for signs are clearly made with the intention of keeping increasing numbers of non-Indigenous people away from sites and off the land – asserting control over the land that the Intervention signs undermine through their positioning and messages.

Analysis: Different Kinds of Resistance The responses to the draconian measures implemented under the NTER exhibited in, on and by countering Intervention signs can be read as different kinds of resistance. The instances of graffiti on Intervention signs are communicative responses to a sign that stands for something the person doing the graffiti disagrees with. The Intervention signs ‘stand’ for the Intervention and all it implies, and Aboriginal opposition to the Intervention is ‘voiced’ on the sign. Put differently, the act of writing graffiti is an act of resistance against an act by the government; however, it does not target (nor necessarily reach) the government implementing these policies, rather, it constitutes an immediate response to a particular sign’s existence in a particular location, and is read like that by Warlpiri passengers when we pass graffitied signs. Satirical signs can be understood as an extension of the communication on Intervention signs to a dialogue between two different kinds of signs, those erected by the government and those erected by those opposing the government’s policy. Strikingly, almost all of these signs are erected in or at entry points of Aboriginal settlements – unintentionally pointing to a significant difference between the Intervention signs erected at any entry point into Aboriginal land and these signs erected close to where people live. A different kind of spatial thinking is expressed through this, one which substantiates my suspicion that the majority of these signs were created and erected by local non-Indigenous people, or at least in cooperation with local non-Indigenous people, who, in contradistinction to both the government and Warlpiri people, have town-centric spatial views, whereas the government and Aboriginal people are concerned with land more broadly. These satirical signs (perhaps a dozen or two) had a prominent presence on social network media, and were discussed much more by non-Indigenous people than by Warlpiri people. They were written about in blogs, posted on anti-Intervention webpages, and busily shared by email and on Facebook pages by non-Indigenous people (I never saw them shared on Warlpiri Facebook pages). They can be read as a distinct kind of resistance,

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a voicing of opposition with a different target audience (also drawing attention to the Intervention in the more populous and un-affected areas of urban southeast Australia). A third kind of resistance is manifest in the demands for AAPA site protection signs. It seems to me that the steady requests for Sacred Site signs is not only a matter of protecting sites against potential damage, it is also, at least in part, a response to both the Intervention signs and some of the effects of the NTER. In the same vein in which the government puts up signs proclaiming that under NTER legislation it can exert control over (certain issues on) Aboriginal land, AAPA signs state that Warlpiri people exert control over (certain issues on) Warlpiri land; indeed, these signs proclaim that this is Warlpiri/Aboriginal land, and that Warlpiri/ Aboriginal people have control over it, and are in a position to exercise this control through fines and up to two years imprisonment. These signs (no matter whether requested or actually erected) encapsulate two deeply culturally-specific Warlpiri strategies of dealing with problematic matters. Firstly, much in tune with Warlpiri notions of balancing out injustice, the erection of signs can be viewed as fighting fire with fire. This has literal antecedents in Warlpiri ways of administering law and justice, as for example in the so-called fire ceremonies (see Morton 2011, Peterson 1970). Other Warlpiri versions of justice, such as payback and squaring off, also demand equal portions of punishment, or a response equal to the original insult. An eye for an eye, or a sign for a sign: this is the Warlpiri way. Secondly, requests for the site protection signs deploy the land as the source of life, well-being, identity and all that matters, as well as a site of opposition. In distinction to the counter-signs erected at the entrance of Aboriginal towns, Warlpiri-requested signs attempt to protect the land while simultaneously signalling that the land is Aboriginal. While non-Indigenous folk opposing the Intervention view the NTER as rash, unjust, contravening the racial discrimination act and echoing measures from the era of assimilation, Warlpiri people grasped immediately that the Intervention was as much about their land as it was about their ways of being in the world. And to Warlpiri people, those two – land and ways of being in the world – are intricately and irrevocably interconnected (amongst many others, see Meggitt 1962, Munn 1970, Stanner 2009). Hence, they wished to respond by signposting their control over their land. However, intending to protect the land with a sign is not exactly the same as fighting fire with fire, which I was reminded of during another site registration consultation: custodians debated whether or not to fence in the site to protect it from non-Indigenous people, as someone reported that he had witnessed such fencing further to the south. There was

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overwhelming agreement that fencing in was not an option, and it was argued that fencing in was not how the Dreaming works, that it would isolate and cut off the site from the surrounding landscape as well as cage it in. Instead, signs were requested, and again, custodians instructed that they be erected at a considerable distance from the actual site. Curiously, signs were not found to be at odds with the Dreaming. It can be argued, then, that by translating Warlpiri notions of fairness into a language in and of (road) signs, Warlpiri people loose bargaining power in an overall unequal contest through the simple fact that they are engaged in an act of mimicry. Countering signs with signs, clearly, is a mimetic strategy; it is oppositional in its perceived potency to protect Warlpiri land from non-Indigenous folk specifically and the government more generally. The graffitied signs, the satirical signs, or for that matter the AAPA signs voicing Warlpiri control over their land have this in common: they can be understood as one more attempt to be heard by ‘speaking the language the government speaks’, a language literally of signs in this case rather than legal speak, economic talk or political discourse. This ‘sign language’ is different in form but not in content from repeated Warlpiri requests for ‘proper consultation’ and the chance to have some input into decisions that affect their lives.

The End of Signs The inability or unwillingness to listen (or see) by those who orchestrate ‘external legal and political processes of conceptual and institutional standardization’ (as the editors put it) to those targetted by said initiatives comes strongly into relief when considering what happened next in the sign saga. The overwhelmingly negative reaction against the unpopular Intervention signs meant that ‘In 2009 the Australian Government agreed to “work with the Northern Territory Government and Indigenous communities to look at ways to make the alcohol and prohibited materials road 13 signs more acceptable to local people”’. As the legislation changed to allow new signs, individuals, communities, land councils and action groups submitted suggestions, including new wording identifying who the traditional owners of the land are and which language is spoken, announcing that a permit is necessary to enter Aboriginal land, announcing local organizations, and including strong positive messages in the local language. Curiously, or maybe not so curiously after all, rather than changing 14 the signs to suit local demands, all Intervention signs were dismantled. Today, there are no more Intervention signs in the Tanami. Not even on

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the most remote, barely-visited tracks does one encounter any of the blue Intervention signs. Much as they appeared overnight, so they disappeared. What continues, however, are the policies, first defined and rolled out under the NTER and now under the Stronger Futures legislation. Over the period since they first began, in 2007, their presence, and that of the bureaucrats and the ever-increasing administrative layers implementing them, have become pervasive and quotidian, so much so that they do not require sign-posting any more. With the removal of the signs, and the ever-increasing attempts to transform Warlpiri ways of being in the world through policy, the sites of Warlpiri resistance have entirely moved into the area now most affected – the realm of everyday life – and have thus become much less legible.

Conclusion: Acquiescence as Resilience? The editors of this volume invited contributors to investigate, in our respective fieldsites, social events in terms of both resistance and resilience, to explore how local strategies ‘go beyond the contradiction and conflicts inherent in the confrontation between different political and legal worldviews and systems’. I have taken a minuscule aspect of a potentially world-altering policy (the NTER), namely the signs announcing it and where it is in effect, as a case study to unpack how Warlpiri responses can be read as resistance. I want to conclude by considering how aspects of this resistance can be understood as resilience, and, additionally, how a focus on resilience can open vistas onto other, less easily legible responses to the NTER. Drawing on Christina Aschan-Leygonie’s (1998) thesis in geography, Reghezza-Zitt et al. (2012: 5) produce a definition of resilience that is instructive when interpreting Warlpiri responses to NTER signs: ‘In the context of geography, resilience is thus the ability of a system (social, spatial, economical, etc.) to reproduce itself: it is not continuity without change but the ability of an element at risk to maintain itself through a disruption or even to assimilate the disruption to its functioning’. Two elements underwriting Warlpiri responses stand out if highlighted through the prism of resilience in this way: the fact that Warlpiri people attempted to fight signs with signs (much as fighting fire with fire) and the fact that they emphasized the land in their attempts at (mimetic) resistance – both can be understood as aspects of ‘the system’ (Warlpiri ways of being in the world) employed in the struggle to maintain that which is meaningful in the face of disruption. However, fighting fire with fire and emphasizing the land are not the only aspects of ‘the system’ in the Warlpiri struggle for control over their lives in times of Intervention. A third one, much less easily observable,

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came into play, made less legible through absence. After a while (and before they were removed), people started to ignore the signs, driving past them without comment, without paying them any notice. I want to submit that this reaction is more than just having got used to something. Warlpiri people live in the Tanami, a vast desert, with very low population density. There is room for everyone and everything on Warlpiri country, which leads to a way of moving through space that is culturally specific. The ampleness of space generates an assured knowledge that one can avoid confrontation by moving sideways, something I find brilliantly visualized in the way in which Warlpiri people deal with obstacles on their roads (see Figure 1.7). Whether they be fallen trees, or washed out tracks, obstacles on roads are never removed, filled in or otherwise fixed; instead, people simply drive around the hurdle: it’s a desert – there is lots of room to sidestep, to go around, to give way, to move to the side. Over time, the course of roads is thus altered here and there, depending on where a tree fell, how a creek ran, or a swamp flooded. Such acceptance of obstruction without resistance (or protest) by simply moving around or away from the impediment is somewhat reminiscent of, but not the same as, acquiescence: a yielding to circumstances in the confident knowledge that there is enough space to move sideways (or, in the case of offending signs, to avert one’s gaze).

Figure 1.7 Warlpiri detour (photo courtesy of Joanne Thurman).

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This not-quite-acquiescence, the ignoring, disregarding and overlooking of things in one’s way by altering one’s path, I put forward, is very much an aspect ‘of the system’, and a key way in which Warlpiri people maintain their way of being in the world in the face of ‘disruption’. I propose that this is how many Warlpiri people deal with many aspects of the NTER: rather than engaging in legible forms of resistance, they act resiliently through avoidance: avoidance which may appear acquiescent. How successful this form of resilience is as a strategy remains to be seen; in light of the unequal relationship between Warlpiri people on the one hand and the might of the state on the other there always lurks the bitter irony that such resilience is being taken as yielding acquiescence.

Acknowledgements I am immensely grateful to Julian Cleary (formerly of the Central Land Council) for keeping me up-to-date with sign developments. Thank you also to the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (to Ben Scambary for allowing me to write about aspects of my former work at AAPA, to Jo Thurman and Sophie Creighton for always being on the lookout for graffitied Intervention signs). I thank the panel organizers for an excellent panel and for pushing our ESfO papers towards publication, and thank Chris Marcatili for excellent research assistance. Financial assistance (towards RA and travel costs to ESfO), for which I am very thankful indeed, was provided by the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, and time to write was afforded by an ARC Future Fellowship FT130100415. As always, my deepest gratitude is to the Warlpiri people of Yuendumu. Yasmine Musharbash (PhD Australian National University, MA Freie Universität Berlin) is an ARC Future Fellow/Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at the University of Sydney. She has been conducting participant observation-based fieldwork with Warlpiri people in central Australia for more than twenty years. Her research focuses on different aspects of everyday life, the emotions, the senses, embodiment and the nature of social relations. She has published widely on topics ranging from neo-colonial transformations, Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Australia, to boredom, laughter, fear, sleeping, the night, grief and monsters. She is the author of Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009) and co-edited a number of volumes, most recently Monster Anthropology from Australasia and Beyond (with Geir-Henning Presterudstuen, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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Notes  1. In full, the legislation is titled Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (NTNER) (Cwth).   2. This line of garnering support for the Intervention was fuelled by a government official masquerading as a ‘former youth worker’ on the ABC’s Lateline programme, alleging the existence of sexual slavery at Mutijulu, an Aboriginal community adjacent to Uluru (Ayers Rock); see http://www.abc.net.au/ lateline/content/2006/s1668773.htm [accessed 14 August 2014]. These allegations were later found to be without basis, and caused great offence in the community (see for example http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/mutitjulu-women-hit-back-at-pedophilia-claims/2006/09/15/1157827160823. html?page=fullpage [accessed 14 August 2014]).   3. For a selection of different approaches and attitudes towards the NTER in the domain of Australian anthropology, see Altman and Hinkson (2010), and for a taste of the acrimony caused in public (Indigenous) debate, see the arguments between Bess Price (a pro-NTER politician and Warlpiri woman) and anti-Intervention activist and academic Larissa Behrendt (e.g. http://www. theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/indigenous/bess-price-takes-on-hercritics-over-nt-intervention/story-fn9hm1pm-1226188154969 [accessed 30 December 2015]).   4. Famous, not least for his ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples’ addressing the wrongs done to the so-called ‘Stolen Generation’ (see http://www. australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-country/our-people/apology-to-australias-indigenous-peoples).  5. Original FaHCSIA report removed, quoted in http://www.crikey.com. au/2012/03/15/a-big-blue-sign-of-the-times-for-nt-intervention/?wpmp_ switcher=mobile [accessed 14 August 2014].   6. I tried very hard to gain access to information about the budget allocated to the signs. All I got, in terms of sums, is in an email from FahCSIA (dated 11 July 2012) stating that ‘Norsign Pty Ltd was contracted to install the signs across the NT and $4.308 million had been spent on signs during the period between 2009-2012’. Note that the signs were erected in 2007/2009, meaning much more would have been spent in the period before 2009–2012.   7. The sections about penalties on the signs read as follows:

NO LIQUOR It is an offence to bring, possess, consume, supply, sell or control liquor in a prescribed area without a liquor license or permit. Maximum penalty: $1,100 1st offence $2,200 2nd offence $74,800 and/or 18 months jail for supplying

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

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NO PORNOGRAPHY It is an offense to bring, possess, supply, sell or transport certain prohibited material in a prescribed area. Maximum penalty possession: $5,500 level 1 material X18+ $11,000 level 2 material unclassified Maximum penalty supply: $11,000 less than 5 items $22,000 and/or 2 years jail 5 or more items. Northern Territory Emergency Response Evaluation Report 2011, http://web. archive.org/web/20120317140037/http://www.facs.gov.au/sa/indigenous/ pubs/nter_reports/Documents/nter_evaluation_report_2011.PDF [accessed 14 August 2014]. See http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2011/08/04/intervention-sign-warsin-the-tanami-desert-part-1045/ [accessed 14 August 2014] for more images and an article about these signs. You can see an image here: http://rollbacktheintervention.wordpress.com/ [accessed 14 August 2014]. Incidentally, this cost factor highlights the ‘waste of funds’ in the erection of NTER signs at every turn into Aboriginal land, including on the most remote of tracks. A highly publicized and widely discussed example was the desecration of a sacred site through the unsanctioned erection of a toilet under the NTER. See, for example, http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/22/taking-a-dumpon-sacred-land-the-long-drop-toilet-and-the-nt-intervention/ [accessed 14 August 2014]. This quote is from page 11 of the Northern Territory Emergency Response Evaluation report 2011 (http://web.archive.org/web/20120317140037/http:// www.facs.gov.au/sa/indigenous/pubs/nter_reports/Documents/nter_evaluation_report_2011.PDF [accessed 14 August 2014]); and it in turn quotes page 8 of Australian Government (2009), Policy statement: Landmark reform to the welfare system, reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act and strengthening of the Northern Territory Emergency Response, Australian Government (the latter has been removed from the web). There was one further change, which also happened in the same overnight-like fashion (making people suspect that the army and helicopters were involved in placing, replacing and removing Intervention signs): all signs were replaced with new ones which, instead of ‘No Pornography’, read ‘Prohibited Material’. Again, I was unable to gain access to information about how much this cost, and who exactly implemented the changes.

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References Altman, J.C. and M. Hinkson (eds). 2007. Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia. North Carlton: Arena.  . 2010. Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Aschan-Leygonie, C. 1998. ‘Résilience d’un système spatial: l’exemple du comtat. Une étude comparative de deux périodes de crises au XIXe et au XXe siècles’. PhD thesis in Geography, Université de Paris 1 Sorbonne. Meggitt, M.J. 1962. Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Morton, J. 2011. ‘Splitting the Atom of Kinship: Towards an Understanding of the Symbolic Economy of the Warlpiri Fire Ceremony’, in Y. Musharbash and M. Barber (eds), Ethnography and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge: Essays in Honour of Nicolas Peterson. Canberra: ANU E Press, pp. 17–38. Munn, N.D. 1970. ‘The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth’, in R.M. Berndt (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of Australian Aborigines. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, pp. 141–63. Musharbash, Y. 2010. ‘“Only Whitefella Take That Road”: Culture Seen Through the Intervention at Yuendumu’, in J.C. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds), Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, pp. 212–25. Peterson, N. 1970. ‘Buluwandi: A Central Australian Ceremony for the Resolution of Conflict’, in R.M. Berndt (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of Australian Aborigines. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, pp. 200–15. Reghezza-Zitt, M. et al. 2012. ‘What Resilience Is Not: Uses and Abuses’, Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography 621: 2–21. Stanner, W.E.H. 2009. The Dreaming & Other Essays. Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda. Wild, R. and P. Anderson. 2007. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: ‘Little Children are Sacred’. Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse 2007. Darwin: Department of the Chief Minister, Northern Territory Government.

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Global Models and Local Management of Land Ownership in Rapa (French Polynesia) ♦l♦

Christian Ghasarian

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ny attempt to address the relationship between global and local models and forces necessarily faces issues of acceptation and resistance but also, in a more subtle process, issues of adjustment, accommodation and reformulation. Because of their geographical situation and often their distance from the state infrastructure and the main centres of distribution to which they are connected, insular societies of the South Pacific always offer interesting contexts for studying what has been called ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1995, Wilk 1995, Bauman 1998). No generalization can be made with respect to the local management of the cultural and environmental resources in these milieus, as it is contingent on many factors and the capacities to enforce, or not, a certain local autonomy. French Polynesia, with its sixty-seven inhabited islands, illustrates particularly well this diversity of situations and answers to global processes. It appears that the most remote islands and those less easily accessible from Tahiti, the main regional centre, have a better margin of action than the closest ones or those that can be easily reached by plane. This chapter will discuss the case of a forgotten island from a neglected archipelago: Rapa, a small land of 40km2 in the South Pacific. This southernmost inhabited island of French Polynesia is approximately 1,250

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kilometres from Tahiti and 600 kilometres from the next island, Raivavae. Until today, the island, with its 500 inhabitants, has only been connected to outside life, people, institutions and supplies through boats, as it is located far south from the group of four islands in the northern part of the Austral Archipelago. Its only physical connection to the outside world is a cargo ship reaching the island approximately every two months: a situation that considerably complicates dealing with local issues of education and health. Yet, this occasional and somewhat unpredictable connection with external social life is apparently not a matter of great concern for the islanders. Interestingly, for most local people it is not considered a problem or a deprivation of possibilities (material, social and cultural) but rather as an advantage in the global context. In other words, the difficulties of coming to and going from the island are precisely what provide life on the island with even more value for its inhabitants. Based on sixteen years of fieldwork on the island of Rapa (Ghasarian 2007, 2014a, 2014b, 2016a, 2016b), I address here what is at stake in valuing the distance and difficulty of access to this isolated island of the

Map 2.1 French Polynesia (source: Ghasarian 2014b, reprinted with permission).

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French Republic. My analysis highlights the local management of external influences that have been impacting the society since it was officially ‘discovered’ by George Vancouver in 1791. It also stresses the fact that the constraints of smallness and distance associated with islands like Rapa do not make them as ‘vulnerable’ as they may at first appear. Smallness and remoteness have their advantages and disadvantages. Some analyses of island economies actually show that that they are quite vigorous in the globalized world. This is the case for Rapa which, with its subsistence economy, would probably come through the predicted economic crises more easily than other societies, which may be much richer but are also globally dependent on one another. In this respect, these societies are much less vulnerable than they may appear if we look at their internal dynamics (Bertram and Poirine 2007). With regard to the South Pacific, some authors even suggest that ‘the real strength of the region lies in the character of its people who have demonstrated throughout their history a high level of resourcefulness and resilience’ (Huffer 2006: 54). What have been designated as ‘Pacific cultural values’, such as solidarity, reciprocity and respect for kinship networks, appear to be key principles for producing and maintaining social cohesion in times of hardship. As a consequence of contacts with Europeans, the population of Rapa endured severe epidemics that at some point eradicated a huge part of its inhabitants. But the history of this island provides a good example of the extraordinary resistance of human societies when facing adversity. An anthropologist who studied the social organization of the island in the 1960s, Allan Hanson (1973), suggests that its social change mostly stemmed from internal adjustments rather than from the imposition of external laws and institutions. As in all the islands of the French Polynesia political entity, for the survival and benefit of the community, the Rapa population had – and still has – to adjust to and sometimes overcome new ideologies, institutions and diseases brought from the outside. In this chapter, I examine in particular a local customary institution in Rapa that today expresses a mixture of endurance and flexibility towards external forces and influences of globalization. But first, we need to briefly return to the colonial history of the island. This is necessary to understand on what bases the main religious and state institutions operate in the neo-colonial context of what is today qualified as a ‘French Overseas Country’ (la Polynésie française). In the first part of this chapter, I evoke the historical ruptures, resistances and processes of resilience in four institutional domains central to everyday life on the island: religious activities, political administration, education and health. Then I will focus on the communal management of land tenure in a system that is unique in French Polynesia today. As we shall see, this system as it is implemented locally is

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a perfect expression of a form of resistance and resilience towards external and globalizing forces.

The Historical Establishment of New Institutions and Their Local Impact The first imposed institution that considerably impacted the local worldview was religious. The British missionaries of the London Missionary Society landed on Rapa in 1826 with the head of the Tahitian mission in person, John Davies, and apparently succeeded in a few years in eradicating the

Map 2.2 The island of Rapa (source: Ghasarian 2014b, reprinted with permission).

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previous beliefs. However, the missionaries admitted that they owed their rapid achievement in great part to an unexpected support: an epidemic resulting from the population’s contacts with foreigners that carried away, in the space of a few years, two thirds of the island’s population, including the aged king. We have no European written records of any form of resistance to this ideological introduction except that the epidemic delayed somewhat the work of conversion as the disease was locally attributed to the ancestral gods punishing the people for embracing another religion (Pritchard and Simpson 1829). Today, the majority of Rapa’s population are Protestant. Yet, when observing the social form of all religious activities on the island, we observed that Christian involvement takes its full expression locally in the numerous collective activities (on and off the island) undertaken by the Rapa community, in its name and for its benefit. Besides the personal belief and faith at stake, it is quite evident that the new religion has been adjusted to local necessities in order to play a major role in the formation and maintenance of social unity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Rapa people distinguished themselves during the blackbirding period of 1861–1863, when Peruvian ships were sailing the South Pacific to capture Polynesian men and women to constitute an enslaved workforce in the guano (an agricultural fertilizer) mines of Peru. A boat of this kind (the Cora) arrived on the shores of Rapa in 1863, but the population had already been warned of these doings in the South Seas. Thus, instead of being captured, the men of Rapa themselves captured the entire crew of the boat and brought them to Tahiti to be judged by the French administration that had already established a protectorate on the region. This heroic act of resistance to what could have become a tragic external assault is apparently unique during this blackbirding period in the South Pacific (Maude 1981). It is still a matter of local pride today and has somewhat acquired the status of a founding myth that is part of the current representation of the insular relation to the external world. Yet, these blackbirding episodes had a serious impact on the Rapa population. The same year (1863), following international pressure, another Peruvian ship, which was supposed to bring 360 Polynesians who had been enslaved in Peru back to their respective native islands, reached Rapa with only sixteen people remaining alive on board. All had died during the trip because of bad treatment and the unhealthy travelling conditions. The captain forced these already ill passengers, none of whom were natives of the island, to disembark on Rapa. After initially refusing, the Rapa people complied as the captain threatened to throw his remaining Polynesian passengers overboard. This compassionate act was to have a dramatic impact on the local society, and a huge proportion of the population later died in

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a new epidemic. After having been estimated at around 2,000 people by the first foreign visitors, the population of Rapa was reduced to 120 people in 1867 (Méry 1867). It did not entirely disappear but the death of many elders definitely impacted the cultural development that followed on the island. This event is clearly the worst to have happened to the population of Rapa in terms of its unavoidable relation with the outside world. It left a strong mark on local memory and, until today, any arrival of a boat on the island is associated with the possible spread of health disorders among the population. The imagining of a threat from the outside is, I should add, often confirmed by the fact that many Rapa people go to the local hospital (most often with flu) just after the arrival of a boat from Tahiti. It is in this historical context that France established its protectorate on the island in 1867. According to written documents drawn up by the French at the time, the king and chiefs were apparently not opposed to this step. Because of its strategic location on the maritime line between Panama and New Zealand, Rapa soon became the object of growing interest and the French, already established in Tahiti, were faster than the British to annex the island in 1881 (Bambridge and Ghasarian 2002). The information currently at hand, again produced by the French, indicates that this was not an easy decision for the islanders to take. They resisted foreign political intrusion and it was only after intimidation and threats by the French to disembark on the island with a company of soldiers that the official representative of France, Commandant Chessé, obtained (from his boat, as he did not leave it during this operation) the signatures of the last king, Te Parima, and the chiefs of the island. In 1886, this king died and the following year another French Governor, Theodore Lacascade, came to the island to abolish the monarchic institution and to impose French laws (Ghasarian 2016b). Since this period, Rapa has been part of the French overseas political system and has to deal locally with two external powers: the Polynesian government based in Tahiti and the French state. To cut a long story short, this imposed system entails the official management of the island through a municipal council (conseil municipal), a French state institution called a commune. As in any commune of the French Territory, this political institution is meant to have an elected mayor and to hold official meetings of the council and official visitors in a room of the town hall, under the symbolic watchful eye of France (a picture of the current French President nailed on the wall). Yet, despite this formal context, this French institution is managed in the Polynesian language by the elected Rapa people and deals with all local matters linking the population to the outside world. This outside world notably concerns issues related to education and health. Both require the Rapa people to develop forms of resilience. With

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regard to education, the system in French Polynesia and in Rapa is the same as in France: children have to go to school until the age of sixteen. The problem is that in Rapa, there is only a primary school. Therefore, when children are ten, they have to leave for a secondary school on another island, Tubuai, the main island of the Austral group located 750 kilometres northeast of Rapa. On Tubuai, they spend four to five years in a not very convivial boarding school and only return to Rapa twice a year, during vacation time, for three to four weeks at best. Rapa children are thus to some extent ‘extracted’ from their parents’ home and their island at a very young age. In the compulsory and challenging promiscuous conditions of the boarding school, while waiting to return to their family on the island, Rapa children together nurture a feeling of unity that helps them to overcome the separation from family. If they succeed at school, they may continue their studies in high school in Tahiti, since there is none in the Austral group. There they go to another boarding school or stay with relatives and adjust to new ways of life and new relationships. This situation disrupts each Rapa family, as well as leading parents and children to develop a kind of emotional endurance. Health is the other domain in which the Rapa people are not totally able to control their lives and in which they particularly have to develop patience. There is a small infirmary on the island, with one or, in the best case, two Tahitian or French nurses (who stay for a while until they are replaced by others in a rotation system) and two beds in a little room for emergency cases. When a disease cannot be cured with the medicines available, the nurse in Rapa decides to proceed with an evacuation in accordance with the health authorities (Caisse de prévention sociale) in Tahiti. This is fully taken care of and paid for by the social security system implemented by the French institutions. Several scenarios are possible in this context: either the patient waits for the next boat (which can be several weeks later) to go to the hospital in Tahiti, or a military ship (if one is available) sailing in the area is diverted from its route to come to Rapa (in this case the rescue can take place within two to three days), or the patient’s health deteriorates quickly and immediate intervention is required from Tahiti. In this case, a French army helicopter is sent from Papeete, the Tahitian capital, with medical staff and a doctor on board to pick up the patient and bring him or her in a few hours to the urban hospital of Papeete. There, the healing and recovery process can take several months, and the patient has to adjust to the new situation, generally with the help of relatives already established in Tahiti. In the worst cases, the patient’s health will not allow him or her to return to Rapa and, again, new solidarities have to be forged and adjustments made with relatives from the island already living in Tahiti. I should mention that having to leave the island for health purposes does not only concern people with diseases. Since 1998, it has been

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compulsory for pregnant women living in islands outside Tahiti to move and reside in Tahiti when they reach their seventh month of pregnancy 1 in order to avoid health complications. Besides the social and symbolic fact that children are no longer born on their native island, this involves numerous adjustments being made by the families, whose stay in Tahiti is not financed by the Polynesian government or the state. In this case too, the Rapa people have to cultivate patience as, for practical reasons, families are often separated at these times. Patience is said to be one of the main Polynesian values. My fieldwork on Rapa leads me to fully endorse this idea. As a way of surmounting political, cultural, social and other situations produced by external circumstances, patience is already a form of resilience. Attached to it is a Polynesian predisposition to ‘let go’, to adjust to what happens, even in times of difficulties, and through this to overcome them. To be patient does not mean to be resigned, but rather to endure a situation until it comes to an end. Patience and resilience are imbricated, as neither imply a passive acceptance of an unwanted situation, but rather involve dealing with it in accordance to one’s ultimate – even if sometimes redefined – purpose. All situations connecting Rapa people to the outside world that create new constraints and possibilities are coped with by mobilizing solidarity

Figure 2.1 While waiting for the boat from Tahiti (photograph by the author, 2001).

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networks. These networks are primarily based on kinship. They are possible because relationships have been maintained through contacts, visits and reciprocal exchanges of goods and services with kin and affines. This feature is primordial in the processes of resilience. In this respect, a singular customary institution established on the island, which I will describe below, plays a crucial role in collective support for the local and external management of life.

A Unique Land Tenure System The Polynesian government, through its president and ministers, and the French state, through its High Commissioner (Haut Commissaire) and the Administrator of the Austral archipelago, represent and enact political and economic power which is external to the island but on which it largely depends. From time to time, delegations from these institutions pay a visit to Rapa, most of the time for the economic benefit of the island. During these events, the mayor and the municipal council welcome the delegation, show them what they have undertaken with the funding previously received, and explain what they need to do next to enhance the development of the island with new funding requested and expected. This is followed by a big, well-prepared banquet for the delegation and part of the population with special local status. This banquet serves two purposes: it expresses commensality and a genuine pleasure in being hospitable, as well as sending signals of kindness that are expected to be politically and economically reciprocated later by the guests once they are back in Tahiti: a (cultural) way of being positively remembered. Significantly, during these formal political encounters on the island, the municipal council, which is the local state institution on Rapa, systematically and in a very ritualistic manner introduces a very important customary institution called the Toohitu or the Council of Elders (Conseil des Sages) to its official visitors (see Figure 2.2). Meetings are organized with this institution to inform the visitors about its purposes and its mode of operation and to make them listen to what it has to say. And what this Council of Elders has to say is a significant expression of resistance and resilience to external influences and pressures in this small local community. Let me now introduce this unique case in French Polynesia which, in my opinion, demonstrates a very well-established insular strategy of dealing with dominant global models. The Council of Elders on Rapa is the symbol as well as an existing tool of a local principle of communal management of land tenure. It was set up to run the island as the collective property of everyone with ‘Rapa blood’. Each person who has at least one parent of Rapa ancestry of matrilineal or

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patrilineal ascent, even if they were not born in Rapa, can request from the Council a piece of land to grow food and to build a house on. The Council of Elders meets, addresses the request and, if nobody else is already working on the said piece of land or has previously applied for it, grants a surface area of twenty to twenty-four square metres to the applicant(s). However, the land is granted with a condition: it is a right to use and to live on the land, but – and this is a crucial point – it is not a right of ownership as such. Today, this Council is composed of fourteen members (mostly men) with their substitutes. Each of them represents a ramage (cognatic descent group) of the island (kopu) and is elected by his or her kin members on the basis of his or her knowledge of the places, names and original users of ancestral lands, as well as his or her wisdom and capacity to think and act peacefully in the primordial interests of the community, notably those beyond issues of family and ramage. The principle upon which this institution works is very simple and in accordance with the well-known Polynesian distinction between the right of use and the right of property (Ottino 1972). However, anybody studying the Polynesian land tenure system knows that this non-European distinctive principle, related to that of latent rights (based on genealogy) and actual rights (based on residency), is the cause of what is probably the main

Figure 2.2 Council of Elders (Conseil des Sages) (photograph by the author, 2001).

