“When Australia was the Big Name for Papua New Guinea”: the Colonial Constitution of Faiwolmin Subjects

Abstract

Abstract This essay addresses the constitution of colonial state subjects among Faiwolmin people of the Western Province, Papua New Guinea. As Australian power was consolidated here beginning in the 1950s, a relatively liberal, paternalistic colonialism encountered problems of containment and control on a historical and geographical penumbra of Empire. The process of bringing highly mobile and scattered shifting cultivators within the borders of the Territory was plagued by a shortage of “patrol” officers and technologies of indirect rule. This analysis is concerned with the consolidation of Australian colonial power and with how Faiwolmin became subjects, and their “customs” increasingly objects, of rule. By the time of nation state formation in 1975, it is argued, the subjectivities of Faiwolmin themselves had been reconstituted within a new terrain of conflict introduced by the imperial power.