Paige West is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Conservation Is Our Government Now

The Politics of Ecology in Papua New GuineaBy PAIGE WEST

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3712-6

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………….xiAcknowledgments……………………………………………..xxiiiAbbreviations and Acronyms……………………………………xxix1. New Guinea-New York……………………………………….12. Making Crater Mountain…………………………………….273. Articulations, Histories, Development……………………….524. Conservation Histories…………………………………….1255. A Land of Pure Possibility…………………………………1476. The Practices of Conservation-as-Development…………………1837. Exchanging Conservation for Development……………………..215Appendices………………………………………………….239Notes………………………………………………………251Bibliography………………………………………………..279Index………………………………………………………311

Chapter One

New Guinea-New York

In the 4 February 1985 “Talk of the Town” section of the New Yorker magazine, sandwiched between an item about a man who translated The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid, and a news item about fashionable hats, is a story entitled “Birds of Paradise.” In the story, New Yorkers are introduced to Wildlife Conservation International (part of the New York Zoological Society), the island of New Guinea, birds of paradise, and an ethnolinguistic group known as “the Gimi.” Wildlife Conservation International had invited the magazine to an event at the Salon Vendome in the Hotel Parker Meridian to meet the anthropologist Gillian Gillison and the photographer David Gillison and to hear them talk about Papua New Guinea (PNG), birds of paradise, and “the Gimi.” The invitation, as quoted in the New Yorker, reads, “Led through the dense tropical rain forest by a local Gimi guide, the researcher crouches inside a blind to observe the mating display of a bird of paradise. As they watch this splendid creature, the Gimi envisions the spirit of his ancestor; the scientist one of the last of a spectacular species” (New Yorker 1985:36). The article goes on to discuss the natural history of New Guinea, the conservation-related projects sponsored by Wildlife Conservation International, the New York Zoological Society’s captive bird of paradise collection, and the mythological and ritual connections between Gimi social life and birds. At the end of the article, David Gillison cautions the mid-1980s Manhattan cocktail party audience that even with their “spirit of reverence toward birds,” the Gimi, economically poor subsistence horticulturists, are strongly tempted to sell the birds’ skins for profit (ibid.:38).

The location of the “Birds of Paradise” piece in the New Yorker between discussion of The Odyssey and of fashionable hats is both eerie and poignant, as is the invitation’s invocation of “the Gimi” imagining kinship and the past and “the scientist” imagining the loss of spectacular nature in their future. The hero in The Odyssey travels in order to understand the meaning of life and to explore distant exotic lands. Milton was so moved by this narrative tradition that he used it as a model for his epic tale Paradise Lost, in which a man seeks to understand the meaning of his experience in life. Paradise Lost, in turn, became the basis for Western narrative forms, as its style and rhythm have captured the imaginations of generations of writers. Papua New Guinea, a country whose travel industry slogan was “The Land of the Unexpected,” has for many years drawn writers, travelers, adventures, anthropologists, and others, who all wish to find themselves, their fortunes, and “spectacular” nature and culture. Bird of paradise plumes first drew explorers to the island of New Guinea as early as 2,000 years ago (Swadling 1996:53), and their beauty took hold of the imaginations of European explores as early as 1522 (Cooper 1977:17). Their spectacular nature was inextricably tied to place early on, and indeed in Spain in 1523, there was a slippage in language concerning the birds, and they were referred to as “birds from paradise” (ibid.). These birds and this imagined “spectacular” nature in New Guinea have worked for over 2,000 years to create the transnational loops that envelop New Guinea today.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the trade in bird of paradise skins increased, as did the scientific study of the birds and their collection by various navigators, explorers, and naturalists. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British made significant commercial trips to the island during this time period and during these voyages; as was the case with other voyages during this period, collection for commerce and empire, and the collection for science, were intertwined (Pratt 1991; Swadling 1996). Alfred Russel Wallace, the well-known English naturalist and adventurer, was enamored of the birds and observed them extensively during the time he spent in the Malay Archipelago between 1854 and 1862 (Wallace 1880). Wallace first visited New Guinea in March 1858, staying five months on the island and not having the collecting success he had initially expected (ibid.:492). Of his first view of New Guinea, Wallace writes, “I looked with intense interest on those rugged mountains, retreating ridge behind ridge into the interior, where the foot of civilized man had never trod. There was the country of the cassowary and the tree-kangaroo, and those dark forests produced the most extraordinary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabitants of the earth-the varied species of Birds of Paradise” (ibid.:494). And later, when his foot was injured and he was confined to his house lamenting the days of collecting lost, he writes, “New Guinea!-a country which I might never visit again,-a country which no naturalist had ever resided in before,-a country which contains more strange and new and beautiful natural objects than any other part of the globe” (ibid.:504).

