[ANU Pacific.Institute] Wednesday anthro seminar November 12

[Nicholas Mortimer]

The final scheduled anthropology seminar for this year will be next Wednesday, November 12, at
9:30-11:00 in Coombs Seminar room A, by

MONICA MINNEGAL  University of Melbourne

Title:  Reconfiguring social identities among Fembi and Kubo, Papua New Guinea: anticipating the PNG LNG project

Abstract:             Through late 2013 and the first half of 2014, in anticipation of the PNG LNG royalty payments they expected to start flowing from mid-2014, people at Suabi village dramatically ramped up a reconfiguring of social identities they had tentatively begun eight years earlier.  This paper explores how people are responding to what they see as new demands and potential opportunities, by renegotiating relationships within, between and crosscutting previously named groupings and among variously named persons.  To some extent, the negotiations are occurring in an information ‘vacuum’; people do not know the bases on which benefits will be distributed, or the legal requirements and processes for incorporating land groups (ILGs) which they do know will have a part to play in the receipt of royalty payments.  There is thus considerable variation in the ways identities are being mobilised and redefined.  But prior understandings of relational personhood continue to shape the ways that people are responding to those uncertainties.  And politics of allegiance beyond those entailed in securing access to royalty payments are crucial in shaping the configurations that are emerging.  The consequence of these processes, however, has been a cascade of decisions that will have effects far beyond those that the people making them envisage. This paper describes that cascade and explores some of its implications.

Brief bio:             Monica Minnegal is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne.  Her research focuses on the processes that shape change in the ways that people understand relationships to each other and the land.  Monica has spent many years working with Kubo and Bedamuni people in Papua New Guinea, studying the impacts of modernity on their understandings and practices.  More recently, She has worked with professional fishermen in Victoria, investigating the effects of different forms of engagement with the sea, with markets and with management on organisation of social relationships, community cohesion and reproduction, and fisher identity.  Her latest research is taking her back to PNG, to explore how anticipating the arrival of a major resource-extraction project – the PNG LNG pipeline – is affecting local social practices and cultural understandings.

Cheers,

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