THE LAND TENURE SYSTEM OF THE NASIOI PEOPLE

And the bare cupboard of sustained research in mining areas

Summary

A small amount of research into Nasioi land tenure was conceived and carried
before the copper was discovered. No known studies have been done since.
Furthermore, sustained fieldwork-intensive studies are not being carried out in
any of the new mining areas. The paper calls for a reorganisation of funding
arrangements for applied social research in Papua New Guinea as a matter of
utmost priority.

John Burton

September 1989

Department of Anthropology and Sociology

University of Papua New Guinea

Introduction

I will get straight to the point. A carelessness over matters of land and
custom has cost the country and the people of Bougainville dearly. I do not
expect this to be controversial.

What I want to do here is to tell you about the information gathering ability we
ought have had. Now, when I say "we", especially if I say "we know little about
land holding among the Nasioi", this is a shorthand for "we non-Nasioi who need
to know about it", a group which includes a mere handful of anthropologists, but
a large number of government and company negotiators. It also seems necessary to
add that, while a perfect understanding of matters is never a guarantee against
disasters, there is a body of opinion makers in this country who believe that
doing basic ethnographic and sociological research is a waste of time - or worse
- and that not one toea of anybody's money should be spent on it. I do not
believe this is very constructive.

My title is the land tenure system of the Nasioi people, and I can be
surprisingly brief - because "we" know virtually nothing about it. However, as
you may have guessed, this is not the end of my paper, because I am saddened to
announce that we also know virtually nothing about the land tenure systems
around Ok Tedi, Porgera, Iagifu, or almost anywhere else in Papua New Guinea for
that matter. Much local information is needed to make sensitive and just
decisions about such a precious commodity as land, so it may come as a shock to
many people that it is the norm for this to be non-existent. Whose fault is

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this? Whose fault is it that not one single anthropology graduate is employed as
such by a provincial government? Whose fault is it that mining and drilling
companies do not have anthropologists on their staffs?

Customary land is my interest and is of publically stated importance to

politicians and prominent Papua New Guinean writers and thinkers. But while we
read daily in the media that Papua New Guinea is a country of rich and varied
cultures, in practice the state, in its many dealing with customary groups, acts
as if the country had only one culture. I will call this approach "the method
of division by 700". It gives rise to statements such as "land in Papua New
Guinea is held in trust by customary groups". It is nice to build the
preambles to commissions of inquiry on this kind of statement, but as a charter
for practical action, it is worse than useless. It leads to the impression than
customary aspects of land ownership are being taken care of, when in reality
they are not.

Research on Nasioi land tenure

What do people from the southern part of Bougainville conceive of by the term
"land"? Is the cultivable soil separate from economic resources like fruit
trees, and do different groups exercise the rights of ownership over different
parts of a composite thing which makes up what other legal systems call "land"?
Can land be bought and sold in the traditional context of use - or disposed of
in any other way than by the normal methods of inheritance in the matrilineal
societies of this region?

If it can - and there are various kinds of funeral payments in the area which
may take the form of grants of land - how permanent is the transaction that
takes place on these occasions? These issues go to the heart of landowner
strife. Recent events are a harsh lesson that following the wrong path can lead
to losses of millions of kina and, worse still, to the tragic waste of human
life we have recently witnessed.

These are important questions, but even the basic research has not been carried
out. You would think, for example, that Panguna land tenure was a well-known
subject, perhaps even widely discussed in student textbooks at the university.
This is not the case. The baseline work of the anthropologist Douglas Oliver in
the Siwai language area of Buin District dates back fifty years to 1938-39, and
that of his student Eugene Ogan in the Aropa Valley of South Nasioi in the Kieta
District, to 1962-64, and was obviously conceived long before the copper was
found. Another team - also graduate students at the time - Jill Nash and Donald
Mitchell, worked among the Nagovisi of Buin District in the period 1969-73. The
publications arising from this research effort (see Oliver 1949, 1955; Ogan
1971, 1972; Nash 1974; Mitchell 1974) are of a high standard, but - I am
confident the authors would agree - do not constitute the basis for making
crucial and continuing decisions on a resource development as large and as
intrusive as Panguna.

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A systematic treatment of what they say would take many pages, but there are
some points that it is well to be aware of. Ogan, Nash and Mitchell all
focussed on change and development. Nash was interested in how a matrilineal
society can handle the introduction of cash cropping; the land, of course, is
controlled by women, but - in PNG as a whole - it is almost always men who are
more active in non-subsistence agricultural ventures. Her conclusion, in 1974,
was that Nagovisi culture had adaptive features that limited the potential for
strife. Most prominent were the clearcut roles of women, fairly strict
observance of the ideal that husbands should live in their wives' villages
("uxorilocal" residence) and a system of dual organisation. (The husbands of a
group of clanswomen must come from the same - that is, opposite - moiety and
this leads to a degree of solidarity among the in-married men which they might
otherwise disruptively seek to find among their natal clans.)

