Anthropology Colloquium Series

"Sporting with Leviathans: Making Feasible Actors At the Porgera Gold Mine, Papua New Guinea"

Speaker: Alex Golub, Department of Anthropology, UH Manoa
3:00 pm, 4 September 2008, Saunders 345

The Porgera valley of highlands Papua New Guinea is home to the third largest gold mine in the world, and the Ipili speaking people who host it are some of the most successful grassroots people in the world at extracting benefits from global capital. How have they managed this success?

This paper discusses the Porgera and elaborates a framework for understanding the politics of identity in the valley which might 
be applicable elsewhere. Specifically, it argues that analyses of 
’legibility’ derived from the work of James C. Scott and other 
political scientists might be supplemented with an approach the 
focuses on ‘feasibility’, a term with lineages in science studies, 
linguistic anthropology, and exploration geology.

Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the 
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research focuses on mining in 
Papua New Guinea and hardcore raiding guilds in World of Warcraft.

His publications appear in the journals Human Organization, The Contemporary Pacific, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Quarterly, and the volume Customary Land Tenure and Registration in Australia and Papua New Guinea: Anthropological Perspectives (2007).

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Cosponsored with the Center for Pacific Islands Studies

For further information, please contact Anthropology at anthprog@hawaii.edu

Event Sponsor
Anthropology Dept, Manoa Campus

More Information
Marti Kerton, 956-7153, anthprog@hawaii.edu, http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu