Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea by Paige West (review)

Double whammy. If you are interested in certain kinds of materials from what is now Papua New Guinea's past, then you are not keeping up with modernity; if you are interested in people's continuing distinctiveness, then you undermine efforts to bring them into an ostensibly equalizing present. The insidious pressure on anthropological scholarship to support the development agenda at all times brings home, in a minor key, the powerful message of this angry book. It is not written angrily; indeed, it is written with great clarity and empathy. Rather, it arouses anger, and in my view more than justifiably. The story that is told should be heard in a major key; it is a wretched one, and goes on and on being repeated. Perpetuating "Papua New Guinea" as an icon of remoteness and of every prejudice that goes with it, the las ples ("last place") in the world (as it is internalized in Pidgin), does untold damage to place and people alike. However well-meaning those who cast themselves as midwives for modernization, it is a process of conversion somewhat like Christian evangelization and, like evangelization, must be kept suspended in the ultimately unrealizable. What gives this book its particular strength is its theoretical illumination of just how necessary it is to global capitalism that new resources are forever in the making: peoples' inadequate "capacities" have become fresh frontiers to conquer. Terra nullius: existing skills, minds, philosophies become invisible, leading to dispossession on a drastic scale. Not since encountering Teresa Brennan's illumination of capital's appetite for raw materials—its search for external replenishment, compelled by its own process of binding energy in fixed forms that cannot themselves reproduce—have I been so moved by the insights of political economy.