Wallace’s desire for birds of paradise was, however, not to be fulfilled in Dorey or Mansinam, the villages on mainland New Guinea where he set up camp. After an initial few days, during which the locals he paid to hunt for his collections returned with a bird of paradise and several other “beautiful” birds, he faced ten days with no more birds of paradise, finally deciding that “Dorey is not the place for Birds of Paradise” (Wallace 1880:500). During his stay, however, several ships came into Dorey harbor, and Wallace, upon discussion with their crews, realized that bird of paradise skins came to coastal peoples through trade with peoples living farther in the interior of the island. Upon acquiring them, the coastal inhabitants sold them to Bugis or Ternate traders (ibid.:507). These traders were already part of an existing international trade in plumes, and these interior parts of New Guinea, which Wallace imagined as untouched by civilization, were already connected to transnational commerce.

Even with his lack of success on the island of New Guinea, Wallace had profound collecting success on the Papuan islands to the northwest and southeast of the New Guinea bird’s head peninsula. These collections, and his narration of his trip, inspired other naturalists and museum collectors to venture to New Guinea on collecting trips (Swadling 1996:74). For Wallace, New Guinea was an imagined frontier; it was “the beyond,” a place that always turns on our images, ideas, and dreams, but that is also always destroyed by them (Crapanzano 2003:14). The beyond can never be found. Once it is constructed, it is immediately displaced; one can spend their whole life looking for it, and will never find what they are looking for.

While Wallace and others were collecting the birds for scientific study and to be housed in the collections of museums and private collectors, the ancient trade in skins for commercial purposes increased in the late 1800s as fashionable women began to wear the plumes in their hats. Indeed, by 1913 there may have been as many as 80,000 skins exported from New Guinea (Swadling 1996:91). In the summer of 1896, bird of paradise plumes were all the rage among fashion-conscious New Yorkers (ibid.:85).

A little over a hundred years later, in the summer of 1999, as I walked down Madison Avenue in New York City, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the “flash” of an image in the window of a shoe store. It was decorated with what seemed, at first glance, to be stuffed birds of paradise. I had just returned from PNG, where I had been conducting anthropological research while living with Gimi speakers in Maimafu village. The birds in the window were indeed modeled after the real birds of paradise-they were brightly colored with striking feathers displayed in wondrous ways. But these birds were a little bit strange, and it took me a couple of minutes to figure out what was wrong. The colors were a little too bright and the feathers a little too spectacular. They were copies of copies of copies, withdrawn from the objects on which they were based-birds that were squawking, displaying, and singing-they were drained of the lifeblood of the living (see Baudrillard 1981:169). Based on a model, the birds of paradise in the window had become a sign, an object and image with a particular kind of meaning (Baudrillard 1981:63). The birds themselves had become “hollowed out things” that worked to draw in meanings seemingly not connected to them at all (Taussig 2000:254). And these things that were once ritual objects, subjects of myth and religious practice, and even commodities themselves-things that had use- and exchange-value in and of themselves-were there being used to sell shoes, commodities that have nothing in the world to do with birds. Or so it seems.

In what follows I try to disentangle the connections between New Guinea and New York, conservation and development, and birds of paradise and commodities. The central arguments are (1) that ostensibly out-of-the-way places exist within, are made by, and help to make transnational loops; (2) that in the past imaginaries of New Guinea and its nature and culture as untouched, exotic, and spectacular drove people who wished to protect it, sell it, explore it, and study it, and that these same imaginaries drive environmental conservation in Papua New Guinea today; (3) that the contradiction articulated in the 1985 invitation in the New Yorker-of the Gimi guide seeing a bird and imagining his family’s past, and a scientist seeing it and imagining a future loss-is the central contradiction present in the integrated conservation and development project at Crater Mountain today; and (4) that there are profound differences in Gimi understandings of exchange and the social relations of exchange, on the one hand, and conservationists understandings of these relations, on the other.

CRATER MOUNTAIN Places that are imagined as far from the historic reaches of capital hold much of the in situ biological diversity that is targeted for protection by environmental conservation organizations. These places are often geographically isolated and seemingly far from the prying eyes and actions of post-Fordist capital. Deep in the forests of PNG, there is a mountain surrounded by a rugged and beautiful forested landscape. The people that live to the north of the mountain call its highest peak Bopoyana, after one of the bird species that lives on it. Many of the other people who know the place call the entire mountain range the Crater Mountains and the highest peak in the range, rising to about 3,100 meters, Crater Mountain. Indeed, it has had this name since the 1950s, when the first Australian colonial patrol posts were established in Gimi territory (Carey 1950/ 1951; Eisenhauer 1950/1950; Young-Whitforde 1950/1951). The mountain range is a group of peaks that are the remainders of a volcano that last erupted in the Pleistocene era. This mountain range and the lands that surround it have become a physical, discursive, and imaginative landscape in which the fields of conservation biology, cultural anthropology, and development studies have been drawn into conversations over the past, the present, and the future. It has also become a place where local and expert groups have been drawn into conversations, conflicts, and compromises about the environment and society and the appropriate relationship between the two.

