探访世界最后的疯狂部落（二）Seeing like an anthropologist（2）

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探访世界最后的疯狂部落（二）Seeing like an anthropologist（2）

Steve Grimwade 

I remember stories ofpeople, and I believe this is true, about someone finding the last - or thelast known tribe that hadn't met Western civilisation being found I think it wasin the '60s. Is that true?

Monica Minnegal 

Oh no, it's a - there arecertainly people who stayed away from the government as much as they could.They all knew about the government. Most of these stories - when they do comein they're - you discover that their names are things like Tom and Joe. They'vebeen influenced by the colonial authorities. But I will say that the place Iwork, the first government patrol to actually go to that area was in 1968. Socolonisation reached this place very, very late. It was the last uncontrolledpart of Papua New Guinea until 1961 when a government patrol station was set upin a place called Nomad, not very far away.

So there are definitely parts ofNew Guinea where certainly into the '60s and '70s - when I first went there in1986 there was almost no-one who spoke English or Pidgin or Motu, the tradelanguages. People were - there was no-one who had gone to one of the towns andstayed. So it's all very, very recent, which makes of course for people like mewho are interested in change, it's just - you're confronted with change inevery level of society.

Steve Grimwade 
If you tie change and you go to the other side and you think of the romance ofthe new, and also to the romance of the old, I sort - in my mind I think ofanthropologists and I do think of colonial times and I do think of pithhelmets. I figure there is probably less room for the romance of the old andfinding totally new things in those sort of places. Yet now maybe anthropologyis being drawn into the city now more about seeing change, how it happens inmodern cultures. Would that be correct?

Monica Minnegal 
Oh, yes. But it depends on what you mean by the romance of the - by the old.People may be engaging in different contexts. They may now be coming to thecities. They may be working for mining companies and running seismic linesthrough the mountains, operating heavy machinery. But they're still very muchgoing to be making sense of the things that they see in ways that they didbefore. You don't wipe out a way of seeing the world and impose a completelynew way on top of it. What it does is it draws attention to different ways, ofdifferent things but not necessarily different kinds of things. I could throwbig words like ontology and epistemology at you, but I don't think you reallyneed those.

It's really about knowing that -I'll give you one example. For people in this place it's really important topay attention constantly to what's going on around you. What the weather'sdoing, what the trees are doing. It's unpredictable so you have to be ready toact whatever the weather's doing. This year will the acari nuts produce, okay,we'll do that. This year is there going to be a drought and we're going to haveto move to a different part of the country. So you're constantly payingattention.

What you did in the past doesn'treally matter. What matters is the present and what you're going to do in thefuture. They didn't construct boundaries around what you could do, where youcould go. Your relationship to land was predicated on what you do today, andthere are no constraints on where you could garden tomorrow in this particularplace. Now we come along and we say, who was your father and your grandfather?We need to know where you came from, we need to know those past connections. Weneed to know where's the edge of your land because if we put a mine here weneed to know who to pay money to. So we have to draw lines on the land. Nowthat's a very different way of constructing things in the world, thosecategorical distinctions.

And people are now doing thatbecause it's the only way they can see to engage with the state, to engage withthe corporation. But that doesn't mean that they're not also deeply embedded ina relational way of being in the world. They get very frustrated when thepeople in the mining camp pay no attention to them as individuals. They arethere watching the mining camp. This is an exploration camp at Swarbi. They'rethere watching the comings and goings, they're constantly trying to get hintsof what the plans might be for the company. They're constantly payingattention. They say, "these people pay us no respect, they don't attend tous as people. We are just workers."

In a sense it's the same thingthat I'm seeing with commercial fishermen where the thing that disturbs most,and the reason why they probably many of them will vote for Pauline Hanson -will vote for the hunters, shooters, fishers - is because what they see thegovernment doing is turning them into numbers. Turning them into anonymoussubstitutable numbers. You have a licence and it's the number on your licencethat matters. It's not about you or your relationship to the sea, or yourknowledge of the sea. If we decide to cancel that licence you're no longer afisherman. If we decide to - or you could decide to sell that licence tosomeone else, and you've now completely alienated yourself from place. But ofcourse people don't live that way.

Steve Grimwade 
So what are the structures or the processes that government and bureaucrats useto best enable people to be represented as people and not numbers?

Monica Minnegal 
This is hard, and this is probably where most of our attempts to intervene havebeen. To say that actually go out there and see how people relate, rather thandrawing up the grids, drawing up the maps before you go. Go out there and seehow people switch between different fishing targets, okay. Go out there andrecognise that what works over here is not necessarily going to work overthere. This applies in all sorts of domains where anthropologists are trying tointervene. 

There is not one solution forclosing the gap on the various issues that Indigenous people confront. Becausepeople are caught up in different local situations. Rural, regional, remote,urban, people live in all of those different contexts and if we don't actuallyunderstand how they live in those contexts and try to say, we can come up withone solution; one Indigenous policy. It's not going to work.

Steve Grimwade 
Some of your work and the ideas that came from that with regards to your workin PNG and the fact that people were changing their tribal affiliations, ortheir group affiliations. That would potentially have an impact I suspect onthe - on remuneration. I mean we're talking about communities on the edge of a$30 billion LNG plant or a field. The stakes are very, very high. So how arethose relationships to land and community groupings changing?

Monica Minnegal 

I hinted at that earlierwhen I said that they are now having to draw lines around the land and registerownership of land in a Western sense. That immediately means that you drawlines, you say, you're in, you're not in. We do this - they do the same thingsincreasingly now with people where they say, you belong to my group, you don'tbelong my group; you belong in a different group. 

Whereas previously thoseboundaries were always really fluid and that was very important in a placewhere you had to be able to be nimble in responding to whatever the environmentthrew at you. But we now draw these sharp boundaries.

There is a strong emerging senseof haves and have-nots. The lucky ones who got the gas and the unlucky ones.There's a lot of - what's emerging is a sort of - a horizontal inequality. Nota class distinction here now, but people who in all sorts of ways are exactlythe same and yet some are rich and some are not.

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