What Is Literary Anthropology?Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology. By Marilyn Cohen, ed. New York: Lexington Books, 2013.

Abstract

ways that assumptions about who the Ipili are, how they live and organize their social networks, and who, in different contexts, might be a legitimate personation of the leviathan. The intricacies of Ipili kinship, residence, intermarriage, and claims of descent defy bureaucratic attempts to limit or restrict workable definitions that fit neatly into contractual relations between a mining corporation and a group of “landowners.” Indeed, such are the complexities that “the Porgera case is one in which the ambiguity of the local resource frontier has created a discursive space for descent claims without creating a hegemonic account of what those descent groups are or how they operate” (115). In some respects, the Ipili appear more like another mythical monster—the many-headed hydra. Throughout the book, Golub uses the notion of feasibility as a way of exploring the possibilities and practicalities of the different agents and their projects in Porgera. In the final chapters he shifts his analysis of the problem of feasible identity to the national level, scrutinizing the myths of “the Melanesia Way,” the idealized rural villager, and the “grassroots” communities who live “traditionally.” Here the full force of his argument is expressed, for just as the Ipili pursue dreams of modernity and the transformation of their villagers into modern towns with urban-style housing and amenities, so too do other rural Papua New Guineans who hope that a gold mine might be established on their land. Environmental destruction, social discord, widespread corruption, and new inequalities have been the legacies of every mining project in Papua New Guinea to date. Mining companies don’t want to abandon mines so long as the shareholders are benefiting from the profits; more surprisingly, neither do local people want mines to close. They continue to hope that they will find some feasible way of gaining more of the spoils. Golub pronounces the Porgera experiment a failure and places his hope for the valley in the post-mine era. But after decades of waste dumping in the river, vast areas of land rendered unsuitable for farming, and thousands of migrants now settled in the valley, the prospects seem grim.