Table Of Contentdispossession and the environment
leonard hastings schoff memorial lectures
University Seminars
Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures
The University Seminars at Columbia University sponsor an annual series of
lectures, with the support of the Leonard Hastings Schoff and Suzanne Levick
Schoff Memorial Fund. A member of the Columbia faculty is invited to deliver
before a general audience three lectures on a topic of his or her choosing.
Columbia University Press publishes the lectures.
Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy 1996
Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization 1996
David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain 1999
Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War,
Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust 2003
Lisa Anderson, Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy
in the Twenty-First Century 2003
Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics
in Most of the World 2004
David Rosand, The Invention of Painting in America 2004
George Rupp, Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community 2006
Lesley A. Sharp, Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning,
and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer 2007
Robert W. Hanning, Serious Play: Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid,
Chaucer, and Ariosto 2010
Boris Gasparov, Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Philosophy of Language
and Its Early Romantic Antecedents 2012
Douglas A. Chalmers, Reforming Democracies: Six Facts About Politics That Demand
a New Agenda 2013
Philip Kitcher, Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach 2013
Robert L. Belknap, Plots 2016
disp ossession a nd
t he en v ironmen t
Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea
Paige West
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “‘Such A Site for Play,
This Edge’: Surfing, Tourism and Modernist Fantasy in Papua New Guinea”
in Global Sport in the Pacific, ed. Fa'anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa and Tom Mountjoy.
Special issue of The Contemporary Pacific 26, no. 2 (2014). Reprinted with
permission of the University of Hawaii.
“The Blackest Crow” (trad.) as performed by Laurie Lewis © 2002 Spruce
and Maple Music, from the album Birdsong.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: West, Paige, 1969- author.
Title: Dispossession and the environment : rhetoric and inequality in Papua
New Guinea / Paige West.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2016] | Series: Leonard
Hastings Schoff lectures | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008164| ISBN 9780231178785 (cloth : acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9780231178792 (pbk. : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231541923 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology—Papua New Guinea. | Indigenous
peoples—Ecology—Papua New Guinea. | Indigenous peoples—
Papua New Guinea—Social conditions. | Papua New Guinea—
Social conditions. | Papua New Guinea—Environmental conditions.
Classification: LCC DU740.42 .W643 2016 | DDC 305.8009953–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008164
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover design: Rebecca Lown
Cover image: Photograph by J.C. Salyer
For Liam Tiso Irunei, Solomon Aini, Vincentia Aini,
Jasmine Aini, and Jeremiah Aini, who all call me aunty
and in doing so make me want to make a better world.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Map of the Early Colonial Boundaries of New Guinea xiii
Introduction 1
1. “Such a Site for Play, This Edge”:
Tourism and Modernist Fantasy 37
2. “We Are Here to Build Your Capacity”:
Development as a Vehicle for Accumulation
and Dispossession 63
3. Discovering the Already Known: Tree Kangaroos,
Explorer Imaginings, and Indigenous Articulations 87
4. Indigenous Theories of Accumulation,
Dispossession, Possession, and Sovereignty 111
viii———contents
Afterword: Birdsongs—In Memory of Neil Smith
(1954–2012) 141
Notes 153
Bibliography 165
Index 189
Acknowledgments
The essays in this book are based on research conducted in
Papua New Guinea between 1997 and 2015. My biggest debt is to the
Gimi-speaking people, with whom I have worked continuously during
this time, and the people living in New Ireland Province, with whom I
have worked since 2007. I can’t ever give back what these people have
given me—they have given me my life, for my life is fully intertwined
with my work as a professor and a scholar of Papua New Guinea. And
I am a tenured, full professor of anthropology because I have published
books and papers, given talks and seminars, concerned with the lives of
these people in Papua New Guinea. Thank you, to all of you.
I also want to thank my colleagues at the Papua New Guinea Institute
of Biological Research and Ailan Awareness. I especially want to thank my
friends—people who have become more like family than anything else—
Miriam Supuma, John Aini, Banak Gamui, Anna Koki, Onika Okena,
Kamena Yoriene, Sisera Kamena, Muse Opiang, Enock Kale, Katayo
Sagata, Debra Wright, and Andrew Mack. Miriam Supuma and John Aini
are the sister and brother I never really had before, and that means every-
thing to me. I am grateful as well to all of our students over the years and
all of the researchers who have come in and out of the offices of these
two amazing organizations. Paul Igag, one of the co-founders of PNG
