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Jason Roberts, "We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea" (U Arizona Press, 2024)
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Hi everybody. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li, a PhD candidate in Socio Cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. In today's episode, we turn to the Western Pacific to think about subsistence, resource extraction and the uneasy promises of development. Set on New Hanover island in Papua New guinea, the New Book today combines ethnographic and ecological research to examine how Luvangay communities navigate the overlap, damping pressures of small scale logging, multinational agroforestry schemes, and the persistent hope that development will finally bring good change. This book offers a powerful account of what the author properly call a political ecology of hope, tracing how global capitalist development projects reshape local aspirations, desires, while leaving many people in their own words, the same. And today, I'm very glad to have the author, Dr. Jason S. Roberts, with us today. Dr. Roberts, welcome to New Books Anthropology.
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Oh, thank you. Thanks for Having me.
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Well, I'm very glad to have you here. The book we will be discussing today is We Stay the Subsistence Logging and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New guinea, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2024. The book's author, Jason S. Roberts, is a political ecologist and anthropologist whose work focuses on resource extract extraction, global development and environmental change. He has carried out long term research in Papua New guinea and now works on subsistence policy and natural resource management in Alaska. And to begin, I hope to invite you to introduce yourself to our audience. Dr. Roberts, how did you first come to work in the West Pacific in Papua New guinea? And what drew you to questions of political ecology and global development?
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Thank you. So that's a good question. Kind of had a roundabout way of getting there. You know, I'm from North Carolina and I got my undergraduate degree in forestry and found myself it was really quite a useful curriculum of study, but there were questions that it didn't seem like we were asking that I thought maybe I have more interest in looking at down the road. And that led me towards the political ecology framework and graduate studies in anthropology. And so as a result of that, I eventually ended up at University of Texas at San Antonio where I did my doctoral program and was floundering about trying to figure out exactly what I was going to do for a dissertation research project, as I'm sure many grad students can probably relate to. Had some ideas that kind of fell through, but I knew I wanted to do something that combined interests in anthropology and forestry. And a person who became one of my advisors on the dissertation told me about these special agriculture and business leases taking place across Papua New guinea, but particularly on New Hanover island where she worked in New Ireland Providence. And so that sounded like kind of the perfect topic to explore given my interests. And she put me in touch with some people from New Ireland and New Hanover and that's kind of how things took off. And after doing some Pilot research in 2012, it doesn't feel like it's been that long, but it has been that long. Things kind of got rolling from there and really found it, you know, that the topics from both a theoretical perspective, but maybe more importantly kind of a humanistic perspective, very interesting to me what was going on there and the people very welcoming. Just very good to me throughout the the process.
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Excellent. Thank you very much for sharing your personal background, your trajectory and your thoughts with us. And it's definitely unsurprising for me to know that you have a forestry background and because you talk about Logging and its, you know, effects on local leaves in the book. So now I'd like to turn to the origin story of this particular book. So what was the starting point for which stayed the same? How did you first encounter, you know, New Hanover island and the loving guide people living here, which you have already mentioned before? They are very friendly. And when did you, when did it become clear to you that the intertwined issues of subsistence logging and hope for development would anchor a long term project eventually?
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This book project, you know, it's hard to pinpoint exactly when that happened. It was pretty piecemeal, like I said. Dr. Paige west, who I'm sure most people have heard of, who would listen to this podcast, this is the person who kind of put the bug in my ear about doing this project. And then through her I was putting in contact with a local leader, John Heine, who really facilitated kind of my entry into New Hanover and this project and had one particular gentleman from New Hanover who agreed to kind of take me under his wing and show me around and introduce me to the project, the situation on New Hanover and the people in his village. And he became a really long term research collaborator, really close to me personally. And that's how it started. But it originally started as a much more, I guess, straightforward kind of political ecology study looking at, you know, what are, what's happening specifically. You know, we talk about how extensive clear cut logging is bad for tropical forests and people who make their living from shifting cultivation, but we don't often really delve into exactly what happens and how people adapt to these kinds of situations. And so that was the initial focus of the project. And then as I moved along in it, it shifted more towards this, keeping that in mind and studying that original interest, but also the idea of development. And what was so appealing, given the history of development efforts that had taken place on New Hanover. And now they generally had not, you know, delivered on their promises. But the idea of development remains, you know, appealing. I think in that way. It kind of led to a lot of things, a lot of issues that you see across the world with people kind of striving for things that are difficult to reach. But there's something about that that really keeps you going for it. And so really understanding what was this impetus for getting into these projects over and over again that didn't seem to quite have a lot of people's best interests at heart.
