Abstract
This chapter explores the questions of social inclusion/exclusion in Papua New Guinea and argues for a deeper critical engagement about the intellectual origins, applicability and political consequences of these concepts and terms as analytical tools within both the context of colonial and post-colonial Papua New Guinea. These terms, constructed within a broadly Western, liberal and representative democracy remain incredibly difficult for a culturally heterogenous society and its historically autonomous clan-or-tribal-based kinship relationships and relationality. Drawing on the author’s longitudinal work in Papua New Guinea, this chapter attempts to map the epistemic politics of the concept of social inclusion/exclusion within a decolonising context. Over the last 40 years, the shift from an economy based almost entirely on subsistence agriculture to one where the economy is driven and dominated by a limited number of conglomerates and aid, has further anchored a Western-framed ideologue of a social inclusion/exclusion approach and process in Papua New Guinea. This chapter explores the performativity of the notion of social inclusion and proposes that concepts of social inclusion/exclusion provide opportunities for a deepened critically reflexive interrogation of epistemic dominance and singular ways of interpreting the world.
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Notes
- 1.
The opening of the Morobe Goldfields in the 1920s and 1930 heralded a colonial epoch—one that opened the doors of Papua New Guinea to an increasing presence of large-scale resource extractions activities, including copper and trees. Wau, a colonial-constructed township, was the site for these rapidly growing extraction activities and enabled the spread of the industries inland and into some of the more remote areas of the districts and especially into Watut customary land. This enabled the spread and protection of colonial power and commerce, transforming, until into the late 1990s, both Wau and its neighbouring town Bulolo into booming resource extraction service centres. Yet little of this wealth was spent for the benefit of the Upper Watut area. As independence approached, the Bulolo district's large-scale mining industry also began to lessen; and local employment opportunities and services also declined significantly. This led to a spiralling process of socio-economic stagnation that gathered pace rather than reversed in postcolonial Papua New Guinea.
- 2.
The Kukukuku people (also variously called Anka, Anga), a remote tribal community of approximately 98,000, are spread across the Kaintiba district in the Gulf Province to Menyamya and Wau districts in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Since the 1930s, powerful and often uncompromising global demands for resources, land and control have guided state expansion into these remotest parts of Watut customary land. A significant aspect of the Kukukuku tribal identity in external/foreign/colonial literature on Papua New Guinea is articulated in images such as ‘ferocious’, ‘harsh-featured’ (Sinclair, 1998); fierce and detested for their unwelcoming disposition and apparent love of fighting and ambushes. Such narratives prevail till today. Papua New Guinea is a developing nation; and state-led development agendas often seem to be at odds with a growing population that relies mainly on agriculture. About 97% of the total land is customary land, owned and looked after by the people who have intimate knowledge and relationships with their environment. More than 85% of the total population lives in rural and remote areas and depends on subsistence agriculture.
- 3.
In late 2011, a group of Elders from this Kukukuku tribal community travelled to Wau and invited the author of this chapter to their land in the Upper Watut areas. The author had been travelling to Wau as part of a national study, entitled Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development in partnership with the Papua New Guinea Department of Community Development. The study’s aim was to address problems and gaps in the literature on development and create a new qualitative conception of community sustainability informed by substantial and innovative research in Papua New Guinea.
The Elders were not as interested in the national study, but much more in building a relationship with the author. They had been observing her in and around Wau, as she was meeting and talking with other tribal communities. The Elders commended me for my patience, deep interest and respect for the people as I conducted my research and felt that I would be ‘the right person’ for them to invite into their lands to hear what they had to say about development and the presence of the West on their lands. In 2012, I began my first visit; welcoming this shift in my research as an important process of a critical reflexive examination of my own field of development and policy.
Over the years, this place-based collaborative research has provoked a different, empowered, non-subordinate cultural future—one that bestows a deeper understanding of local people’s connection to kin and country and its resilient intergenerational transmission of ancestral inheritance, kinship and distinctive metaphysics of place and language.
- 4.
Many years later, as my work deepened in these areas, I asked one of the Elders what that act of shooting the arrow into the air meant. He laughed for a while and then said that the Kukukuku were also known as the ‘arrow shooters’. Such a performance, in front of all the people, was an act of acceptance, of connectivity. One that expressed a way of life and truth that was also connected to their knowledge of life.
- 5.
Spivak (2002) Righting wrongs, unpublished paper available at http://www.law.columbia.edu/law culture/Spivak%20Paper.doc, accessed 12 October 2002 as cited in Ilan Kapoor (2004), Hyper‐self‐reflexive development? Spivak on representing the Third World ‘Other’, Third World Quarterly, 25:4, p. 627–647.
Accessed in September 2020 by author of this chapter, and new citation is Spivak,(2004); Righting Wrongs; The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 103, Number 2/3, Spring/Summer, 2004, 523–581 (see final reference list).
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Nadarajah, Y. (2022). Living Between the West and the Pacific—Papua New Guinea and the Question of Social Inclusion/Exclusion. In: Panda, S.M., Pandey, A.D., Pattanayak, S. (eds) Social Exclusion and Policies of Inclusion. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9773-9_16
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