Local Custom and the Art of Land Group Boundary Maintenance in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Much of the debate about land group incorporation seems to assume that land groups are indeed all much alike, just as ‘clans’ are all much alike, and this view seems to be shared by the most radical proponents and opponents of any kind of land reform. What I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter is that people have been incorporating land groups for different purposes and with different outcomes in different branches of extractive industry. But that is only half the story. For if the ideology of landownership also conceals a real variety of ‘local customs in relation to land’, we should also expect to find that Landowners in different parts of the country are not all equally willing or able to sustain the incorporation of ‘land groups’ for any particular purpose, whatever the policies or strategies adopted by the State or the Developers. And that is the point at which the art of land group maintenance invites the need for social mapping studies to debunk the ideology.