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Perfect, thank you very much. So basically, development and the desire, aspiration forward are part of the local people's recent history and their current Everyday lives. So I think it's necessary to talk about these people themselves. So for some of our audience who may be new to the Pacific region, it would be helpful to situate the people and the place at the center of this book. So who are the loving guy of the New Hanover and what kinds of everyday livelihoods and aspirations are at the heart of your ethnography? How do subsistence practices such as gardening and fishing, small scale logging, and more recent large scale agro form forestry schemes come together in this setting to shape both everyday life and people's visions of their future?
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Yeah, so that's, that's a really involved question. And so just to kind of place them. Lavangay, it's the name of the people and as well, you know, the proper name of the island, New Hanover was given by German colonial forest that was in effect there in the 1800s. And so, yeah, the Labangay obviously live on New Hanover. It's part of New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. So it's in the islands region and it's fairly remote, probably even by Papua New Guinean standards. Pretty small about, if you believe the census statistics, which I'm not sure how they get them, but around 30,000 people live on the island. And the primary way of making a living is, you know, shifting cultivation in tropical forests. And fishing is the primary source of, you know, protein. I would say there are some people who raise pigs, but in the areas where I worked, that wasn't a big practice. And so occasionally people would find pigs or hunt pigs, but it was mostly, you know, gardening and fishing and primarily, you know, the classics of shifting cultivation. So taro, cassava, banana, sweet potato, these kinds of plants that are cultivated in the area and, but you know, which is in many ways a great kind of way of making a living. They're much more healthy than we are and it's worked perfectly fine for generations. But you know, the Lalangai, like all of us, they're exposed to things that are happening in other parts of the world and people from other parts of the world and have been for many, many years and in that process have seen and heard about different ways of living in different areas where you have, you know, access to running water, regular electricity, you know, houses made out of manufactured materials. And quite naturally, you know, these things are desirable. I think we, most people would agree. And so that's been going on for a very long time. And you know, it starts with colonization traders coming into the area, which eventually leads to first the Germans coming into the area. And you get to development of copra plantations and things like that, and then missionization. And the particularly interesting thing, and perhaps beneficial to me, was the history of Americans and American missionaries in New Ireland, particularly Hanover, the part of the area where I worked being in kind of part and parcel with Poiss Catholic Mission, which is located on the coast, but was originally kind of developed by American Catholic missionaries. And so a lot of people would tell me these stories about, you know, what the American missionaries told them of the United States, what kinds of things the missionaries brought with them and the development that took place as a result of them coming, establishing this mission. Of course, this was a way to get converts into the mission, was to provide services that people wanted. And you see that going on throughout the history of this part of the world. And so that is kind of these a story that continues to be told. And, you know, I don't know how much it would be told to someone who was not an American. Would it be told to the same degree that I, you know, people talk to me about it? Probably not, but it remains an important story, especially for the elders talking about the missionaries from America and what kind of the development initiatives and highlighted by, you know, this TIA local farmers cooperative that for a lot of people kind of stood out as the highlight of what could possibly be achieved by cooperative development and kind of doing things the right way in a way that everyone could benefit from. And the Catholic Fathers of Missions there were part of that process of getting that going and helping, keeping it going. And so these kinds of things are all wrapped up into why is development so desirable for many people here? What do people expect to get out of it? The problem is that there aren't a whole lot of options for achieving it in this area of the world. And so that's. That's a lot of what the book talks about. You know, how does this history of involvement with different people from all over the world intersect in local desires for improving lives and taking those desires and trying to implement them within kind of the framework of options that people have available with the recognition that there aren't or haven't been historically a ton of options for the type of development changes that a lot of people are looking for.
