Customs, Commons, Property, and Ecology: Case Studies From Oceania
John Wagner and Malia Talakai
In this introduction and the collection of papers that follows, common property theory is critiqued on the basis of its frequent conflation with customary property systems. Case studies from throughout the Island Pacific are used to demonstrate the many ways in which customary systems do not correspond to common property systems and to argue that the application of common property theory in such settings leads to distortion and misrepresentation. As an alternative, we propose an approach that stresses the idea of property as a set of social relations arising out of increasingly complex interactions of people and processes at local, national, and global scales. We also stress the close relation of property rights to the construction of personhood and social identity, and the futility of attempts to categorize property systems on the basis of simplistic distinctions among private, public, and common property domains. By way of a discussion of the Polynesian concept of fonua, we suggest that more carefully (and culturally) situated analyses are available to conceptualize customary property relations throughout Oceania. On the basis of the series of linked case studies that follow, we also attempt to summarize some of the more important trends occurring within customary systems throughout the Island Pacific and elsewhere in the context of increasingly globalized flows of people, money, and information.
Key words: Oceania, common property, customary property, global commons, fonua
Changes in Social Orientation: Threats to a Cultural Institution in Marine Resource Exploitation in Tonga
Andrea Bender
While access to marine resources is de jure open in Tonga, this has not led to a decline of resources and an increase in noncooperative strategies. This is partly due to a strong social orientation underlying core values and institutions as well as economic decisions. Food sharing is one institution that strengthens social cohesion and supports sustainable strategies. Yet this social-environmental relationship is increasingly threatened by a tendency to individualize efforts and yields and thus diminish social cohesion. Extracting institutions can trigger increased efforts, and new ideologies focusing on the nuclear family trigger reduced sharing. Contrasting two island villages from Ha’apai illustrates this tendency and its consequences: weakening the social net goes together with more commercially oriented strategies. Responses occur on several levels and entail risks. On the family level, networks expand to become less dependent on marine resources, but risk eroding local social ties. On a political level, community-based management is now proposed. It remains unclear, however, in what direction these changes will lead on the community level. They may (re-) motivate single fishermen to sustain common interests, but these common interests may not be in sustaining fish stocks.
Key words: Tonga, marine resources, open access, sharing, values and social changes
Property, Propriety, and Ecology in Contemporary Tonga
Mike Evans
The agro-forestry system of Tonga includes crops used for food, medicine, and other purposes. Among these is the ‘ahi or sandalwood tree. This paper describes events that occurred in the Ha’apai region, in the early 1980s, when a trader offered to buy ‘ahi at unheard of prices. Although farmers have detailed and sophisticated knowledge of the island’s ecology; in spite of the fact that Tongan lands are privately held and farmers control garden plots as individuals under the law; and that ‘ahi is prized within traditional gift exchange, the farmers of Ha’ano harvested all their ‘ahi in the space of two years. Much of the overharvest was the result of the defensive actions of farmers. Superordinate kin (fahu) were harvesting the trees without permission, encouraging many farmers to harvest their trees defensively. Though land in Tonga is privately controlled, land, crops, or people are encumbered by the interests of, and obligations to, others. This means, as in the case of the ‘ahi tree, that the conservation potential of private property may not be realized. Nonetheless, the ongoing kinship system that supports fahu also continues to ensure biodiversity and sustainability in contemporary Tonga by regionalizing the ecology.
Key words: Tonga, argoforestry, common property, human ecology
Conservation as Development in Papua New Guinea: The View from Blue Mountain
John Wagner
In the village of Kamu Yali, Papua New Guinea, changes to the customary property rights system are complex and multi-directional and do not support the argument made by some scholars that economic development in the Island Pacific is resulting in an overall tendency toward individualization and de facto privatization of property rights. At Kamu Yali there are simultaneous trends toward the fragmentation of collective landowning groups into smaller units and their consolidation into larger units. These changes appear to be the outcome of the varied efforts villagers are making, individually and collectively, toward fuller participation in regional economic markets and closer articulation with external governmental and nongovernmental organizations. In this paper I argue that, while common property theory helps to shed light on some of these events, the local system has to be understood, most fundamentally, as a mixed property system in which external agencies are playing increasingly dominant roles. Three case studies will be used to illustrate the impact of provincial land courts, external markets in marine resources, and NGO sponsorship of a village project on the local property system.
Key words: Papua New Guinea, customary property, common property theory, conservation and development
Ironies of Organization: Landowners, Land Registration, and Papua New Guinea’s Mining and Petroleum Industry
Alex Golub
Contemporary policy work in Papua New Guinea portrays the country either in terms of an inflexible tradition to be remedied by liberalization, or a weak state whose disintegrating social institutions must be strengthened by regional neighbors. As an analysis of land registration issues surrounding resource developments shows, rural Papua New Guineans demonstrate a willingness to innovate on past practice that is strikingly modern in its outlook, and the politics of land registration cannot be explained by liberalization or disintegration approaches. At the same time, the fluidity of land tenure makes it difficult to study land in Papua New Guinea as if it were common property, as is done in new institutional economics.
Key words: Papua New Guinea, land tenure, kinship, globalization, mining
Land and Marine Tenure, Ownership, and New Forms of Entitlement on Lihir: Changing Notions of Property in the Context of a Goldmining Project
Martha Macintyre and Simon Foale
We describe and analyze changes in ideas of land and marine tenure and resource rights in the Lihir group of islands in Papua New Guinea as they have developed over a ten-year period. The paper examines some issues that have become contentious since goldmining mine began in the 1980s, analyzing the underlying principles of tenure and changing ideas of entitlement that inform them. Beginning with a description of the basic representation of tenure given to the anthropologists who worked there before mining began, we shall then examine the ways that clan ownership and communal rights over sacred sites have been influenced by notions of land having monetary value. We also explain some ways that rights of transmission and inheritance, claims for compensation, benefits from leasing, and transactions and emergent ideas of individual ownership have developed in the context of the mining project. In particular we look at disputes and tensions that have arisen in the context of a dramatic increase in population, changes in housing, transport and land use, and the monetization of the economy.