But both Ogan and Oliver describe matrilineal societies where things are not so
simple. Oliver makes it plain that the traditional Siwai pattern departed
substantially from the ideals of matrilineal inheritance and uxorilocal
residence. Wealthy big-men, for example, rarely moved to their wives' villages
and folk sayings asserted the primacy of the father-son relationship in a very
patrilineal manner. Land holdings were fragmented, not tidily arranged into
matriclan estates as among the Nagovisi. Ogan seems to have found it difficult
to pursue land studies, and he speaks of "new procedures" evolving in response
to the pressure of post-war change. He says that "at this point [i.e. late
1960s] one can only sketch the possible outlines of a modern Nasioi system of
property rights".

Hard as it is to imagine, no substantial field studies have since been

undertaken to resolve any of these perceptible differences in land usage. Long-
term studies of the appropriate nature were not commissioned by the
Administration or the company in the area directly affected by the mine
(however, other studies did receive apparently ample funding, cf. Mamak, 1979).
I do not exaggerate. A scattering of seminar papers were read at early,
unpublished Waigani Seminars, and a short paper on land tenure by Ogan appeared
in the journal Oceania (Ogan 1971), and but these do not constitute the basis
for gaining a comprehensive insight into the way the Guava Nasioi own, transact,
and litigate over land. Of course, an appreciation of the need to have this
information was the last thing on the minds of officials. Contemporary papers
by Fr. Momis, recently reprinted in the Times of Papua New Guinea, and by J.
Dove, Theodore Miriung and Mel Togolo - in the aptly named book Problem of
choice: land in Papua New Guinea's future (Momis 1974; Dove et al. 1974) - leave
little doubt about the the attitude of the Administration: "it assumed a
contemptuous air and was not prepared to come down to the level of the people"
(Dove et al. 1974:183).

What of Oliver's reports to the mining company, for whom he worked as a

consultant from 1968 onwards? This is the biggest mystery of all, because the

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documents were kept secret and never released for public or scholarly scrutiny.
We know a fair amount about Oliver's views about Bougainville in general - but
we have no idea (a) whether his report was accurate when discussing the Nasioi,
or (b) whether the company paid any attention to his views, other than those
that affirmed the position it had already adopted. (It seems quite likely that
both points could be answered in the negative.)

Ok Tedi

Surely the post-Independence negotiators earned a fairer hearing for ples and
kastom at Ok Tedi, and this means that we can expect fewer problems in the years
to come? Not so - again we do not have the background knowledge we need to make
any assessments. Two environmental (not sociological) impact reports were
commissioned before the mine went ahead - but customary land studies, including
thorough studies in oral history, in this legend-filled landscape, did not
feature in them. A brief, but unpublished report identifying the owners of Mt
Fubilan was lodged somewhere, enabling the first group of authors to state that
"complaints that no one has investigated land around the mine are blatantly
false" (Jackson et al. 1980:188). But it is a telling comment on this
document's priority that its reference failed to make an appearance in the
general bibliography.

By the time of the second report, the ecologically orientated anthropologist

David Hyndman had carried out a study of the environmental resources used by
local people, but his was but a tiny part of the overall impact assessment and
was based on a scant six weeks of fieldwork (see Maunsell & Partners 1982). By
Hyndman's own standards and the complexity and richness of his academic
publications, this is a travesty. As Pamela Swadling (Swadling 1983) relates in
her book How long have people been in the Ok Tedi impact region?, Hyndman
further recommended that archaeological studies should be undertaken, but this
was edited from his manuscript and does not appear in the version that appeared.
(Later the National Planning Office granted about K10,000 to the National Museum
to travel expenses and museum staff did the work from their departmental
budget.) In the second report as a whole, the "land required for project
facilities" is covered in precisely fifty words (Vol. 1, p. 79), while a further
twenty lines suffice for "cultural perspectives" (p. 113). This is an insult.

Porgera

Porgera is sited in what the Huli like to call the Hela cultural area. The
only published ethnographic information dates back to the 1950s, when Mervyn
Meggitt visited the area. I know that various bits and pieces of sociological
work have been carried out (e.g. Gibbs 1981), but there has not been a
satisfactory follow-up . This is dangerously silly, because it is well known
that the Ipili have a very flexible attitude to land tenure and that they follow
the Huli pattern of many claims to land parcels through any remembered
genealogical connection. But beyond that rather broad-brush generalisation, the

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detailed case studies just do not exist to highlight the differences between
Huli and Ipili custom in this respect, and to point out specifically Ipili ways
of doing things.

