Imagining the city in remote Papua New Guinea: Relational and categorical modes of ‘belonging’

Abstract

‘Nation’ and ‘City’ are exemplars of much more general phenomena – categorical identities (language group, province) and the central sites (village, town) through which connections among and beyond the members of that category are channelled. Drawing on examples from Western Province, Papua New Guinea, we look at how relational logics of kinship and categorical logics of citizenship are articulated around such sites, regardless of scale. We begin with tales of imagined cities, in the past and the present. Then, from the hamlet of Gwaimasi to the village of Suabi and the town of Kiunga, we trace how the emergence of these sites as loci for accessing aspirational futures has changed the ways people assert or contest rights to a place in these assemblages. At each scale, we see the work entailed in ‘cutting the network’ of kinship, with its sense of unbounded connection, to construct bounded groups of exclusive rights-holders. And we see, too, the tensions that may then emerge when bounded rights-groups operating at different scales (landowners, nations) are mobilised in assertion of rights to the same place: “I'm not a landowner here but I am a citizen”.

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