Mining and Indigenous Lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea

This volume gives a vital and unique insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive fieldwork with the people concerned, it offers a comparative focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction with the forces of 'development'.A central dimension of contrast is that Australian as a 'settled' continent has had wholesale dispossession of Aboriginal land, while in Papua New Guinea more than 95% of the land surface remains unalienated from customary ownership. There are also important similarities owing to a shared form of land title (largely unheard of outside Australia and Papua New Guinea) in which the state retains ownership of underground resources, and some surprising parallels in the ways that social identities on either side of the Arafura Sea have traditionally been grounded in landscape.These studies are essential reading for all scholars involved in assessing the effects of resource extraction in Third World and Fourth World settings. Their distinctive contribution lies in their penetrating study of the forms of indigenous socio-cultural response to multinational companies and Western forms of governance and law.