Clan Claims: Land, Law and Violence in the Papua New Guinea Eastern Highlands1

Land has become the source of new end more complex disputes in Papua New Guinea in recent years. Economic opportunities associated with government programs and multinational corporations have altered land values in rural districts. This paper examines how in the context of such shifting attitudes toward land, competing groups in an Eastern Highlands district use both law and violence in their confrontations. One component of the legal strategies pursued includes the elaboration of clan stories to legitimize claims before the courts. Yet, while rural elites and their families may desire the support of the law in their economic pursuits, the realities of intergroup violence set limits on the likely success of this approach. Land has become the source of new and more complex disputes in Papua New Guinea in recent years. Always a critical aspect of life in this predominantly horticultural nation, recent years have seen acrimonious and hostile confrontations pitting various opponents against each other, ranging from the opposition of families to that of rebel groups versus the state. In 1995, even international agencies were caught up in the contests over land as largescale protests were held in the national capital, Port Moresby, in resistance to government land registration plans associated with the World Bank. What has become apparent over the past decade is that the competition for land at all levels of society has created a new environment in which land disputes have been transformed. My aim in this paper is to examine how recent confrontations over land in one region of the country have been spurred by new economic opportunities in rural districts. In such cases, law and violence have been applied as varying strategies in land competition, yet this pattern can only be fully understood in the wider context structured by government programs, multinational economic incentives and the weakness of state authority. As part of this process of economic competition surrounding land, there has been an interesting elaboration of the histories of individual clans, the clan stories, which often serve as the basis for claims to land. The application of these stories within government legal settings, and, most especially, the effort to record written versions and establish their legitimacy with the courts has been precipitated by the competition for land for various commercial enterprises such as coffee plantations and mining. Although violence and law are often conceived of as opposing categories, the presence of the former taken as an indicator of the absence or breakdown of the latter, I am interested here in exploring the interconnection of threats and acts of violence, legal institutions, and the cultural elaborations associated with clan stories. The ethnographic focus of my attention is a region of the Eastern Highlands. Central to my discussion will be the analysis of four land conflicts among the Agarabi people of the Kainantu District. The cases demonstrate how, in the midst of violent acts and legal proceedings, a new public use for the clan stories has emerged. Either by reasserting or reformulating a link to ancestral lands, or by attempting to exclude families previously said to