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social problem in Polynesia inherited from colonization. For in reference to the French Civil Code, according to which undivided ownership of land is not the norm, since the end of the nineteenth century many Polynesians have used their genealogical rights to sell collective properties they share with their relatives. Encouraged by the colonial administration, individual strategies have therefore undermined the pre-European conception of collective land ownership. The historical development of land management on Rapa is in ‘opposite resonance’ with the decisions taken by the French authorities in Tahiti to ‘encourage land settlement by Europeans and people of mixed race through making real estate transactions safer’ (Ravault 1972: 21). To better understand the Rapa situation and position, it is necessary to retrace the impact of the implementation of French laws on land tenure in what has become ‘French Polynesia’. In 1887, a French decree instituted a complex procedure to claim and assign land by stating that all undeclared land would return to the ‘colonial domain’. This obliged the Polynesians to claim ownership of the land they occupied, although private ownership of land was previously an unknown concept in Polynesia. In this colonial strategy, consisting in recording indigenous lands in order to acquire them (Bambridge and Neuffer 2002), the French administration allowed personal profits to be made through the full implementation of French law related to land ownership in Tahiti. Most Polynesians therefore quickly registered land – on which they only had a right of usage – in order to become owners and to obtain a written title deed. This procedure enabled them to obtain written rights of property to land for which they already had rights of usage. The neglect by the French of the Polynesian distinctions between ‘rights of usage / rights of property’, and ‘potential rights / actualized rights’ (in French the droits potentiels and the droits actualisés) also made it possible to claim ownership of land on which one had not been working previously. In other words, the ancient Polynesian views were confronted with ones that, based on French legal principles, saw the land as a ‘commodity’ to be traded. In spite of this possibility, the Polynesians’ attachment to a collective form of land tenure gave rise to what French institutions defined as the ‘problem of undivided land’ (le problème de l’indivision); undivided land being considered in the rationale of French law as an ‘anomaly’ which should be brought to an end through the holders’ unanimous decision to sell the land (Panoff 1970, Ringon 1970, Ravault, 1972). After having imposed its jurisdiction over Polynesia, the French administration introduced local committees to manage this land. These district councils, with elected members (who replaced the previous heads of the ancestral ramages even if these were still alive), dealt with land disputes according to traditional principles such as the evocation of genealogy to

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prove membership to the group of relatives who previously held a said plot of land. Over time, these indigenous courts and their decisions (tomite: assigning ‘titles of property’) acted as an implicit reference to the traditional order upon which the Civil Code had to count. Based on the land registry and on marital status, these tomite gave rise to land claims. In the pre-European system, one person was responsible for the family plantations. The new imposed context often allowed ramage heads to take advantage of their social position to claim ownership of land on which they only had ceremonial duties and to register it in their name. To measure the steps the Rapa people have taken regarding issues of land ownership, it is useful to retrace the specific evolution of the Rapa land tenure system before and after contact with Europeans. On Rapa, it was the seven leaders of important families – members of the implemented district council – who in 1889 endorsed a redistribution of the ancestral ramage lands to individual owners who were representatives of the island’s ramages at the time (Hanson 1973: 40). A new era began, since the land had been previously owned by the pre-Christian ramages. According to an early visitor to Rapa, Eugene Caillot (who came to the island in 1912), in ancient times ‘there was individual property and whoever owned land could even bequeath it to his children or to strangers’ (1932: 32). But if the use of land, with its plantations, could be passed down, this did not imply definitive ownership in Western terms. Studying Rapa in 1921, John Stokes writes that one of his informants (Hehe a Afora, also called ‘Mato’) explained to him that the meetings set up in 1889 to distribute land after the end of the monarchy in 1887 were held in secret. After speaking with the last protagonists of this redistribution of land (of which there were three survivors in 1921), Stokes considered that the council in charge of redistributing land did nothing other than grab the land for themselves and their close relatives (1930: 728). Throughout French Polynesia, after this distribution, ‘the original claimants have acquired the particularly valued status of tupuna (ancestors) because they are known and, through the business of land, because they remain in some ways in contact with their direct descendants’ (Bambridge 2006: 50). But, in Rapa, the consequential amendments to this distribution seem only to have extended a dynamic established during the interaction with missionaries (begun in 1826) and the clustering of the population in the main village of Haurei, which very quickly became the political, religious and commercial centre of the island. Although Rapa society had to follow the process of definition and nominative distribution of lands that took place throughout French Polynesia, Rapa has remained until today one of the few islands in this political entity 2 without a land register. Here, land is not divided into exclusive ownerships,

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nor purchased or sold. It is only associated with cognatic descent groups (kopu), bearing the name of the founding ancestor. ‘The land belongs to no one, and at the same time it belongs to everyone’, people used to say on the island. Whoever can provide the proof of a filiation with ascending Rapa blood is entitled to a piece of land. When the person who occupied and worked on this land dies and has no heirs, the land theoretically returns to the community (Hanson and Ghasarian 2007). This fact, which implies the absence of private property – and therefore of claims to it – is in contradiction with the French Civil Code which states that ‘no one is obliged to remain in the undivided land system’ because it is a source of potential conflict. It is with perfect awareness of this that land tenure has become a – and even the –‘Polynesian problem’ that produces family sadness, conflicts and ruptures but the Rapa people prize their own system. They value it all the more because they know it is outlawed by the French Civil Code, according to which land ownership should be private. Incidentally, the Council of Elders, today acknowledged as a customary institution, was only created and established in 1985 by the municipal council of Rapa and its meetings take place in the same room as those of the municipal council in the civic centre of the village. Although it is an extension of a state institution, this council of Elders operates on a system of reference that is not only different from, but also in many ways in contradiction with, state models and institutions. In this sense, it is the expression of a local autonomy from models and directives imposed from the outside. The processes that take place through this institution combine a capacity for resilience and a resistance to external models that otherwise would disturb the local organization, system of meaning, and social order. The striking fact is that up until now this system of undivided land has been tolerated and even supported by the French authorities who, from the Administrator of the Austral group to the High Commissioner, represent the French institutions in Tahiti, and travel from time to time to the island. Tamatoa Bambridge rightly notes that: since the final annexation imposed by Governor Lacascade, no administrative decision has changed the social organization of land relations in Rapa. It is so much so that in the absence of land titles or a land registry, a magistrate from Papeete recently raised the question of whether there was a legal basis for the intervention of state justice in Rapa land matters (2009: 99).

This administrative tolerance with respect to the specific land tenure system in Rapa stems from the growing recognition of indigenous customary rights at the international level, as well as from the consciousness of

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French institutions of the existing social tensions subsequent to the selling of family land following the implementation of the Civil Code in French Polynesia. Thus, in a general context of land conflicts, this small and isolated island in an archipelago, often seen as minor in French Polynesia, provides a benchmark for a system of collective ownership that perpetuates itself without generating social disorder. As mentioned above, this system is today maintained by a key political authority in Rapa, the Council of Elders, whose local name is Toohitu (the prefix too refers to ‘collegiality’ while hitu means ‘seven’). Like the district council of 1889, at its creation in 1986 this institution, as reflected in the terminology, involved seven men, all respected and considered mature, who for the benefit of the community managed and together took decisions on all land issues on the island. The term Toohitu is also used to designate a member of this committee. Fifteen years ago, and thirty years after the council’s creation, the number of council members was increased from seven men to fourteen men and women, to be more representative of the community. It still constitutes a moral authority, legitimized through references to the past – in this case the tupuna, the ancestors, and the sacred dimension attached to them. An island consensus prevents the system, as it has developed, from breaking down, even if it is very fragile. For by referring to a Rapa ancestry, some Rapa people who do not live on the island have the possibility of claiming a piece of land, an undertaking that, if it is reproduced on a larger scale, could damage the entire (encompassing) system. Therefore, the condition enforced by the Council is that one must be living on the island (and not just visiting it for short periods while living in Tahiti) in order to be allowed to request a piece of land. Interestingly, although the principles set up by the Council of Elders are in total contradiction with French jurisdiction, which favours private ownership, local strategies to reinforce the power of this customary institution are expressed in the continuous support it officially receives from the local state representatives, who are the municipal council members. Therefore, the plural juridical situation is not one of confrontation between the local state apparatuses and the non-governmental institution. This illustrates how the Rapa people manage their plural system of rights and duties through a double and fluid system of meanings that enables this insular society to overcome the inherent contradictions resulting from its official political situation of being part of France.

Protecting the Island from Outside An imaginary of the island and of the people who live on it, and to a certain extent of those who live abroad but who are of Rapa ancestry, has developed

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on the island and among Rapa people in Tahiti (around 2,000 people). This imaginary, which produces an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) that represents itself as distinct and specific, is not a unique phenomenon in Polynesia, where the word fenua is constantly evoked by people to refer to the island on which they were born. As in many Polynesian islands (Baldacchino 2011), a growing number of songs created in Rapa make this concept central and repetitive – along with those of atua (God) and metua (parents) – in the lyrics. But to simply refer to the beloved island (fenua) is not enough. I have observed that a complementary concept is systematically associated with it in Rapa: that of paruru (protection). The protection at stake is twofold: it is the of protection the island and the feeling of being protected by and on the Island. A protection from what, one may ask? Of any supposed external threat! Striving to uphold the principles of ancient lineages on land matters, the Council of Elders boasts a policy of non-interference from the FrancoTahitian legal authorities in most important decisions taken on and for the island. In the light of the development projects that are adding pressure on land, the Rapa people intend to maintain their specific form of land management. Today, despite it being only thirty years old, the Toohitu is perceived by the islanders as an ancestral system whose decisions, because they relate to land issues, have a positive effect on their everyday lives.

Figure 2.3 Collective fishing (photograph by the author, 2016).

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Although the Council of Elders is a new ‘customary institution’, it cannot be fully classified as a reinvention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) as its purpose is not to express a distinction of identity to the outside world but to maintain an ancient model of collectively dealing with land. Fourteen years ago, the desire to keep the island for islanders led this council, with the support of the majority of the population, to oppose a project to build an airport on Rapa, even if it was at one point strongly supported by the Polynesian government. Indeed, beyond the risk of seeing the community increasingly visited (and disturbed) by outsiders, the presence of an airport would imply that a significant amount of land – the airport and the airstrip – would belong to the government of French Polynesia. The construction of an airport on the island is therefore perceived as the threshold of what is acceptable by the local community, as it would open the doors to private or institutional ownership through the purchase of other plots of land on the island, a situation that would contradict the established local principle of undivided land. The local resistance to this project fully expresses the desire of the Rapa community to maintain the principle of collective sharing of the land. As a result of this resistance to uncontrolled interference with the local life, the circulation of people inside and outside the island is still precarious, with an old, slow and very uncomfortable boat accosting approximately every two months. The cultural rhetoric at stake here is that of an island requiring protection from what is external to it. This mind-set is part of a shared sense on the island which expresses and generates a daily constructed bond between people. To reinforce this emotional idea, the islanders refer to two kinds of watching eyes that can be protective and, if needed, punishing: the ancestors (tupuna) and the main protective entity of Rapa (ta’ura) that can take the form of a young and beautiful girl with long black hair, that of an eel (a totemic animal on the island), or of other sacred animals. Many local stories told by the elders relate the appearance of this entity on the island and its actions to help the living people and, when necessary, to teach them a lesson. The convening of the sacred and the invisible – with their associated powers, beyond human will and action – contributes to the idea that a supreme order of things does exist and does impact the social order, but it also empowers the Rapa people on and beyond their island. Thus, in the face of global changes, a little community in a remote and forgotten island in the South Pacific is today resisting in its own ways external land tenure standardization and endeavouring to maintain a certain control over the management of its land. At the same time, this island is part of a larger political entity, the French Republic, with a divergent – but dominant – model of land tenure. Interestingly, this divergence had not led to a confrontation. We find here a situation similar to that described for

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the Walpiri people in Australia (see Musharbash, this volume), in which the native indigenous attitude of apparent acquiescence to state policies and constraints does not prevent important local issues prevailing. Facing a land tenure system considered locally inappropriate for the community, the Rapa people have invented a subtle way to establish and maintain their own regulation of collective property. Similarly to the Walpiri, without engaging in an actual confrontation with external laws and jurisdictions, people calmly resist the inducement to private property, which is at the core of the French Civil Code, and through this express a form of resilience. This process is possible because of Rapa’s geographical distance from the political centres. In fact, the wise Rapa elders know that neither the Polynesian government nor the French state, fully aware of the land tenure drama that has been created in French Polynesia, would dare to question (what has become) Rapa’s newly created customary institution with its moral and social values based on a collective consensus. Several systems of reference are thus at work in Rapa. These systems place in parallel, and sometimes in competition, jurisdictions, hierarchies, solidarities and duties, as well as customary and state rights. The legal and political standardization of the local systems through the French legal and administrative models have not yet been observed, and the current local legal pluralism will in my opinion last for a long time. It is always useful to analyse the past and current dialogical processes at stake in the circulation of different legal systems (Assier-Andrieu 1996, Bambridge 2004). In the case of Rapa, the current juridical pluralism and tolerance is possible because we are living in a time of growing awareness that alternative models (to the capitalist principles) of ownership and of sharing common goods may be valuable forms to appreciate and respect (Ghasarian, Bambridge and Geslin 2005). This has to be considered in relation to the emerging environmental awareness that increasingly associates the idea of private profit with that of threat to social well-being and the environment. It is therefore worth understanding the different contemporary modes of managing land in ways that make people and their heritage secure in the global context of environmental, institutional and ideological crisis (Le Roy 2011: 34). The collective regulation of the use and sharing of the environment is therefore an idea that is ‘in the – global – air’, and Rapa offers an example of this model, even if it is a tiny, remote society with a negligible population. In many cases, the processes of creolization (Hannerz 1992) and cultural hybridization (Bhabha 1994) at stake in globalizing processes do not create losses or reductions of diversity, but rather engender practices of re-appropriation, which can also strengthen the cultures affected. When a society finds itself in a peripheral situation to a given centre, the integration and re-appropriation of common values created by this centre stimulates

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a complex dynamic in which it is possible to act and to impose (or at least negotiate) alternative models. Processes of acculturation are observable in Rapa through the impact of many French institutions and structures (religion, citizenship, education or health), but these are most often locally adjusted for the benefit and empowerment of the community. We have seen how a state institution can be manipulated by islanders to reinforce an autonomous idea of society. Through the local support of the municipal council, a recently created customary institution, the Council of Elders, defines and enacts ways of doing what the community wishes to establish and preserve in spite of the current dominant global forces with which they are confronted. This socio-ecological or socio-geographical condition seems to confirm that a loose connectedness to a larger system – the French Republic in French Polynesia – provides more adaptive cycles and margins of action, and therefore possible forms of resilience, than tightly hierarchically connected systems (Gunderson and Holling 2001). Clearly, being a ‘remote territory’ not easily reachable with maritime connections has considerably helped Rapa society to keep some of its cultural specificities, notably collective management of the land tenure system. In this respect, the claim for independence, an issue among some political and intellectual leaders in urban Tahiti, is of no concern locally. In fact, the people of Rapa, all of them officially ‘French citizens’, continue

Figure 2.4 Sharing of the fish among the population (photograph by the author, 2016).

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to say, with a little smile on their faces, ‘We do not need to ask for independence because we actually already are independent!’ They say so because they feel they have maintained a certain political autonomy with respect to their social governance. Just a feeling, one may say, but a feeling that has psychological and social implications. Christian Ghasarian is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Neuchâtel and Research Associate at the LAIOS (CNRS). He conducted his initial research on the island of Reunion where he studied a rural community of ‘petits-blancs’ in the village of Salazie (1982–1984) and the norms and values originating in South India in contemporary Reunion society (1986–1991). He then spent several years as a Research Associate at the Centre for South Asia Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, during which he analysed the cultural and social adjustments of Indian migrants in the United States (1992–1996). Back in Europe, he worked on processes of legitimation and rationalization of the practices of workers in construction sites in France (1996). His current research focuses on alternative spirituality and the construction of identity in French Polynesia, in particular on the island of Rapa, on which he has published two books: Rapa: Île du bout du monde, île dans le monde (2014) and Rapa dans l’histoire (2016).

Notes   1. This way of dealing with local pregnancy and childbirth has apparently been instituted by the French medical administration in other overseas territories such as New Caledonia (Mélissa Nayral, personal communication).   2. The other islands in a similar configuration are found in the eastern Tuamotu and in the southern Marquises Islands. Besides, all the islands that went through land registration procedures through the elaboration of a cadastre are not fully divided into cadastered concessions. Many areas in Tahiti for instance have not been through cadastral procedures. In the Austral group, the cadastre was implemented in 1944 at Tubuai, in 1952 at Rurutu, in 1953 at Rimatara, and in 1954 at Raivavae (Bambridge 2009: 99).

References Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Assier-Andrieu, L. 1996. Le droit dans les sociétés humaines. Paris: Nathan. Baldacchino, G. 2011. Island Songs: A Global Repertoire. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

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Bambridge, T. 2004. ‘L’anthropologie du droit à l’épreuve des processus dialogiques dans le Pacifique’, Droit et Culture 2004(4): 39–50.  . 2006. ‘Fondement et évolution du pluralisme juridique en Polynésie française: L’exemple du foncier’, in E. Huffer and B. Saura (eds), Tahiti: Regards intérieurs. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, pp. 29–60.  . 2009. La terre dans l’archipel des Australes: Etude du pluralisme juridique et culturel en matière foncière. Tahiti: Au Vent des îles. Bambridge, T. and C. Ghasarian. 2002. ‘Droit coutumier et législation française à Rapa: les enjeux d’une traduction’, Droit et culture 44: 153–81. Bambridge, T. and Ph. Neuffer. 2002. ‘Pluralisme culturel et juridique: la question foncière en Polynésie française’, Hermès 32/33: 307–15. Bauman, Z. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Bertram, Geoff and B. Poirine. 2007.‘Island Political Economy’, in G. Baldacchino (ed.), A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader. Charlottetown: University of Prince Edward Island, pp. 323–75. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Caillot, E. 1932. Histoire de l’île d’Oparo ou Rapa. Paris: Ernest Leroux. Ghasarian, C. 2007. ‘Art oratoire et citoyenneté participative à Rapa (Polynésie française)’, in C. Neveu (ed.), Cultures et pratiques participatives: Perspective comparatives. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 135–53.  . 2014a. ‘Mobilité trans-insulaire et réseaux d’entraide à Rapa (îles Australes)’, in P. Vitale (ed.), Mobilités ultramarines. Paris: Edition des Archives Contemporaines, pp. 223–38.  . 2014b. Rapa: Île du bout du monde, île dans le monde. Paris: Demopolis.  . 2016a. ‘Protections of Natural Resources Through a Sacred Prohibition’, in T. Bambridge (ed.), Rahui & Social Organization in Polynesia, Special Issue, Journal of the Polynesian Society, The University of Auckland.  . 2016b. Rapa dans l’histoire. Paris: Gingko. Ghasarian, C., T. Bambridge and Ph. Geslin. 2005. ‘Le développement en question en Polynésie française’, Journal des Océanistes 119: 211–22. Gunderson, L. and C.S. Holling (eds). 2001. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington, DC: Island Press. Hannerz, U. 1992. Cultural Complexities: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Hanson, A. 1973. Rapa: Une île polynésienne hier et aujourd’hui. Paris: Société des Océanistes, Musée de l’Homme (original published in 1970 as ‘Lifeways. Society and History on a Polynesian Island’, Waveland Press). Hanson, A. and C. Ghasarian. 2007. ‘“The Land Belongs to Everyone”: The Unstable Dynamic of Unrestricted Cognatic Descent in Rapa, French Polynesia’, Journal of Polynesian Society 116(1): 59–72.

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Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huffer, E. 2006. ‘Regionalism and Cultural Identity: Putting the Pacific back into the Plan’, in S. Firth (ed.), Globalisation and Governance in the Pacific Islands. Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 43–55. Le Roy, E. 2011. La terre de l’autre: Une anthropologie des régimes d’appropriation foncière. Paris: L.G.D.J, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Lextenso Editions. Maude, H.H. 1981. Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Labour Trade in Polynesia, 1862–1864. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Méry, J. 1867. ‘Notes sur l’île Rapa’, Messager de Tahiti 1867: 14, 21, 28 September, 19 October. Ottino, P. 1972. Rangiroa: Parenté étendue, résidence et terres dans un atoll polynésien. Paris: Cujas. Panoff, M. 1970. La terre et l’organisation sociale en Polynésie. Paris: Payot. Pritchard, G. and A. Simpson. 1829. ‘Visit to Austral and Marquesas Islands 17 March to 22 May 1829’. LMS Journals, Wellington (NZ), Alexander Turnbull Library, box 6, Item Micro-Ms-Coll-02 reel Film 5. Ravault, F. 1972. ‘L’origine de la propriété foncière des îles de la Société (Polynésie française): essai d’interprétation géographique’, Cahiers de l’ORSTOM 9(1): 21–24. Ringon, G. 1970. ‘Mutations et changements sociaux dans un village de Polynésie française, Afareaitu, Moorea’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes 28: 117–234. Robertson, R. 1995. ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in Mike S.L. Featherstone and R. Robertson (eds), Global Modernities. London: Sage, pp. 25–44. Stokes, J. 1930. ‘Ethnology of Rapa Island’, four bundles, Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii. Wilk, R. 1995. ‘Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Difference’, in D. Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local. London: Routledge, pp. 110–31.

3

Between Vulnerability, Resilience and Resistance Fiji Islander Women Activists and the Ethno-Nationalist Political Crises in 2000 ♦l♦

Sina Emde

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his chapter rethinks the ethnographic data that I gathered during 1 my doctoral fieldwork in urban Fiji in 2000 and 2001. My work at that time asked how different political actors and groups articulated and imagined the multicultural nation(-state) in urban Fiji during and after the attempted ethno-nationalist take-over of government in May 2000 (Emde 2008). Here, I look at one of Fiji’s civil society groups that opposed political ethno-nationalism, the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, in the theoretical context of crisis, vulnerability and resilience. The chapter is also a snapshot in history. In Fiji and abroad, the political crisis of the year 2000 is almost forgotten as an episode between the more prominent military coups of 1987 and 2006 (but see Cretton 2007, Lal and Pretes 2001, Robertson and Sutherland 2001, Trnka 2002a, 2008). Yet, in many ways the events of 2000 paved the way for the political changes Fiji has gone through over the last decade. On 19 May 2000 the so-called George Speight Team, an armed group of Fijian ethno-nationalists officially led by George Speight, stormed the Fijian parliament. They took the Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry

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and members of parliament hostage and declared a civilian take-over of the government in the name of the indigenous people of Fiji. Mahendra Chaudhry was Fiji’s first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister who had been voted into power only a year before. The multi-ethnic composition of Fiji makes this state rather unique in the Pacific context but it also poses specific problems related to the historical ethnic divisions. In 2002 the population was estimated at 825,000 inhabitants, out of which 53.5 per cent were Fijians. Indo-Fijians, descendants of indentured labourers brought to Fiji by the British colonizers, made up 39.8 per cent of the population (Lal 2003: 269). The George Speight Team and supporters kept the hostages at the parliament complex for almost two months from 19 May until 14 August 2000. During that time the political order of Fiji changed profoundly. Two weeks after the hostage taking, the President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara stepped down and the military, under Commander Frank Bainimarama, took over power in the name of the stability of the country and installed an almost entirely indigenous Fijian interim administration. Later that year, in November 2000, Fiji was shaken again by an army mutiny that intended to assassinate the army commander Frank Bainamarama and bring the Speight supporters in the army to power. During the whole of 2000, sixteen people died (Trnka 2002b: 2). That may sound like few to those who work in more violent parts of the world. But for Fiji it was the nation’s biggest crisis since the ethno-nationalist motivated 1987 military coups. After the mutiny, stories of killings and torture circulated. These events shocked many people in Fiji, more than the hostage crisis earlier that year. In August 2001 elections took place and the Interim Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase was elected prime minister of Fiji. Thus, the entire time of my fieldwork was dominated by this political crisis that centred on questions concerning the state of the multicultural nation, political power, and the place of different communities and social groups in the state and nation of Fiji. By executing the coup, George Speight and his followers rejected the vision of Fiji as a multi-ethnic nation-state built on the principles of civic equality and democracy in favour of a ‘Fijian nation’,2 i.e. a hierarchical nation where Fijian interests are paramount. These struggles between Fijian hierarchy and civic equality have been part of Fiji’s post-colonial history and are rooted in the colonial history of the country (see Kaplan 1993, 2004, Kelly and Kaplan 2001, Norton 1990). As I show below, they are linked to the different histories of distinct communities and social groups in Fiji, Indeed, the ethno-nationalist articulations of the George Speight Team were highly contested by Fiji’s civil society which called for the upholding of civic equality and democracy. Urban women’s organizations were seminal in these protests.

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In this chapter I look at the political engagement of one of Fiji’s most prominent women’s organization and its women activists during the ethno-nationalist Fiji 2000 coup and its aftermath. I ponder their work between vulnerability, resilience and resistance in the context of ethno-nationalist pressure and violence. Following Martin Voss (2008), I define vulnerability in a broad sense as ‘a question of (context dependent) cognition, of how people construct reality and the value of their lives in their local environment, of what they see as a disaster (in relation to all their other problems of managing everyday-life)’ (2008: 45). In other words, I ask what puts civil society in general, and the Fiji Women’s’ Rights Organisation in particular, at risk in the moment of a political rupture. I depict the politicization of ethnicity in times of political crises as a crucial factor for the vulnerability of Fiji’s multi-ethnic urban civil society and women activists. But I also suggest that due to the experiences with Fiji’s recurring political patterns of political crisis and reconciliation since independence, older political activists and NGOs had built sufficient adaptive capacities to resist the ethno-nationalist pressures in 2000 and to have a voice in the national domain. Several scholars have highlighted the importance of women’s organizations for multicultural relations in Fiji (Emde 2008, George 2012, Leckie 2000, 2002). The country has had powerful urban women’s movements since the 1960s, ‘promoting a multicultural identity and models of collec3 tivity which are not defined by ethnic identity’ (George 2012: 25). Indeed, 4 urban women activists share gender and an urban middle-class background as grounds for common agency beyond ethnicity. But as Nicole George has pointed out, since independence women activists in Fiji worked within a volatile local political environment and negotiated serious challenges to national stability. The ramifications of the four coups that have taken place in Fiji since 1987, the development crises and communal tensions that these events have triggered, and the ensuing political struggles that have been waged over Fiji’s governance structures have had important impacts within the realm of women’s organising and have tended to shape women’s political agency in complex ways. (George 2012: 5)

I suggest that as a result, women organizations construct specific articulations and positioning between global narratives of civic rights, equality and democracy and local political contingencies of ethno-nationalist pressures and Fijian affirmations of hierarchy. These particularities are crucial for the ability to resist ethno-nationalist political pressure and to communicate successfully across the ethnic divide in times of political crises. While social resilience has been discussed in a systemic approach in the context of natural disasters, violent conflict and war,5 I suggest that resilience

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can also be of interest when we look at the agency of civil society in times of political crises. My argument is informed by recent approaches that highlight the importance of the participative capacity of social actors in moments of rupture and crisis (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, Lorenz 2013, Voss 2008). Voss (2008: 49) and Lorenz (2013: 13–18) identify three aspects crucial to social resilience: coping, adapting and participation. Coping refers to the ability ‘to cope with and overcome the immediate disaster or crisis’ (Keck and Sakadapolrak 2013: 10) and to make meaning of the events (Lorenz 2013: 14). Adaptive capacities involve the capacities to readjust and if necessary transform one’s social system to gain stability in times of crisis (Lorenz 2013: 13f.). Participation refers to the ability to have a voice and a role in the social field that enables actors and social systems to access resources and participate in political and social decision-making. Hence, participation highlights the capacities and practices of social actors and the importance of social learning, possibilities of participation and processes of collective transformation (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013: 14). In this context, several authors argue that a Bourdieuan notion of capital, habitus and field may be useful to think through both vulnerability and social resilience (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, Lorenz 2013, Voss 2008). What kind of social and cultural capital is available to the actors at the moment of rupture, and what is the position of the actors in the social field to be able to participate and influence the events? Asking these questions, I pay particular attention to the way in which civil society in Fiji articulated6 its resistance to ethno-nationalism between global narratives of human rights and civic equality and locally construed notions of hierarchy and equality. In the next part of this chapter I turn to Fiji’s post-colonial political history between the poles of equality and hierarchy. I then look at the predicaments of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement in the context of the ethno-nationalist military coups of 1987 and the more reconciliatory phase of the 1990s and depict this phase as a crucial period of political capacity building for the organization and its members. The third part looks at vulnerability, resilience and resistance of women activists during the ethno-nationalist crisis of 2000. I conclude by highlighting the importance of the acquired capacity of women activists to position themselves between global narratives of civic equality and local discourses of indigenous Fijian rights and paramountcy for social resilience and resistance in the moment of political crisis and ethnic tension.

Fiji between Hierarchy and Equality The British colonizers established an ethnic division of power, labour and land in Fiji (Kaplan 2004, Kelly 1995, Norton 1990: 35–52, Sutherland

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1992: 26–102). They maintained a politics of protection towards the Fijian population including the safeguard of Fijian land rights.7 But they also were in need of cheap labour for the sugar plantations in Fiji, and started to bring Indian labourers to Fiji in 1879. When Fiji became independent in 1970 Indo-Fijians constituted fifty-two per cent of the population in Fiji. The British-raised Fijian political elite was convinced that political power, now ceded by the British, should come into Fijian hands (which once had ceded Fiji to Britain). As in the system of indirect rule, Fijian interests should always be paramount and safeguarded. Most Fijians supported these views. Indo-Fijian politicians had a rather different imagination of what the new nation-state should look like. The nation should be based on civic equality, hierarchical and vertical structures should be abandoned. Fiji should introduce a common roll franchise so that the new nation would overcome the colonial legacy of racial segregation (Lal 1992: 195, 198ff.). Scholars have referred repeatedly to these two very different imaginaries of nation and political order as the reason for political conflict and the ‘crisis of nation’ in Fiji (Kelly and Kaplan 2001, Lawson 1991, 2004). Indeed, since independence the strengthening of egalitarian concepts was always interpreted as a challenge to Fijian paramountcy and fomented rupture in the political order. The two military coups in 1987 serve as examples for this argument. In 1987 two military coups headed by Lt. Sitiveni Rabuka overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Dr Timoci Bavadra and his coalition of the Fiji Labour Party and the National Federation Party. While the coups were a result of many factors, Rabuka justified them with the need to safeguard Fijian interests within the nation-state. But from the mid-90s onwards, Fiji went through a phase of reconciliation and a new constitution was envisaged and came into being in 1997. These processes shifted the emphasis from Fijian paramountcy and hierarchy to more egalitarian visions of the nation-state. The coup in 2000 abruptly reversed these processes again. In 2000 the paramountcy of Fijian interests were still pivotal elements in the nation-state. This contrasted with notions of civic equality promoted by other communities and social groups in Fiji. But while these other communities and social groups strove for equality, they nevertheless accepted certain aspects of Fijian hierarchy. Robert Norton has aptly called this process a ‘partnership across difference’ (Norton 2000: 112). Political inequality is crucial in his argument, because once things got too equal and certain fundamental aspects of hierarchy were challenged, rupture emerged, as in the coups of 1987 and 2000. But the established hierarchy was then again challenged by reconciliation, accommodation and dialogue. A phase of continuity set in until a new attempt to establish

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civic equality fomented the next rupture. These processes constitute the recurring patterns of rupture and continuity that characterize Fiji’s history (Ratuva 2005). An adaptation to this cycle and the particularities of the Fijian situation had been crucial for civil society to survive since 1987. I will now turn to the example of women’s activism in Fiji to illustrate my point.

Women’s Activism in Fiji between Ethnic Divisions and Multiculturalism The Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) is one of Fiji’s most important women’s organizations. From its beginnings in 1986, it was a multi-ethnic organization with members from all ethnic communities in Fiji that shared an urban middle-class background. The organization’s work involved both grass-roots awareness raising and lobbying on the national policy level. Projects like the Family Law Legal Literacy Campaign (1993–1994) and the Community Paralegal Training Program (since 2000) reached out to communities and NGOs in all parts of Fiji. But, considering all the projects the FWRM has initiated since 1986, the emphasis is clearly on the side of national legislative reform (see FWRM 2001). Working in the context of the post-coup era after 1987, the FWRM inevitably also lobbied in the area of constitutional law, as I show later in this chapter. The first coups and their aftermath linked women activists to nation making and discourses of human rights and democracy at a very early stage in their existence. The 1987 coups in Fiji, and the re-inscription of ethnicity that accompanied them, also enforced ethnic divisions within the FWRM, despite their stated objective to be a multicultural women’s organization. When the military coups took place in 1987, the FWRM had existed for one year only, and was not able to overcome the strains the politicization of ethnicity put on the organization (Lateef 1990, Jalal 2002). Imrana Jalal, a former board member of the FWRM, recalls the impact of the 1987 coups on the organization: During the 1987 coups the FWRM membership polarized along racial lines … Indigenous Fijian women thought FWRM should focus on gender issues and leave democracy to other civil society organizations. Indigenous women were seen to be ‘disloyal to the Fijians and Fijian traditions’ and, although many hours were spent discussing the issue and encouraging them to remain members, many resigned. (Jalal 2002: 29)

Several authors have highlighted this specific tension between gender, ethnicity and ethno-nationalism that women activists had to negotiate in

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Fiji in 1987 (Jalal 2002, Lateef 1990, Leckie 2002). In moments of political rupture and crisis in Fiji, ethnicity becomes strongly politicized and can emerge as what Chhachhi (1991) calls a ‘forced identity’ and a crucial contribution to women activists’ vulnerability. As Deniz Kandiyoti points out, ‘wherever women continue to serve as boundary markers between different national, ethnic and religious collectivities, their emergence as full-fledged citizens will be jeopardised, and whatever rights they may have achieved during one stage of nation-building may be sacrificed on the altar of identity politics during another’ (Kandiyoti 1991: 435). The ethno-nationalism that was part of the 1987 and 2000 coups put considerable pressure on indigenous women to align with their ethnic group. It could exert this pressure precisely because ethnicity was and is far more than one collectivity among many. In Fiji, I suggest, we should talk about multiple identities of ethnicity, class and gender that emerge and form in different contexts and times of women’s lives. Ethnicity is never unimportant to women’s agency. Especially since 1987, politicized ethnicity is part of everyday life. Women working towards a multicultural society emphasize their gendered collectivity and often share a similar class background, but precisely because they live in a nation where ethnicity is always debated, articulated and performed, it never disappears from women’s consciousness. While in times of political stability women are able to distance themselves from ethnic divisions in society, in moments of crisis and rupture it resurges and comes to the forefront again. Ethnicity then can become a ‘forced identity’ that makes multi-ethnic organizations and their activists vulnerable to destabilization and puts their existence at risk. But while in 1987 FWRM was not able to withstand those pressures of ethnicity and almost collapsed, in 2000 they proved to me much more resilient. So what had happened?