Bopoyana, or Crater Mountain, is the centerpiece of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area (see map 1). This Wildlife Management Area and the rural villages that it encompasses were the center of an externally funded integrated conservation and development project (ICAD or ICDP) from 1994 to 1999. The project was designed and implemented by three nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) made up of conservation scientists, conservation planners and practitioners, and environmental activists from the United States, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. These actors entered into a set of social relationships with Gimi and Pawaia peoples in which it was promised that if Gimi and Pawaia gave their lands for inclusion in the Wildlife Management Area, they would derive cash benefits, access to economic markets for the forest products tied to local biological diversity, and “development.” This was a conservation-as-development project in which conservation was to be the development.

Within this Wildlife Management Area (WMA), at the edge of the Lufa District and close to the borders of the Eastern Highlands, Gulf, and Chimbu (or Simbu) Provinces, lies Maimafu, one of the rural settlements whose traditional lands and lives have been subsumed by this conservation-as-development project (see map 2). It is easy to imagine Maimafu as cut o from the rest of the world, but this “out-of-the-way-place” is not an example of a fixed and timeless periphery relative to a dynamic and changing core (Tsing 1993:10). Rather, like many other seemingly out-of-the-way places in PNG, it is a place where its inhabitants and their social institutions have a dynamic and fluid history that is tied to individual and community engagements with local, regional, national, and transnational influences (Biersack 1995a; J. Carrier 1992; Errington and Gewertz 1996; Foster 1995; Jacka 2003; Knauft 1999, 2002; Lederman 1998; LiPuma 2000; Morren 1986). For the past three decades, many of these engagements have been associated with and connected to the creation of this Wildlife Management Area. The Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area (CMWMA) is tied materially, socially, politically, economically, and ideologically to the Research and Conservation Foundation of Papua New Guinea (RCF), a nongovernmental organization (NGO) located in Goroka, PNG; the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), an NGO located in New York City; The Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN), an NGO funded by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and others, and located in Washington, D.C.; and a host of individuals living in the United States, Papua New Guinea, and Australia.

Broadly, this book takes one conservation-as-development intervention and ethnographically examines how the NGOs and villagers associated with it understand the environment and society. In so doing, it looks at how they imagine the past, future, and the present and how they understand and participate in the contracts of conservation. I am also concerned with the production of spaces that have come to be known as Crater Mountain, the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, and Maimafu village. By the production of space, I mean the ways space is appropriated, controlled, understood, and represented and the making of new material and representative systems to deal with that space (Harvey 1990:218-225). I examine the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area as a “rich site of cultural production” (Brosius 1999a:277) as well as a rich site of spatial production (Lefebvre 1991) that is made by and that makes the transnational. With this, the book offers an anthropological critique of conservation-as-development interventions. Also, by demonstrating the ways in which anthropology and anthropological units of analysis are implicit in and complicit with conservation and development, it problematizes anthropology’s role in both. More specifically, using history and ethnography, the book examines the discursive productions, practices, ideologies, and consequences of conservation-as-development as they have been articulated and carried out by people associated with the Crater Mountain project and people whose livelihoods have been affected by it.

Another level of analysis within this book is the relationship between anthropology and NGOs. These organizations have become key sites of analysis within anthropology-rightfully so given that NGOs often produce and circulate certain discourses about the relationship between nature and culture and then act upon their own discursive productions as if they were real (J. Carrier and Miller 1998). They produce the “problems” to be solved and then design and carry out the projects meant to solve them. Anthropologists, myself included, often articulate their critiques of NGOs using the language of the critical analysis of contemporary culture and veiling them in a progressive politics of human rights. But we often fail to discuss the relation between our critiques and the fact that NGOs have become the discursive and material terrain through which “indigenous,” “native,” and “other” peoples are known to outsiders and managed by statelike entities. While, in the past, this was the role of anthropology, NGOs, and conservation NGOs in particular, have usurped the traditional role of anthropology: speaking for and about “the other.” They have also become the producers of the bureaucratic apparatuses that manage their productions (Said 1978). In what follows, I examine discursive and material productions with regard to the people who were the subjects of traditional anthropological inquiry. I also examine the environmentalists’ and conservation practitioner’s reliance on Western-derived notions of nature and culture in projects where they work with people who have radically different notions about the environment and society and the relations between the two.

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