Tony Power, who was working for the CNGL External Affairs Department when the initial registration of oil project area ILGs was first carried out in 1992, recently wrote the following account:
Since the beneficiaries are Incorporated Land Groups, vetting of lists that have developed since dividends began to be paid must be done to prevent possible fraud. In the early 1990’s before there was any clear incentive to form new land groups all the population within the project area belonged to the original land groups assisted by Chevron to incorporate via the Land Groups Incorporation Act. All of these people were also censused and recorded in the Village Census Books. Nobody forced these village people to record their genealogies in this manner and hence it must be assumed that the original groups were for the most part accurate. Since the original land groups were incorporated a number of ‘new’ ILGs have emerged. As new groups will dilute the benefits to the original groups it is necessary to examine all new ILGs to see if they are justified. This could be done in the field by a team including Chevron, DPE and a Provincial Lands Officer, after consultation with the Registrar of Titles and PRK (Power n.d.(b): 1).[3]
As I have said, the ILG is simply seen by the Foi as a strategic device whose purpose is primarily political-economic rather than one of customary land management per se. Leaders among the Foi are using the creation of new ILGs to leverage additional shares of the petroleum revenue for their supporters since, as a result of the initial memoranda of agreement, each ILG owning land in the PDL area would receive the same share of the revenue, regardless of population size or absolute amount of PDL land owned. PDL landowners are also enhancing their own support amongst non-PDL landowners by offering to make them ‘PDL landowners’ in a variety of ways.
An example of how this is working itself out can be found in Lower Foe. The leader behind the landowner company called Muiyoke Pty realises that he represents only a small population, and what is more, compared to the larger and more central Foi villages, he commands few educated, literate men who can help him form the core of an effective political and economic organisation. He thus uses Muiyoke to attract men from the more populous Upper Mubi. This is achieved by promising them that if they buy shares in the company, not only will they receive oil revenues, but by forming their own ILGs, through their shares in Muiyoke, they can become, by definition, PDL landowners. This is illustrative of a distributive mechanism that is not based on the assumed behaviour of the liberal sovereign individual who is viewed by many as the basis of the governance system empowered by the LGIA (Weiner 1998; see also Rowse 1998; Lea 2000).
In the same way that the LGIA requires (without enshrining) this autonomous, sovereign individual, the same urge that characterised early social anthropology — towards achieving a clear, unambiguous ‘sharp-edged’ definition of indigenous social units and their territorial property — is evident in the thinking behind the LGIA:
If an original land group divided into two or more then the members would have to demonstrate the following:
That the two or more land groups have distinct land and do not have cross claims or interests in each other’s land.
That they followed their ILG constitution when dividing the original ILG.
That they have the support of their ethnic group who recognize their separate identity.
Where new ILGs have no customary basis for division they would divide their original one share between them [emphasis added]. This is exactly what happened with the Foi beneficiaries for royalties. 24 ILGs representing 8 clans shared 8 shares of dividend …
A primary consideration must be that recognition of new groups will dilute the benefits to existing beneficiaries. In that case any new groups would have to be approved by the existing beneficiaries. A mechanism will have to be devised to seek approval of existing beneficiaries by means of consultation at general meetings with the members of landowner associations or shareholders of companies. Once this vetting takes place a definitive list of beneficiaries can be recognized by DPE and forwarded to the Trustee (Power: n.d.(b): 1).
But the previous examples indicate that the ILG (as understood by its architects) has been uniformly misunderstood and misapplied by the great majority of ordinary Foi. By 1999, there were at least 48 cases requiring ‘land group maintenance’: that is, the alteration, re-registration, or splitting and new registration of previously incorporated land groups. In mid-1999, 26 original ILGs had been deregistered by the Lands Department in Port Moresby, and about 80 new ILGs had been registered claiming distinct and separate status (and separate petroleum revenues as well). Additional new ILGs were applying for and receiving ILG certificates from the Lands Department in Port Moresby in June 2000. The reasons given for these proposed alterations have been varied:
groups fear that money has not been distributed equitably within the ILG and therefore wish to establish their own income stream and passbook;
disputes have emerged over the land borders originally registered, and over the membership of groups already registered;
there have been uncertainties as to the kinship and clan membership of component groups within the ILG;
finally, and commonly, there were accusations of improper behaviour levelled at ILG chairmen.
At a broader level, regional leaders tried to register as many ILGs under their own political ‘association’ as they could, to claim as large a proportion of the fixed petroleum royalty as possible, and to enhance the appearance of their numerical support. In all of these cases, the codification of customary ownership of land figures hardly at all.