Building Political Capital in the 1990s One of the phenomena catalysed by the 1987 coups was a burgeoning of non-governmental organizations at the end of the 1980s and beginnings of the 1990s, working towards reconciliation and visions of a multicultural nation (Lal 1997, Slatter 1997, Subramani 1997). This was also due to the fact that the military government had replaced the old constitution and installed Fijian hegemony in the national domain, politically, legally and administratively. The FWRM also saw a return of members. Imrana Jalal remembers: To their credit most returned within two years. A coalition to fight for equal rights in the constitution was partly responsible for their crossing that racial divide again,

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so that FWRM could again focus on gender issues within the constitutional review process. Learning that gender issues unite women was a critical step in FWRM’s development. Coalitions work when specific critical issues are identified and women can find the commonalities that unite. (Jalal 2002: 29)

Thus, because of the dividing experiences of ethnicity that never disappeared from activists’ lives, women activists in Fiji who believe in feminism, multiculturalism and democratic values chose their identity as women as a uniting principle above ethnicity and class. They named women as a group, as a ‘collection of persons who do mutually identify, who recognize one another as belonging to the group with a common project that defines their collective action’ (Young 1995: 209). Like other urban NGOs, the FWRM passionately engaged with the constitution reform process that began in 1995. The FWRM initiated the Women’s Coalition for Citizenship Rights (see FWRM 2001). Their main objective was the change of laws regarding citizenship and the implementation of a strong Bill of Rights. The constitutional law regarding citizenship in the 1970 and 1990 constitutions was gender discriminatory: women married to foreign nationals could not pass on Fiji citizenship to their children if the children were born overseas. Foreign national males married to Fiji female citizens were not automatically eligible for residency in Fiji, nor could they apply for citizenship on the grounds of marriage (Jalal 1997: 95ff.). In contrast, foreign women married to men who were Fiji nationals could apply for residency immediately. The constitutional citizenship rights thus did not differ between different communities but were based on gender. This provided a common concern for women that cut across ethnicity and class. The coalition incorporated sixteen women’s organizations and ‘could boast well-established networks around the country and support from all Fiji’s ethnic groups’ (Goodwillie and Kaloumaira 2000 cited in George 2006: 227).8 The lobbying for gender equality within constitutional law was always embedded in the wider framework of the aim to build a constitution that could be the foundation for a nation that emphasizes multiculturalism in Fiji. This struggle defined both democratic citizenship and human rights as the crucial framework for women’s agency in that decade. Women’s groups which lobbied for equal citizenship were successful. The 1997 constitution granted equal citizenship and residence rights to both men and women. Thus, the agency of the FWRM was always based on global notions of democracy, human rights and equality. Nevertheless, while women activists promoted gender equality and a strong Bill of Rights in the 1997 constitution, they also accepted the compact of the constitution that assured safeguards for

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Fijian land rights and interests. This is a particularization of the global, a concession to the distinctive configuration of Fijian modernity. So, throughout the work of the 1990s towards constitutional reform, women activists became active agents in nation making and their political agency raised their awareness as national citizens. With their work they tried to enact a nation-state which did not discriminate by gender and sexuality, and which, although it conceded the precedence of indigenous Fijians, was avowedly multi-ethnic. They situated themselves as citizens in this optimistic vision of a future state. When the Fiji Labour Party won the elections in 1999, women’s organizations enjoyed very productive working relations with the state (George 2006: 230). The new parliament included eight women, most of them close to the women’s movement, e.g. Ema Tagicakobau and Atu Emberson-Bain. The co-ordinator of the FWRM, looked back at her work in the 1990s. C:  But then you get more awareness and you understand what a NGO does, and then it can be a great place to work. An excellent learning ground. Just so that you are more involved, you are feeling you got your pulse on the nation. And I mean you get involved in government policy making and contribute to government policy making and I just felt that this is what I want to do, and an opportunity came up then… We were just making sure that we were balanced in representing women of Fiji. We worked on it, we had our discussions about what we wanted in the constitution, and in fact we asked for a quota, for parliament, we asked for 30%, that of course they didn’t put into place. And we had to make our submission at the Suva Civic Auditorium. I remember. Sex and gender discrimination. We were actively involved in making submissions for the constitutions, we had worked on it too. Sina:  What were your thoughts when the 1997 constitution was introduced? C:  We were happy about it, in terms of citizenship, and the Bill of Rights in it was really strong, even affirmative action, we were just, it was like, I think for us we saw it as a new hope, a way of moving forward. I think we were overall just really pleased and proud. We felt that this provides the framework to work towards stronger multi-racialism… it was setting up where Fiji was going. Because it had affirmative action, the Bill of Rights, the things that we wanted to protect, gender equality. You know it was like, yes, this is our vision, our framework for hope or for moving. And we have to make sure that we will not give up on this, these are our core principles, our values. So that is why in terms of defending, that is why it was so important to stick with it, this is what we should be protecting. This is our democracy, the return to law, the constitution is the foundation, because it is setting in place everything. (Interview, 20 January 2004)

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The above statement shows that for feminist activists the personal and the political were intimately entangled in their hopes for a multi-ethnic nation. By being involved in the reconciliation process after the military coups in 1987 and nation building in the 1990s, NGOs became intertwined with the nation-state they imagined. The coup in 2000 was an attack on this vision. Indigenous articulations of Fijian hegemony contested equal citizenship and human rights as imagined by women activists. This addressed political as much as personal concerns. One cannot be separated from the other. How activists imagine citizenship and the nation-state is inevitably connected to how they imagine themselves as citizens in the nation. This is also evident in the following narrative of one of the board members of FWRM, who remembers her feelings at the time of the coup: I was angry. I was angry because we worked hard, when I say we I mean we as a nation, as individuals and groups had worked hard after the ’87 coups to rebuild Fiji, the Fiji that we knew, worked on legislative changes that would hopefully avoid these kind of things, and one of these was the constitution. But that still didn’t seem to work in the sense that people still thought and demonstrated at the 2000 coup that they could do whatever they wanted to do and hold the country at ransom. So I was upset with that, how dare these people to do such a thing. (Interview, 3 February 2004)

Vulnerability, Resistance and Resilience in 2000 The coup of the George Speight Team signified a moment of rupture again. While the politicization of ethnicity that accompanied the events in 2000 did put NGOs under considerable pressure, the effects were not as devastating as in 1987. Only a few members left because they perceived their ethnicity as more important than the work they had done in the previous decade. I suggest that women’s activism in the 1990s strengthened gender as a ground for common agency and weakened the impact of ethnicity. This is further supported by the intersections of gender and class that frame the lives of women activists in the urban areas and which characterized this phase of reconciliation in general. Women activists I interviewed related the different developments in 2000 to their experiences during the 1990s. Working through issues like gender equality in the new constitution and reconciliation had heightened awareness of the divisive effect of ethnic alliances. Through the work of the 1990s women activists had gained sufficient experience to negotiate the emerging voices of ethno-nationalism. Nevertheless, the moment the coup happened, ethnicity, once again, became foregrounded in people’s consciousness and put activists at risk.

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One of the Fijian project officers of the organization remembers how worried she was for the safety of Indo-Fijian staff members and volunteers the moment she heard about the hostage-taking: What was my first thought? I think I was angry, I can’t remember now, because there were just really a lot of things that were happening, I called R. and his phone was just ringing, and then we looked out of the window and could see a lot of people running around, and right away I just wanted to keep S. and V. safe. That was really was, I really. Starts crying. I remember that S. wanted to go home but she couldn’t. She lived just up Waimanu Road where a lot of Fijian people walked around with their looted goods from town. She was really really scared… For me it was really, now when I think about it, it was really, it was quite unbelievable, and then we took V. home that day. I think H. came to pick up S., but for us it was important to ensure that they were safe. And we took V. all the way home, all the way to Nausori.9 (Interview, 16 February 2004)

All Indo-Fijian staff members stayed at home for several days after the hostage-taking, fearing potential ethno-nationalist violence in public spaces. Rumours of further violence by ethno-nationalist supporters of the coup perpetrators circulated regularly, potentially silencing public manifestations against the George Speight Team and their political agenda. How strongly ethnicity resurged in this politically tense climate also becomes evident in an interview I conducted with Jane. Jane was a board member of the FWRM and staff member of another NGO. She is of Fijian, Samoan and Indo-Fijian descent and speaks fluent Fijian and Hindi, but is visually not easily identifiable as belonging to a specific ethnic group. When I talked to her, she recalled how the atmosphere in Suva changed immediately after the George Speight Team seized parliament. I remember the next morning it was dead calm. It was really dead calm and shops were closed and we were going with our director and his wife to shop in Navua. Because most of the main shops were closed or they had been looted anyway. I just stocked up on our food supplies. I guess in terms of being affected I didn’t really think much of it in terms of how did it affect me or what does it mean in terms of my movement until a few times I was stopped and asked by Fijians where are you from. When I spoke the Fijian language people would stop and asked me ‘Where are you from?! What village, where is your village’. Before I would never be asked that and I was thinking why am I being asked this now, you know, it’s like there suddenly was this climate or atmosphere of asking people questions, especially where they are from, or what they identify with. Then that became a problem for me and I had one particular incident having to deny my Indian heritage because I was in a situation where if I had admitted to being of Indian heritage I wouldn’t have been sure if the

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person would have treated me the same or not. So that was when I really started to think about the coup, and all that. In terms of racial issues. (Interview, 3 February 2004)

Jane’s experience was not unique. Other women of multi-ethnic descent related similar experiences. Young women from all ethnic groups also commented on this immediate emergence of ethnic divisions as something that depowered them. In 2000 the FWRM ran a programme called ‘Girls Can Do Anything’ that focused on young women and professionalization. These women were children in 1987 when the first military coups happened and they were challenged by the rapidly changing atmosphere in their families. In conversations in the office they would talk about the increasing racist remarks they heard in their families. They were shocked by this. Having grown up in the 1990s it was the first time they saw ethnic divisions coming to the forefront of their lives in such a forceful way. They felt helpless and did not really know how to discuss and reconcile these tensions running through their own families. While for non-Fijian women the politicization of ethnicity signified increasing fear, insecurity and danger, indigenous Fijian women activists, like in 1987, saw themselves under pressure by ethno-nationalist supporters in their families to withdraw from their work which emphasized human rights and civic equality. The FWRM kept most of its members this time. But the organization lost one of their young Fijian staff members whose story reveals the tensions indigenous women may face. But it also shows how important the experience and work in nation-building in the 1990s was for the ability to resist ethno-nationalist pressures. This young staff member, Serena, was a relative of one of the members of the George Speight Group in parliament. The tension between her own work and the ethno-nationalist pressure in her family was not resolvable for her. Over a period of some months she became increasingly quiet and unhappy, finally leaving the job. Despite the fact that her work colleagues were very aware of the situation, they were not able to find a resolution for her dilemma. Serena was twenty-three in 2000. She experienced the 1987 coups only as a child and this was the first time she found herself in such a situation. This differentiates her from older women who experienced 1987 and the time of continuity and reconciliation in the 1990s. But it also shows how the intimacy of scale and personal allegiances impact on women’s agency when different political positionings exist in one family. In comparison, Kaca sees the experiences of the military coups in 1987 and the post-coup era as crucial for finding her way within the tensions of gender, class and ethnicity. Being Fijian, but coming from an urban

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middle-class background, differentiates her from the majority of Fijian women. Because she grew up in the capital, moved in a multicultural environment at school and at work and married a European citizen, she is not fluent in Fijian any more. This renders her as ‘un-Fijian’ in the imagination of many indigenous Fijians. But she sees herself as an example of a new generation of urban Fijian women. Kaca:  We were living through it and we were really tested, and that for me as an activist it really calls on a lot, you know and I really had to do it. But I think the experience of going through the first coup also helped me. Because at that time, and I was looking at it from a different position now, a lot more, before I was still in the family and I had all this, you know it was my first year at uni in 87, so I had all these sort of Marxist ideas, you know just thought of the opening of my eyes, and opening my world to that area and then coming home at night and having to be with mummy and daddy and everybody would come and bring grog and talk about things. You know I was always caught in between having to find a position. So it was really challenging, because you really had to find your position. Sina:  Was your family pro coup in 1987? Kaca:  Oh absolutely. And again in 2000. I had huge rifts with my family, huge rift in 2000… my family is pro coup, you know. And the thing with my family is that my mother’s mother, my grandmother married into a very influential family. And the whole family has always been on the conservative side, always has been Alliance Party. But all that aside, I come from a very influential family and I have gone against the grain. But there have been other people in the family who have done that. So, for us, what I felt in 2000, it really called on young Fijians who believed in something different to really stand up and then that is when I really felt, you know, I always felt my inadequacy as a young Fijian in Fiji not being able to speak the language proficiently. And then being married to a white used to carry that stigma you know I had an excuse. I had an excuse because of the school I went to and everything. But when the coup happened, I just felt I have to make a stand because no one else will listen or hear what we have to say. You know at least to say something different. I mean of course Steve Ratuva and them were out there, of course Ratu Joni was there, but they were saying things from a different perspective, and what is lacking is for young Fijian women or Fijian feminists or Fijian women who are feminists to say something different. From a Fijian woman’s perspective to say that this coup doesn’t reflect who am I as a Fijian, and there is a great number of us today and there is a changing identity of a Fijian woman and not necessarily those women who are there in parliament, that is one viewing. (Interview, 16 February 2004)

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While the experiences of the 1987 military coups and the post-coup era were crucial for the positioning of women activists in 2000, I suggest that many indigenous Fijian members also remained with the movement because the stand of the FWRM in 2000 was more mediating than generally recognized. As shown above, besides the personal capacities and experiences that women had gained throughout the 1990s, they also had construed a particular position between global notions of civic equality and democracy and local concepts of indigenous Fijian rights and hegemony in the nation-state. This particularization of the global enabled them to have a voice in the national domain throughout the crisis and to keep their indigenous Fijian members on board.

Between Civic Equality and Fijian Hierarchy in 2000 The following recounts a meeting which took place shortly after the hostage taking in May 2000: Chair: I think we should now discuss about our future proceedings. It is important that everyone feels free to state their opinion and that we do not pick on each other if we disagree. Member:  First we should consider what options we have. There are several proposals out by different groups how Fiji should proceed now and we should think about which one we support. Maybe it is wise to review all the different positions. Board member: That may be the best. Well, I guess we can rule out the proposal of the George Speight Team that wants a taukei government constituted by staunch Fijian ethno-nationalists. Member:  But we have to be aware that they have strong support in part of the Fijian population. Board Member: True, we may have to find a compromise between all the different positions. We have the proposal of the military that wants to install an Interim government, review the constitution and have new elections at a later point. Member:  Why should we review the constitution, there is absolutely no need. The 1997 constitution is the best we can have. And the compact of the constitution safeguards Fijian interests. There is no need to make a new constitution. And who knows whom the military is going to appoint, it may be one-sided. Other participants nod.

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Between Vulnerability, Resilience and Resistance  79 Board Member:  Well, there may be alterations and one of the main questions is if we are willing to accept the position of Prime Minister to be reserved for an indigenous Fijian. Member:   I have no problems with that. If Fiji still needs this for stability, why not. Other members agree, there is no objection to this idea. Board Member:  To my view the best proposal is the one from the Citizens Constitutional Forum. It calls for a government of National Unity made up of parliamentarians who are available and outside of parliament. The Cabinet of National Unity should be drawn from both the upper and lower house and should not include any supporters of George Speight. The framework remains the 1997 constitution. This way we would follow the legal and constitutional path. Member:   But will this be realistic? I don’t think that the military will agree to this proposal. Chair:   It should not matter to us if this will happen or not. We are an organisation that believes in human rights and democracy. I believe that we have to take the higher moral ground in this debate. Our area of work is women’s rights are human rights and we cannot compromise our position.

The discussion continues. In the end participants of the meeting agree to support the idea of the Government of National Unity and to call for the upholding of the 1997 constitution. The same afternoon we go to the Centra, one of Suva’s major hotels. The bar is packed. Curfew hours mean that meetings are moved to the early afternoon. Nightclubs now open from 4pm to 8pm. Increasingly more people start to meet for a drink in the early afternoon to see friends and release some of the tension that accompanies everyday life. Over free margaritas offered by the hotel out of frustration about bad business, the issue of indigenous rights versus human rights comes up again. ‘We are in a specific situation in Fiji’, says one of the women. ‘Speight supporters use the notion of indigenous rights as a justification for their struggle. This is a very powerful argument’. ‘Yes’, says the chair, ‘but this is a false argument. We have to communicate that indigenous rights are human rights and that indigenous rights must never violate human rights, and that the actions of the GST are going against what they proclaim as their struggle for indigenous rights’. The next day the chair sent out the following email to members of the FWRM.

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As I said at the Centra last night our communiqué ought to include the following: We acknowledge the uniqueness of indigenous Fijian culture and the protection of indigenous rights. They have a special place in the life of our nation and these rights should be protected by law noting that there is nothing incompatible about indigenous rights and human rights. They are entirely compatible co-existent principles and cannot exist without each other. (Email, 30 June 2000, 10:47am)

Drafts of the Policy Statement were circulated by email over the next couple of days. The debate about the relationship of human rights and indigenous rights came up several times in email comments by members. A Fijian member of the organization commented: Thanks for the material and would like to support comments. This is particularly so where the common Fijians are being asked to choose between human rights principles which I believe encompasses every right and specifically Indigenous Rights. People need to know this and should not be fooled. We should use our documents as a teaching tool since a lot of people do not fully understand rights. (Email, 30 June 2000, 10:57am)

Finally, the FWRM published a Policy Statement, which reflected the specific political situation activists found themselves in. These are some excerpts from that statement: WE, the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, a multi-cultural non-governmental organization, VALUING the principles of human rights, democracy, equality and peace, RECOGNISING the human rights and fundamental freedom of all individuals, communities and groups in the Fiji Islands. Recognising the special place of indigenous Fijian people and affirming the compatibility of indigenous rights with human rights … REITERATING the uniqueness of our country as reflected in The central role of custom and tradition; The primacy of the family The strong affinity of our people with the land; The unique challenges we face as a consequence of our history, … SUPPORT the 1997 Constitution and the principles it is based on, and any concerns to be addressed through means of education and consultation, including the prompt introduction of studying the Constitution in the schools’ curriculum. Any amendments to the 1997 constitution must go through a process of national referendum

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Between Vulnerability, Resilience and Resistance  81 to endure the full participation of the peoples of Fiji. (FWRM press release, 30 June 2000)

This document, written in the international language of the United Nations, reveals FWRM’s particular articulation of the civic nation in Fiji. It shows the specific configuration of equality and hierarchy that is envisaged. This discourse privileges equality and human rights, but it also acknowledges the special place of indigenous Fijians in the nation and reiterates the unique role of custom and tradition and the strong affinity of the people with the land. However, by acknowledging the connection between people and land in general, Indo-Fijians are not excluded from a possible connection to the land through their labour. Simultaneously, the document emphasizes the compatibility of indigenous rights with human rights. Thus, while acknowledging the special place of indigenous Fijians in the nation, the call for a multicultural democracy and civic equality ultimately encompasses Fijian hierarchy. Civic equality is maintained, while recognising the specific situation in Fiji given the competing interests of different groups and communities. The document also reveals the centrality of discourses on human rights in the FWRM rhetoric and how the discourse of global human rights was in dialogue with the rhetoric of indigenous rights claimed by the GST and its supporters. This dialogue was an on-going process throughout my entire stay in Fiji. At the beginning of this chapter I asked about the participative capacity of social actors at the moment of rupture: what is the position of the actors in the social field to be able to participate and influence the events? I argue that the experiences and the specific articulation of protest between global narratives of human rights and civic equality and locally construed notions of hierarchy and equality made it possible to resist the disrupted forces of Fijian ethno-nationalism and to communicate with different social and ethnic groups throughout the crises. The development of this position had not happened overnight. It was a result of the work and the experience of the organization in nation-building over the previous decade. Throughout this decade activists had not only developed a particular vision of Fiji’s nation-state but they had also become known and respected political actors in the public domain. They had adapted and incorporated hegemonic discourses of indigenous rights and Fijian paramountcy into their articulations of equality, human rights and democracy. By doing so, they had acquired a strong political voice, built successful social and political networks and had a strong position in Fiji’s political field. This enabled them to participate as a political actor in the events that were unfolding.

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Conclusion In this chapter I have shown how women activists articulated dissent in response to the political events in Fiji in 2000. Focusing on the work of the multicultural Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, I explored resilience and resistance, articulations and agency at the moment of a severe political crisis. While the women activists and their organization who struggled for a multicultural democratic Fiji were vulnerable to ethno-nationalist pressure and the local forces of ethnicity, their long experience with the tension between civic equality and indigenous Fijian hierarchy in the nation enabled them to resist and cope with the crisis at hand. At the time of the coup many non-governmental organizations were closely connected with the nation-state due to the engagement of activists in reconciliation and nation-building after Fiji’s first military coups in 1987. They tried to enact their vision of a nation-state and situate themselves as citizens in this space. When the coup of 2000 rejected their visions, they became defenders of the constitution and the ousted government. Thus, during the fourteen years of the existence of the organization women activists had not only built enough capacity and knowledge to withstand the political ethno-nationalist pressure, but they had also gained a position within the public political field that enabled them to have their voices heard. But throughout this crucial period of the 1990s, FWRM had also articulated a specific vision of the multicultural nation between global concepts of civic equality, multiculturalism and democracy, and local notion of indigenous hierarchy, land rights and political dominance within the nation-state. While their work was embedded in a universal/global framework of human rights and democracy, their local public discourses in 2000 were in close dialogue with ethno-nationalist affirmations of indigenous rights. Activists recognized the specific situation of Fiji and integrated Fijian interests and land rights into constitutional law. Notions of hierarchy and the paramountcy of Fijian interests and land rights had found their way into local discourses of civic equality and human rights. This enabled the organization to communicate across the ethnic divide. The experience of the FWRM shows that integration into a global world and increasing transnational movement in the Pacific and the wider world all impact on local political narratives, discourses and strategies. Yet, this is not a one-way street. Ideas and notions that travel globally, potentially becoming universals, also particularize in local contexts (see also Nayral, this volume). It is this dialectic that interests me most and that is often overlooked as scholars either emphasize local aspects of resistance in studies of globalization or foreground hegemonic global processes in their studies.10 Instead of seeing these processes as ‘either/or’, my findings really

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ask us to look for both, how they impact on each other, co-exist and engage in different emergent forms and conjunctures and produce capacities and knowledge that may support local resilience and resistance in moments of 11 crisis. Sina Emde studied anthropology in Berlin and Canberra and holds a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University. She is interested in the anthropology of gender, political anthropology, globalization and social movements, and peace and conflict studies. Her research projects include ‘Gender and Higher Education in the Pacific’ (MA), ‘Between Equality and Hierarchy – Articulating the Multicultural Nation in Postcolonial Fiji’ (PhD), and ‘Emotion, Memory and Violence in Cambodia’ (post-doctoral). She is currently a lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Notes   1. The research was funded by the Department of Social Anthropology of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University as part of my PhD scholarship. My sincere thanks go to the ANU for this support. My special gratitude goes to all women activists and organizations in Fiji who so generously shared their experiences, work and lives with me.   2. I have borrowed the term ‘Fijian nation’ from Henry Rutz (1995). He defines the ‘Fijian nation’ as a nation where Fijians hold state power and Fijian interests are paramount in the nation-state. Throughout this chapter, the term ‘Fijian nation’ refers to this concept.   3. Fiji’s first multi-ethnic women’s organization was the Fiji branch of the Young Women’s Christian Organisation (YWCA) in Suva established in the 1960s (George 2006: 80–117, Riles 2000: 28f.). The first directors were two expatriate women. Their employment was initiated by European women living in Fiji at that time. But they soon inspired local educated women with their feminist ideas. Local women who engaged with the YWCA in the 1960s took an active part in the debates on dawning independence. They emphasized the need for civic equality and equal citizenship if Fiji ever wanted to overcome the racial legacies of colonialism (George 2006: 94f.). The YWCA became increasingly localized in the 1970s and was the main multicultural women’s organization during that decade. In the 1980s more locally founded multi-ethnic organizations followed.   4. It has been argued that the concept of class is not applicable to Pacific societies that are rather status- than class-based (cf. Hamelin and Wittersheim 2002). But, as I have shown in a different context, class in a Bourdieuan sense (Bourdieu 1984) can be pertinent to our understanding of post-colonial pro-

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  5.   6.

  7.

  8.

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cesses, especially in the urban Pacific where new professions and capitalized labour have introduced new patterns of life-style and consumption (Emde 2004, see also Gewertz and Errington 1999, Hau’ofa 1987). These new forms of class co-exist and connect with older notions of rank, hierarchy and status (cf. Hooper et al. 1987). Thus, it would be equally wrong to explain Fiji’s history in terms of class alone. Contemporary urban multi-ethnic relations, positionings and articulations in Fiji are the result of a complex entanglement of ethnicity, class and gender that originated in the colonial system and continued in the post-colonial state (see Leckie 2002, Norton 1990). The literature on social resilience is too wide to be cited here. For an overview see Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, Lorenz 2013. Drawing on articulation theory for my explorations, I follow in the footsteps of Stuart Hall (1986) and James Clifford (2001). I refer to articulation in its double sense: both as expression and connection or disconnection (see also Hermann and Kempf 2005, Jolly 2005). Different articulations not only express different viewpoints, they sometimes also join different agents and narrators. Stuart Hall evokes the image of an articulated lorry to illustrate his argument: ‘a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken’ (Hall 1986: 53). Recently a number of scholars have drawn on articulation theory to explore notions of indigeneity (Clifford 2001), nationalism and feminism (Jolly 2005), multicultural relations (Hermann and Kempf 2005) and masculinity and militarism (Teaiwa 2005) in the Pacific. All these works reveal the fluid nature of articulations of various sorts in the Pacific where social actors combine and recombine different elements at the intersections of local, national and global positionings, locations and narratives. The specific arrangements around ownership and lease of land in Fiji constitute a major factor in the relationships between Fijians and Indians and inform potential conflicts between the two (Ward 1995). Fijians perceive their ownership of land as one of the most important factors for Fijian paramountcy within the post-colonial state. The ownership of land contributes to racial segregation, as Fijians own the land and Indians lease it. It symbolizes insecurity for both sides in emic discourses: Indo-Fijians fear that their leases will not be extended and Fijians are insecure because of the ongoing rhetoric that Indo-Fijians want to be able to own land and not only to lease it (Hereniko 2003: 87f.). Any threat, real or imagined, to their land, is perceived as a danger to Fijian political power and identity. Inherent in these fears is the belief that Indo-Fijians will change the laws on land rights if they have the political power to do so. The coalition included FWRM, Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre, (FWCC), Women’s Action for Change (WAC), National Council of Women (NCW), Pan Pacific and South East Asian Women’s Association (PPSEAWA), YWCA, the Fiji Women’s Lawyers Association, the Women’s Wings of the National Federation

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Party and the Fiji Labour Party, the Fiji Girmit Council of Women, TISI Mathar Sangam and Stri Sewa Sabha (George 2006: 227).   9. Nausori is a small town outside Suva. 10. The literature on globalization is too large to be recited here. See, among others, Appadurai (1996, 2001), Comaroff and Comaroff (2000), Featherstone (1990), Featherstone, Lash and Robertson (1995), Friedman (1994), Hannerz (1992), Meyer and Geschiere (1999), Tsing (2005). 11. Since those days in 2000, Fiji has undergone major changes: another military coup has taken place, the fourth constitution in less than fifty years came into being, and in 2014, Fiji saw the first elections since the coup in 2006. While ethno-nationalism has been marginalized in national politics, a new style of political authoritarianism has been established by the military government of Frank Bainimarama who was elected prime minister of Fiji. The Fiji Women’s Rights Movement has been under considerable pressure for their defence of human rights and democracy. Their members, as is the case for other political activists in Fiji, now walk the tightrope between the predicaments of local authoritarianism and global narratives of democracy and human rights. It warrants further research to examine these emerging political changes and processes in depth.

References Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.  (ed.). 2001. Globalization. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chhachhi, A. 1991. ‘Forced Identities: The State, Communalism, Fundamentalism and Women in India’, in D. Kandiyoti (ed.), Women, Islam and the State. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 144–75. Clifford, J. 2001. ‘Indigenous Articulations’, The Contemporary Pacific 13(2): 468–90. Comaroff, J. and J.L. Comaroff. 2000. ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, Public Culture 12(2): 291–343. Cretton, V. 2007. Négocier le conflit à Fidji: ‘Ceremonies du pardon’ et enjeux du coup d’État de 2000. Paris: L’Harmattan. Emde, S. 2004. ‘Local Modernities: Women and Higher Education in the South Pacific’, in H. Dilger, A.Wolf, U. Frömming and K. Volker-Saad (eds), Moderne und Postkoloniale Transformation: Ethnologische Schrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Ute Luig. Berlin: Weissensee, pp.22–37.  . 2008. ‘Between Equality and Hierarchy: Articulating the Multicultural Nation in Postcolonial Fiji’. PhD thesis, unpublished. Canberra: The Australian University.