Key words: common property, land rights, customary marine tenure, development, Melanesia, mining
Property of Spirits: Hereditary and Global Value of Sea Turtles in Fiji
R. Christopher Morgan
This paper considers sea turtles as a form of spiritual and social property among Fijians. It emphasizes the ways clan groups with rights to turtles respond to regional and global forces affecting their area. For Fijians, turtles are both a subsistence food and a prestige food associated with hierarchical obligations among the chiefs and clans. Customarily, rights to catch and consume turtles derive from hereditary relations and mediations with ancestral spirits. Various factors operating at regional and global levels have attenuated the property rights of the indigenous clan groups. Who has rights over the sea turtles now? Fieldwork in the Wainikeli District of Taveuni Island provides material to describe and analyze these changes. Three trends may be identified. The special value assigned to turtles in global conservation culture poses some challenge to local exploitation of the animal. Of greater concern to Fijian turtle catchers, however, is the recognition of hereditary prerogatives reflected in turtles. In contemporary Fijian society, clan identity and prestige is continually negotiated. Competition within the regional hierarchy of clan leaders is undermining the social position of some local groups. In this context, recognition of the rights of hereditary groups holds great significance. Concurrently, the involvement of Indo-Fijians in turtle catching at once both disrupts aspects of the clan’s integrity but also provides a new version of recognition of their right to control the catching of turtles. The paper examines these trends with reference to ethnic difference (indigenous and Indo-Fijian) and to the dynamics of competition within the regional hierarchy. It demonstrates how local, regional, and global factors interact to influence local group affairs and finds that regional pressures from within indigenous society are the greatest concern to the local people involved. The case suggests that drawing explicit attention to spiritual value can help explain local responses in contests involving the significance of property for indigenous communities.
Key words: sea turtles, clans, property, value, Fiji
On Understanding Too Quickly: Colonial and Postcolonial Misrepresentation of Indigenous Fijian Land Tenure
Adrian Tanner
From the very beginning of British colonial rule, government attempts to understand Fijian land tenure led to confusion about its nature and the development of a European understanding that oversimplified and misrepresented it as simple communal ownership. Indigenous land ownership was officially recognized and standardized over most of Fiji, as communal rights in the collective hands of a mid-level descent group within the sedentary lineage system, the mataqali. Actual land tenure is, however, more complex, and in many areas continues to be followed today. Recently, the common property theoretical model has been applied in many parts of the non-Western world, based on a similar oversimplification and misrepresentation of actual practice, as well as on a similar conviction that such tenure systems can be reduced to communal land rights. Drawing on a critique of the common property approach and empirical observations from the interior of Vitilevu, this paper shows how Fijian land tenure cannot be reduced to its superficial common property aspect, but has simultaneous, multilayered sets of rights, both communal and individual. A land tenure theory must be able to take into account such systems if it is to have any serious analytic value.
Key words: Fiji, land tenure, common property, individual rights, collective rights
Access and Alienation: The Promise and Threat of Stewardship on Mokil Atoll
Bryan Oles
Land tenure on Mokil Atoll, an island in Pohnpei State, Federated States of Micronesia, is undergoing a notable shift from an emphasis on individual ownership of land to a system of collective, kin-based ownership. This alteration in the jural dimension of land tenure is intimately related to historical changes in the region’s political economy that have entailed significant population movements and concomitant transformations in the values assigned to land, subsistence farming, local resources, and the atoll itself. This paper explores these changes by focusing on the system of stewardship that emerged as a means of protecting the ownership rights of emigrants. It examines how the system of stewardship ironically increases the threat to absentee ownership rights. This threat, coupled with economic and political forces that are compelling further emigration, and a fundamental transformation in the meaning of land, is a driving force in the transition to collective, kin-based ownership rights that secure both resident and absentee use rights to atoll property. In the course of describing these changes, the paper reveals tensions among Mokilese residents and absentees who, as a result of maintaining different relationships with the land, rely on competing definitions of identity, inheritance, and land tenure.
Key words: land tenure, Mokil Atoll, Pacific Islands, place, common property
Conclusion: Oceanic Conceptions of the Relationship between People and Property
Michael D. Lieber and Michael A. Rynkiewich
This concluding article examines Oceanic cultural premises that define the relationships between people and the places they inhabit, taking local concepts of property as manifestations of these premises. Oceanic people share a common conception of the person as a relatum, one end of a relationship, because they share common ideas about how one becomes a person. Central to these conceptions is the common understanding of fetal inheritance: the idea that a fetus inherits not only somatic traits that its parents inherited from their parents, but also somatic changes that the parents acquired before and during the pregnancy. These include relationships between the fetus’s parents and other people and relationships between the parents and features of their environment. Once incorporated, they are transformed into somatic substance and transferred to the growing fetus. In this manner, a baby’s somatic substance includes parts of the place the parents lived. People are in places, but places are also in people. The claims that Oceanic people make on development agencies thus make sense as conventional responses to new situations, particularly to the new opportunities that development projects offer. With this argument, we explain the inadequacy of common property theory to represent accurately Oceanic concepts of property.
Key words: Oceania, context, cultural models, place, ontogeny
