The Yakatabari Negotiations

"We may not have a mine, but Alex will have one hell of a dissertation." —Community affairs officer, after a tough round of negotiations

The Porgera Mine Sustainability Report: 2000 (Placer Dome Asia Pacific 2001) is a colorful twenty-page booklet full of statistics detailing the mine's metallurgical and financial doings for the year and pictures of smiling children benefiting from the mine's commitment to sustainable development. As Placer's most stylistically accessible and complete statement of what had happened in Porgera in 2000 its synoptic charts and nontechnical prose address everything from the mine-funded creation of a local branch of the Girl Guides (Placer Dome Asia Pacific 2001, 6) to the amount of steel-grinding media used as a reagent in operations (Placer Dome Asia Pacific 2001:16). On page five of the report is a box entitled "Yakatabari Waste Dump Negotiations—Failure or Foundation for the Future" (fig. 1.1).

In roughly four hundred words, eighteen months of intense, immensely important negotiations regarding the future of the valley was condensed into a single, authoritative, and anonymously voiced narrative. Distributed widely outside the valley—in fact, distributed mostly outside the valley—the report circulated farther and faster than any other account of the negotiations, including those of the Ipili themselves. Indeed, as a pdf available on Placer Dome's website, the Porgera Mine Sustainability Report: 2000 became available to a global audience. In this chapter I examine what happens when we open this black box.

One by-product of the report's brevity is the number of leviathans tucked into its prose: "the PJV" negotiates with "landowners" while "stakeholder groups" and the "community" hover anxiously in the background. This black-boxing of actors in Porgera's political process is typical of narratives that circulate outside the valley and simplify the complexity of life inside it. This is ironic, since my detailed account of Yakatabari will exemplify something else: the multitude of struggles to create and maintain feasible actors in a context that constantly threatens to unravel them.

In this chapter I present a richly detailed case study of the Yakatabari negotiations in order to provide an introduction to valley politics and some of the wider ethnographic themes of this book: how easily the mine creates itself as a leviathan, how contested collectivity making is among the Ipili, and how ontologically uncertain various facts about international finance and the geology of the valley are. The negotiations bring issues of representation and personation to the fore by examining how the plans of leviathans always devolve on the individuals who represent them. In particular, the feasibility of individual actors hinges on their ability to successfully personate leviathans, just as the feasibility of leviathans hinges on their ability to be successfully personated. As we shall see, the Yakatabari negotiations were as much about the personalities of the negotiators as they were about the wider issues that faced the leviathans in whose name they claimed to speak.

Personating Leviathans

Leviathans are like totemism: once we doubt that it is possible to isolate certain phenomena and group them together as an objective institution, the actors who make them up appear refractory. Th us Diamond Jenness writes:

Just as the Indians have their chiefs or leading men, so there are chiefs or "bosses" (to use a word from the lumber camps that the Indians themselves employ) among animals, birds and fish, even among the trees ... The bosses are always larger than the other plants and animals of their kind, and in the case of birds, fish and animals, always white. Now and then the Indians see and kill them, but generally they keep out of sight of human beings. They are like the government in Ottawa, one old Indian remarked. An ordinary Indian can never see the "government." He is sent from one office to another, is introduced to this man and to that, each of whom sometimes claims to be the "boss"; but he never sees the real government, who keeps himself hidden. (1930, 61)

Leviathans can never negotiate about waste dumps by themselves. They need spokesmen who can represent them. Many of us are used to tightly black-boxed accounts of politics because we grew up in places where "the notion that there may be something in a collective, something more than the group, which somehow emerges from their interaction, yet is above and beyond any individual is so commonplace ... that it seems wholly unremarkable" (Leach 2006, 8). But during Yakatabari, the situation was much more unsettled.

In early modern Europe, political actors faced a similar dynamic as they opened the black box of divine right kingship. As Edmund Morgan (1992) notes, "the idea of fundamental law or higher law or fundamental constitutions is an ancient one; and the idea of resting such superior law on the people themselves is at least as old as the sixteenth century. The problem has always been to differentiate "the people themselves" from their mere representatives." And indeed, although we tend to think of Hobbes as semiotically naive, it is important to note that Hobbes's account of covenanting emphasized the performative power of speech to make something—a powerful, punishing something. Before the social contract, there was only a multitude. After it, there is a commonwealth and a sovereign who personates it (Skinner 2007). In this way individual actors became "the state" by virtue of their personation of Leviathan, the "artificial person" created by (but not subject to) the covenant which imparts sovereignty.

As we will see, Yakatabari rendered problematic who was representing what: Did mine negotiators really have the ear of the mine manager? Were landowner representatives really personating the Ipili, or acting in their own self-interest? How many clans existed inside the special mining lease? Where should the line between clan and subclan be drawn? In the negotiations leviathans were "not silent things, but rather that provisional product of a constant uproar made by the millions of contradictory voices about what is a group and who pertains to what" (Latour 2005, 31), and whether "spokespersons are turned into subjective individuals or into objective representatives" (Latour 1987, 78) was one of the most important questions that negotiators were to ask.

In the event, the negotiations did not turn on who was recognized as a "subjective individual" and who objectively represented a leviathan. Rather, Yakatabari would rise or fall based on how subjective projects became interpellated into the negotiations. Marshall Sahlins would insist that cultural structures are always realized in particular times and particular places, and that this moment of instantiation subjects them to risk. In particular, some cultural systems amplify the agency of individuals by putting them in a position of...