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Featherstone, M. (ed.). 1990. Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London. Sage Publications. Featherstone, M., S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds). 1995. Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications. Friedman, J. 1994. Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage Publications. FWRM. 2001. FWRM 1986-2001. Suva: Fiji Women’s Rights Movement. George, N. 2006. ‘Situating Agency: Gender Politics and Circumstance in Fiji’. PhD thesis, unpublished. Canberra: The Australian National University.  . 2012. Situating Women: Gender Politics and Circumstance in Fiji. Canberra: ANU E-Press. Gewertz, D.B. and F.K. Errington (eds). 1999. Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S. 1986. ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2): 5–27. Hamelin, C. and E. Wittersheim. 2002. ‘Introduction: Au déla de la tradition’, in C. Hamelin and E. Wittersheim (eds), La tradition et l’état: églises, pouvoirs et politiques culturelles dans le Pacifique. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 11–21. Hannerz, U. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Hau’ofa, E. 1987. ‘The New South Pacific Society: Integration and Independence’, in Hooper et al. (eds), Class and Culture in the South Pacific. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, pp. 1–15. Hereniko, V. 2003. ‘Interdisciplinary Approaches in Pacific Studies: Understanding the Fiji Coup of 19 May 2000’, The Contemporary Pacific 15(1): 75–90. Hermann, E. and W. Kempf. 2005. ‘Introduction to Relations in Multicultural Fiji: The Dynamics of Articulations, Transformations and Positionings’, in E. Hermann and W. Kempf (guest editors), Relations in Multicultural Fiji: Transformations, Positionings and Articulations. Special Issue of Oceania 75(4): 309–14. Hooper, A. et al. (eds) 1987. Class and Culture in the South Pacific. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies. Jalal, I.P. 1997. ‘The Status of Fiji Women and the Constitution’, in B.V. Lal. and T.R. Vakatora (eds), Fiji in Transition. Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, The University of the South Pacific, pp. 80–104.  . 2002. ‘Gender and Race in Post Coup d’état Fiji: Snapshots from the Fiji Islands’, Development Bulletin 59: 28–30. Jolly, M. 2005. ‘Beyond the Horizon? Nationalisms, Feminisms and Globalization in the Pacific’, Ethnohistory 52(1): 137–66. Kandiyoti, D. 1991. ‘Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation’, Millenium: Journal of International Studies 20(3): 429–43. Kaplan, M. 1993. ‘Imagining a Nation: Race, Politics and Crisis in Postcolonial Fiji’, in V. Lockwood, T.G. Harding and B.J. Wallace (eds), Contemporary Pacific

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Societies: Studies in Development and Change. Eaglewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice Hall, pp. 34–54.  . 2004. ‘Fiji’s Coups: The Politics of Representation and the Representation of Politics’, in V.S. Lockwood (ed.), Globalization and Culture Change in the Pacific Islands. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, pp. 72–84. Keck, M. and P. Sakdapolrak. 2013. ‘What is Social Resilience? Lessons Learned and Ways forward’, Erdkunde 67(1): 5–18. Kelly, J.D. 1995. ‘Threats to Difference in Colonial Fiji’, Cultural Anthropology 10(1): 64–84. Kelly, J.D. and M. Kaplan. 2001. Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lal, B.V. 1992. Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.  . 1997. ‘Submissions’, in A. Griffen (ed.), With Heart and Nerve and Sinew: Post Coup Writing from Fiji. Suva: The Christmas Club, pp. 327–46.  . 2003. ‘Heartbreak Islands: Reflections on Fiji in Transition’, in S.E. Meggle and D. Brenneis (eds), Law and Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai’i. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press and Oxford: James Currey, pp. 261–80. Lal, B.V. and M. Pretes (eds). 2001. Coup: Reflections on the Political Crisis. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Lateef, S. 1990. ‘Current and Future Implications of the Coups for Women in Fiji’, The Contemporary Pacific 2(1): 113–30. Lawson, S. 1991. The Failure of Democratic Politics in Fiji. Oxford: Clarendon Press.   . 2004. ‘Nationalism versus Constitutionalism in Fiji’, Nations and Nationalism 10(4): 519–38. Leckie, J. 2000. ‘Women in Post-Coup Fiji: Negotiating Work through Old and New Realities’, in A.H. Akram-Lodhi (ed.), Confronting Fiji Futures. Canberra: Asia Pacific Press at the Australian National University, pp.178–201.  . 2002. ‘The Complexities of Women’s Agency in Fiji’, in B. Yeoh, P. Teo and S. Huang (eds), Agencies and Activisms: Gender Politics in the Asia-Pacific Region. London: Routledge, pp. 156–80. Lorenz, D.F. 2013. ‘The Diversity of Resilience: Contributions from a Social Science Perspective’, Natural Hazards 67(1): 7–24. Meyer, B. and P. Geschiere (eds). 1999. Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure. Oxford: Blackwell. Norton, R. 1990. Race and Politics in Fiji. 2nd edition. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.  . 2000. ‘Reconciling Ethnicity and Nation: Contending Discourses in Fiji’s Constitutional Reform’, The Contemporary Pacific 12(1): pp. 83–122. Ratuva, Steven. 2005. ‘Politics of Ethno-National Identity in a Post-Colonial Communal Democracy: The Case of Fiji’, in A. Allahar (ed.), Ethnicity, Class and

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Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra-Caribbean Dimensions. Oxford: Lexington Press, pp. 171–98. Riles, A. 2000. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Robertson, R. and W. Sutherland (eds). 2001. Government by the Gun: The Unfinished Business of Fiji’s 2000 Coup. Annandale: Pluto Press. Rutz, H.J. 1995. ‘Occupying the Headwaters of Tradition: Rhetorical Strategies of Nation Making in Fiji’, in R. Foster (ed.), Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Post-Colonial Melanesia. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 71–93. Slatter, C. 1997. ‘Mostly with Heart…’, in A. Griffen (ed.), With Heart and Nerve and Sinew: Post Coup Writing from Fiji. Suva: The Christmas Club, pp. 320–26. Subramani. 1997. ‘Civil Society: People’s Participation and Building a Political Consensus in Fiji’, in B.V. Lal and T.R. Vakatora (eds), Fiji in Transition. Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, The University of the South Pacific, pp. 24–43. Sutherland, W. 1992. Beyond the Politics of Race: An Alternative History of Fiji to 1992. Canberra: Department of Social and Political Change, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. Teaiwa, R. 2005. ‘Articulated Cultures: Militarism and Masculinities in Fiji during the Mid-1990s’, Fijian Studies: A Journal of Contemporary Fiji 3(2): 201–22. Trnka, S. 2002a. (Guest editor), Ethnographies of the May 2000 coup Fiji. Special Issue Pacific Studies 25(4).  . 2002b. ‘Introduction: Communities in Crisis’, in S. Trnka (Guest editor), Ethnographies of the May 2000 Coup Fiji. Special Issue Pacific Studies 25(4): pp. 1–8.  . 2008. State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tsing, A.L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Voss, M. 2008. ‘The Vulnerable Can’t Speak: An Integrative Vulnerability Approach to Disaster and Climate Change Research’, Behemoth J Civilis 1: 39–56. Ward, G.R. 1995. ‘Land, Law and Custom: Diverging Realities in Fiji’, in G.R. Ward and E. Kingdon (eds), Land, Custom and Practice in the South Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 198–249. Young, I.M. 1995. ‘Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective’, in L. Nicholson and S. Seidman (eds), Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 187–215.

4

Resisting UN Ideals to Make Men and Women Equal in Politics When a Humanist Concern Turns into Arithmetic in Ouvea (New Caledonia) ♦l♦

Mélissa Nayral

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or the last thirty years, New Caledonia has been experiencing a unique decolonization process (Naepels 2010: 245), agreed with the signing of the Noumea agreement in 1998. This agreement implied the transfer of several competencies from France to New Caledonia, and the creation of new institutions such as the Government, its Assembly and the Customary Senate (Sénat Coutumier), as well as three Provinces. Its major goal was to enable an economic rebalancing in favour of the Kanak people, as well as creating a Caledonian citizenship. Lastly, it was a framework supporting a cross-community project, the Common Destiny (Destin Commun), which sought to bring about ‘transformations of social and political relationships 1 within the Caledonian society itself ’ (Demmer and Trépied 2017: 13) . Since 1998, the inhabitants of New Caledonia have hence been engaging with this Common Destiny on a daily basis. However, the latter is not limited to questions relating to the relationships between the various political and ethnic groups that constitute the neo-Caledonian population. It also had to reflect on the relationships between genders. Indeed, in Ouvea Island, Kanak men and women remain separated in many domains of everyday

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life, especially in the so-called customary arena of political life, from which women appear to be rather excluded. And yet, since the year 2000 and the implementation of the French parity law, there has never been such a high number of women occupying official positions in the institutions of the territory. Anthropologists have observed that for the past two decades, gender relations in Kanak society have undergone deep transformations, some of which are now clearly noticeable in everyday life as well (Salomon 2003, Salomon and Hamelin 2010, Nicolas 2010). Kanak women now have easier access to a better and longer education. The number of women groups, as well as of salaried women, some of whom occupy highly qualified positions (Nicolas 2010), has significantly increased. These changes appear to be rather out of phase with the so-called customary political structures. A new question thus arises: how have these changes impacted political practices? By studying the implementation of the French parity law in the rural insular political life of Ouvea, this chapter wishes to examine how it pushes forward – or not – a reorganization of the Kanak gendered relationships. In so doing, the study of its implementation in Ouvea should help to understand what being a Kanak woman in politics can say about resistance and resilience with regard to a system that structures hierarchical and unequal gender relations. This chapter begins by describing men and women’s customary political responsibilities within Kanak chiefdoms before returning to the political struggle for Independence during the 1980s and actions for women’s rights. The creation of the parity law back in France and its implementation in New Caledonia will then be the focus of the following section. Finally, and in order to understand how parity did affect Kanak social relationships, sociological profiles of women deputies from Ouvea will be analysed.

Politics and Public Speeches: For Men Only Ouvea Island is one of the thirty-three councils of New Caledonia. Over ninety per cent of its population is Kanak. The customary political organization of Kanak chiefdoms, which includes councils of clans and councils of elders, is characterized by a strict distinction between men, who have the monopoly when it comes to public speeches, and women, who are not necessarily excluded from political knowledge but do not have a place in the so-called political life of the chiefdom. For example, women are not allowed to participate in certain meetings where only chiefs and other prestigious men are welcome. In fact, political public speaking, ultimate men’s work, reflects complex rationales linked to one’s hierarchical status.

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In Kanak society, one can observe a neat gendered distinction, applicable from childhood. In Ouvea, what Salomon terms ‘sexual dualism’ (Salomon 1998: 81) permeates both the structuration and the use of space (1998: 81), but also, and mainly, by teaching and learning appropriate gendered behaviours as well as very distinct ways of socializing for boys and girls. Consequently, women are widely involved in the production of food crops and in charge of domestic work, and they are also responsible for their children’s good health and education. When it comes to organizing customary events, women are accountable to their clans in so-called customary political life, at least where it can be witnessed publicly (Salomon 2000a: 314). All customary authority remains in the hand of males, with no exception. However, in spite of not being allowed to express themselves in public during customary assemblies, married women do have some access to clan knowledge (songs, clan itineraries, myths) and can have their say at the level of their husband’s clan. Married men are indeed expected to consult their wives at home before publicly expressing their points of view and speaking out loud during these assemblies. In spite of this, Kanak women still appear subordinate to men. This is a consequence of the various social hierarchies that result from custom, more specifically the ‘sexual hierarchy’ according

Map 4.1 The island of Ouvea (adapted from Daniel Miroux, published with permission).

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to which all Kanak women are considered to be inferior to men, whom they must serve. It is however important to note that these norms are no longer unilaterally taken for granted and have been discussed and criticized for the past twenty years, especially among the younger population (Salomon and Hamelin 2008, Nicolas 2010 and 2012).

The Political Struggle for Independence and Women Activism Since the 1970 and 1980s and the Kanak political struggle for independence, in which women were significantly involved, women have progressively begun to question the significant male domination they experienced. After openly demanding better conditions for women, they progressively acquired new spaces for freedom and action (Salomon and Hamelin 2008). During the 1970s, many activist Kanak women were involved in pro-independence political parties; they would attend meetings and some took responsibilities on certain collective actions. Right after the 1878 group and the Palika Party were founded, one of these activists, Déwé Gorodé, became resolutely committed to politics. She even wrote the party manifesto in 1988 (Dornoy 1984: 209). But women’s mobilization in the struggle for independence seemed to have been insufficient to grant them access to leading positions, and they were relegated to second-rate roles and functions. Influenced by a more Marxist-inspired radical feminism and under the leadership of Suzanne Ounei from Ouvea, some of them created the Group of Exploited Kanak Women Fighting (GFKEL) in 1982. These women described themselves as autonomous, pro-independence and feminist. This very small – but active – group numbered around sixty members: Kanak women, most of whom were fairly young (and unmarried), and a few European women. They joined the Pro-Independence Front (FI) and contributed in creating the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) in 1984. Dealing with a lot of pressure from male activists, they finally put an end to their activities in 1986 (Salomon 2003: 136). Interestingly though, the temporary Government of Kanaky modelled by Jean-Marie Tjibaou did include one woman in 1984: Yvonne Hnada, current politician from Lifou island. In 1988, the signing of the Matignon Agreements led to the administrative division of New Caledonia into three Provinces. These agreements also allowed the creation of specific services linked to women’s rights, such as a women’s department in the Provinces’ administration, which lead to the deployment of women’s groups. These groups, both secular and religious, were mostly set up in rural areas. They called for mobilization on new themes such as the abuse of alcohol or violence against women.

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Following the activities undertaken within activist groups or political parties, a few Kanak women got involved in Republican institutions as elected members. Déwé Gorodé, who has been a member of the government since 1999, is without doubt the most emblematic woman of this more general movement of the feminization of neo-Caledonian public life, but several former activists have since then been politicians (Jacqueline Deteix, Yvonne Hnada, Marie-Claude Tjibaou, etc.). Indeed, Kanak women did not wait for the French parity law before (progressively) appearing on candidacy lists. However, and in spite of the significant role they played in the political struggle for independence, not a single Kanak woman had ever been represented in an eligible position before 1999, when three of them were finally elected (none in the Loyalty Island Province). However, in spite of their important –and acknowledged – political commitments until 2002, when the French parity law was implemented in New Caledonia, Kanak women have never assumed leading roles. In New Caledonia, the questioning of gender inequalities takes place in rather subtle ways. Indeed, in order to reach their goals, women individually develop resilient strategies that can involve studying, salaried work or moving to the city as well as addressing the French court in cases concerning divorce or domestic violence. These strategies seem to have led many women to juggle between ways of behaving within the customary world on the one hand, where their tasks are mostly domestic ones and do not include the practice of political public speaking, and ways of behaving outside the customary world on the other hand. In the political system, the State, which establishes equality for all before the law and courts through the French parity law, seems to be the most popular tool used to question current gender standards. It thus establishes in fact two distinct ways of being a Kanak woman.

From Paris to Noumea: The French Parity Law At the beginning of the 1990s in France, there were still few women with high levels of political responsibility, as well as elective mandates in general. Hence, some started to support the idea of a strict parity within all the elected assemblies, an idea that was gradually supported by various political movements and parties (Bereni and Revillard, 2002). After many attempts, both assemblies, the Assemblée Nationale and the Sénat, finally agreed to add two sub-paragraphs to the 1958 French Constitution: Subparagraph of article 3, which expressly states: ‘This law facilitates an equal access to both men and women to mandate and functions’

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Subparagraph of article 4: ‘They [the political parties] contribute to the implementation of the principle announced in the subparagraph of article 3 in conditions established by law’ (Mossuz-Lavau 2002: 46)

The modification of articles 3 and 4 of the constitution finally ratified these two principles in June 1999 (Mossuz-Lavau 2002: 47). A year later, on 6 June 2000, Law n°2000-493 was enacted (French official journal, 7 June), leading France to become ‘the only country in the world which adopted a law setting up a parity between men and women for candidatures to most of the existing elections’ (Mossuz-Lavau 2002: 41). This bill, voted in France on 6 June 2000, promotes equal access for men and women to both election mandates and elective positions. It provides various arrangements intending to bring parity between men and women on electoral lists. It imposes the respect of parity with strict alternation for one-round elections (woman candidate/man candidate/woman candidate/ men candidate, etc.); parity by group of six for two-rounds elections (three women candidates for a group of six candidates altogether within a larger list); and, for parliament elections, political parties are required to present as many women as men over their whole sections. The effects of the enactment of this law in France varied, but women’s representation significantly increased in every context where parity had been made compulsory. This law was however not applicable to Cantonal elections (groups of several town councils, called Departmental elections since 2015) nor to some elections that take place in the Sénat (high chamber of French parliament). Nor was it applicable, at least in 2000, to councils numbering fewer than 3500 inhabitants, which account for approximately ninety-six per cent of French councils and fifty-one per cent of the thirty-three councils that exist in New Caledonia. The ‘French parity law’ implements a constitutional principle which expressly states equality for men and women in electorate mandates and legislative functions. Progressively extended to all French overseas territories, it became applicable to all types of political elections in New Caledonia. Indeed, in this ‘non-decolonized former colony’ (Demmer and Salomon 2013), as in France, the organization of elections is based on the so-called electoral code. This law ensures continuity with the goal set in 1998 by the Union of Women Citizens (Union des Femmes Citoyennes), a group of both Kanak and non-Kanak Caledonian women which argued for the plenary exercise of women’s political rights. Its implementation in 2001 first affected the 16 communes (local councils) numbering over 3500 inhabitants before spreading more widely to Provincial assemblies and the Congress as of the May 2004 Provincial elections. Before this year, not a single woman was a member of the Loyalty Island Province assembly and only one commune

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(local council) was managed by a non-Kanak woman (AFP, Tahiti press, 7 May 2004). During the elections for the provinces, women represented fourteen out of the seventy-six elected members, and there were no women in the Island provincial assembly, to which Ouvea belongs. This law had an obvious and immediate impact on the composition of the New Caledonian political assemblies where women became massively involved all at once. The report made on the implementation of the French parity law in New Caledonia (Bargel et al., 2008) makes it clear that before the law was passed, in the council assemblies of communes with over 3500 inhabitants (like Ouvea), only eight per cent were women. Once it was implemented, this figure jumped to forty-seven per cent. The authors of this report also point out that this proportion was roughly the same in all assemblies throughout the territory (Bargel et al., 2008). Similarly, after the 2009 provincial elections, women took seven out of fourteen seats of the Loyalty Island Province assembly (Gindre-David 2008: 41). Finally, on 10 October 2012, four out of the eleven government members were women and two of them Kanak women. Thus, in spite of an ideology that explicitly advocates the patriarchy (cf. the Charte du socle commun des valeurs kanak conceived and adopted by the Kanak Customary Senate in 2014) and excludes women from customary political life, several women are now in such positions, providing them with an important decision-making power. Within the context of Republican institutions at least, Kanak women now hold some authority over people who are customarily considered to be of a higher rank (their husbands, clan chiefs, etc.), to whom they are normally expected to serve and show respect and not publicly discuss or give orders.

Elected Women from Ouvea: Contrasting Sociological Profiles During the 2008–2014 term, the Council assembly included twelve female members (out of twenty-seven elected members), four of whom were adjointes, meaning that they occupied highly valued positions. In French institutions, the mayor (maire) is the main authority of the council. He/ she is however surrounded by several deputies (adjoints/adjointes), who are elected by (and from among) the councillors (conseillers municipaux); their numbers can vary but are never to exceed thirty per cent of all councillors. As deputies, elected members of the local council can have significant responsibilities. I will now distinguish two categories of women councillors. It seems indeed that the ways in which they act within the council generally match with their own life-trajectories.

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Long-time Activists The first category concerns women who occupy the positions of second, fourth, sixth and eighth deputies (adjointes) in the council. With two of them over forty, and all of them having or having had permanent jobs, these members are representative of broader social trends for New Caledonian elected women. They are all, or used to be, particularly involved in their professional arena and/or in community life (especially women’s church groups) where they progressively trained themselves, especially in public speaking. These women have been actively involved in political parties and workers’ unions at least since the ‘events of the 1980s’, the most recent social and political crisis in New Caledonia between 1984 and 1988 leading to the signing of the Matignon Agreements. One of them, Jacqueline Deteix, born Lavelloi, for example, has a rich professional and activist history, which she however built in parallel to that of her husband, Jean-Pierre Deteix. During the 2009 provincial elections, Jacqueline Deteix, second on the list of candidacy for the pro-independence UC party (Caledonian Union), was elected in the Loyalty Island Province Assembly and became its very first female vice-president. The implementation of the French parity law is an ideological battle that long-time activists have supported. In public meetings, their attitudes are not very different from those of men: their French vocabulary is very broad, they know how to use the lexicons of political activism and of administration perfectly; they speak and write fluently in French, the language that they have used generally during their professional careers. They take on responsibilities as well as initiatives, deal with particular issues from the beginning to their end, and suggest projects and ideological orientations. But most of all – and this is where their behaviour differs substantially from that of other elected women – they speak out when they believe that they have something relevant to contribute; they appear to have rather free speech. These women take part in discussions just as men do. They approve, criticize or even oppose ideas, which stands out sharply from the local or customary behaviour expected of a Kanak woman in everyday life.

Newly Arrived The second category combines all the other elected women, who are more numerous than those in the former category. They do not stand as high in the Council assembly’s hierarchy, are not deputies but ordinary councillors and have a more varied range of trajectories. Most of them say they are committed to their political responsibilities. We note however that the municipal registries, which record everything about the assembly’s sessions (decisions, attendance, etc.), show a frequent, not to say systematic, absenteeism, in

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distinct contrast to women in the previous category. But women are no exception in this since, according to the same registries, 50.8 per cent of the sessions between 1987 and 2010 took place as a second session due to a lack of quorum. The data collected in 2009 and 2010 show that of the twelve elected women, only six were actively taking part in their mandate, and that at least three of them, all belonging to the newly arrived category, had not shown up to any of the assemblies since their election two years earlier. A few of these newly arrived deputies are unemployed and/or are a lot younger that the other Council assembly members (under forty years old). They are generally active in community life (non-governmental organizations and charities) in which they occupied various responsibilities when the research was conducted. These women always attend meetings for which they are convened, but not all are actively involved in their political party. They generally come from families of pro-independence activists and – unlike the long-term women activists whose candidacies were mostly spontaneous – most of them were asked to be on electoral lists following the enactment of the French parity law. Again, unlike the women I previously described and for whom the political ideology of Kanak independence was regarded as essential, their goals seem to be to deal with everyday issues in Ouvea: M.N.:  Is there an idea that you defend above all? E.T.:  Hum…well…I never thought of that…Well…The only thing I’ve actually thought about is…I’m going to be up there [at the council] but that’s in order to bring back. Because, we are, the, we are the go-between the council down here and the tribe…so when we’re up there, we bring back information, regarding people’s needs here in the tribe…People come and see me and then I bring their questions up there to see, to talk a bit about them with the deputies …. But really the deputies are the ones who do the work, we, are mostly here to attend meetings, see what is going on during meetings. (E. Tiaou, 2009)

As we can see from the conversation, the concerns are local and have to do with one’s own tribe or area rather than anything else. In this case, the deputy explains how she was sent by her tribe to represent its members at the Council assembly. Her duty appears to be the intermediary between the tribe and the Council. The fact that these women were appointed by others and did not necessarily decide for themselves whether to be candidates led to ridiculous situations where some of them only found out they were candidates on the election day: M.N.: Did you decide to be on the list for the council elections? M.A.: No!! The party put my name down for me!!

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M.N.: Were you happy with this decision? M.A.: Hum…I wasn’t in the first place. I agreed because my name was already on the list! But I was surprised to find that it was!!! Afterwards, they came and explained that they needed women to be candidates… to make the list… So I said, ah, ok, I agree. (M. Adeda, 2009)

Other women in this second category are not as young as the first ones described and have been actively involved in political parties since the 1980s and the Kanak political struggle for independence they experienced as young adults. They also have a culture of activism within their own families or social and political networks. Unlike the elected women belonging to the first category described above, however, they have little education and have never occupied permanent jobs. On the other hand, they also stem from pro-independence families and have been permanent residents of Ouvea since they were adults. This may explain why their attitudes significantly differ from those of the former category and are in fact much more similar to those of younger women deputies. These women also speak French and could – of course – technically speak publicly but despite what several of them regularly say, they hardly ever express themselves during meetings and never do so when it comes to criticizing an idea or contesting it. What is even more striking is the way these women oppose politics and custom when speaking, even if their attitude during Council meetings is much like the ones they have during customary ceremonies: they never sit next to men, they look down when men are talking, etc. Unlike the longterm activists, the way in which they take part in the council assemblies, especially when it comes to public speaking, shows how difficult they find it to escape more customary social patterns. I believe that… as a women, in the institutions, I must not forget that I am the kanak woman… I must not be above men …, I must admit that the parity was brought up here by white people, but, Kanak women must be discreet … when it comes to speaking, I must never forget that, as a Kanak woman, I must be discrete in front of men. (C. Adjouniope, 2009)

What Parity Does to Social Relationships Dealing with Gender Standards The above-cited woman states the importance of customary gender standards and admits facing difficulties in overcoming them within the council arena. However, she considers that, in this arena at least, women should

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be able to experience equality between men and women. Some women deputies hence attempt (not without difficulty) to get away from this domination, at least in their role as elected assembly members. This is precisely what this woman tells us when describing the preparation of the Festival of Melanesian Arts that occurred in Ouvea in October 2010: C.A.: The mayor said: ‘C. This needs to be done!’; It is true that, after all, this is my duty! But …people who do the job are old… so, for me it is… [silence]. Us, Kanak people, you have no right to tell an old person what to do, but it is my duty! This is my function… … it’s hard. When the Festival was over, I went down there and did a customary gesture to them, in order to thank them… Because, as a woman… … They are old men! I can’t tell them what to do! But …its my duty! This is what I’m supposed to do! It is because of the work group I belong to that I have to do so! And when I’m finished, I went down there to apologize! …that was to show them that I am humble …, to ask them to forgive me [a customary gesture to apologize for having temporarily changed the social hierarchy] because I sent them to do this, do that, while they were old men, you know, they’re like my fathers… you know… (C.A., 1 October 2010, Hwadrilla, Ouvea)

C.A. very clearly explains that, as she was a second deputy of the council assembly, the logistics of the set-up of the festival was of her responsibility. But we can also understand here to what extent, as a rather young person and a woman, she was embarrassed about telling older men – towards whom she is expected to show signs of respect on a double level, as their junior and a woman – what they had to do. She nonetheless chose to act according to the expectations of her role as deputy while at the same time complying with specific social mechanisms that underpin customary relations. She chose to use a Kanak practice of humility (to ask for forgiveness). In doing so, she demonstrates that she is not permanently negating her weaker position within the chiefdoms’ hierarchy. Her gesture echoes what the political analyst J. Lagroye wrote about social change (Lagroye 1994). The way this woman acts underlines ‘the outbreak of a new type of social relationships’ mentioned by Lagroye, even if these relationships are still largely clustered around a specific arena that can lead to ‘a juxtaposition of roles’ (Lagroye 1994: 13). The gesture for forgiveness suggests that when it comes to men-women relationships, the main set of references remains custom. The above case therefore illustrates a willingness to change gender relationships and power, starting with the rights available with parity in politics. But, as a type of ‘diagnostic of power’ (Abu Lughold 1990: 41–42), couldn’t it also be an example of the type of resistance women have to face when trying to reconcile two very different social statuses and institutions? In fact, by performing a customary gesture of apology to elders

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for something she was told to do and did, the woman deputy is to some extent resisting a system in which she can’t be a Kanak woman in politics. At the same time, it is hard not to wonder if in so doing, she isn’t also being resilient. Ortner insists on the ‘ambivalences and ambiguities of resistance itself ’ (Ortner 1995: 190) while Leroux et al. warn us about the likelihood of confusion between the two latter concepts (Leroux et al. 2008: 3). Yet it seems that we can consider that, here, the woman deputy is showing attitudes of resistance and resilience at the same time. Very much like a common ground definition of resilience (Gilligan 2000, Cantoni and Lallau 2010, Hassler and Kohler 2014, etc.), theirs includes two conditions: exposure to adversities and a positive adaptation towards change (Leroux et al. 2008: 3). Sticking with this definition, it seems that we can consider that, while resisting a system by finding strategies to deal with her two social roles at the same time – combining references from both institutions – the woman deputy is also being resilient. Further analysis based on Holling’s definition of resilience also leads us to understand that in this very situation, resilience doesn’t only arise from the woman deputy but also from the organization of gendered relationship itself as ‘resilience determines the persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb change of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist’ (Holling cited in Folke 2006: 254). The woman deputy was able to do what her commitments required her to do – organize the set-up for the festival – but her customary apology shows that once out of the political arena, and specifically with regard to men-women relationships, the system ‘persists’ (Folke 2006).

Distinguishing Social Spheres With regard to the two categories of women councillors described above, we can indeed observe a certain distinction in behaviours. Women councillors will indeed act differently depending on whether they are within the political arena or at home in a more customary situation where they no longer have – with respect to men – the equal position they occupy as deputies: What also needs to be said, is that, I, for example …, when I am here [in Ouvea]… I do take part in everything that is linked to Custom and all… and people come and see me for everything that is related to the Province, and I make a distinction between …my status as deputy and my status as a Kanak woman. (J. L.-D., 18 June 2009, Hwadrilla, Ouvea)

Another woman deputy expresses this in similar words:

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Resisting UN Ideals to Make Men and Women Equal in Politics  101 E.T.: It’s like, you know, within our Custom, well, that is how it is, women are not allowed to speak out loud… well, with parity now, we are starting to speak out, but… M.N.:  With parity? Does parity apply to Custom as well? E.T.:  No, no [she laughs] only… It started in politics and politics influences a bit… it is here now, and we always get told, well, now parity is here so women also get their say, and, but, for everything that is linked to Custom, it stays, within Custom… When we are asked to speak out, well this is when we give our opinion. (E.T., 30 April 2009, Ouvea)

Another woman councillor argues: Well I believe we shouldn’t exaggerate too much either… For example, I stand here as a woman-deputy, but I know that, at home, I first have to do my job and I know that, when I am a mother, I first have to stand up for my responsibilities at home and, once this is done, this is when I will come here at the council. Because I am a Kanak woman you know! It doesn't mean a lot to go up there [at the council building] and blah blah blah and down there [at home] nothing happens! The very first things to do are at home! That’s the basis. (C.A., 11 October 2010, Ouvea)

The question here is who is resisting what? Are women deputies resisting some type of social pressure which wants them to remain in the domestic arena? Or, on the contrary, and here we can consider Leroux et al.’s definition of resilience, are women deputies showing resilient capacities which are progressively leading them towards standard ideals of men and women equal in politics? In this perspective, the two concepts of resistance and resilience are not exclusive from each other. On the contrary, resistance is almost one of the first steps in the whole ‘dynamic and multi-dimensional process of adaptation to adverse and/or turbulent changes in human, institutional, and ecological systems across scales’ (Almedom 2008: 11). Is resistance (acknowledging a system in which women are dominated by men) a condition for resilience (a state of equilibrium to come, in which men and women would be equal in politics)?

Does the Feminization of Political Life Help Reaching Sex Equality? If these women like to remind us that their first obligations are domestic, it is precisely because in the line of women’s significant involvement in the political struggle for independence, and more widely in the critique of male domination, they recognize and can measure what a big step it was

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to be able to become council members. While conducting an interview, one of them first acknowledged the arrival of Kanak women in institutions but also described it as a ‘deep upheaval for Kanak men’. She even added that this process was ‘dangerous, because it goes fast, too fast and that it [wa]s creating negative consequences’. The reaction of self-censorship is what N.-C. Mathieu was describing as the dominated consciousness where the oppressed care more about their oppressors than their own freedom (Mathieu 1991, 2002). This Kanak woman, like many others, has been socialized to taking care of men and to listening to them to such an extent that she first seems to worry about how affected they might be by women’s arrival in politics. From this perspective, which in fact reflects men’s point of view, the arrival of Kanak women in politics is perceived as damaging for their domestic and educative duties. It can lead to the integration of egalitarian claims and practices in domestic relationships as well as in customary politics. Various social issues, in particular school withdrawal, impoverishment of youth, alcoholism and addiction to cannabis are said to be linked to the current evolution of gender relationships, just like mixedsex schools, higher studies and employment were earlier. The issue here is what is commonly referred to as the ‘deregulation’ of custom which organizes sexual-gendered distinctions of work within the domestic area. Even if this deregulation doesn’t only concern the presence of Kanak women in politics, it is surely thought by many (also by women) to play a role in this situation. However, and in spite of a very deep and strong interiorization of men’s point of view, the implementation of ‘individual tactics to deal with codes and constraints’ (Lepinard 2007: 146) leads us to think that Kanak women councillors are currently working at establishing themselves in the arena of political republican institutions where they never used to belong. In doing so, they are also helping to (re)define their status in other areas of social activities, both public and private, and in particular in custom.

Conclusion Since 2004, the French parity law, or ‘Law n° 2000-493, 6th June 2000 aiming to facilitate an equal access of both men and women to elective mandates and functions’, made women’s (especially Kanak women) presence in New Caledonian institutions compulsory and systematic. By doing so, it was a vector of change for local political practices. Imposing quotas of women on candidacy lists led to a situation where Kanak women now have access to political functions with high responsibilities, in particular in Council and Province assemblies, which are the decision-making bodies where most choices with significant impacts on the population are made.

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A report on the implementation of the law showed that the newly elected women were already involved in their local political life or were members of non-governmental groups and charities. It also indicated that these women were rather young, with higher degrees diplomas, that they had fewer children and accumulated fewer political mandates than elected men (Bargel et al. 2008). These characteristics are not sufficient to describe the sociology of Ouvea women councillors since some of them are retired and others have never studied. Of course, the very limited number of women deputies on Ouvea local council – eight – when my fieldwork was conducted may explain the fact that figures describing the situation in Ouvea differ somewhat from those for New Caledonia. Today, the concept of parity itself goes beyond the electoral scene. It also helps women to establish themselves in professional backgrounds and hence significantly contributes to the rise of a political awareness that questions gender relationships in Kanak society. However, if the implementation of this law seems to have increased the awareness of women’s rights in general, we can see the various forms of resistance that Union Calédonienne political party women councillors from Ouvea have to overcome in order to conciliate two roles they consider contradictory: behaving as subordinates within custom and acting as councillors or deputies in the Republican political arena of the local council (commune). Seen from this perspective, these signs are those of local resistance; firstly, to a law that was clearly not elaborated for the New Caledonian context and Kanak people in the first place; and, more generally, to a model that attempts to standardize social hierarchies. Additionally, the fact that some women actively encourage younger women to get involved in politics indicates that this experience can be valorized as well as valorizing. As this chapter tried to demonstrate, ‘equality’ for men and women in politics implies more than just a declaration, especially when it comes to a highly hierarchized context such as Ouvea in New Caledonia. However, by encouraging women’s participation in the political life of their country, the French parity law offers a new register of identification, that of women in politics who can talk publicly and defend their opinion. This law now allows and encourages women to occupy this status. In that sense, it has directly impacted Kanak men-women relationships. Together with the rise of both the number of women with permanent jobs and the level of education of younger women, in particular Kanak women, the French parity law is part of the on-going renegotiations of gendered relationships (Salomon 2000b: 304; 2003: 165; Nicolas 2012). Within the Republican institutions themselves, it shows a renewal of political staff and practices. In conclusion, stating that women deputies are resilient when dealing with gender standards does teach us about ‘resilience’ as a scientific concept

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and not as a political, rhetorical or operational tool (Metzer and Robert 2013: 25). By helping us to focus on ‘dealing with’ a situation rather than on ‘being confronted to’ it, it enables us to observe, describe and analyse social changes as on-going processes. In other words, ‘resilience’, provided we know ‘who says that there is resilience, when and why’ (Reghezza-Zitt et al. 2012: 13), can be a resourceful tool. It seems particularly appropriate when it comes to describing strategies locally set up to move beyond the conflicts linked to the confrontation of different political and legal worldviews and systems, here gendered relationships and equality in politics.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the maire and all the deputies of Ouvea, especially the women deputies for their generous interviews on their experience as politicians. I would also like to thank the panel participants for making discussions so interesting that we decided to work towards publication. Thank you also to Laurent Dousset and Martha Macintyre for carefully reading previous versions of this chapter, and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments. Funding for fieldwork trips to Ouvea Island in 2009 and 2010 and funding to the 2012 ESfO conference were provided by the CREDO (UMR 7308, Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania; Aix-Marseille University, CNRS and EHESS). Mélissa Nayral holds a PhD in anthropology from the French University of Aix-Marseille. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania, Marseilles) and teaches anthropology at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University. Her particular interests are New Caledonia (Ouvea and the Northern Province in particular) and its population, more specifically the Kanak people, and the political practices taking place in this unique on-going decolonization process. The research she has conducted so far is linked to political anthropology and deals with governance, controversies, polemics, decision-making processes, articulation between the Republican institutions and chiefdoms, the emergence of new elites, and gender. She is also interested in the practices of ethnography and has recently conducted research on land governance issues and sense of place in a local Natural Park in New Caledonia as well as a comparative study of the politics in marine governance issues in several French overseas territories (La Réunion, New Caledonia, Mayotte and La Guadeloupe).

