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THE LIHIR DESTINY: Cultural Responses to Mining in Melanesia. Asia-Pacific Environment Monograph, 5. By Nicholas A. Bainton. Canberra, A.C.T.: ANU E Press, 2010. xxiii, 229 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, colored photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-9216-6684-1.
Nicholas Bainton's ethnographic monograph, the fifth of the Asia-Pacific Environment series, examines the social and cultural history of gold mining in a particular place. Taking the reader through an ethno-historical analysis of the relationship between mining corporations and local communities, we find the story of a previously highly isolated assemblage of clan groupings, and of how they have ameliorated the effects of large-scale resource extraction.
Weaving together a deep historical analysis of one site with a comparison to others across Melanesia, Bainton generates a diachronic case study with a far-reaching utility. This text takes the reader from broad strokes of the century-old history of cargo cults and Custom practices of Melanesia to the detailed specifics of the Lihir Island group in Papua New Guinea's eastern province of New Ireland. We land on the southernmost tip of the main island, where a holy mountain, the Ailaya, is now ensconced by a land-churning mine. Once surrounded by two communities composed of members of island-wide kin networks the Ailaya is now distanced due to industrial mining, both in space and in access, from the modern resettled communities, namely "PutPut 1" and "PutPut 2."
The ethnographer began his study of...