Making the Ipili feasible: Imagining local and global actors at the Porgera gold mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea

This dissertation examines the relationship between the Ipili speaking 'landowners' of the Porgera Valley and Placer Dome Inc., the Canadian mining transnational which operates a large gold mine on their land. The dissertation examines the 'feasibility' of the Ipili in two ways. On the one hand, 'the Ipili' must present themselves as an ethnic group with certain features in order to be 'feasible' partners who could sign the agreements necessary to create the gold mine and receive compensation from it. On the other hand, the Ipili took this opportunity to become feasible (efficacious) political actors who successfully extracted numerous concessions from the government and company. This dissertation presents a close ethnographic analysis of high-stakes negotiations between landowners and company representatives and examines Ipili identity, the relations between extractive industry and indigenous people in Papua New Guinea more generally, and the interaction of 'global' and 'local' forces. It finds that relationships between institutions depend on the personal relationships of their representatives. It argues that the dynamics of land registration in Porgera involved the creation of ethnic groups which take their form in response to the elicitation of outside forces. This contrasts sharply with how this process is envisioned by Papua New Guinea's elite, who consider land registration a transparent recording of primordial and unchanging ethnic identification. The dissertation finds that in order for these abstract institutions to appear to act, the coordinated action of networks of particular individual people must be portrayed as something done by collective subjects such as "the Ipili," "the State," "the Company," or even "globalization" more generally. Thus despite supposed differences of scale between 'global' and 'local' institutions, both rely on a similar dynamic of 'mediation' to appear in the world.