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Note   1. Original text in French: ‘transform[ation](d)es rapports sociaux et politiques à l’intérieur même de la société Calédonienne’ (Demmer and Trépied, 2017: 13).

References Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women’, American Ethnologist 17(1): 41–55. Almedom, A. 2008. ‘Resilience Research and Policy/Practice Discourse in Health, Social, Behavioral, and Environmental Sciences over the Last Ten Years’, African Health Sciences 8: S5–S13. Bargel, L., S. Guyon and I.-S. Rettig. 2008. Mission d’évaluation de l’application de la loi sur la parité en Nouvelle-Calédonie, en Polynésie française, et à Wallis et Futuna (avril-juin 2007). Nouméa: Secrétariat général de la Communauté du Pacifique (C.P.S.). Bereni, L. and A. Revillard. 2002. ‘Des quotas à la parité?: Féminisme d’État et représentation politique (1974 2007)’, Genèses 7: 5–23. Cantoni, C. and B. Lallau. 2010. ‘La résilience des Turkana: Une communauté de pasteurs kenyans à l’épreuve des incertitudes climatiques et politiques’, Développement durable et territoires 2(1): 1–19. Demmer, C. and C. Salomon. 2013. ‘Droit coutumier et indépendance kanak’, Vacarme 64: 1–6. Demmer, C. and B. Trépied. 2017. La coutume Kanak dans l’Etat: Perspectives coloniales et postcoloniales sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie. Paris: L’Harmattan. Dornoy, M. 1984. Politics in New Caledonia. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Folke, C. 2006. ‘Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social-ecological Systems Analyses’, Global Environmental Change 16: 253–67. Gilligan, R. 2000. ‘Adversity, Resilience and Young People: The Protective Value of Positive School and Spare Time Experiences’, Children and Society 14: 37–47. Gindre-David, C. 2008. Essai sur la loi du pays calédonienne: La dualité de la source législative dans l’État unitaire français. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hassler, U. and N. Kohler. 2014. ‘The Ideal of Resilient Systems and Questions of Continuity’, Building Research and Information 42(2): 158–67. Lagroye, J. 1994. ‘Être du métier’, Politix 7(28): 5–15. Lepinard, É. 2007. ‘Féminiser, égaliser, inclure’, Travail, genre et sociétés 18: 143–46. Leroux, M. and M. Théorêt, R. Garon. 2008. ‘Liens heuristiques entre la réflexion sur la pratique et la résilience des enseignants en zones défavorisées’, Travail et formation en éducation 2: 2–11. French Law n° 2000-493, 6th June 2000 tendant à favoriser l’égal accès des femmes et des hommes aux mandats électoraux et aux fonctions électives.

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Mathieu, N.-C. 1991. ‘Quand céder n’est pas consentir’, nn N.-C. Mathieu (eds), L’anatomie politique: catégorisations et idéologies du sexe. Paris: Côté-femmes, pp. 131–225.  . 2002. ‘De la conscience dominée des femmes’, Les cahiers du GRIF 29(1): 73–75. Metzger, P. and J. Robert. 2013. ‘Elementos de reflexion sobre la resiliencia urbana: usos criticables y aportes potenciales’, Territorios 28: 21–40. Miroux, D. 2010. Parlons iaai. Paris: L’Harmattan. Mossuz-Lavau, J. 2002. ‘La parité en politique, histoire et premier bilan’, Travail, genre et sociétés 7(1): 41. Naepels, M. 2010. ‘Epilogue’, in E. Faugère and I. Merle (eds), La Nouvelle-Calédonie, vers un destin commun? Paris: Karthala, pp. 245–53. Nicolas, H. 2010. ‘Emporter un diplôme dans son sac: Les transformations de la socialisation sexuée à Lifou (1945-2004)’, in E. Faugère and I. Merle (eds), La Nouvelle-Calédonie, vers un destin commun? Paris: Karthala, pp. 225–44.  . 2012. ‘La fabrique des époux: Approche anthropologique et historique du mariage, de la conjugalité et du genre (Lifou, Nouvelle-Calédonie)’. PhD thesis, submitted to the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I. Ortner, S. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173–93. Reghezza-Zitt, M., S. Rufat, G. Djament-Tran, A. Le Blanc and S. Lhomme. 2012. ‘What Resilience Is Not: Uses and Abuses’, Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography: 1–15. Salomon, C. 1998. ‘La personne et le genre au Centre-Nord de la Grande Terre (Nouvelle Calédonie)’, Gradhiva 23: 81–100.  . 2000a. ‘Hommes et femmes, harmonie d’ensemble ou antagonisme sourd?’, in A. Bensa and I. Leblic (eds), En Pays Kanak. Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 311–38.  . 2000b. ‘Les femmes kanakes face aux violences sexuelles et domestiques: Le tournant judiciaire des années 1990’, Le Journal des anthropologues 82: 287–307.  . 2003. ‘Quand les filles ne se taisent plus: un aspect du changement post-colonial en Nouvelle-Calédonie’, Terrain 40: 133–50. Salomon, C. and C. Hamelin. 2008. ‘Challenging Violence: Kanak Women Renegotiating Gender Relations in New Caledonia’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 9(1): 29–46.  . 2010. ‘Vers un changement des normes de genre’, in E. Faugere and I. Merle (eds), La Nouvelle-Calédonie, vers un destin commun? Paris: Karthala, pp. 203–24. Senat Coutumier. 2014. ‘Charte du Peuple Kanak – Socle commun des valeurs et principes fondamentaux de la civilisation Kanak’. http://www.senat-coutumier. nc/phocadownload/userupload/nos_publications/charte.pdf

5

Independence from Independence History, Landownership and Politics in South Malekula, Vanuatu ♦l♦

Laurent Dousset

O

ne evening in the late 1990s, in the shade of a Port Vila kava bar, two men were discussing the possibility of a development in Vanuatu that would match and even surpass similar ambitions in London, New York, Singapore or Dubai. The two men were dreaming of building a city of a new kind, set in a modern world and in sharp contrast with their otherwise struggling country. The city would have its own borders and mint its own currency. Its security force, dressed in flashy uniforms, would march under a new flag. It would be built around a harbour so vast that it could accommodate the largest vessels and become the ultimate maritime hub of the Pacific. The city would also be equipped with an international airport accommodating the world’s biggest planes and welcoming thousands of tourists and businessmen. The dirt tracks linking villages would give way to large sealed roads, and enormous power plants would make it possible to light the streets at night. Visitors would enjoy unrivalled seven-star hotels, and suspension bridges would enable them to move from one part of the city to another. An international university and renowned boarding schools would cater for students, and a hospital employing prominent surgeons and equipped with the most recent technological innovations would help to lessen humankind’s physical misery. The city would become a

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financial hub, attracting investors and making profits. Coconut and cocoa plantations would be ripped out to make way for ostentatious private villas, well-equipped workshops and modern industries. It would be the city, the state of tomorrow, ahead of anything that had ever been dreamed of in Vanuatu, the Pacific, or the world. Far from being limited to infrastructure, business, development and science alone, the ambitions of this city would also include a new kind of social project. The politics of equity and equality, facilitated by unprecedented abundance and prosperity, would be the foundation of its philosophy. It would meet everyone’s needs and eliminate discrimination. It would be governed by the imperative of abolishing social and cultural differences. It would be a place where distinctions between locals and foreigners had no meaning, and where skin colour became a question of mere aesthetics. Melanesians would either be employed in positions of responsibility or become the happy beneficiaries of the immeasurable wealth produced, cheerfully collaborating through reflection and light-hearted efforts with visiting scientists, engineers and businessmen. Whether this discussion happened the way it has been depicted above is not certain. Whether these two men’s futurist dreams were established right from their first meeting, or whether they progressively evolved thereafter is another question. What is certain, on the other hand, is that people believe that the discussions did occur, and the identities of these two men are also undeniable, as are the consequences of their deliberations for the community they targeted: the villages of Lamap, in the southern part of Malekula Island in Vanuatu. The meeting and subsequently many other such meetings did take place and involved at least two men who were well known in this Pacific country. The first was the late Frenchman Gilles Daniel, who died in 2015 and was renowned for being some kind of businessman also involved in the political arena in Vanuatu and, some detractors claim, in France. In the past, detractors have accused him of being an international financial crook allegedly wanted, and at one stage arrested, by Interpol. The second was the late Father Gérard Leymang, a Catholic priest and important figure in Vanuatu, who died in 2002. Like other elements of his biography that will need to be stressed, it is significant that he was born in Lamap itself, in 1937, in the above-mentioned target community, albeit from a father whose ancestor had migrated to the area from a more northern region of the island. He is still remembered today as an important actor during the political movements preceding independence in 1980. But he is also and more importantly – at least for the problems addressed in this chapter – highly respected for defending the interests of the francophone and Catholic community of Vanuatu more generally, that is, the areas and

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villages occupied by the French during the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides from 1906 till independence. What an astounding encounter this must have been; one between a ‘financial crook’ and a Catholic priest. What could have motivated these two figures to imagine a new world together, and soon after to succeed in involving the entire community of South Malekula in this dream? And above all, what were the consequences of this dream for the community itself and how could it ever have been taken seriously? Let us look at this with no further ado. It is tempting to explain the story as an unfolding of the fairly classic pattern of the long and intensively discussed notion of cargo cults (for 1 example Harding 1967, Lindstrom 1993, Jebens 2004, etc.), and reflect upon it as a tale about the emergence of a vision preparing the Kingdom of God: millenarianism (Worsley 1970, Lindstrom 2004). But how could a French businessman and a Catholic priest’s involvement be accounted for? How can the fact be explained that, very early on, many doubting local voices were heard in the community itself? How can it be explained that the two men’s dream united, divided and then reunited the 1500 or so inhabitants of the Lamap area? This chapter will thus attempt to offer a different kind of analysis; one that departs from cargo cult explanations and from some of the usual conclusions suggested by observers of the Melanesians’ and other Pacific peoples’ assumed drive for the ‘invention of tradition’ (i.e. Keesing and Tonkinson 1982, Babadzan 2009, etc.). It will suggest avenues for reconsidering these social dynamics, which are too often depicted as having as their sole purpose or consequence the emergence of new local elites, new political orders and new economic divisions (Babadzan 2009). Instead, I will consider the above-mentioned dream, which soon turned into a project, as forms of multi-layered rationales of resistance and of resilience, as well as expressions of resistance towards processes of resilience. In doing so, we will follow Ortner’s (1995: 180) advice and ‘show that an understanding of political authenticity, of the people’s own forms of inequality and asymmetry, is not only not incompatible with an understanding of resistance but is in fact indispensable to such an understanding’. I therefore suggest that in one and the same community, although sharing past experiences of domination and collectively struggling to gain common expressions and adherence to practices and structures in the domain of political organization, different and sometimes contradictory forms of resistance and of resilience coexist. Moreover, this coexistence, articulating one process with or against the other, reflects internal divisions based on diverging interpretations of the past. While the actors themselves orient their material and immaterial forms of resistance towards the State of Vanuatu, which

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they believe to be materially, intellectually and culturally alienating, these resistances rather reflect internally differentiated and antagonistic processes of and for resilience. The ethnographic material from Malekula allows us herewith to reconsider the notion of resilience and to question the fundamentals that underpin its definition in socio-ecological terms (see the introduction to this volume): the drive towards relative states of equilibrium as an expression of well-being (see Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013). This chapter will illustrate that resilience is not necessarily a property of a ‘system’, but can also – and possibly predominantly as well as in less holistic terms – be understood as the processes dealing with the question of social and political legitimacy. In other words, as we will see, the central point inherent in both, resistance and resilience, is neither the rationale of these processes themselves nor their ultimate goal, but peoples’ ways of dealing with three major questions that reconsider the internal political hierarchy: resisting and being resilient to what, for what reason and by whom? Just as resistance is a ‘diagnostic’ of power (Abu-Lughod 1990: 42), resilience can be understood as a ‘diagnostic’ of the ‘system(s)’ (of political organization) people imagine and aspire to. Necessarily, performances and beliefs in both these domains need to be articulated in the light of each other. We will therefore look at local peoples’ engagements and disengagements as responses to historical and existential uncertainties lying beyond the sole scope of the city project itself. The analysis considers these expressions against their local and national, as well as historical and political, background. What these multi-layered and imbricated forms of resistance and resilience embody are competing interpretations of the local history, and through these divergent visions of contemporary and future forms of social and political organization, which themselves reflect contending modes of being. Before we dive deeper into these complexities, and before a more solid argument can be made, we need to further engage with the two central actors involved at the beginning of ‘Lamap Cité Nouvelle’, as the project came to be known, and to place them within their sociocultural and historical contexts.

Lost Dreams The reasons why Gilles Daniel, the French businessman, became a central figure in the project seem to have been the possible prospects for financial return, be they the incomes produced by the future city or the profits stemming from the promises on investment he would eventually be able to generate. Rumour has it that soon after the initial discussions, most probably in the year 1999, he had entered into negotiations with national and international investors and banks, marketing an unprecedented

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Figure 5.1 Father Gérard Leymang’s grave in Lamap, next to his clan house. Note the different varieties of croton plants attesting to the person’s importance (photograph by the author, 2011).

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opportunity in a heavenly setting, with its tropical coral beaches and the availability of ‘easily’ accessible land. Unfortunately, we do not know much more, other than rumours, about this central actor in the play. We can merely add here – but will have to come back to this part of the story later – that during the initial stages of the project Father Leymang’s family, back in South Malekula, had adopted Gilles Daniel as a clan member and therefore in 2015 buried his body on the island next to Father Leymang’s own grave (Figure 5.1). Understanding why Father Leymang acted as he did in imagining and later actively promoting the utopian ‘Lamap Cité Nouvelle’ is more complex. Leymang had been a friend and collaborator of Walter Lini, the leader of the Vanuatu independence movement in the 1970s. Leymang was chief minister of the New Hebrides from 1978 to 1979 during the AngloFrench Condominium and invited Lini to join the government of national unity he was forming. Walter Lini, an Anglican priest, became chief minister of the still colonial New Hebrides from 1979 to 1980 and was Vanuatu’s first independent prime minister (also see Wittersheim 2009). Father Leymang is reported to have been a highly religious man preoccupied with the destiny of his community of South Malekula, Vanuatu – then the New Hebrides – and the Pacific more generally. But he also underlined the importance of maintaining a traditional Melanesian culture and what he called the ‘mentality of the New Hebrides’ (Leymang 1969). He considered that his culture should and could cohabit with Western ideas on education, democracy and the emergence and control of state institutions, provided the process of Christianization took a less alienating path and was separated from the principles of the Westernization of life-ways. He was highly sensitive to the problems that the confrontation of his fellow citizens’ ‘mentality’ with Western structures of thought and practice could produce. With respect to education, and while emphasizing how much the latter was a key to human, political and economic emancipation, Leymang also wrote that [education] can in particular, and although its aim is to socially promote the human being, become a (conscious or unconscious) alienating factor created by men of the Church and educating nations [i.e. France, the United Kingdom and Australia]; it then resembles badly digested food or a medicine blindly absorbed in an overdose, inducing psychological and sociological illnesses. (Leymang 1969: 242; my translation)

He believed that the central problem lay in the fact that the ‘mentality’ of his fellow Ni-Van citizens, as the inhabitants of Vanuatu are called today, is based on a conception of the spiritual and temporal domains different

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from that conveyed by the West and, in particular, its Christian Church. He considered that this discrepancy was the reason for the collapse (without replacement) of traditional culture. The teleological dualism between the spiritual and the temporal is incomprehensible for a Melanesian, whose traditional life is based on agriculture. His entire religious life is a function of an economy of consumption. Women’s biological cycle, the biological cycles of land and vegetation tied to the movements of stars, the agrarian life of the Hebrides seem to be a great solidary system whose structure is expressed in terms of cycles. (Leymang 1969: 250; my translation) How can people of the New Hebrides be given the opportunity to become not Western-style Christians, but Christians of the Pacific who do not abjure their race or tradition in order to remain an authentic Christian, and thus without ceasing either to be people of the New Hebrides. The problem is substantial, considering the traditionalist conceptions of the Church that expresses itself through dogmatisms and moralism that do not facilitate the adaptation of Christianity to the Pacific mentality. (Leymang 1969: 243; my translation)

We cannot, he warns, build a ‘Church on such fragile grounds as the systematic Westernization of the people of the New Hebrides’, and he asks further, ‘what kind of people of the Hebrides do we want to shape?’ (Leymang 1969: 245). Believing that the country and its people were not ready to imagine an integrated way of combining this traditional Melanesian culture with a home-made Christianity and a modern state apparatus, he was convinced that Vanuatu should claim autonomy from the colonial powers and only gradually move towards complete independence. As we will see below, this way of thinking, which stood in radical opposition to the views of his friend and colleague Walter Lini, had the effect of distancing the two leaders, but also had important consequences, in particular on the Lamap inhabitants’ representation of and relationship with the state and with independence in general. In summary, for Leymang himself, Lamap Cité Nouvelle was largely a project that emerged from the frustration his opposition to Lini and the latter’s perspectives had crystallized. Indeed, in the 1970s, Lini and Leymang were both active members and leaders of the National Party which was campaigning for independence. However, Lini soon propounded a unifying view of the nation that Father Leymang could not accept. This was because Walter Lini’s slogan – ‘one nation, one language, one religion’ – played down a historical division, strong remnants of which remain in existence today, in particular among older generations: that between francophone, mainly Catholic communities that had been occupied by the French colonial forces and anglophone, mainly Anglican or Presbyterian ones that had experienced the colonial

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presence of the United Kingdom (for accounts concerning these differences, see Bresnihan and Woodward 2002). Lini’s ‘one nation, one people’ left little room for the coexistence of a differentiated colonial history and a different approach to the nation-state and of independence. Hence Father Leymang parted from the National Party and in 1978 became leader of the UCNH party (Union des Communautés des Nouvelles-Hébrides), which attracted supporters from francophone communities and later became the UMP (Union des Partis Modérés). Meanwhile, Lini led the Vanua’aku party. More importantly, UCNH and most of the francophone and Catholic communities continued to believe that independence should be a slow process and that autonomy was a more appropriate concept for the New Hebrides. Lini’s Vanua’aku party, on the other hand, demanded the immediate departure of the colonial powers. These are, of course, general tendencies, and situations were locally more complex. Even in Lamap, Leymang’s home community, which still remains firmly Catholic and French-speaking today, a small number of families were loyal to what was to become the Vanua’aku party during the struggle for independence. These were also families who had sold most of their lands to settlers, who had converted to Protestantism, and for whom immediate independence, and thus rapid recovery of their means of existence, was an important reason for adhering to Lini’s views. During the independence movements, these families provided the Vanua’aku party with lists of local leaders who shared Leymang’s views and would be arrested soon after Independence Day, when Papua New Guinea soldiers arrived in Lamap with a contingent of the Vanuatu Defence Force. Many of these men remained imprisoned for several months on the island of Santo. As a journalist stated in the Nouvelles Calédoniennes of 3 May 2002, a few days after his death, ‘Gérard Leymang’s wounds never really healed’. Indeed, he was a strong supporter of the idea of autonomy and progressive independence and, as his nephew testifies today, he strongly resented the intervention of Lini’s troops in his home community, Lamap. A man who had experienced the arrival of Lini’s men and Papua New Guinea troops in Lamap spoke of it in the following terms: They first arrested all the men and kept local leaders imprisoned for several months and later sent officials to remove equipment the French had left before departing: power generators, tables and chairs in the school and hospital, and even the windows [see Illustration 2]. For us, independence was a disaster, a betrayal. Our own people arrested us, humiliated us. We had to strip and they painted our private parts with yellow paint. We lost everything: our school, our hospital, our pride. (Elder, Lamap 2011, my translation).

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Beyond Lamap, the francophone community had, in the eyes of Leymang and many of Lamap’s inhabitants, become the victim of the struggle for independence which, so they say, divided the country further rather than uniting it, plunged its population into poverty and misery and created a corrupt and inefficient state. Walking along the airstrip with an elderly Lamap man in 2010, I remember how he turned to the mower lying along on the strip as a heap of rusty, disjointed metal parts, saying: ‘see this mower, look at it: this is the image of independence!’ Whether the picture people paint of the state of Vanuatu is objectively true is not a point of concern here. What matters is that this view of independence in general – and of the moment of independence more particularly – and thus the view many of the inhabitants of Lamap have developed about the state of Vanuatu and its symbol, the capital Port Vila, is one of segregation and disengagement. Independence, Vanuatu and its capital are metaphors for loss and defeat, and are no departure from the former colonial conditions. Furthermore, many of Lamap’s inhabitants suggest that the current situation is in fact worse than that experienced under French governance. A senior man and clan chief of Lamap once told me that the struggle was now to ‘become independent from independence’. Taking into consideration the defeat he experienced during the independence movement, the wounds that never healed concerning the abusive treatment he thought his fellow citizens of Lamap and other

Figure 5.2 The remnants of the old French colonial school of Lamap (photograph by the author, 2010).

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francophone communities had endured because of Lini’s people, and his fight for Vanuatu to remain French-speaking, we now understand better why Leymang ended up discussing the Lamap Cité Nouvelle with Gilles Daniel. Father Leymang still had a dream… a dream that has remained vivid in many of Lamap people’s minds today.

Arguing about Local History In the period beginning in 2000, Gilles Daniel, Father Gérard Leymang and others who had joined the project, such as Romain Batik, a Lamap-born former minister for education, made several visits to Lamap, discussing the project with the local people who enthusiastically engaged with it, at least at the start. All the clan leaders signed their approval for their lands to be used for the construction of Lamap Cité Nouvelle (see also Figure 5.4 below). Huts were erected to house the new city’s authorities. Coconut trees were cut down to make room for new buildings (Figure 5.3), and young people were sent to Port Vila to be trained in policing and security. They

Figure 5.3 The remnants of what was to become the University of Lamap Cité Nouvelle, standing on land on which coconut trees had been chopped down (note that coconut trees, through the production of copra, are people’s principal source of income in Lamap). In 2014, the house was burned down by an angry landowner still waiting for compensation from the project leaders for the loss of income incurred by the chopping down of his coconut trees (photograph by the author, 2011).

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were to become the guards of this new country’s borders. In Port Vila, the project’s leaders established an official office and employed staff – all of them Lamap-born – for accounting, designing the infrastructure and architecture of the future city, and lobbying investors and politicians to support the project. People today remain unanimous in their view that it was a good project, a project for development, for unification, a project that would overcome the backwardness caused by independence and Port Vila’s administrative inefficiency. To reach such a consensus, Gilles Daniel and Gérard Leymang first had to define the nature and structure of landownership on the Lamap Peninsula, since the new city was to be built on the villagers’ space for housing and gardening. Indeed, landownership had undergone considerable upheaval with the arrival of missionaries, settlers and the French delegation from the late nineteenth century onwards. I will come back to some of these points in more detail, but let me here for the moment underline that land had been taken or bought from the local people, leaving many families with insufficient space for their subsistence economies. After independence, most of this land would be handed back to the original owners’ descendants; such was the expectation. However, the arrival of the

Figure 5.4 A Navsagh company certificate of membership signed 24 April 2000 (photograph by the author, 2011).

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missionaries on the coast (Monnier 1991) also attracted a large number of families and groups that had been living inland. These migrants progressively married into the local families and erected their own men’s houses (Batu in the Port Sandwich language) with their ritual spaces (Nasara), on the peninsula, thus claiming nearly a century later to have become locals. Adding to these processes the many intermarriages and adoptions that had occurred between families and clans, the land question and the problem of identifying the ‘original’ owners were turning into a nightmare. The forms, of resistances – sometimes violent, sometimes expressed through alleged practices of sorcery (Dousset 2015, 2016) – adopted by some clans against those that claimed an authentic and thus dominant status became peoples’ everyday subject of conversation and anxiety. Envisaging solutions to these problems and attempting to refocus the vitality of resistance towards the state, Father Gérard Leymang and his followers had what in the first instance looked like a simple but fair idea: re-establishing what they believed to have been the structure of the regional integration of lineages and clans before colonization, in a region that went far beyond the sole Lamap Peninsula, the Navsagh, and redistributing as equally as possible user rights to – and not necessarily ownership of – the lands of this former Navsagh region among the clans currently inhabiting the peninsula. The philosophy behind this idea was largely inspired by the ‘Melanesian Way’ suggested by the politician and philosopher Bernard Narokobi (1980) for Papua New Guinea: a democratic and collectivist model articulating a profound Melanesian identity with infrastructures and means accessible thanks to modernity. It also reflected Leymang’s vision for a Christianity adapted to the Melanesian ‘mentality’ as mentioned earlier. In accordance with the strong collectivist flavour of Leymang’s idea, a company was incorporated called Navsagh, the latter being the collective owner of the lands. Each clan would hold shares, but not actual land, in this incorporation and would receive, according to needs, user rights on plots as defined by the act creating Navsagh. Clan leaders signed the document establishing the Navsagh company and subsequently received a bilingual (Bislama-French) certificate of ownership of shares. The front of the certificate identified the clan and the number of shares it owned (Figure 5.4), while on the back were listed the individual family households with the stretches of land to which they had rights of access and use. Although in 2000 all the clan leaders had signed to become members of Navsagh and through this confirmed their adherence to the Lamap Cité Nouvelle project, a few years later, and in particular after Gérard Leymang’s death in 2002, people gradually identified the problems inherent to the project (I will come back to these later) and questioned the very existence of

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Navsagh as a possible account of the past and a vision for the future. After the death of the project’s leader, it was due to growing resistance by part of the population towards the idea of Lamap Cité Nouvelle and the Navsagh company behind it, and the attempt to regain a certain resilience based on alternative interpretations of the past, that the project was abandoned altogether eight or nine years after the initial discussions. Differing interpretations of the peninsula’s former social and territorial structure exacerbated the already underlying conflicts between clans with respect to access to land (Dousset 2015) and crystallized two visions of and for Lamap. Greater clarity is necessary to develop these conflicting historical visions, which were responsible for the breakdown of the short-lived unity achieved by the community through Navsagh, before returning to the project itself, its local development and the problems it was thought to generate. The idea behind Navsagh has already been mentioned above. In prehistoric times, before white people settled in Lamap, so the supporters of the idea claim, all the tribes and clans of a much larger area than the sole peninsula heavily interacted on a regular basis and together constituted a sociocultural and religious bloc. One of the main protagonists of the Navsagh incorporation, in an attempt to legitimize its foundation, underlined that the reality of this larger socio-territorial entity had even been recognized by the French authorities who had even started mapping its contours. Unfortunately, I have as yet been unable to find either these maps or any note testifying to their existence. Within this large Navsagh area, people are thought to have exchanged goods and spouses, talked similar languages, practised identical rituals, and to have been able to move and migrate fairly freely within the entire region: a kind of collective and large-scale principle of mutual accessibility to resources well before colonization. Among other things, the unity of Navsagh was based on the adherence to, and performance of the rituals of the grade society called Namangi. The latter allowed men to progressively climb the ladder of social, spiritual and ritual privilege through the organization of rituals in which large numbers of pigs were exchanged and sacrificed (see Deacon 1934 for the culturally similar area of South-West Bay; Guerard 1994). The Namangi ritual and men’s capacity to elevate themselves in these socio-religious grades were independent from landownership. They solely relied on these men’s ability to redistribute wealth (predominantly pigs) they acquired through the promises of magical and military support and the acknowledgment of debts. The last grade a man could attain, just before turning entirely into a spirit himself, was that of the Namal. This was a highly spiritual ‘chief ’, who dominated the profane clan chiefs and landowners, usually protected by heavily armed warriors, and who had the prerogative to practise sorcery and

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cannibalism (Dousset 2016). One of the last and certainly the most powerful of these high-graded chiefs, called the Namal of Bangrere, was killed by the French in 1896. He was a man depicted as having been landless, but also as an excellent speaker, negotiator and businessman. Through marriage, debts and services he was able to progressively acquire the necessary pigs to complete the grade rituals and to weave a network of interdependence that criss-crossed all the clans of the area. ‘You do not kill, and you even protect those that owe you pigs’, people of Lamap underline, illustrating the methods through which this Namal had acquired his position. But people in Lamap also recall that this chief soon became too powerful and ruthless, killing and eating other chiefs’ – the landowners’ – sons. His fellow high-graded chiefs and the landowners plotted to organize his assassination, informing the missionaries of his whereabouts and promising them support. The unpublished memoirs of Lucienne Bourgeau (1937), wife of the French delegate in Lamap in the 1930s, partly confirms this story: the local people were so frightened of the Namal of Bangrere that they ‘returned to paganism for 15 years’, she explains, before the missionaries asked the French army to bomb his stone house. The irony of fate was that the rubble of this Namal’s house was subsequently used to build the official French house of Delegation in Lamap. As a symbol testifying to the satanic aspects and desired end of the chiefly grade system, the missionaries buried the Namal face downwards. Mentioning the rise and demise of the Namal of Bangrere is of some importance for our story. It has already been mentioned above that Father Gérard Leymang’s ancestor was not a local landowner but had migrated to the peninsula from the north in the late nineteenth century. He was a ‘Man-Cam’, a foreigner, as the inhabitants of Lamap describe these people today in Bislama. The Namal of Bangrere turned out to be this ancestor. The deeds of the Namal of Bangrere, the violence he used to reign and the authority he exerted over his fellow residents, even though he was a landless and indebted Man-Come, have helped to fuel yet another view of the past, one that depicts the collectivist-inspired Navsagh as a fantasy fashioned by the descendants of all these migrants, who are stigmatized today as the same people that blindly adhered to the Lamap Cité Nouvelle project even after Gérard Leymang’s death. Obviously, the supporters of this opposing vision of local history claim that the Man-Cam’s options were limited to actively supporting the idea of Navsagh and Lamap Cité Nouvelle, since these were the only means through which they could possibly gain access to land. Similarly, and as can be imagined, the people who defend this second view are also those who believe themselves to be the descendants of the original clans that inhabited the peninsula well before colonization and thus consider themselves to be its ‘authentic’ owners.

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Their capacity for resilience was required, the truth had to be ascertained, and the former and traditional local clan system re-established. Some time after signing the certificate of membership, they suggested that, after the settlers and missionaries, Navasagh was in fact simply going to turn into a new wave of misappropriation of what they believed to be their legitimate possession. The name Navsagh itself is a misrepresentation, they claim. Stemming from nawus (arm, firearm) and sagh (embark, carry), it simply recalls and confirms the migration of the northern people, carrying firearms, who had arrived in the area soon after the settlement of 2 Europeans in the north. In strong opposition to the large regional collectivist cultural bloc upheld by Navsagh, this second view of the local history depicts an enclosed peninsula owned by three clans or tribes called respectively Bangü, Pnoamb and Lambrü. These are said to have intensively interacted, exchanging women, pigs and services, performing together the rituals of initiation and grading and defending their common territorial borders. What people believe to have been a harmonious cohabitation of the three groups, together jealously defending the peninsula against potential invaders, was shattered when another group called the Haur moving from the north was able to invade the peninsula well before the arrival of the first missionary in 1887. The Haur ended up being adopted by one of the local groups, the Lambrü. A complex story then unfolds with a progressive amalgamation of the Haur and the Lambrü and tales of many wars between the latter and the other two remaining groups of the peninsula. Missionaries were finally able to pacify the situation, possibly around 1910. Since these times, the Haur-Lambrü community, residing on one side of the peninsula, is reminded of its origins through its village’s name, Dravail, literally meaning ‘the people in search of land’.