This progressive fragmentation of ‘traditional’ landowning groups has been perceived to be against the spirit of the ILG program. The philosophy of the ILG is that the corporate group will act in the interests of a body corporate. When it does not do so, it is common to blame the failure on the self-interest of its leaders or on the ignorance of local landowners — although the frequent and regular emergence of such ‘self-interested’ leaders should itself act as a critique of the assumption of the landowning group’s ‘collective interest’.
I have argued, however, that the fragmentation of Foi ILGs is consonant with more deep-seated oppositional behaviour that governed to a marked extent the shape of political life and the resulting composition of local residential groups in Foi and indeed throughout the societies of the petroleum project area (Weiner 1998). The company, on the other hand, has mistakenly taken the appearance and rhetoric of collective action as evidence for the existence of a collective interest.
The proliferation of ‘splinter ILGs’ represents the response to the pressure on the Foi system of pervasive social differentiation caused by the influx of petroleum revenues. The ‘names’ of Foi social groups, like those of their Daribi counterparts, ‘only group people in the way that they separate or distinguish them on the basis of some criterion’ (Wagner 1974: 106). Usually, this criterion is territorial in the Foi case. Hence, subdivisions of clans are referred to as, for example, Mubiga So'onedobo (‘the So'onedobo who live near the head of the Mubi River’), as opposed to Baibu So'onedobo (‘the So'onedobo who live near Baibu Creek’).
Individual lines within a Foi clan are conventionally differentiated in one of two ways. The most common is to label them according to their land. For example, in Hegeso village, the elder men Abosi and Haibu were ‘Hesa Orodobo’ and Midibaru and Tari were ‘Yebibu Orodobo’. Midibaru’s son Kora cannot build a house or garden on Hesa Orodobo land without permission; and Abosi’s son Dobo cannot do the same without permission from Yebibu Orodobo, even though they maintain they are of a single clan and act collectively in other matters. The other manner of distinguishing lines within a clan is by way of their clan of origin. For example, Sobore, a Fo'omahu'u man, was taken in by the Orodobo clan of Hegeso, was given resources and protection, and kinship ties were extended to him. His descendants, though functionally full Orodobo clan members, are more precisely referred to as Fo'omahu'u Orodobo.
As Wagner has observed, these names are significant ‘not because of the way they describe something, but because of the way in which they contrast it with others’ (Wagner 1974: 107, emphasis added). These distinctions are for the most part contingent and emergent — they appear in the context of some specific incident of oppositional behaviour, and can easily disappear once that opposition is defused or brought to some resolution. Most often, Foi men of the same local clan find themselves in dispute over one issue or another — the division of bridewealth, the use of specific spots of land, accusations of adultery or theft, and so on. These can lead to factions emerging that look ‘as if’ the clan is fissioning. But such acts of fission are not necessarily either irreversible or even long-lived, though they can be both. They merely reflect the territorial fluidity of such groups, in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the way Evans-Pritchard described the Nuer:
Nuer tribes are an evaluation of territorial distribution and tribal and intertribal and foreign relations are standardized modes of behaviour through which the values are expressed … Moreover, it is not only relative because what we designate a tribe to-day may be two tribes to-morrow, but it can only be said to determine behaviour when a certain set of structural relations are in operation, mainly acts of hostility between tribal segments and between a tribe and other groups of the same structural order as itself, or acts likely to provoke aggression. A tribe very rarely engages in corporate activities, and, furthermore, the tribal value determines behaviour in a definite and restricted field of social relations and is only one of a series of political values, some of which are in conflict with it (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 149, emphasis added).
More generally, what Schieffelin (1976) calls the ‘opposition scenario’ in this part of PNG can have a more positive rendering — that is, the customary understanding that land boundaries and landownership are what neighbouring clans acknowledge them to be. In a judgement pertaining to disputed ownership of the Hides gas project licence area,[4] and in one of the judgements pertaining to the Gobe dispute, it was recognised that ‘a land [sic] is said to belong to a group when the land boundary is acknowledged by the neighbouring clans’ (Kanawi et al. 1998: 17).[5] It is this recognition of the relational aspect of property, and of land in particular, that leads Cooter (1989: 13) to contrast ‘market property’, appropriate to the non-kin-based societies of the modern West, with ‘relational property’, characteristic of the kin-based societies of nations such as PNG.[6]