TY - JOUR
T1 - Covering the land with oil palm
T2 - revelation, value, and landownership among the Kairak-speaking Baining of Papua New Guinea
AU - Yaneva-Toraman, Inna
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2024.
PY - 2024/9/17
Y1 - 2024/9/17
N2 - This article explores how a displaced Papua New Guinean people decided to lease their customary land for oil palm plantation farming to restore their land use rights and resolve ongoing disputes with migrant settlers. By transforming the landscape into a territorialized space as a plantation, Kairak-speaking Baining hoped to gain actual landownership status and control over their land, which in turn, they believed, could bring them the development they had long dreamed of. I argue that Kairak conceptions about the plantation as a tool to reveal their landownership and remove the settlers drew on Melanesian notions about covering and revelation, changing perceptions of value, and discourse around ‘settlerhood’ and ‘nativism’, and show how agribusiness capital expansion strategies leverage regional politics of identity and autochthony. By illustrating how the plantation expansion unfolded differently in this region, the material offers new insights on the Plantationocene, global land grabs, dispossession and migration, and reaffirms the consequences reported elsewhere in the world where enclosures of exclusion lead to forceful rearrangements of people's social and economic lives, leaving their hopes and plantation promises unrealized.
AB - This article explores how a displaced Papua New Guinean people decided to lease their customary land for oil palm plantation farming to restore their land use rights and resolve ongoing disputes with migrant settlers. By transforming the landscape into a territorialized space as a plantation, Kairak-speaking Baining hoped to gain actual landownership status and control over their land, which in turn, they believed, could bring them the development they had long dreamed of. I argue that Kairak conceptions about the plantation as a tool to reveal their landownership and remove the settlers drew on Melanesian notions about covering and revelation, changing perceptions of value, and discourse around ‘settlerhood’ and ‘nativism’, and show how agribusiness capital expansion strategies leverage regional politics of identity and autochthony. By illustrating how the plantation expansion unfolded differently in this region, the material offers new insights on the Plantationocene, global land grabs, dispossession and migration, and reaffirms the consequences reported elsewhere in the world where enclosures of exclusion lead to forceful rearrangements of people's social and economic lives, leaving their hopes and plantation promises unrealized.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85204092323&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/1467-9655.14206
DO - 10.1111/1467-9655.14206
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85204092323
SN - 1359-0987
JO - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
JF - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
ER -