The shift to large-scale mining development marked a departure from the egalitarian program of the Eight Aims, and fostered regional disparities between prosperous mining enclaves and an increasingly impoverished rural sector. Despite this, traces of the ideology of the Melanesian Way remain in key aspects of the state’s dealings with its citizens in areas affected by such projects. The role of the state in mining projects is a dual one in which it strives to deliver a secure contract environment while safeguarding local interests.[4] It is in this latter capacity that the ideology of tradition enters into the picture by providing the outlines of a template for establishing legibility.
PNG law declares subterranean mineral rights to be a state prerogative, but this doctrine has had to come to terms with the fact that virtually all land in PNG is held under customary forms of tenure — a situation that obliges the state to broker negotiations with local people in order to identify ‘landowners’. In this climate the state has been at pains to formulate a template of customary land tenure informed by its ideology of tradition. The logic underlying this approach is best summed up in a recent review under the imprimatur of PNG’s Law Reform Commission. After sketching the principles of segmentary lineage systems familiar to most anthropologists, the author concludes that:
In Papua New Guinea landownership is vested in descent groups — tribal or clan segments. All clan members are co-owners. This gives individuals the right to use land but not to alienate it. Thus, land ownership is part of the identity of a group. It is an inalienable right, passed from the ancestors into the guardianship of successive generations (Toft 1997: 14).
This generic model of clan-based land tenure guards against worries over land alienation by calming fears that local people will be dispossessed by transnational capital because it ties land rights to traditional groups. Ideologically, it fosters a manageable contract environment while affirming tradition, and that means development in the Melanesian Way. The strategy is to mediate between two kinds of corporate entities — mining companies and landowning clans — and its technical prerequisite is to establish the legibility of customary tenure by making clans visible.