Testimonies Soon after the initial discussions and the signature of the Navsagh certificates and its charter by the clan leaders of Lamap, Gérard Leymang and Gilles Daniel organized an official launch of the project. According to the people that participated, hundreds of visitors arrived in the peninsula to attend the feast. Along with the villagers, people from Port Vila, including businessmen and politicians, but also people from Australia and France, are said to have attended. It is remembered as an impressive event and a costly and well-organized ceremony. The president of the new Navsagh company made a speech, followed by Gérard Leymang and others, all recalling the importance of developing Lamap in economic as well as political terms. It was important to rethink the country and define it for the people by the

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people. It was necessary to redress the mistakes and injustices of the past, of independence. Lamap was now ready to attain its own independence and to engage with the world on its own feet. To mark the launching of the project, a monument overlooking the bay was erected to forever recall to all, locals and visitors, this historical moment of the origins of Lamap Cité Nouvelle and to praise peoples’ capacity to be resilient and resist the disempowering and standardizing oppression of the state (Figure 5.5). As we will see below, the questions that soon emerged were fundamental: who is resisting what, with what kind of legitimacy and to achieve what kind of resiliency for what nature of material or immaterial benefits? Meanwhile, Gérard Leymang and Gilles Daniel, with other followers they had convinced, established an official office for the project in Port Vila and employed people to contribute to and work in the name of Lamap Cité Nouvelle. One of these employees, a Lamap-born man then living in Port Vila, remembered this in the following terms: One day, Father Leymang invited me to talk with him about the project. He invited me again a few days later, and we met with Gilles Daniel. There were also other people attending the meeting, some politicians from Port Vila and other people. They asked if I wanted to work for Lamap Cité Nouvelle, and I ended up agreeing and started to work for them, in their office.

Figure 5.5 Monument erected for the launching of Lamap Cité Nouvelle, overlooking Port Sandwich Bay (photograph by the author, 2010).

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Independence from Independence  123 Since I had done some training in agriculture, I did work for them in this domain. I planned the extensive culture of rice, water taro, and many other vegetables for Lamap Cité Nouvelle. Father Leymang ended up saying one day that I would become responsible for all agricultural projects in Lamap Cité Nouvelle and that I would manage and supervise all these activities, like a minister. They employed other people, and each had a particular domain to look after: tourism, aquaculture, architecture, transport… (Extract from an interview in Lamap, 2011)

Both in Port Vila and Lamap people started to work frenetically. The formalized context in which it took place, with offices and statutory roles and responsibilities, provided the project with an appearance of realism and weightiness. People chopped down trees to make room for future constructions and erected wooden houses that would, at least temporarily and before constructing more solid buildings, host the headquarters, the police, or the university. Unsurprisingly, the first and main discipline taught at this university would be political science in order to train people to develop ‘good political thinking’. Families abandoned parts of their horticultural land for the sake of the project. At the same time it would, however, be erroneous to believe that adherence to the project was seamless among the entire population. There were cases of scepticism even within families. For example, one of the chiefs started cutting down coconut trees on his clan’s land to make room for a building. His younger brother, however, used his statutory right of blockage and placed a taboo sign (the branch of a particular shrub) on the plot of land, prohibiting his elder brother and chief from proceeding with further changes. The problems soon escalated and became intense following Gérard Leymang’s death in 2002. The realism and seriousness of the project was increasingly questioned. Where was the money that should compensate families for the loss of copra due to the cutting down of coconut trees? Where were the funds to pay for all the work and materials people had voluntarily provided for the first buildings? Who would lead the project in Lamap now that Father Leymang was no longer around? Would it be the president of the Navsagh company, who was a clan leader among others, or was it to be another chief or a council of chiefs? How should this chief be appointed, for how long and with what legitimacy? In the capital Port Vila as well, employees began to question the enterprise and worried about the project’s management, funding and transparency, as well as their capacity to handle such an enterprise. Discourses identical to those that twenty years earlier had motivated the drive for autonomy rather than independence emerged:

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Soon I came to think that Lamap was not really ready for all this. People don’t know how to manage a system, they have no skills to administer such a thing. People have only little schooling, I realized. Lamap is not ready, I thought! The project was good, it was a good project, but the administration and the politics of it were not thought through. (Extract from the interview of an employee of Lamap Cité Nouvelle in Port Vila, Lamap, 2011)

Another employee condemned the lack of transparency: The problem was that we didn’t know if there actually was money, or where the money was hidden. And we didn’t know if it was dirty money, what kind of money. Maybe it came from corruption or crime. Also, everything was secret. I had a computer, in the office in Vila, but I could not see all the things on it and I was not allowed to talk about anything, not even to my family. All was secret.

Finally, and at least from 2003 onwards, the project and its distant Port Vila leaders were thought to be disconnected from the people who owned the resource, who were living off it, and who should have reaped the principal benefits. During the project, there emerged the sense of a kind of elite class living in Port Vila and disconnected from everyday reality in Lamap and a lower class that gradually saw itself as exploited workers and resource providers, as well as betrayed supporters. The lower class of landowners and workers were increasingly convinced they needed to resist their Port Vila fellow men’s ambitions who were managing their lives from a distance. The above employee continues: [The project leaders] should have organized some discussions, some meetings in Lamap, where everyone would say what they thought about the project, about the future of Lamap, and contribute with whatever they can. But this never happened. People should have been able to say how the project should be based on their own culture, their own understanding and needs, their own kastom. But this never happened. It was just organized by some people in Vila that never said anything and that kept everything secret.

In addition to the progressive disengagement and exclusion of the inhabitants of Lamap from the project’s key roles, people also started to get worried about the basic material aspects involved, such as the space they would be able to occupy and use once Lamap Cité Nouvelle was built. If the entire space was to be used for hotels, industry, tourism, aquaculture, transport and so on, where would they be able to live, to have their houses and kitchens, raise their pigs and plant their gardens? Would they be segregated, hidden away from the tourists and businessmen who would

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occupy the peninsula? Was this going to become again – and contrary to the original ideology behind the project – a place of racial and social segregation? Would it engender struggles for existence and survival like those experienced when the days of independence had arrived in 1980? People came to think that it was wrong to engage in such a project while all these problems had not been solved and when, simultaneously, adherence to one of the two versions of local history was starting to split the population into factions, each having a different perspective on the nature of and the reasons for local development. The promised money that never arrived, as well as the various issues mentioned above, which people thought profound and almost insoluble, gradually caused the Lamap Cité Nouvelle project to fade into oblivion, or rather to move from realism to unrealism, from weightiness to shallowness, away from people’s everyday minds and hopes. It became a utopian project, losing peoples’ will for material offerings and physical sacrifices, losing its capacity to become an expression of peoples’ resilience. It had again become a white man’s project, one into which old Father Gérard Leymang was lured by Gilles Daniel without understanding what was actually happening, blinded by his dreams of a kind of Vanuatu that had never been achieved. Some people, young and older, still recall and discuss the issue every now and then, while drinking kava at night with their friends and family or walking past the abandoned huts that represented the future buildings of Lamap Cité Nouvelle. Such is the case with the former president of Navsagh, who not without nostalgia still believes something is possible and necessary: You know, after independence, lots of Australians came to Vanuatu to buy the land. At the same time, we also had many fights in Lamap. Fights on land and other things. So we thought we must create something ourselves, we must resist the White man from Australia and from other places coming to our land and taking it away, otherwise we would lose our place, we would lose everything. With the signature of Navsagh, we promised each other peace, and we promised to look together after the land and after our children. It was good. Still today I think we should do it. The project is not dead. We should still try, and we will reach the aim, one day. If people want to change the name, give it a different name, call it something different than Lamap Cité Nouvelle or Navsagh, that’s all right with me. The Father [Leymang] was able to appease the people and make them work together. The wars and fights had stopped, and now they are back. We do need to try again. But today, this is just my own personal thinking. (Former president of Navsagh, clan leader, Lamap, 2011)

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Resistance and Resilience: Winding Back the Clock The concepts of resistance and resilience present some odd peculiarities, in particular if considered in relation to each other. Both are intrinsically dynamic and contextual, and are therefore never absolute but relative. Resistance is a diagnostic of power and domination, alienation and oppression: resistance to challenge what kind of power with what kind of legitimacy? Resilience is a diagnostic of an anticipated state of being and of social organization, or of the will to recover from loss and unwanted change: but resilience to achieve what kind of status, to invent new forms of collective being or to argue about the interpretation of historical realities? If, as in the socio-ecological approaches, resilience describes the capacity of a social group to regain a shape or structure of relative ‘equilibrium’ after some kind of stress or change, then we are faced with a considerable problem: these supposed states of relative ‘equilibrium’, if ever they were identifiable, are themselves places of internal frictions with their own instabilities, with economic inequalities and political domination, hence stimulating others to resist and to be resilient again. Resilience, which points to a movement and process of (often ‘backwards’) transformation, of rewinding the clock with nostalgia (also see Macintyre’s chapter), embodies as an untold ultimate objective the annihilation of its own dynamic capacity. The concept turns into an oxymoron: a movement for stability, a change crafting the unchangeable. If the concept is to be useful, then it needs to depart from its measure of the absolute and be adapted to describe the social attitudes and practices (not ‘systems’) of which the dynamics are to induce transformations expressing a local vision of potential and ‘legitimate’ stability. Indeed, resilience in these terms tells us nothing about the illusory stability of an abstract system, nor does it explain the dynamics of its people, but reflects the social, cultural and historical references that are mobilized in processes of objectification. Moreover, the example and the various episodes discussed in this chapter illustrate that forms of resistance (towards independence, the state and finally the projects’ leadership and the project itself) necessarily relate (in complementing or counteracting) the objectives of resilient attitudes and ideologies. Political resistances are nourished by social attitudes of, and ideals for resilience. Both notions are herewith intrinsically embedded in the idea of change, as well as in the indigenous motives elicited to explain the necessity for these movements. So, what happened in Lamap and its ‘Cité Nouvelle’ project? What forms and aims of resistance and resilience did the various categories of actors adopt throughout the various stages of the project? What do these forms and narratives tell us about South Malekula more generally? Let us summarize the story again in a few words, now addressing

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more specifically the processes of resistance and resilience as indigenous expressions of verbalized desires for change. First of all, as other chapters of this volume demonstrate (for example Ghasarian), resistance, with the capacity for resilience as its aim, is a place of confrontations between ‘external’ or ‘globalized’ means and ideologies and the incapacity or unwillingness of local people to anticipate their own position within an uncertain possible change. Resistance and resilience are here processes of a glocalized world. The central question however remains: what is external and what is internal, what is exogenous and what is endogenous? This difficulty was central during the independence movement itself, where the ideal of the Nation was embedded in the risk of a change of church (from Catholicism to Protestantism/Anglicanism), or a change of language (from French-Bislama to English-Bislama), and thus a sense that local history and conditions would disappear in the wave of unity and standardization. Local specificities would be absorbed by a more global and nation-building process to which resistance was considered an imperative. However, behind this resistance to a danger of homogenization also lay anxiety: the fear of being incapable of being resilient and of returning to self-management and to organizing everyday life through institutions they had mostly only experienced through observation or dominated participation: the colonial ways of running schools, hospitals, administration, etc. Although independence remained the objective, the people of Lamap thought that Vanuatu was not ready for such a step. The means to combine the ‘Melanesian mentality’, as Father Gérard Leymang called it, with a modern state apparatus, which they nevertheless did not want to miss out on, were not yet in reach. Two decades later, the Lamap Cité Nouvelle project came as a means to finally achieve this goal. It became the metaphor for resistance against the nationalizing and homogenizing ideology independence had conveyed, they thought, without success, without improving peoples’ lives and power, without bringing any form of real independence. It turned into a second, and this time hopefully successful, wave of resistance against independence. This time it was fuelled by the will for resilience to revive a form of community, of social organization, as it had stood before independence and even before colonization, while simultaneously integrating the ‘Melanesian mentality’ and Christianity: a modern but Melanesian city. Soon, however, the project as a form of resistance to the state became a process of internal divisions of various kinds: between an emerging and increasingly delocalized elite, and between groups that had divergent interpretations of the local history, and thus also opposed visions for the future. Was Lamap Cité Nouvelle to become a place of the Melanesian way, the Navsagh, where resources should be shared according to needs and where

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landownership was not a sufficient criterion for political domination, or should Lamap Cité Nouvelle reconstruct former political hierarchies and distinctions and identify the ‘authentic’ owners to become the political leaders? The latter perspective soon became a form of resistance within and against the more general expression of resistance. Indeed, those that demanded the revival of the traditional political hierarchies – which they thought were the only legitimate forms of resilience – had no other choice than to resist and reject the project altogether.

Postscript In 2015 the situation had largely calmed down. High peaks of conflict, with numerous accusations of sorcery, the burning of houses and violent fights between the clans that defended Lamap Cité Nouvelle as well as the Navsagh version of pre-colonial history and those that vindicated the necessity of returning to a more hierarchical and closed mode of local organization, had been dominant for the last few years. People adhering to each of these visions finally went to court, and those defending the idea of a closed peninsula, with its three interrelated clans and a hierarchical political structure based on landownership, won the case. The court had to rule and identify the ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ landowners of the peninsula, and thus had to encourage one or the other interpretation of the local history. The Navsagh group, among them Father Gérard Leymang’s family, lost the case, thus definitively putting an end to the Lamap Cité Nouvelle project. Navsagh came to designate a region and a group of languages spoken within it, without implying any political or corporative objective. The judge deemed that the group opposing Navsagh, who claimed to be among the descendants of the three original clans, had more evidence and that these three clans were the actual landowners. Despite the ruling, the three clans decided that they would not drive the other families from the peninsula. How could they, with all the intermarriages over generations that tied them to each other? What had changed was that the ‘Melanesian Way’ was no longer an option, and cohabitation between the many clans, although difficult, had become possible if the legitimacy of some was acknowledged by the others. A few months before his death, Gilles Daniel returned to Lamap where he had been adopted by Father Leymang’s clan years before and, during a meeting of the recently inaugurated Council of Chiefs, suggested that Lamap should be ruled by a proper Town Council, one solely elected by the people, and not one partly based on the hereditary rights of chiefs. Gilles Daniel was thanked for his suggestion and politely asked by the president

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Independence from Independence  129

of the new Council of Chiefs to leave the meeting. ‘This time’, the president told me, ‘any new project should come from our people. We do not want a second Lamap Cité Nouvelle!’

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the useful comments made by the anonymous reviewers as well as Deborah Pope for carefully reading previous versions of this chapter. The various field trips to Malekula were funded by the ANR (French National Research Agency, project LocNatPol ANR09-BLAN-0320-01), the Labex Corail (French Laboratory of Excellence, project MelaCompa) as well as the CREDO (UMR 7308, Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania; Aix-Marseille University, CNRS and EHESS). Laurent Dousset is Professor at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and member of the CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania, Marseilles). He has carried out research in Aboriginal Australia, in particular in the Western Desert area, investigating kinship, social organization, discourses about first contact situations and social transformations as well as working in the domain of legal anthropology. Since 2010 he has also worked in Vanuatu on the relationship between local and national structures and institutions of power. He has also developed several IT knowledge systems for the social sciences. Among his books are Assimilating Identities: Social Networks and the Diffusion of Sections (Oceania Monographs, 2005), Mythes, missiles et cannibals: Le récit d’un premier contact en Australie (Société des Océanistes, 2011) and The Scope of Anthropology (with S. Tcherkézoff, Berghahn, 2012), as well as a recent biography of an Australian Aboriginal woman, Pictures of My Memory (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016).

Notes   1. See in particular Hermann’s chapter (2004) for a critical perspective of the concept.   2. There is no space to go further into these events here. Simply note that the exchange of weapons for land and other resources has been attested to for North Malekula and that some people even believe that settlers provided locals with firearms from the mission to combat and exterminate other groups.

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References Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women’, American Ethnologist 17(1): 41–55. Babadzan, A. 2009. Le spectacle de la culture: globalisation et traditionalismes en Océanie. Paris: L’Harmattan. Bourgeau, L. 1937. Trois ans chez les Canaques. Unpublished manuscript. Bresnihan, B.J. and K. Woodward. 2002. Tufala Gavman: Reminiscences from the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. Deacon, B. 1934. Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides. London: George Routledge & Sons. Dousset, L. 2015. ‘Sorcery, Poison and Politics: Strategies of Self-Positioning in South Malekula, Vanuatu’, in M. Forsyth and R. Eves (eds), Talking it Through: Responses to Sorcery and Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia. Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 161–79.  . 2016. ‘La sorcellerie en Mélanésie: élicitation de l’inacceptable’, L’Homme 218: 85–115. Guerard, C. 1994. ‘Mana et pouvoir dans les sociétés à hiérarchie de grades (Vanuatu)’, Archives des Science Sociales des Religions 85: 153–74. Harding, T.G. 1967. ‘A History of Cargoism in Sio, North-East New Guinea’, Oceania 38(1): 1–23. Hermann, E. 2004. ‘Dissolving the Self-Other Dichotomy in Western “Cargo Cult” Constructions’, in H. Jebens (ed.), Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 36–58. Jebens, H. (ed.). 2004. Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Keck, M. and P. Sakdapolrak. 2013. ‘What is Social Resilience? Lessons Learned and Ways Forward’, Erdkunde 67(1): 5–19. Keesing, R.M. and R. Tonkinson (eds). 1982. Reinventing Traditional Culture: The Politics of Kastom in Island Melanesia. Special Issue of Mankind 13(4). Leymang, G. 1969. ‘Message chrétien et mentalité néo-Hébridaise’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes 25: 239–55. Lindstrom, L. 1993. Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.  . 2004. ‘Cargo Cult at the Third Millennium’, in H. Jebens (ed.), Cargo, Cult and Culture Critique. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 15–35. Monnier, P. 1991. L’Eglise catholique au Vanuatu, 3: Lamap, Baie Banam et Baie du Sud-Ouest, Malakula. Port Vila: La Maison Mariste. Narokobi, B. 1980. The Melanesian Way. Boroko and Suva: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and Institute of Pacific Studies.

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Ortner, S.B. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173–93. Wittersheim, E. 2009. ‘La solitude du Père Leymang: la question du clergé indigène au miroir des préjugés coloniaux’, in Y. Fer and G. Malogne (eds), Anthropologie du christianisme en Océanie. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 57–77. Worsley, P.M. 1970. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia. London: Paladin.

6

The Reasonableness of Leaders and the Gaming of Mining Incomes in Papua New Guinea ♦l♦

John Burton

T

he generalized idea of resilience, as it relates to Indigenous Peoples, is often understood as the quality of being able to maintain traditional life ways and customs, and especially a distinct ethnicity, in the face of overwhelming and externally imposed change. Nowadays it would not be unexpected to see ‘traditional ecological knowledge and climate change resilience’ in the title of a research initiative – it sounds eminently likely to attract funding. However, if there is indeed resilience in a traditional culture, is it wishful thinking to imagine that this will always be expressed in a positively adaptive way, or should we also prepare to find resilient behaviours that are disagreeable, opportunistic and exploitative of others? As much as we may mourn the loss of traditional customs throughout Melanesia in the face of the onrushing modern world, how do we explain the persistence of tribal fighting, worsened indeed by the use of automatic weapons (e.g. Rumsey 2009, Wiessner 2010, Burton 2014: 44–45), or the alarming rise of sorcery and witchcraft accusations recently seen across several nations in the Western Pacific (e.g. Forsyth and Eves 2015; see also further discussion by Macintyre, this volume)?

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I will turn for a moment to concepts of legal pluralism. In early colonial Melanesia, the interest of the colonizer in introducing a metropolitan legal system included creating a stable environment in which future civil servants, health workers, teachers and so could be educated, reducing the future cost of running the colony; giving legal clothing to land dealings; and a general belief that a modern civil or common law system, at a level above the village, was a ‘gift’ to colonized peoples. At the same time the interest in leaving ‘village’ systems alone had much to do with delaying the establishment of costly administrative systems covering marriage and compensatory customs, local government councils, low level courts and the like. Specifically, in relation to customary laws, these were to be left alone as long as they were not ‘repugnant to natural justice, equity, and good conscience’ (e.g. Merry 1988). Since Independence in 1975, village courts in Papua New Guinea have begun to regularize and/or supplement customary decision-making, with cases varying quite widely in their adherence to custom or application of ‘rules’ (e.g. Demian 2003). Writing of a peri-urban village in Port Moresby, Goddard concludes that the ‘colonially created village court … has been appropriated into Pari’s sociality’ but that it now emphasizes the use of restorative rather than punitive justice (2003: 67). Customary law indeed forms the primary part of the underlying law of the country (Zorn and Care 2002), and the principles and rights set out in the Constitution speak frequently of its equity principles, for example ‘that our national wealth, won by honest, hard work be equitably shared by all’ (Papua New Guinea Constitution, Preamble). In turn, these principles are referenced in more recent national policies, such as those for gender equity and social inclusion (Papua New Guinea 2015: 9, 12; see also Nayral’s discussion of the Loi sur la parité in New Caledonia, this volume). I set these things out because a recurrent fate befalls the distribution of national wealth, especially when this is derived from natural resources: namely that it is not equitably shared, neither among different sections of the broad society, nor among individuals and/or genders in particular communities (for recent conundrums in the outcomes of mining, see Filer and Le Meur 2017). While few instruments of the state appear to be worried about this, they should be. In the extractive industries, pre-project social mapping exercises are routinely carried out in Papua New Guinea to determine who the key stakeholders are and who are entitled to become known as the project’s landowners. Equally routinely, the results of such exercises are set aside by the ministries who require them to be done in the first place, and some other means of implementing the distribution of resource rent payments substituted, often after political agreements are brokered at a Development Forum (cf. Filer 2008).

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Social mapping is characteristically carried out at two scales. Broadscale social mapping is carried out to show the lay of the land, as it were, and in particular to guide a company and (supposedly) the minister in their initial dealings with the communities around a project. A finer level of detail is obtained when a census is carried out or a genealogical database created in order to arrive at a checklist of specific people entitled to things, which is intended to form the basis for equitable benefit sharing. Unfortunately, this seldom goes according to plan. In this chapter, I examine three examples of benefit sharing at mines in Papua New Guinea to shine a light on behaviours that demonstrate a customary resistance to the equity principles of the Constitution on the part of particular actors. I argue that the behaviours are exploitative of others and disagreeable to broader policy aspirations in Papua New Guinea. I have to leave open why what might be termed ‘resilient expressions of custom’ tend to defeat the (rather weak) mechanisms of the State, but defeat them they do in many cases. It is only occasionally possible to show what other members of the same communities think about this in real time (e.g. the twenty-four elders at Hidden Valley, see below). In other cases, we are left with critical analyses at the provincial level (e.g. Haley and May 2007), the exasperation of national institutions at poor outcomes (e.g. Johnson 2012), and assessments of corruption vulnerability (e.g. Burton and Haihuie 2017), forms of evidence at least one level of abstraction removed from the actions and responses of individuals. Nonetheless, such forms of discourse cumulate in policy contexts as implicit reasons for the formation of multi-stakeholder partnerships such as the PNGEITI (see below). I now turn to the three cases.

Cash Sharing in Ok Tedi’s Downstream Impact Area The oldest system believed to be in place is the payment of royalties at Ok Tedi, conducted on the basis of a regularly updated census of the landowning villages since the mine started production in 1984. Or at least that is what is believed to have been happening over the last three decades, but no outside observer has been able to monitor whether this is actually occurring and whether it is done fairly and equitably. By contrast, some clues to the competence of any large organization to oversee ‘wealth … equitably shared by all’ is given by the system put in place to pay benefits to 156 villages in the river system impacted by the Ok Tedi mine after the 2007 round of community mine continuation agreements (CMCA agreements). This committed a not-for-profit entity, the Ok Tedi Development Foundation (OTDF), to pay some of the assistance in cash on the basis of village populations:

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The Reasonableness of Leaders and the Gaming of Mining Incomes  135 A census will be conducted in 2007 to provide an updated estimate of the population within each village within the impact area. During the census design process, consideration will be given to how census information could be updated each year to take into account changes in the village population and how to account for those born within the CMCA region or not currently living within the CMCA region but living within the Western Province. (CMCA Working Group 2007: 7)

The curious mathematics of the OTML / OTDF officials responsible casts doubt on how well the ‘census design process’ was pursued. The figures are presented in a variety of different ways from year to year and with a surprising degree of carelessness, given that the value of the payments was hammered out over two years of exhausting meetings. The cash payments form a cornerstone of the community agreements to allow the mine to continue operating with discharges of waste rock and tailings into the river system (Table 6.1). Between 2007, the first year of the cash payments, and 2008, the total population of the 156 villages jumped by an alarming 64.5 per cent. There is insufficient information to say whether the 2007 figures were undercounts or the 2008 figures were inflated. No census was carried out in 2009, because the 2008 figures were carried over unaltered. Thereafter, the figures are quoted haphazardly, though with a steep rise from 2013. The overall growth in population from 56,650 in 2005 to 125,000 in 2014 represents an annualized increase of 12 per cent a year. This is impossible when the national average during the period was 3.1 per cent annual increase (NSO 2014). It is obvious that a satisfactory ‘census design process’ was not put in place as the CMCA negotiation outcomes had stipulated. The Ok Tedi Development Foundation has not commented on this (OTDF 2012, 2013, 2014). I was able to visit a village in the Middle Fly region in 2014 during the week of its annual census update and conversations with village elders enable me to interpret what has happened. In 2007, it is certain that company community affairs officers undertook the first census. The specially printed books for 2007 survive and are in good order. Thereafter, perhaps immediately, the responsibility for doing the census was taken away from the OTML community affairs section and handed to village elders to self-census as a community capacity building exercise. However, it was unmistakably the case that older family heads were including their married children as part of their own families, while duplicate entries were also being made for newly married couples and their children in the books that the elders were updating. It seems very likely that both sets of the parents of newlyweds were following the same practice, meaning that a double duplication was occurring.

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There were no criteria for including or excluding in the village headcount emigrants ‘not currently living within the CMCA region but living within the Western Province’. All family members, regardless of location and whether or not married elsewhere, were counted as residents. What has happened here is that any restraint in attempting to cite accurate population figures for the benefit of distributing the cash payment fairly has been removed. There is no incentive to do this, as any ‘honest’ village stands to be penalized by its ‘dishonest’ neighbours, who will by weight of numbers stand to gain a bigger share of cash available for distribution. Table 6.1: Population of 156 villages in nine CMCA regions downstream of the Ok Tedi mine. Year

NF

MF

SF

2007

19,850

8,300

28,500

56,650

–

OTML 2008: 17–18

2008

31,520

11,185

50,457

93,162

64.5%

OTML 2009: 24–26

2009

31,520

11,185

50,457

93,162

0.0%

OTML 2010: 15–17

‘over 90,000’

-3.5%

OTML 2012: 11

2010

Population Growth over previous year

Source

2011

20,000

25,000

45,000

90,000

0.0%

OTDF 2012

2012

28,000

20,000

45,000

93,000

3.3%

OTDF 2013

2013a

30,000

20,000

67,000

117,000

25.8%

OTDF 2014

2013b

‘over 120,000’

29.0%

OTML 2014: 73

2014

‘over 125,000’

4.2%-6.8%

OTML 2015: 69

Notes: NF = North Fly. MF = Middle Fly. SF = South Fly. Average population growth for Papua New Guinea 2000–2011, 3.1% p.a. (NSO 2014)

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The Reasonableness of Leaders and the Gaming of Mining Incomes  137

What is the value of the cash payment per head? In 2014, the company said it paid US$22.9 million in CMCA-related payments (OTML 2015: 65) when it said the total population of the CMCA villages was ‘over 125,000’ (OTML 2015: 69). This amounts to just US$183.20 per person per year, or 50 US cents a day. OTDF has said that the payments represent ‘a significant proportion of … total cash income’ in the Middle Fly (OTDF 2013: 36) and, whether or not that is the case in all regions, it is sobering to reflect that this is barely a quarter of the updated international poverty line of 2 $1.90 a day (Cruz et al. 2015). As such, it would seem a matter of no little significance to ensure that this amount, meager as it may be, is shared arithmetically fairly. This has not been the case to date. Papua New Guinea was recently accepted as a candidate country by the Oslo-based Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and recently submitted its first EITI national report (PNGEITI 2016). However, efforts to document where diligent procedures were being followed, beyond the internal accounting procedures of the mining corporations, uncovered no formal audits of what landowners were receiving at any operations, including the US$20+ million distributed annually by OTDF to 3 the CMCA communities.

Payment Distribution at Porgera Despite the presence of many more researchers at and near the Porgera mine for longer periods of time than at Ok Tedi (e.g. Banks 2006, Golub 2014, Jacka 2015), no investigator has been able to report anything statistically robust on the basis of how financial benefits, notably royalties and compensation, are distributed to those entitled to them. Banks (e.g. 1997: Chapter 9) was able to aggregate compensation payments in the first years of the mine, but no social mapping database was available then that could be used to determine if the recipients were the people entitled to them. Nonetheless, from the outset it was clear that substantial anomalies were present. The largest payment sighted by Banks was for K520,000 (1997: 126; Department of Enga 1992). The twenty-three recipients that can be easily identified were members of an extended family, starting with the children of a prominent leader from the 1970s. The breakdown followed a hierarchical pattern, but with curious omissions and inclusions. In particular, only two of the four sons of the leader, both prominent men themselves, were listed. The two ‘ordinary’ sons, and all five daughters, were excluded. Five of the listed recipients, men in their thirties, shown against sums of money in the K20,000-K30,000 range, appeared unrelated to the family by marriage or descent. It looked very much like their inclusion on the list

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of recipients was to satisfy unrelated, and very likely short-term customary obligations, but it was impossible to say for sure without a detailed analysis of kinship. In 2007, as I was putting in place the genealogical database that would at last make it possible to understand the distribution patterns, one of these men presented at the interview location. In 2007, he now had a grievance against the men that I could now see were his former benefactors. He gave all sorts of reasons why he was being excluded from a new entitlement and the substance of his complaint confirmed that he had no attachment to them by kinship. We can be fairly confident, therefore, that the windfalls that all five unrelated men had collected fifteen years earlier were ‘side payments’ awarded for local political reasons. The effect was to deprive other rightful recipients – members of the old leader’s family – of large sums of 4 money. The disquiet felt by outside researchers when evidence comes to light that a distribution system is being gamed is also shared by government. In 2012, the PNG National Research Institute (NRI) attempted to follow the income flows to Porgerans, given that it is ultimately part of the duty of care for government to ensure an orderly system of benefit distribution. The study concluded that: The [Porgera Development Authority], the PLOA [Porgera Land Owners Association], the managers of the landowner portion of the equity stake, and [Local Level Government] officials have been unable or unwilling to explain where and how billions of kina are spent. (Johnson 2012: xi) … in the PLOA case, K40.2 million [of royalties] is untraceable and unaccountable to anybody but a very small number of people. (Johnson 2012: 88)

Those involved in the K520,000 payment twenty years earlier fit within the ‘very small number of people’ referred to here. Names, albeit pseudonyms in order to protect the research process, were put to them by Golub, depicting the situation during the period 1998–2000 (Golub 2014). Golub discusses the distribution of royalties to the broader mass of ordinary landowners at Porgera (2014: 151–55), but he manages little more elucidation of how much they are worth, who is entitled to them, and what safeguards defend against abuse.

