While my colleagues and I have certainly been able to generate a lot more information in the 1990s than in the 1980s, we have not been capable of prompting lasting reform within the corporations. In each instance, the companies are industry leaders—BHP, Placer and Rio Tinto—and each espouses best practice principles at the level of boardroom. At the ‘coalface’, that is to say at the middle management levels where their organisations interact with the village societies hosting their projects, these ideals are discarded and a reversion to type occurs.

What is this ‘type’? I recently described what I called the ‘discovery’ paradigm, a package of concepts validating the enterprises of geological exploration and mining in—using the paradigm’s own words—‘remote’ areas of the world (Burton 1997). The mission statement for the discovery paradigm, was Forbes Wilson’s 1981 book The Conquest of Copper Mountain, about the discovery of the Freeport mine in Irian Jaya. Wilson described the overcoming of apparently insurmountable physical obstacles in ‘the mountainous interior of the world’s most trackless wilderness’ (Wilson 1981:10). An additive is the cliché ‘remote’, still making almost daily appearances in mining-related literature on Papua New Guinea and seen in press reports such as ‘the Ok Tedi project, on a mountain’s edge in the remote… highlands of Papua New Guinea’, which appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on the day the Ok Tedi court settlement was announced. I added the companion concept of terra nugax, which has one meaning of land that, not being used for anything else, or having ‘trifling other uses’, is a promising candidate for mineral extraction, and the fulfilment of national developmental goals through the exploitation of nationally appropriated resources.

But is this not a cultural landscape populated by tribes and customary landowners? Unfortunately, the qualities of being ‘remote’ and ‘undiscovered’, in the special sense of not having had a mining industry culture hero traverse the landscape, brings a second and key meaning to terra nugax; land that, though it is ‘of someone’, lies untouched by the political process of metropolitan society: it is invisible to the politically empowered citizenry of that society. The political connections of this land are believed ‘trifling, of no consequence, nugatory’ and that decisions can happily be made about it with few repercussions.

These attitudes centralise the metropolitan actors thought to be the ‘real’ political players and relegate the resident societies to being peripheral. Since they are all ‘much the same’, the ethnographer, whose job is often about difference and diversity, is out of work, or at best occupies an ornamental position. When our work closes in on something of real importance, as it occasionally does, we typically find ourselves, ostensibly the holders of key areas of knowledge, side-lined or neutralised.

However, the outcome of the Ok Tedi litigation, the extremely favourable compensation and royalty packages negotiated at Lihir and Porgera destroy the fundamental assumptions of the discovery paradigm, namely that the political connections of terra nugax to metropolitan political structures are not ‘trifling, of no consequence, nugatory’. In fact they are extraordinarily powerful. In all of these examples, indigenous interest groups easily matched or surpassed both central government and the largest corporations in the court room and at the bargaining table.

Is what I have described about culture or about politics? ‘Culture’ is often discussed as a kind of thing separated from political affairs, governance, business and development. In Papua New Guinea, miners, often encouraged by government agencies, have consistently faced problems by believing that culture is something people put on with the feathers and paint they dance with. In Papua New Guinea, politics, whether inside the men’s house or out on the hustings, is culture. Landowner representatives who bargain harder than others are doing it because their culture supplies them with better tools to do so—they are using their culture to elevate their profile as stakeholders.

It is frustrating to find that the thorough analysis of social issues—despite the sobering experiences of Bougainville and Ok Tedi—still has no more than an ephemeral, discontinuously-funded presence in the management structures of the resource companies. The ‘new competencies’ of mining may have been heralded by their chief executives, but they are definitely still to take root lower down their organisations.