This in itself should ring a few alarm bells. But the fact that there are huge
differences in land custom between the Ipili and their eastern Enga neighbouring
should set off veritable klaxons in Waigani, if not in Wabag.

Lihir

Contrasting with these is Filer and Jackson's Lihir study. I am happy to say
this deliberately investigates the clan system and land claims to the prospect
area in detail - but it is notable for being the only impact report to do this.
This is a ridiculous situation and the impossibly short time available to the
authors for company-funded fieldwork makes their achievement all the more
remarkable. To quote them:

[the report is limited by] the absence of any substantial documentation of Lihir
society by anthropologists or other writers who have spent long periods of time
there ... [and it must be said that] research conducted on a "fly-in-fly-out"
basis can only produce particular kinds of information, and cannot do more than
scratch the surface of village society (Filer and Jackson 1989:2)

This may be taken as a strong note of protest to both the Department of Minerals
and Energy and the mining company, Kennecott-Niugini Joint Venture.

Conclusion

What practical action can we take, starting tomorrow? I have a shopping list,
but I must preface it by saying that it will a case of "more haste, less speed"
if hurried measures are attempted in Bougainville and if nothing is done
elsewhere. As the nature of my suggestions will make clear, I emphasize action
on a national scale.

1. Acceptance of the need for much longer term follow-up of socio-economic,

cultural and environmental issues than my brief review indicates has happened in
the past.

2. In particular, socio-economic impact studies must pay much more attention

to customary issues and land holding system in the respective areas. A major
contributing factor to the weakness of these studies is that they rely too
heavily on short, very expensive periods of consultancy. These largely benefit
the consultancy business; they are carried out at the expense of solid, baseline
studies carried out full-time by researchers resident in Papua New Guinea.

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3. To this end, the role PNG's existing institutions of higher learning and
research should be taken much more seriously. In this connection, I cannot
stress too much the unsatisfactory nature of present arrangements, speaking in
terms of the conditions and opportunities for field studies away from Moresby.
The Museum, for example, has many responsibilities, but each year is crippled by
some new budgetary disaster. The university has little ability in social
science to equip a cadre of graduate students to begin their careers in the
business of becoming experts in cultural advocacy.

4. A new formula for funding must be hammered out. Well might Fr. Momis
calculate that just six cents per hundred dollars flowed to Panguna landowners
(1974:196). My calculations indicate that fewer than two toea per thousand kina
spent on starting new mines goes on investigating matters directly related to
land and custom. I suggest to the venture companies, in the light of recent
events, that this is a risky way to do business.

Bibliography

Dove, J., T. Miriung and M. Togolo

1974. Mining bitterness. In P.ÿG.ÿSack (ed.) Problem of choice: land in Papua

New Guinea's future. Canberra: Australian National University Press, pp.ÿ181-189

Filer, C.S. and R.T. Jackson

1989. The social and economic impact of a gold mine in Lihir: revised and
expanded. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea, Department of
Anthropology and Sociology

Jackson, R.T, C.A. Emerson and R. Welsch

1980. The impact of the Ok Tedi project. Port Moresby: Department of Minerals
and Energy

Mamak, A.F.

1979. Nationalism, race-class consciousness, and action research on

Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. In G. Huizer and B.ÿMaunheim (eds.) The politics
of anthropology. The Hague: Mouton

Maunsell & Partners Pty Ltd

1982. Ok Tedi environmental study. (Six Volumes)

Mitchell, D.D.

1974. Land and agriculture in Nagovisi, Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby:
Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. Monograph 3

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Momis, Father J.

1974. Taming the dragon. In P.ÿG.ÿSack (ed.) Problem of choice: land in Papua
New Guinea's future. Canberra: Australian National University Press, pp.ÿ190-199

Nash, J.

1974. Matriliny and modernisation: the Nagovisi of South Bougainville. Port

Moresby: New Guinea Research Unit. New Guinea Research Bulletin No. 55

Ogan, E.

1971. Nasioi land tenure: an extended case study. Oceania 42:81-93

1972. Business and cargo: socio-economic change among the Nasioi of

Bougainville. Port Moresby: New Guinea Research Unit. New Guinea Research
Bulletin No. 44

Oliver, D.L.

1949. Studies in the anthropology of Bougainville, Solomon Islands. Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology. Papers
Volume 19, Nos. 1-4

1955. A Solomon Island society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University

Press

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