Hidden Valley The mine landowners of the Hidden Valley gold mine in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea are drawn from among the Biangai and Watut peoples of the Bulolo District. The Biangai quickly embraced

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The Reasonableness of Leaders and the Gaming of Mining Incomes  139

modernism during the gold rush by Australian miners that saw the creation of the towns of Wau and Bulolo in the 1920s, while the Watut self-identify as the ‘Kukukuku’ who fought with miners and Australian patrol officers 5 into the late 1930s (cf. Burton 2003: 2008). Traditional enemies before contact, after the Second World War the two groups became rivals for political and economic advancement. The Biangai were quicker to value education and jobs in town, while the Watut were quicker to embrace entrepreneurial ventures. They produced at least three members of a group of local gold miners who may be referred to as the ‘Black Millionaires of Bulolo’, the leading member of which was Kikingai Nupango whose leases on Little Wau Creek yielded 85 kg of gold between 1972 and 1978 (Lowenstein 1982). When a gold-bearing deposit was discovered on the boundary between their traditional lands in 1985, the two groups contested its ownership in court. In 1987 the Watut village of Nauti won fifty per cent and the Biangai villages of Kwembu and Winima jointly won fifty per cent in the Provincial Land Court. Hidden Valley opened in 2010 as a medium sized mine producing about 180,000 oz of gold a year. The parties to the court case immediately settled on two representatives from each ethnic group in 1987. The four spokesmen immediately claimed a need to have K4 million paid to them so they could better organize their affairs. The response of the mining company, CRA Minerals at the time 6 of the case, was guarded; certainly, within eighteen months the parent company was to lose control of two other operations – Panguna and Mount Kare – and it feared this happening in Morobe. It dealt cautiously with the four spokesmen in brokering local agreements and in hiring local labour on a 50:50 basis. At no point, however, did the four spokesmen submit themselves to 7 an election process. There was considerable talk of forming an association but no name could be decided upon for the first twelve years of this arrangement. Finally, the Nakuwi Association (‘Nauti-Kwembu-Winima’) was issued with a certificate of incorporation in 1999. Papua New Guinea landowner associations like Nakuwi seem, on the world stage, successful incarnations of Indigenous resilience, offering traditional owners the protection of the law to freely associate and negotiate their terms of engagement with international capital from a position of strength that many fourth-world groups would be envious of. But under PNG’s Associations Incorporation Act, a group proposing to form an association must adopt a set of rules (or a ‘constitution’) to show how office bearers are to be elected, the terms of office, how casual vacancies should be filled, and the intervals between general meetings of members of the association. As scholars of group incorporation and land

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grabbing have made familiar in other settings (e.g. Weiner 2007; Filer 2011), an association’s certificate can apparently be issued without being linked to further documentation; in this instance, it was issued without there being a constitution. From 1987, the four spokesmen either never met to settle any matters of common interest or were bickering with the developer about money. For example, the K4 million demand in 1987 was contained in a telex on file at the old Mining Department, the quantum not being based on a development plan assessing their communities’ needs. It was just the round number of K1 million each. After the incorporation, the self-proclaimed president of Nakuwi, who I will call King, and noting that no election procedures had yet been followed, made a personal demand for K1.5 million in a letter to the directors of the mining company. The letter said ‘hereby demanding K1.5 million to pay me for the work I have done for the last eighteen years for the development of the Hidden Valley project which has run smoothly to this stage’. As already seen at Ok Tedi, poor arithmetic is a constant irritant in claims-related matters and in this case eighteen years would backdate the entitlement to 1981, before exploration had been done in the area. King was nineteen years old at the time, an age one does not associate with being a senior traditional owner of anything. In 1986, it is true, he was a witness in the Local Land Court in the first case to be brought to decide on the ownership of the mine area. But he was by far the youngest of ten witnesses from his tribe, the other nine ranging in age from thirty-three to 8 sixty-six years old. The pattern of personal demand – as opposed to fighting a resistant struggle against global capitalism on behalf of a broad kin group – has continued to the present time. The pièce de resistance was King’s letter in 2011 to his own Winima villagers with a recalculated demand for K25 million to be paid by them out of their royalties, a million for each of his ‘25 years of continuous service’ to the community, ‘which I believe is reasonable’, he added. I am eliding the fact that all four spokesmen were writing on a regular basis through the 1990s demanding constant adjustments to the small logistical contracts that the mining company offered them during the phase of mining exploration, which was mainly light trucking and vegetable supply. The benefits took the form of loans to buy vehicles (which were forgiven when one company owner replaced another), a free fuel allowance, repair bills when the vehicles broke down, as well as the actual freight rate paid to do the jobs the spokesmen had demanded. In anthropological writing, of course, I am getting dangerously close to vilifying the subjects of what is generally supposed to be a broadly sympathetic form of inquiry. By professional reflex, of course, we are classically

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The Reasonableness of Leaders and the Gaming of Mining Incomes  141

placed in a position of supporting the subaltern. However, this makes it all the more important that we make sure we have correctly identified who the subaltern is. A dispute illustrates some of the problems. In mid-2006, when the long-delayed construction of the Hidden Valley mine had commenced, King called, with a fellow spokesman, Job, for work on the mine access road to be halted. They claimed that local contractors had not been considered for the work, and this had been handed to foreign firms: It is a sign, they say, that [the company] has total disrespect for the Government, people and the laws of the land by flagrantly denying landowners, Morobeans, and the nation as a whole. The irksome point has been the non-participation of the landowners in the construction of a K12 million all-weather access road linking Bulolo. It is an opportunity to get involved to improve their lot to supplement the meager K500 each family gets in royalties annually. (Post-Courier, 3 August 2006)

Onlookers would have been forgiven for being confused because it was a public assumption that the mine agreements, negotiated by four spokesmen themselves over the course of a year, had taken care of this. This is what village elders also thought; twenty-four of them, who I can identify as the middle-aged to senior men drawn from each of the landowner villages, denounced this action to the Provincial Administrator. It signalled, to those onlookers able to read between the lines, that King and Job were complaining about their personal contracts, not the fact that there were no local contracts at all: Sir, we are not new to [the] attitudes [of these men]. They do something silly when they are unhappy and become good guys when they are happy. The article in the paper … is driven by personal frustration as that is what we are hearing and we will not support this move. Our elders and leaders who are now between their 60s and 80s must receive some form of benefit from this mine before they pass away … it is important this development goes ahead … [if not we] will not see these benefits rolling and that is our great concern. Therefore, moves taken by Nakuwi Executives IS NOT DONE IN OUR BEST INTEREST AND WE ARE GOING AGAINST IT. (Landowners to Manusupe Zurenuoc, 14 August 2006)

Another oddity – more poor arithmetic – is the ‘meager K500 each family gets in royalties annually’. In 2006, no royalties were payable at all because mines do not pay royalties until production starts, and in Hidden Valley’s case none was payable until 2010 when the mine opened. In the first two years after it did open, family bank accounts were set up and approximately K1 million per year was received in royalties by King’s village. The income

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averaged K15,000/year for a hypothetical family of five. King’s average was 9 K45,000/year. However, bearing in mind King’s 2011 letter of demand, we can see that he would later suggest, in demanding a further K1 million a year, that his co-villagers surrender 100 per cent of their income to him personally, a sum he would think was ‘reasonable’. As in the two previous cases, this presents us with a dilemma. If we are to discuss resilience and resistance on the part of the mine area communities in relation to modernization through mining, who is being resilient? If resilience also connotes ‘adaptiveness, flexibility’, I am unable to see that it is King. On the other hand, if the community is being resilient or resistant, why have they not deposed him?

Discussion Although I have chosen to track what is going on here primarily through an audit trail of financial transactions, there are positive reasons for doing so. For a start, there is ample evidence that the principal actors, whether CMCA representatives, or leading Porgeran men, or Hidden Valley spokesmen, measure their own success in negotiations with the corporations involved in terms of the size of the financial packages they have been able to win. Certainly, the question of money cannot be avoided, not least because of the remarkable rise in the sums being talked about by landowners as quotidian topics of conversation: from tens of Kina in the 1980s (e.g. for the loss of a pandanus or in lease payments per hectare of land) to tens of thousands in the 1990s, to tens of millions in the 2000s, to hundreds of 10 millions today. Nonetheless, the focus should be recentred on low-level politics: a pattern of landowner representation became established with the formation, in several parts of the country, of associations in the 1980s that, with very little change in the key actors in the respective executive committees, have perdured for over a quarter of a century. This, it should be said, is in a democratic country where other institutions of governance have passed through five election cycles giving rise to periods in office for a total of nine prime ministers. Golub adopts insightful terminology to portray what has happened here. The existing ‘Leviathans’ formed of the State and the mining companies prior to the construction of mines required – because in our world Leviathans (the State, the company) can only deal with entities like themselves – the myriad of separate interests that constitute rights to land to coalesce into their own Leviathans, in a process that can be also called reification or ‘entification’ (Ernst 1999). The ‘very small number’ of men seen

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to be involved in capturing benefit flows at Porgera and Hidden Valley are those who stepped forward to ‘personate’ the Leviathans, just as the State and the company have officials and managers to personate theirs. This illuminates the process, but it also begins to suggest that community members who are victims of the tyranny of those at the helm of local Leviathans are only victims of the workings of foreign enterprises driven by international capital, of wholly exogenous forces, in other words. This is problematic. In particular, it would be inconsistent to claim, from one analytic viewpoint, that Leviathans cannot help but mould small, fourth-world communities into their own likenesses but, from another, to happily assert that development initiatives always founder when inflexible, foreign-sourced programme planning fails to take into account local social forms and customs. A better question, perhaps, is whether the form that local simulacrum-Leviathans assume does not have something to do with the wider array of procedures and institutions, both of the state and within the community, that permit them to be as they are. In an earlier era, Hogbin devoted a chapter of Transformation Scene to the saga of the despotic paramount luluai (government-appointed chief) of 11 Busama village he called Bumbu (1951: Chapter 8). Embittered by his treatment during the Japanese occupation of the area during the Wau-Salamaua Campaign during 1942–1943, Bumbu established a reign of terror over the residents of Busama after its liberation by Australian and American forces which he maintained through a combination of threats, punishments and forced labour. At the same time, he hoarded the relief rations being supplied by the military administration after Busama gardens had been destroyed as the war passed across their area. In trying to explain this, Hogbin found that villagers had come to believe in the hopelessness of opposing Bumbu because it was he who had the ear of the newly returned wartime Administration, a Leviathan in tooth and claw. It was effective, for example, for Bumbu to say to Administration officials, few of whom had any experience in New Guinea at the time, that the minds of the villagers had been poisoned by Lutheran missionaries who wanted the Germans to return. With impunity, he administered physical beatings, harangued the community at forced work parades, and appropriated unmarried women to be his servants. We have to ask: why did villagers put up with this? Hogbin’s answer is that Bumbu had ‘a genius for advancing himself ’ and was so skilful in manipulating personal grudges that it was difficult for opponents to unite against him. Only when Hogbin himself assembled an array of witnesses in secret and arranged the District Officer to hold surprise court proceedings was he caught out and disgraced. The villagers in turn said that an ‘anchor stone’ had been lifted off them (Hogbin 1951: 161).

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The manipulation of personal grudges and what we now call ‘wedging’ one’s opposition with essentially trivial slights are all to do with things that are within the community and custom, whereas winning the ear of administrative officials has to do with agency with powerful, seemingly uncomprehending and easily angered foreigners. This bears all the hallmarks of contemporary dealings with mining companies, also powerful, seemingly uncomprehending and easily angered. Landowner representatives may no longer be able to threaten their followers with denouncement, but new cards have been dealt to them in the context of the modern state that is Papua New Guinea. The most important is to do with the fetishizing of custom in contemporary political discourse, such that the utterances of custom leaders pass unchallenged in audiences outside their communities. The consequence is that the space that might 12 be taken up by a Hogbin-like collector of evidence, whether translated in modern terms into a higher-level organization (even the PNGEITI), a national politician, a provincial administrator, a company negotiator, or an anthropological ‘moderator or mediator’ (Filer 1999: 90), is pushed to the margins. I will defer to others to portray the dealings of custom leaders with their external audiences; here I do not want to go beyond how they ‘succeed’ within their own communities. Golub eventually concludes that ‘Melanesians are allergic to Leviathans’ (2014: 194) but by this time he is referring to the apparatus of the state, an idea that citizens ‘refuse to accept’ in Papua New Guinea (2014: 195, citing Robert Foster). If so, pace Goddard, it may be the refusal to accept the institutions of the state, or at least the ones that they cannot control adequately, that makes villagers reluctant to collude with them to achieve a better balance among three possible scenarios. First, there is a well-justified belief throughout Papua New Guinea that not having leaders who will project their identity externally condemns a group to marginalization and is liable to render its members invisible to the state and, in particular, the higher-level courts where the more important rulings are made on land matters. There are numerous cases across the country where accidents of demography, history or just poor representa13 tion have left groups unable to make themselves known. Second, is the fear that leaders who are overly aggressive in a community’s external dealings can cause disaster by provoking its neighbours into violent conflict. An example in another part of the Bulolo District to Hidden Valley is a case in point. The well-known leader of Piu village is an aggressive litigant with a string of vexatious land cases pursued against neighbouring tribes in the National Court over twenty years. In 2012, a

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boundary dispute flared up which resulted in a coalition of men from other villages burning down Piu and routing its inhabitants. Faced with these scenarios, villagers are evidently willing to take the third option and put up with the excessive demands of men like Bumbu and his modern-day counterparts. This includes moderating their own anger and frustration as the twenty-four elders did at Hidden Valley in 2006; their letter to the Provincial Administrator was not a response liable to trouble King whose distorted self-image must be very close to what we can imagine for Bumbu. And in being quick to dismiss King as resilient/ resistant, I may have been too hasty – perhaps ‘Bumbuism’ is the very thing that has shown itself resistant to the onslaughts of colonialism, the moral optimism of the post-Independence state, and the rather dilapidated machinery of what both have become forty years on. What of the CMCA cash payments case? Here, there is no ‘very small number’ of individuals able to game a very large system, but gaming is nonetheless taking place. The result may even result in ‘equity’, since no group would appear to have a better chance than any other of reaping more than its share of cash payments and, since much of the financial world 14 appears to have modelled itself on similar principles recently, it may not be ‘repugnant’. Nonetheless, it fails a test of ‘good conscience’. Writ more largely, the lack of attention for fairness and equity across many areas of governance may be said to be an ‘anchor stone’ weighing down on all Papua New Guineans.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Laurent Dousset and Mélissa Nayral for organizing the 2012 Bergen ESfO panel (and for prior hospitality in Marseille), my academic colleagues for continual discussions of the issues discussed in this chapter, and for the diligence of field team members and colleagues in Papua New Guinea over more than twenty years: among them have been Jane Wiyawa and Obert Foneng at Ok Tedi; Basil Peutalo, Ando Diya, Terence Kewa, Sheryl Sialis and the (so sadly) late Daniel Yaluma at Porgera; Peter Bennett, Ngawae Mitio, Walter Pondrelei, Rachael Lennie, Theresa Phillips and Joyce Onguglo at Hidden Valley. Fieldwork at the locations mentioned was carried out in the course of consultancy engagements for the University of Papua New Guinea with Ok Tedi Mining Limited and Placer Pacific Limited; for the Australian National University with Barrick Gold and Morobe Mining Joint Venture; and as an independent consultant with CRA Minerals (PNG), Australian Gold Fields, Aurora Gold and Ok Tedi Mining Limited. Individuals have been de-identified.

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John Burton has a PhD from the Australian National University and has broad research interests in science and development in the Pacific; the social impacts of mining; governance and traditional politics in Papua New Guinea; research into customary land and sea tenure in Torres Strait, North Queensland; and Papua New Guinea. He has previously held academic positions at the University of Papua New Guinea and the Australian National University. He is currently Professor and Deputy Vice President of Research, Divine Word University, Papua New Guinea.

Notes   1. The PNG Oil and Gas Act 1998, s47, is the only legislation that makes the distinction between ‘preliminary’ and ‘full-scale’ social mapping, but it offers no further clarification of what these might entail.   2. In Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollars. The average value for any year may vary from USD.   3. The report shows that 12 principal extractive industry companies passed audits in 2013–2014 but that no subnational benefit distribution entities had done so (PNGEITI 2016: Table 47). The CMCA payments are noted in a table row under ‘Ok Tedi Mining Ltd social spending’ (PNGEITI 2016: Table 34).   4. In 2012 the complainant stood against one of the two brothers in the extended family in the PNG National Elections. He was an unsuccessful candidate.   5. The first known mention of the Kukukuku appears to have been in 1893 as an inland group feared by the coastal inhabitants of the Kerema area (Macgregor 1983: 26). These people would now be referred to as Kamea; the Hamtai language which they speak is intelligible to the Watut people around Hidden Valley in Morobe Province.   6. Some seven companies have owned all or part of Hidden Valley since the 1980s: CRA Minerals, Renison Goldfields Consolidated, Australian Gold Fields, Aurora, Abelle, Harmony and Newcrest Mining. The current operation is a joint venture of the last two.   7. One of the four was the leader I referred to some years ago as a ‘patron’, a rentier leader (Burton 1997); he died around the age of 80 in 2010. Golub (2014: 146–49) is kind enough to take up the concept in relation to Porgeran elites, which bear a striking comparison, but space precludes me re-engaging with it here.   8. In court evidence, King dated his first meeting with the local manager of CRA Minerals, Charles Cole, to November 1985. In fact, he was cross-examined by another party as to whether this was 1982, but he re-iterated his statement that it was November 1985.   9. Many Winima villagers live in towns, and the definitional question of who is a Winiman, as opposed to a member of another village, is not simple to

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answer, as several villages may claim a single individual as their own. Jamon Halvaksz lived at Winima and a neighbouring village (himself replicating the bi-locality of many villagers) between 1998 and 2002 and says the resident population was 202 in 2001 (pers. comm.). I counted it as 360 (270 in the village plus and another 90 resident in Wau town and nearby places) in 2012 (Burton et al. 2012: Table 17). An average of K1.17 million p.a. was paid into 176 Winima family accounts in the first two years of production. The per capita royalty was K3000 p.a. 10. The 2007 Lihir ‘Integrated Benefits Package’ features the financing of a K100 million Lihir Strategic Development Plan (Lihir Gold Limited and others 2007: 8). This was exceeded again by the PNG LNG agreements, signed in 2009, which business seed funding payments alone reached over K500 million. 11. Bumbu is the name of a well-known river in Lae, headquarters of the district where Busama was located. I assume this is the source of Hogbin’s pseudonym. I note but do not cite here the ‘despot/satrap’ literature of the highlands (e.g. Brown 1963, Salisbury 1965, Strathern 1966). 12. Note that Hogbin himself did not have the authority to dismiss Bumbu; he brought evidence to the District Officer who used his powers as a magistrate to do so. 13. Two groups of villagers were still in dispute over land at a Chinese-run nickel processing plant on the Rai Coast in Madang Province sixty years after an accidental death. One party said they were only in dispute because a clan leader went to work as a labourer on the Morobe Goldfields in the 1930s, where he had died in a rock fall. During his absence the Lutheran Mission bought the now disputed land and if he had returned he would have secured the correct documentation to prove original ownership by his clan. 14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers.

References Banks, G. 1997. ‘Mountain of Desire: Mining Company and Indigenous Community at the Porgera Gold Mine, Papua New Guinea’. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University. _____. 2006. ‘Mining, Social Change and Corporate Social Responsibility: Drawing Lines in the Papua New Guinea Mud’, in Stewart Firth (ed.), Globalisation and Governance in the Pacific Islands. Canberra: ANU E Press, pp. 259–74. Brown, P. 1963. ‘From Anarchy to Satrapy’, American Anthropologist 65: 1–15. Burton, J.E. 1997. ‘C’est qui le patron? Kinship and the Rentier Leader in the Upper Watut’, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Working Papers WP1997/1. Canberra: Australian National University, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

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_____. 2003. ‘Fratricide and Inequality: Things Fall Apart in Eastern New Guinea’, Archaeology in Oceania 38: 208–16. _____. 2014. ‘Agency and the “Avatar” Narrative at the Porgera Gold Mine, Papua New Guinea’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes 138–139: 37–51. Burton, J.E., W. Pondrelei, T. Phillips and R. Lennie. 2012. Hidden Valley +10. Development and Social Mapping in the Hidden Valley Gold Mine Impact Area, 10 Year Re-study – Final Report. Volume 1 Main Report. Canberra: ANU Enterprise and Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program for Hidden Valley Services Limited. Burton, J.E. and Y. Haihuie. 2017. Corruption Risks in Mining Awards: Papua New Guinea Country Report. Port Moresby: Transparency International Papua New Guinea. CMCA Working Group. 2007. Memorandum of Agreement Outcomes of the 2006/07 CMCA Review. Port Moresby. Cruz, M., J. Foster, B. Quillin and Ph. Schellekens. 2015. Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: Progress and Policies. Washington: World Bank, Development Economics Policy Research Note PRN/15/03. Demian, M. 2003. ‘Custom in the Courtroom, Law in the Village: Legal Transformations in Papua New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (N.S.) 9: 97–115. Department of Enga. 1992. Compensation claim #244/92, 19 June 1992, Division of District Administration and Mine Site Office, Porgera. Ernst, T. 1999. ‘Land, Stories, and Resources: Discourse and Entification in Onabasulu Modernity’, American Anthropologist 101(1): 88–97. Filer, C. 1999. ‘The Dialectics of Negation and Negotiation in the Anthropology of Mineral Resource Development in Papua New Guinea’, in A.P. Cheater (ed.), The Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures. London: Routledge, ASA Monograph 36, pp. 88–102. _____. 2008. ‘Development Forum in Papua New Guinea: Upsides and Downsides’, Journal of Energy and Natural Resources Law 26(1): 120–49. _____. 2011. ‘New Land Grab in Papua New Guinea’, Pacific Studies 34: 269–94. Filer, C. and P.-Y. Le Meur (eds). 2017. Large-Scale Mines and Local-Level Politics: Between New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea. Canberra: ANU Press. Forsyth, M. and R. Eves (eds). 2015. Talking it Through: Responses to Sorcery and Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia. Canberra: ANU Press. Goddard, M. 2003. ‘The Age of Steam: Constructed Identity and Recalcitrant Youth in a Papua New Guinea Village’, in S. Dinnen (ed.), A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the Pacific Islands. Canberra: Pandanus Press, pp. 45–72. Golub, A. 2014. Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haley, N. and R.J. May (eds). 2007. Conflict and Resource Development in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Canberra: ANU E Press

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Hogbin, I. 1951. Transformation Scene: The Changing Culture of a New Guinea Village. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited. Jacka, J. 2015. Alchemy in the Rain Forest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Johnson, P. 2012. Lode Shedding: A Case Study of the Economic Benefits to the Landowners, the Provincial Government and the State, from the Porgera Gold Mine: Background and Financial Flows from the Mine. Port Moresby: National Research Institute, Discussion Paper No. 124. Lihir Gold Limited and others. 2007. Integrated Benefits Package. Revised Agreement Between Lihir Gold Limited and the people of Lihir represented by the Lihir Mining Area Landowners Association Inc and The Nimamar Rural Local-Level Government. Lihir Island, Papua New Guinea. Lowenstein, P.L. 1982. Economic Geology of the Morobe Goldfield, Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: Geological Survey of Papua New Guinea, Memoir 9. Macgregor, Sir W. 1983. ‘Despatch Reporting Inspection of the Gulf of Papua from Hall Sound to Port Bevan’, Annual Report on British New Guinea, from 1 July 1892 to 30 June 1893, pp. 24–36, Appendix G. Merry, E.S. 1988. ‘Legal Pluralism’, Law and Society Review 22(5): 869–96. NSO. 2014. National Population and Housing Census 2011. Final figures. Port Moresby: National Statistical Office. OTDF. 2012. 2011 Annual Report. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Development Foundation. _____. 2013. 2012 Annual Report. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Development Foundation. _____. 2014. 2013 Annual Report. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Development Foundation. OTML. 2008. Annual Review 2007. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Mining Limited. _____. 2009. Annual Review 2008. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Mining Limited. _____. 2010. Annual Review 2009. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Mining Limited. _____. 2012. Annual Review 2010. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Mining Limited. _____. 2014. Annual Review 2013. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Mining Limited. _____. 2015. Annual Review 2014. Tabubil: Ok Tedi Mining Limited. Papua New Guinea. 2015. National Public Service Gender Equity & Social Inclusion (GESI) Policy. Port Moresby: Department of Personnel Management. PNGEITI. 2016. Papua New Guinea Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Report 2013. Port Moresby: The Papua New Guinea Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Multi-Stakeholder Group [http://www.pngeiti.org.pg/ download-category/reports/]. Rumsey, A. 2009. War and Peace in Highland PNG: Some Recent Developments in the Nebilyer Valley, Western Highlands Province. Canberra: Australian National University, State, Society and Governance in Melanesia, Discussion Paper 2009/7. Salisbury, R. 1965. ‘Despotism and Australian Administration in the New Guinea Highlands’, American Anthropologist 66(4) Part 2: 225–39. Strathern, A. 1966. ‘Despots and Directors in the New Guinea Highlands’, Man n.s. 1(3): 356–67.

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Weiner, J.F. 2007. ‘The Foi Incorporated Land Group: Group Definition and Collective Action in the Kutubu Oil Project Area, Papua New Guinea’, in J. Weiner and K. Glaskin (eds), Customary Land Tenure and Registration in Indigenous Australia and Papua New Guinea. Asia-Pacific Environment Monographs. Canberra: ANU E Press, pp. 117–34. Wiessner, P. 2010. Youths, Elders, and the Wages of War in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Australian National University, State, Society and Governance in Melanesia, Discussion Paper 2010/3. Zorn, J. and J.C. Care. 2002. ‘Everything Old is New Again: The Underlying Law Act of Papua New Guinea’, LawAsia Journal 2002: 61–97.

Afterword

Values in Flux Reflections on Resilience and Change in Melanesia ♦l♦

Martha Macintyre

T

he Argonauts of the Western Pacific begins and ends with statements that are elegiac. Malinowski opens with this passage: ‘The coastal populations of the South Sea Islands, with very few exceptions, are, or were before their extinction, expert navigators and traders’ (1922: 1). Given that the rest of the work affirms that these people are alive and well, busily trading shells in a circular pattern, Malinowski’s opening is precipitate. His conclusion, which dwells for some time on the value of anthropology as a discipline that enhances knowledge, wisdom and compassion for others, also insists that ‘the time is short’. Henrika Kuklick, observing the diverse ways that Europeans saw and represented non-Western peoples, maintains that ‘virtually from the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment to now, an apparently consistent political attitude has joined predictions about the fates of non-Western peoples: though these societies might have some qualities Europeans could envy, these people were destined to become extinct in cultural, if not necessarily physical terms’ (2008: 5). The idea that our subjects of enquiry are fading away as we observe, record and interpret them might not be voiced explicitly in contemporary ethnographic writing; indeed, there is a considerable literature that takes the opposite view (Wassmann1998, Tengan 2008, Hanson 1989, Meijl 1995). But it is certainly an essential element of any discussion of

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the effects of colonialism on Melanesian communities and it insinuates itself into interpretations of the ways in which global forces work in places far away from the post-industrial societies that generate these forces. It is there in the numerous accounts of the ways that the cash economy changes social relations and morality (Akin and Robbins 1999, Martin 2013). It is also in the triumphant accounts of reconstructed canoes voyaging the Pacific (Hanlon and White 2000), or the revival of Pacific tattooing (Kuwahara 2005), or the continuity of quilt-making in the Cook Islands (Jolly 2014). The spectre of cultural loss haunts arguments for heritage site protection, intangible cultural heritage, intellectual property rights, indigenous knowledge and various sorts of cultural revival. The assertion of resilience after centuries of colonization, economic exploitation, conversion to Christianity and political transformation is similarly grounded in the paradoxical claims of historical change and cultural continuity. It responds to the question: ‘What endures?’ Nostalgia is readily invoked in the romantic imagery of picturesque tropical islands and their villages. Here is Malinowski’s description of the southern Massim region, where I did my fieldwork in the 1980s: When, on a hot day, we enter the deep shadow of fruit trees and palms, and find ourselves in the midst of the wonderfully designed and ornamented houses hiding here and there in irregular groups among the green, surrounded by little decorative gardens of shells and flowers, with pebble-bordered paths and stone-paved sitting circles, it seems as if the visions of a primeval, happy savage life were suddenly realised… (1922: 35)

The European vision of ‘primeval, happy savage life’ generates a particular type of nostalgia, not one for a known or experienced past, but one for imagined worlds where life is uncomplicated and simple; where communitas reigns supreme; where ethical relations of reciprocity guide social interactions and, to quote Malinowski again, ‘decisions [are] always arrived at in strict accord with tribal tradition’ (1922: 37). As several of the chapters in this collection demonstrate, the reasons why some aspects of traditional life, identity and cultural values persist are complex and unpredictable. They are not always expressions of resistance, nor can they be seen as unequivocally virtuous or beneficial responses to globalization. In Papua New Guinea the resurgence of killing people alleged to be witches (see Burton’s chapter) illustrates the persistence of beliefs about the human sources of malevolence and might be characterized as social resistance to aspects of Western rationality, Christian teachings and contemporary national laws against homicide. Witch killing is also a clear example of the resilience of traditional understandings of the

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sources of evil, if not of the pre-colonial religious system. But the location of evil in the witch is now overlaid with notions of witchcraft derived from Christian evangelism, where witches are viewed as acolytes of Satan. Moreover, witch killing elicits images of atavism, placing the perpetrators firmly back in ‘the savage slot’ (Trouillot 2003). Resilience is rarely the pure, virtuous continuity of tradition in the face of foreign onslaughts. In the introduction to this volume, Laurent Dousset and Mélissa Nayral observe that ‘resistance implies individual practices, resilience on the contrary seems to refer … to entire sets of complex relationships’. The complexity of processes we deem evidence of resilience demands that we acknowledge historical changes that we cannot witness as well as contemporary events and values that are in many instances the result of those changes. So, for example, the complicated trajectory that might be labelled ‘resilience’, as people invoke the past as kastom (custom/tradition) includes and responds to exogenous and endogenous changes over time. And while Dousset (this volume) has identified the problems involved in using a term that implies the functioning of a holistic system, resilience has other baggage, notably nostalgia for an imaginary past. It is particularly noticeable in ecological and environmental anthropology but is pervasive in local representations that conjure images of homeostatic, pre-colonial societies. Even when anthropologists describe the ontological discrepancies between European understandings of the natural world (as categorically separate from culture and humanity) and those of the Papua New Guineans (see Jacka 2015: 77–155; Kirsch 2006: 57–78), there is a tendency to represent the latter as inherently ecologically benign and conservative. But as Jacka demonstrates in his exploration of the effects of a large gold mining project at Porgera, both local resistance and intrinsic resilience can be ineffective against the onslaught of industrialization. They are vulnerable to the blandishments of international corporations intent on extracting mineral wealth (Jacka 2015: 231; see also West 2006). Nostalgia for the tropics has its own aesthetic – lush and languorous, brilliant in its colours. But my research in Papua New Guinea has required that I explore emerging structures of inequality, those that were introduced with colonial intrusion into the region and those that have emerged in the context of economic development projects, particularly mining. In 1979 I travelled to the tiny island of Tubetube, an island in the Louisiade Archipelago. Tubetube is one of a group of islands that local people refer to as Bwanabwana and which in 1873 Captain John Moresby named after the engineers on his ship, Slade, Watts, Skelton, Bentley, Dawson and Connor. If these prosaic British names seem ill-suited to this scattering of tiny tropical islands, the local names are no more poetic – Bwanabwana means ‘small islands’; Tubetube simply means ‘adjoining’;

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Naluwaluwali means ‘the one in the middle’; and Kwalaiwa is the name of a tree that is visible along the shoreline. The people of the Bwanabwana were seafarers too. Traders and fishers, they too had named the islands and reefs in terms that give no inkling of their beauty. People on Tubetube can also appreciate the extraordinary beauty of their surroundings. Once, when I elicited the word or idea of ‘homesickness’, a young man mused for a while and replied that yes, they too had words to describe those feelings of longing for home that summoned forth mental images of the beauty of Tubetube scenery yanua kasiebwa (lit. place/home sickness). He recalled how as a child at boarding school he had taken a small bag of the white sand from the beach of Dekawaese because he so missed it. He kept it under his bed so that he could lie there and think of home. It is perhaps commonplace to the point of cliché for visitors to speak or write of the glorious landscapes and sea vistas of the islands of Papua New Guinea. But in presenting these images I want to stress the way that for white people, travelling through these islands has consistently evoked images of dreamlike beauty, lyrical prose and fantasies of escape, peace and fulfilment. The places and the people who inhabited them provided the material for these fantasies and while their descriptions bear some similarities to current tourist writings, the assumptions that underpinned them were often very different from the travellers’ tales that today find their way into magazines and web sites. I want to complicate the image of colonial intrusion and suggest complexities and contradictions that can be lost in characterizations of ‘white destroyers’ and ‘black resisters’; these have been obscured by analyses that perceive only the colonial intruder as the protagonist in these encounters – as the sole source of cultural loss. What endures can entail the agency of the nostalgic colonized seeking to reclaim an imagined, integrated past whose desires for holism are often as romantic as those of anthropologists or tourists. In particular, I draw attention to the fact that the gaze of the colonial has been returned and that while the colonials saw in these islands the benighted heathens who might be converted and the natural resources that might be exploited, so the locals glimpsed new ways of living and ever since have set about assisting in the exploitation of these resources in order to gain improvements in their standard of living. So-called ‘cargo cults’ are but one manifestation of the ways that islanders pin their hopes on a future in which they can transform their lives (Lindstrom 1996: 33–60). The difference, of course, is that the resources are theirs and in recognizing the value of their minerals, their natural gas, their forests and their fish to others, they perceive these as the means of attaining a way of life that

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is commensurate with the lives of others. They recognize too that their ambitions are linked to gaining access to global technologies and markets. David Berliner wrote recently: ‘As much as continuity is a key idea for social scientists, our discipline has, from its birth, held on to nostalgia for disappearing worlds, far away or close to home’ (2015:19). I am not claiming that anthropologists necessarily harbour sentimental, romantic, nostalgic images of village life. I want to inflect the term with a more narrow, perhaps more abstract, meaning so that we can glimpse its shadowy presence in our research into the contemporary Pacific and dispense with it in our examination of resilience. Threats to the cultural integrity of non-industrial communities by globalization underpin theoretical arguments about resilience and sustainability in the face of economic and environmental change. These arguments draw on instances of resistance to change, reinvention of past traditions and studies that emphasize cultural continuity in the face of new forms of communication – mobile phones, the Internet and Facebook pages. Many studies of Pacific urban communities note the ways in which town life holds promises it cannot keep; it distances people from their cultural roots, introduces new forms of economic division and discrimination, and breaks the ties that used to bind. In so doing, they (or we) are following in the footsteps of Durkheim, Weber and Tönnies, whose theories of the nature of modernity rest on the moral distinction between past and present social forms. Within this framework, and in order to escape the nostalgia and regret of our forebears in the discipline, we are prone to insist on continuity and resilience as a way of holding fast to essentialist primordialism. It shows in the ways that ‘cultural loss’ are almost forbidden words, seen as pejorative or indicative of a ‘lack’. We smuggle it back in as ‘cultural integrity and continuity’, ignoring the fact that the people of whom we write often see the ways they live contemporarily as highly original, novel and evidence of their enthusiastic abandonment of the past. Tubetube is surrounded by coral reefs that attract diving tours. Sometimes the dive tourists come ashore and walk around, admiring the sago-thatched houses and the frangipani trees. One remarked to me and Russell, a Tubetube man, as we walked around showing him the sights, ‘It’s so good to see that people here haven’t used galvanised iron for roofing, like most of the other islands we’ve visited’. Russell said to me in Tubetube language: ‘Tell him it is because we are poor, not because we don’t want them. If we had iron roofs we’d be able to collect water, we could have tanks. We wouldn’t have to dig wells and carry water’. In 1980, while most women wore cotton clothing, some still wore grass skirts when working. Once, when I admired the schoolgirls going off for the one day a month when ‘traditional dress’ was worn to school, my

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neighbour said to me: ‘Oh yes, they look nice when they are all new. But they take a long time to make properly, they are scratchy, they are hard to keep clean and bedbugs come and live in the waistband! I am so glad that we can now wear white people’s clothes’. Having returned to Tubetube many times in the intervening thirty-five years I have been struck by the ease, sometimes enthusiasm, with which specific customs and practices have been discarded or abandoned – or simply forgotten. In 1989 a collection of essays, Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring was published. In various ways, all contributors (including myself) argued for the cultural centrality of these rituals (Macintyre 1989). Each of the various components was heavy with symbolism of clan unity; matrilineal connection to place; the abundant yams and pigs proclaiming their work; the circulation of substance within and beyond their lineage affirming webs of relationality. Our analyses and interpretations, while far removed from Malinowskian functionalism, were redolent of that theoretical nostalgia that longs for holism, for the study of social institutions as integrating and unifying of a distinct community or culture. These customs appeared to have persisted in spite of missions, plantations, colonialism and independent nationhood. In 2010 I was surprised to find that many of the activities that had seemed so laden with significance had gone and new burial practices had arisen. Bags of rice were ready substitutes for yams; even cartons of instant noodles were acceptable. The custom of building a small house on the grave and lighting a fire in it remained. In 1980 the sandy ground was carefully scrutinized by senior men and women as the fire burned to see if particular insects crawled out – signs that the person had been a victim of sorcery or witchcraft. When I asked about this, people looked at me, puzzled and appalled. They had forgotten or did not know of that custom, although they did recall the practice of elders sitting close to the fire. One senior man immediately pronounced that henceforth the unchristian practice would cease – no more fires on graves. In the intervening years people have shifted their allegiance from the staid Wesleyan Methodism their ancestors embraced in the late nineteenth century and now practice a far more evangelical Christianity, which they associate with modernity. They have daily prayer meetings in each hamlet and sing songs learned from American evangelical broadcasts. Berliner observes that ‘Historically, anthropology lent its passion to pristine, cultural essences, seen as disappearing and set itself against the modern colonial juggernaut. However, scholars began to realize the durability of cultures as well as the absence of a nostalgic bent among the people they studied’ (Berliner 2015: 25). It is this absence that has intrigued me when working in places where social and economic change has been swift

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and dramatic. In considering acts of resistance, we need to attend also to the fact that people in the Pacific have often welcomed change and incorporated new ways, new values and new institutions. Ghasarian’s chapter describes the ways in which Rapa people have sustained their traditional system of distributing rights to land, but he also notes that in the early nineteenth century, British missionaries ‘apparently succeeded in a few years in eradicating the previous beliefs’. The decimation of the population by an epidemic certainly meant that they had fewer people to convert; but it seems a remarkably firm faith that can adhere to the new when the epidemic itself was attributed to the wrath of their former gods. Why did they not resist Christianity and appease their traditional gods in the hope that the sickness would cease? The acceptance of Christianity across the Pacific and its persistence presents conundrums that confound ideas about cultural integrity and raise questions about the ways that both resistance and resilience involve decisions as to what endures and what changes. Melanesian people have repeatedly insisted that their relationship to land, territory and resources is intrinsic and sacred. Many of them continue to protect sites that are redolent of an ancestral past. Some hold that the spirits of such places still inhabit them and admit no tension between the animism that persists and the monotheism that characterizes their faith and their worship. Certainly, some older people will occasionally speak wistfully of the period during the Australian administration when schools and health clinics were equipped and provided consistent service, and when there appeared to be far less crime. But in general people look to the future. They strive to educate their children so that they can find employment in one of the towns on the mainland. Since 1986 my research has been concentrated on the social effects of large-scale mining projects in Papua New Guinea. I have also undertaken research into the lives of Papua New Guinean women in paid employment and violence against women. Contemplating these projects in terms of resilience and cultural continuity, it is clear that one of the most enduring patterns of Melanesian sociality is that of masculine authority over women and the exclusion of women from political life (Macintyre 2008 Salomon and Hamelin 2008; see also Burton, this volume and Nayral, this volume). Men resist changes in women’s status associated with modernity: their education, their employment and their possible independence. They resent female autonomy, especially in situations where women attain power or authority that was previously the preserve of men. Gender ideologies that differentiate social and economic roles, that exploit female productivity (Josephides 1985) and that permit men to physically punish women whose behaviours affront them have proven remarkably resilient. But close

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scrutiny reveals that male responses are flexible and opportunistic. They incorporate novel, colonial introductions such as female dresses and then impose new standards of modesty that they enforce (Kelly-Hanku et al. 2016). For example, in Lihir, where prior to colonization women wore only strings around their waist and woven conical caps (and were therefore virtually naked), mission-introduced smock dresses became the norm. When the mine came, women began to wear trousers and men were outraged at what they perceived as an affront to decency (Cummings 2008, Macintyre 2011). The persistent value is then male entitlement to discipline women and so maintain control over them. These masculine values continue to exist in vastly changed circumstances, as Godelier (2005) and Knauft (2003) have illustrated in their respective analyses of the ways that the Baruya and the Gebusi have given up the elaborate and prolonged male initiation ceremonies that characterized their constructions of gender relations until relatively recently. Hazing, ritual homosexuality, complex ceremonial activities that were formerly construed as essential to the growth and maturation of boys into men have vanished, but the relative values placed on masculinity and femininity have survived (Malbrancke 2016). Resilience can thus be manifest in the continuity of values, even when the cultural institutions and practices that seemed to be critical to their maintenance vanish. The desire for economic advancement and willingness to abandon the old in favour of the new often eclipse attachment to customs and traditions that derive from a subsistence economy. In 1985 I went to Misima Island in Milne Bay Province to undertake a social impact analysis of a proposed mining project. Misimans were familiar with gold mines as this was the sixteenth mine on their land over the past century. Previous mines had altered the landscape, but none so drastically as the open cut mine proposed by Placer Dome, a Canadian-based international company. In a nutshell, Mount Sisa, a strikingly large volcanic mountain, would become a very deep hole in the ground and eventually a lake. People’s hopes were high: they would find employment; roads would be constructed; they would have reticulated water and electricity to their villages; they would have a high school, a large hospital, a new wharf, lots of business opportunities, etc. Many of their hopes were realized while the mine was operating, but following closure, when I went there to undertake a follow-up study in 2005, I found that the roads have not been maintained, the hospital not funded to operate at the levels it could when the mining company was footing the bill, the wharf was dismantled because the provincial government could not fund its maintenance, there was little employment and the hydro-electric machinery was not functioning. The future fund that was meant to ensure that people had the financial base for continuity on the

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path to modern prosperity had vanished – most of it into the pockets of lawyers representing competing landowner claims. During that field trip two Australian mining company directors arrived to negotiate a new mine on the island. I attended their meetings – where Misimans unanimously expressed their enthusiasm for this ‘development’. There were no dissenters. When I queried this response later, Misimans invariably spoke of their hopes for the future, a time when they would do things differently. Misimans were full of hope for another shot at ‘development’. But the lake is there – it is an acid lake. Misima has experienced a severe drought, during which people resorted to drinking its water. To quote Michael Main, an anthropologist who is also an environmental scientist: Apart from producing gold and silver, mineralisation at Misima contains typically high levels of arsenic … and … elevated levels of lead, zinc and copper. Low Ph levels from exposed sulphides will mobilise these and other metals. Even if there are no immediate effects of drinking the mine water there may be a cumulative effect that results in serious health problems later on. (Michael Main: personal communication)

During the period of mine operations many Misimans earned money, built houses, bought motor vehicles and boats. There was also an efflorescence of ceremonial mortuary exchanges between people in which new forms of wealth circulated and were redistributed in ways that followed traditional patterns. This can be interpreted as a form of resilience, of affirming customary exchange relations, transforming modes of social interaction by incorporating new wealth into older modes of interaction. But the dramatic increase in the scale of these transactions has had deleterious effects in the long term. The debts accumulated when people could give lavishly are too large to repay now that mining has ceased. Relations that were based on the ebb and flow of exchange within a subsistence-based economy have been strained and tensions increased. The short-term nature of resource extractive enterprises in Papua New Guinea establishes new forms of inequality, not only during the boom times, but beyond, when the debts cannot be repaid and the benefits crumble or fade away. Research in mining communities can be dispiriting. In 2014, I spent months acquainting myself with the catastrophic environmental damage of the Ok Tedi mining operations in Western Province, preparatory to fieldwork in villages that will eventually need to be relocated. The silt and rock waste will eventually engulf them. The research did not proceed for a variety of reasons, but in the consultations carried out with villagers, their support for continuing mining remained overwhelming. In Bougainville,

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where environmental damage, and political and social conflicts over the mine led to civil war, there is currently considerable political support for negotiations to reopen Panguna mine. In Lihir, in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea, where I worked for the first decade of the gold mining project, there are plans to extend the operations to Kapit, which in 1995, when I first went there, was a tiny village surrounded by bubbling hot springs and rocks sparkling with mineral crystal deposits. In the heady days of mine construction, nobody protested as they were bulldozed. But later, people spoke of their regret at the loss of a place that had been precious, where people could cook food without fire or heal open wounds by bathing in the pools. Lihirians welcome many of the changes that mine has brought – new school buildings, a hospital, roads, employment and business opportunities. But the influx of migrants from other parts of the country who want to share their wealth is bitterly resented (Bainton and Macintyre 2013). It is their presence, more than the mine, which has resulted in a resurgence of kastom activities, specifically the numerous ceremonial feasts associated with mortuary rituals (Bainton and Macintyre 2016). These have become the means for assertion of Lihirian identity and unity and are the site of cultural revival. Practices that had been abandoned, such as carving totemic facades and poles for men’s houses, have been resurrected. Songs and dance performances that had been rudimentary, to the point where only a few people in each village knew them, are now flourishing as crucial, competitive displays of cultural identity. Lihirians are acutely aware of the social changes brought about in the context of the mining project. They reflect upon the increase in drunkenness and crime. They are alarmed by the effects of dramatically increased population as the migration of people from other parts of the country threatens the social homogeneity that existed previously. The resurgence of Lihirian cultural performance is both a form of resistance to the demographic changes they are experiencing and an example of the fact that resilience can also be manifest as revival and a novel interest in the ancestral past as ‘heritage’ (Bainton et al. 2012). But as on Misima, the large scale of the ceremonies is dependent on the income from mining and is probably unsustainable in the long term. Malinowski insisted that the task of the ethnographer should be ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize  his vision of his world’ (1922 25, emphasis in the original). He, like many of his contemporaries, believed that this indigenous world was small, constrained by unchanging traditions and economically detached from the wider world. But as he wrote, the people of that region were already part of a global economy: they were selling their labour on plantations; their copra

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was being processed into soap in Marseilles; their pearls and gold sold in Sydney, London and Paris; their pearlshells were being made into buttons in European and American factories; and their bêche-de-mer were being sold to China. Then as now, they were active participants in the pillaging of their natural resources by colonial powers. As Edward LiPuma pointed out, the process of encompassment by capitalist and globalizing forces creates new ways of working and living, generates new modes of relating to others, and in the past three decades has thrust Melanesians into a globalized economy at an accelerated pace. The modern post-colonial juggernaut is moving across the landscape and many of the Papua New Guineans with whom I have worked (and whose lives I have studied) pin their hopes on its progress as a positive transformative force. Ghassan Hage has written of ‘social hope’ that it is ‘an historically acquired disposition brought about by … social conditions that allow feelings of hopefulness to flourish’ (2003: 23). Melanesian engagement with the global economy, with international agencies of various kinds, provides such conditions. Mining projects, fisheries enterprises, logging and tourism provide the context for these hopes. Evangelical churches, television shows, money scams, the Internet and mobile phones – all in their own way offer novel ways to envisage and enter into a modern world that will enable them to realize these hopes. Recently a travel documentary tracked two Trobriand men as they sailed to the island of Iwa to initiate new Kula partnerships with men there (BBC website). There was none of the ceremony that Malinowski described; their approaches to prospective partners were tentative and unconfident. One of the men hoped to gain wealth and status by charging admission to a film night – he would buy yams with the money and so set himself on the path to renown. Several of the Trobrianders interviewed bemoaned the fact that people were now so involved in selling artefacts to visiting tourist vessels that Kula was dying. What would Malinowski have made of this? I suspect he would see it as confirmation of his dire prediction of cultural extinction. But it can just as easily be interpreted as the resilience of a cultural institution. Kula has been transformed. In 1915 Malinowski constructed the timeless harmony of constant homeostatic circulation for readers who shared his own condition of modernity and he could only construct it by drawing on the intellectual discipline that was the product of that modernity. Today, rejecting the nostalgic moral opposition between primordial primitivism and industrial modernity, anthropology acknowledges change and transformation. But we too work within our conditions of modernity and in doing so through our current theoretical concerns (whether these be the Anthropocene or ontological disparities) we need to attend to the hopes of

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Pacific people in order to comprehend their choices about resistance and resilience. Their capacity to adapt and to incorporate new ways of being and living in a globalized economy has been demonstrated for decades. They now use cash where formerly barter or ceremonial transactions of their products created relationships with others. Sometimes too, the introduction of new forms of wealth based on extractive industries fractures existing social relationships. As Burton (this volume) demonstrates, the hopes of a life that incorporates many of the material benefits of modernity can quickly become strategies for controlling the flow of benefits and wealth. Opportunism and expediency can be interpreted as tactics of resilience in times of transformation; but they can also be factors in the destruction of forms of sociality that had existed for centuries before Europeans began their exploitation of Melanesian resources. The ideas of resistance and resilience as social and cultural responses to globalizing forces are useful in explaining and understanding the various ways in which communities respond to exogenously generated change. They enable us to identify local agency and to analyse the underlying, persisting values that inform actions and reactions. But we risk drifting back into a nostalgic approach to the subjects of inquiry if we omit the political and economic encompassment that colonization and capitalism entails. Studies of resistance and resilience cannot in themselves elucidate the processes whereby some aspects of a culture endure while others fade and are lost. The power of globalization initiates ‘large scale epochal transformations’ (LiPuma 2001: 299) that involve the hopes and desires of people for ways of being that require the abandonment of many of their ancestral traditions. Resilience is but one aspect of the ‘constant processes of cultural creation, destruction, hybridization, and diversification at work’ (Carrithers 2005: 441) as people adapt to these transformations. The interaction between a past that can be imagined as holistic and virtuous and an envisaged future that fulfils contemporary desires creates possibilities both for resilience and for loss, abandonment and dramatic change – but these are in constant flux. Martha Macintyre is a Principal Research Fellow in anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Her early anthropological research focused on the economic and social effects of colonial intrusion in Tubetube, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. More recently she has concentrated on gender inequality and the broad social changes associated with resource extractive industries in Melanesia. She has published extensively on human rights and the status of women. Her publications

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include: M. Patterson and M. Macintyre (eds), Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2011) and A. Biersack, M. Jolly and M. Macintyre (eds), Gender Violence and Human Rights: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu (ANU Press, Canberra, 2016).

References Akin, D. and J. Robbins (eds). 1999. Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bainton, N., C. Ballard and K. Gillespie. 2012. ‘The End of the Beginning? Mining, Sacred Geographies, Memory and Performance in Lihir’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19: 22–49. Bainton, N. and M. Macintyre. 2013. ‘“My Land, My Work”: Business Development and Large-Scale Mining in Papua New Guinea’, in F. McCormack, K. Barclay (ed.), Engaging with Capitalism: Cases from Oceania, Research in Economic Anthropology, Volume 33, pp.139-165 DOI: 10.1108/ S0190-1281(2013)0000033008. Bainton, N. and M. Macintyre. 2016. ‘Mortuary Ritual and Mining Riches in Island Melanesia’, in D. Lipset and E.K. Silverman (eds), Mortuary Dialogues: Death Ritual; and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities. New York: Berghahn, pp. 110–32.Berliner, D. 2015. ‘Are Anthropologists Nostalgists?’, in O. Angé and D. Berliner (eds), Anthropology and Nostalgia. New York: Berghahn, pp. 17–34. Carrithers, M. 2005. ‘Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities’, Current Anthropology 46(3): 433–55. Cummings, M. 2008. ‘The Trouble with Trousers: Gossip, Kastom and Sexual Culture in Vanuatu’, in L. Butt and R. Eves (eds), Making Sense of AIDS: Culture, Sexuality and Power in Melanesia. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 33–65. Godelier, M. 2005. ‘Aspects and Stages of the Westernisation of a Tribal Society’, in S. Tcherkézoff and F. Douaire- Marsaudon (eds), The Changing South Pacific: Identities and Transformations. Canberra: Pandanus Press, pp. 27–42. Hage, G. 2003. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Sydney: Pluto Press Australia. Hanlon, D. and G. White (eds). 2000. Voyaging through the Contemporary Pacific. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hanson, A. 1989. ‘The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic’, American Anthropologist 91(4): 890–902. Hunters of the South Seas: The Kula Ring, Episode 3. Last shown on 25 November 2016 on BBC TWO.

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Jacka, J.K. 2015. Alchemy in the Rain Forest: Politics, Ecology, and Resilience in a New Guinea Mining Area. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Jolly, M. 2014. ‘A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania’, in H. Choi and M. Jolly (eds), Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra: ANU E Press, pp. 429–54. Josephides, L. 1985. The Production of Inequality: Gender and Exchange among the Kewa. London: Tavistock. Kelly-Hanku, A., H. Aeno, L. Wilson, R. Eves, A. Mek, R. Nake Trumb, M. Whittaker, L. Fitzgerald, J.M. Kaldor and A. Vallely. 2016. ‘Transgressive Women Don’t Deserve Protection: Young Men’s Narratives of Sexual Violence against Women in Rural Papua New Guinea’, Culture, Health & Sexuality 2016: 1–14, DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2016.1182216. Kirsch, S. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford, CA: University of California Press. Knauft, B. 2003. ‘What Ever Happened to Ritualized Homosexuality? Modern Sexual Subjects in Melanesia and Elsewhere’, Annual Review of Sex Research 14: 137–59. Kuklick, H. 2008. A New History of Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell. Kuwahara, M. 2005. Tattoo: An Anthropology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Lindstrom, L. 1996. ‘Cargoism and Occidentalism’, in J.G. Carrier (ed.), Occidentalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 33–60. LiPuma, E. 2001. Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia. Michigan, MI: University of Michigan Press. Macintyre, M. 1989. ‘The Triumph of the Susu’, in F.H. Damon and R. Wagner (eds), Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring. De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, pp. 133–53.  . 2008. ‘Police and Thieves, Gunmen and Drunks: Problems with Men and Problems with Society in Papua New Guinea’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(2), Special Issue ‘Changing Pacific Masculinities’: 179–93.  . 2011. ‘Money Changes Everything: Papua New Guinean Women in the Modern Economy’, in M. Patterson and M. Macintyre (eds), Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, pp. 90–120. Malbrancke, A.-S. 2016. ‘Women Don’t Have Testicles: The ‘Making’ of Masculinity among Twenty-first Century Baruya (Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea)’, Paideuma 62: 69– 89. Malinowski, B. 1922. The Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Martin, K. 2013. The Death of the Big Man and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain. New York: Berghahn Books.

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Meijl, T. van 1995. ‘Redefining Ideology in Time: Māori Crossroads between a Timeless Past and a New Future’, Anthropos 9(1/3): 1–16. Salomon, C. and C. Hamelin. 2008. ‘Challenging Violence: Kanak Women Renegotiating Gender Relations in New Caledonia’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 9(1): 29–46. Tengan, T. 2008. ‘Re-membering Panalā‘au: Masculinities, Nation and Empire in Hawai‘i and the Pacific’. The Contemporary Pacific 20(1): 27–53. Trouillot, M.-R. 2003. ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot, the Poetics and Politics of Otherness’, in M.-R. Trouillot, Global Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 7–28. Wassmann, J. (ed). 1998. Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony: Cultural Practices of Identity Construction. Oxford: Berg. West, P. 2006. ‘Environmental Conservation and Mining: Between Experience and Expectation in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea’, Contemporary Pacific 18(2): 295–313.

Index ♦l♦

A Aborigines (Australia), 23–40, 42 acquiescence, 23, 38, 40, 60 activists, 16, 41, 65–83, 92–93, 96–98. See also political adaptation, 6, 9–17, 70, 100–101, 113 alcohol (prohibitions), 15, 24–27, 32, 37, 92, 102 Amnesty International, 24 Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, 112–113, 127. See also Christianity apology, 41, 99–100 assimilation, 24, 36 Associations Incorporation Act, 139 Austral Archipelago, 45, 52 Australia, 3, 8, 13, 15, 18, 20, 23–42, 60, 83, 112, 121, 125, 129, 139, 143, 145, 157, 159, 162 authenticity, 15, 109, 113, 118–120, 128 B Bainamarama, Frank, 66 benefit sharing, 134–135 Biangai people, 138–139 Bourdieu, Pierre, 68, 83, 85 Bulolo District, 138–141, 144 C cash economy, 134–137, 145, 152, 162. See also money Catholicism, 108–109, 113–114, 127. See also Christianity Chaudhry, Mahendra, 65–66 Chessé (Commandant), 49 chief (leader), 17, 19, 49, 55, 61, 90, 92, 95, 99, 104, 112–120, 123–125, 128–129, 132–147

Christianity, Christianization, 1, 2, 48, 55, 83, 112–113, 118, 127, 152–153, 156–157. See also Anglicanism, Presbyterianism and Catholicism. civic (civil) rights, 67–70, 76, 78, 81–82 code, 54–57, 60 clan, lineage, 58, 90–91, 95, 111–112, 115–116, 118–123, 128, 147, 156. Also see chief (leader) colonization, 1, 18, 54, 66, 68, 89, 94, 104, 118–120, 127, 133, 152, 154, 158, 162. authorities (colonial), 3, 14–15, 50, 54, 56, 58, 119 decolonization, 26, 97, 112 Commune, 49, 94–95, 103 Condominium, 109, 112 Constitution, 1, 69–74, 78–82, 85, 93–94, 133–134 consultation, 29, 34, 36–37, 80, 159 copra (coconut),108, 116, 123, 160 Council (of Elders, of Chiefs), 13, 15, 32, 34, 37, 40, 49, 52–53, 55–59, 61, 84–85, 90, 94–103, 123, 128–129, 133. See also chief (leader) crisis, 17, 60, 65–71, 78, 82–83, 84, 96 cultural loss, 126, 152–155, 160, 162 revival, 3, 12, 59, 109, 128, 152, 155, 160, 163 custom (customary), 1, 13, 24–25, 46, 52, 56–57, 59–60, 80–81, 90–91, 96, 98–102, 132–134, 143–144, 153, 156, 158 customary gesture, 99 customary institution, 1, 46, 52, 56–57, 59–61, 89–90, 95, 98,

168  Index

102; customary laws, 24, 60, 133; deregulation of, 102 D Deacon, Bernard, 119 Democracy, 1, 66–67, 70–73, 78–82, 85, 112. See also government and elections, 24, 66, 73, 78, 85, 94–97, 139–140, 142, 146 deputies, 15, 90, 95–104 and legal pluralism,60, 133 Deteix, Jacqueline, 93, 96 development, 1–2, 7, 8, 19, 58, 67, 107–108, 117, 133–135, 138, 141, 143, 147, 153, 159 disaster (catastrophe), 6, 8, 67–68, 144, 159 discrimination, 25, 32, 36, 42, 73, 108, 155 division and distinction (social), 3, 53, 59, 66, 68, 70–71, 76, 90–91, 92, 102, 108–109, 113, 127–128, 155 domination, 4–6, 17, 92, 101, 109, 126, 128 E ecology, 1, 6–7, 9–11, 61, 101, 110, 126, 132, 153 education, 14, 32, 45, 46, 49–50, 61, 77, 80, 83, 90–91, 98, 102–103, 107, 112, 114–116, 124, 127, 139, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160 encompassment, 161–162 equality, 5, 13, 15–16, 66, 67–70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80–81, 82, 93–94, 99, 101, 103–104, 108, 109, 153, 159, 162. See also parity. equilibrium, 7, 8, 10, 11, 17, 101, 126 ethnicity, 1, 12, 16, 66–67, 70–72, 74–76, 81, 82, 83–84, 89, 132, 139 F feminism, 6, 74, 77, 83, 92 Fiji, 16, 65–85 Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM), 70–82, 84 FLNKS, 92 Foucault, Michel, 3–6 France, 15, 49–50, 57, 62, 89–94, 108, 112, 121 French Parity Law, 15, 90–97, 102–103

♦ G Geertz, Clifford, 5 Gender, 3, 13, 15, 16, 19, 67, 70–76, 83, 84, 89–104, 133, 157, 158, 162 standards, 16, 93, 98, 103, 158 ideologies, 157 parity, 15, 90, 93–95, 96, 97–98, 101, 102–103 George Speight Team, 65–66, 74–75, 78 GFKEL (Group of Exploited Kanak Women Fighting), 92 Glocalization, 1–2, 44 Gold, 138–139, 145, 153, 158–161. See also mining Golub, Alex, 137–138, 142, 144, 146 Gorodé, Déwéé, 92–93 government (and non-governmental), 8, 23, 24, 26–27, 29, 32, 34, 35–37, 49, 51, 52, 57, 59–60, 65–66, 69,71–73, 78–80, 82, 85, 89, 92, 95, 97, 103, 112, 133, 138, 141, 143 Graffiti, 15, 30, 35, 37 Gudeman, Stephen, 2 H Hanson, Allan, 46, 55, 56, 151 Hidden Valley, 16, 134, 138–145, 146 hierarchy, 16, 66–69, 78, 81–82, 83, 84, 91, 96, 99, 110 historicity, 1, 3, 15 history global, 46, 127 local, 1, 110, 116–121, 125, 127, 128 holism, 17–18, 154, 156 Holling, Crawford, 6–7, 61, 100 homogenization, 1, 127, 160 housing (settlement), 16, 25, 28–29, 34, 117 Human rights, 16, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 79–81, 82, 85, 162 I ideology, 16, 95, 97, 125, 127 independence, 61, 67, 69, 83, 90, 92–93, 96, 97–98, 101, 107, 108–109, 112–115, 123–125, 127, 133, 145, 157 inequality. See equality Indo-Fijian, 16, 6, 69,75, 81, 84

Index  169

♦ K Kanak, 13, 15, 18, 89–104 Kastom, 124, 153, 160. See also Custom Keesing, Roger, 3, 109 kinship, 14, 18, 46, 52, 129, 138 Kula, 156, 161 Kwembu, 139 L Lacascade (Governor), 49, 56 Lamap (Port Sandwich), 107–129 land Aboriginal land, 15, 25–29 conflicts, 38, 56–57, 84, 119 leases, 24, 32, 34, 84, 139 owner associations), 107, 116–120, 124, 128, 133, 137–141, 142, 144, 159 rights and owners, 24–25, 29, 53–57, 69, 73, 82, 84, 118, 128, 133, 142, 157 Leymang, Gérard, 108, 111–128 Lihir , 147, 158, 160 Lini, Walter, 112–116 Loyalty Islands Province, 93, 94–95, 96 M Malekula, 13–14, 107–129 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 151–152, 156, 160–161 Massim, 152 Matignon Agreements, 92, 96 Mayor, 49, 52, 95, 99 Melanesian Way, 112–113, 118, 127, 128 Méry, Joseph,49 Middle Fly region, 135–137 migration, 8, 14, 62, 108, 118–121, 136, 160 military coup, 65–74, 76, 78, 82, 85 Millenarianism, 109 mimicry, 37 mining. extractive industry, 16, 132–145, 146, 158–159, 160–161, 169 Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), 134, 137 Ok Tedi, 16, 134–137, 145, 159. Porgera, 16, 137–138, 142–143, 145, 146, 153

See also royalties, gold Misima, 158–160 missions, 47–48, 55, 117–118, 120– 121, 129, 143, 147, 156–157, 158 London Missionary Society, 47 modernity, 73, 118, 155, 156–157, 161–162 money, 32, 123–125, 137, 138, 140, 142, 159, 161. See also cash economy Morobe Province, 138–141, 145, 146, 147 multi-ethnic, 66–67, 70–71, 73–74, 76, 82, 83, 84 N Nakuwi, 139–141 Namal, 119–120 Namangi, 119 Narokobi, Bernard, 118 nation, 1, 15, 16, 24, 65, 66–70, 73–74, 113–114, 127, 132, 141 Nauti, 139 New Caledonia, 3, 13, 15, 18, 19, 62, 89–104, 133 Northern Territory, 15, 23–40 nostalgia, 17, 125, 126, 152–153, 155–156 Noumea agreement, 89 NTER (Northern Territory Emergency Response), 23, 25–27, 35–36, 40 O Ortiz, Fernando, 2 Ortner, Sherry, 5, 100, 109 Ouvea, 13, 15, 18, 89–104 P Papua New-Guinea, 3, 13, 17, 114, 118, 132–145, 152–154, 157, 158, 160–161 parliament, 65–66, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 94. See also democracy participative capacity, 68, 81 payback, 36 pigs, 119–121, 124, 156 political crisis, 60, 65–66, 68–69, 71, 82, 96 mandates, 93–94, 102–103 order, 9, 57, 66, 69, 95, 123

170  Index

parties, 92–98; UMP (Union des Partis Modérés), 114; Vanua’aku party, 114 politics, 3, 15–16, 19–20, 69, 71, 85, 89–92, 98–99, 101–104, 107–108, 124, 142 practices, 68, 102, 109, 126 self-determination, 24, 29 strategy, 37, 40, 52, 54 struggle, 1–3, 27, 38, 66–67, 72, 79, 90, 92–95, 98, 101, 114–115, 140 voicing, 36–37 See also democracy, stability Port Vila, 107, 115–116, 117, 121–124 Prime Minister, 24, 25, 30, 65–66, 69, 79, 85, 112, 142. See also democracy Primordialism, 155 Pritchard, George, 48 protection, 24, 29, 30, 32–36, 40, 58, 69, 80, 139, 152 public speaking,82, 90–92, 93, 98 Q Qarase, Laisenia, 66 quotas, 75, 102, 105 R Rabuka, Sitiveni, 69 Rapa, 13–14, 44–62, 157 royalties, 3, 16, 134, 137–138, 140–141, 147 S sacred sites, 30, 32–35, 36, 157 Sahlins, Marshall, 2 signs, 15, 23–40, 103 social mapping, 16, 26, 133–134, 137, 146 sorcery. See witchcraft South-West Bay (Malekula), 119 space and roads, routes and tracks, 23, 25–26, 28–30, 32, 34–35, 37–39, 42, 50, 75, 107, 141, 142, 158, 160 and locations, 25–29, 31, 35, 39, 49, 75, 82, 84, 91, 117–118, 124, 136 stability, 6–7, 8–9, 10, 66, 67–68, 71, 79, 126. See also political

♦ Stokes, John, 55 subaltern studies, 3–4, 141 T Tahiti, 44–45, 47–61, 62, 95 Tonkinson, Robert, 109 Toohitu, 52, 57–58 tourism, 17, 107, 123–124, 154–155, 161 transculturation, 2 Trobriands, 161 Tubetube, 153–156, 162 U UN (United Nations), 19, 24, 81, 89 United Kingdom, 112, 114 Urban, 6, 36, 50, 61, 65–67, 70, 72, 76–77, 84, 133, 155 V Vancouver, George, 46 Vanuatu, 3, 13–14, 18, 107–130 Vulnerability, 7–8, 65, 74–78, 134 W Warlpiri, 13, 15, 23–42 Watut peoples, 138–139, 146 Wau, 139, 143, 147 Western Province, 135–136, 159 Winima, 139–140, 146–147 witchcraft, 118–119, 128, 132, 152–153, 156 woman deputy, 16, 99–101 activist, 16, 41, 92–93, 96, 98 organizations, 66–68, 70–71, 72–73, 80, 82–83, 97 rights, 2, 16, 65, 67, 68, 70–71, 72–74, 79–80, 82, 85, 90, 92, 94, 99, 103, 162 worldviews, 11, 38, 47 Y Yuendumu, 28–34