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Excellent. Thank you very much for answering the question about the people. But also I really like your. Like how you briefly sketch part of the broader historical and political economic context, mentioning the colonial encounter and also the arrival of development projects in New Hanover. So one of the striking aspects of the book is how it develops what you call a political ecology of Hope in dialogue with environmental anthropology, Foucaultian notion of discourse, and also debates in anthropology about desire and temporality. So could you please outline the main theoretical conversations you are engaging in the book? How do ideas about hope, development and the symbolic power of capitalist discourses to reshape local aspirations inform your approach to loving guy experiences of logging and global development?
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Yeah, so I think that gets back. Well, once again, that's a great question and I hope the book does a decent job of answering that. But that does get into the title of the book from this top piece and phrase, which is a pidgin language that's spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. And so the phrase that I offer often encountered when I would ask people about the special agriculture and business leases, which were these large in comparison to what had happened previously, much larger, more intensive, more extensive. Ideally, I guess in theory were supposed to be these long term agroforestry development projects that would clear cut large slots of land and then replant them in commercial agricultural crops so that people could make a living by continuing to sell and produce and sell these crops after, you know, the logging had been finished. Because in the past, primarily kind of short term logging operations that had taken place and sort of short influxes of cash, but, but nothing really sustainable from that. And so when asking people about, you know, these special agriculture and business leases and what was going on and, and how people were living, what the situation was now and how it had changed, and a lot of the refrains I got were me plus typosum, which it can mean a couple of different kind of related things. We, we live like this, we are like this, or we stay the same. And so this was kind of a common refrain when you're talking to people about their history of encounters with development. Meepliste Olson and they would explain it as, you know, these companies come in, they get all the good of the island and we don't really change. But that's not what these projects were supposed to be about. And in fact, you know, not only do we not change, things often get a little worse, at least for a little while. And yeah, so that was kind of looking at it theoretically, again, getting back to the idea of now, how do people strive for things they consider to be, you know, desirable? How do they continue moving forward in this field of kind of somewhat limited possibilities for them? And why do these projects keep taking place in areas like this? And you know, the answer is very difficult. It's quite complicated. I'm not sure I did as good of a job as I could have explaining it. I mean, you know, there's a lot of, you know, it's, it's hope for improving lives, getting development, but also there's a fair amount of corruption and things being forced upon people and, you know, strategic divide and conquer type operations going on in the process. But I do feel that a significant part of it was appealing to these desires for development. Companies come in and present people with the option to sign on for what they perceive to be these very good development processes. Getting, you know, logging royalties, getting commercial agriculture to work with and continue to make money from the possibility of working for the logging company, making money that way. And then these integrated benefits packages that are supposed to happen as part of the project. So developing schools, health posts, roads, these kinds of things that we would generally associate with state sponsored services that just haven't been available on New Hanover for many years, at least not to the degree that many Latvian guy would want them to be. You know, the Germans started work on a ring road during the period of German colonial control and that still hadn't been completed at the time that I was doing research. Right. So it's a long, long time of wanting something that just doesn't seem to be coming to fruition. And so, yeah, looking at the role of hope in that process and bringing people back to, you know, whatever means available to get what they want and then the ways in which it's hard to talk about how it allows certain people who are empowered to make those decisions to often kind of transgress norms of how things are supposed to be done, both from kind of a state level as well as the company level that's coming in and wants the timber, the promises they're making, but maybe not really intending to keep what they sell to local leaders, what local leaders sell to the people they're supposed to be representing and the ways in which kind of family ties go into that. So it's hard to really, I don't know, at a certain degree to protest something after it's gotten going. Maybe you're not benefiting from it, but someone in your family is. And maybe you're not the one who's supposed to be kind of making statements against this person. And of course there's always the use of kind of structural force going on as well, right. From companies and from state actors. So it's. Yeah, it's a difficult question. So Hoop came, I would say, later in the process of just hearing people talk about development, the idea of development and how great it would Be to have things like roads, like permanent houses, running water, electricity, having stores to shop in, and money to buy things in stores. But how do we get it? Because for so long we've been making a good living through shifting cultivation. But as far as like making money, primarily it's through small scale trade of agricultural crops and occasional influxes of a bit more cash through short term logging projects. But how do we get something that actually lasts? And so that was all part of the critique. Maybe briefly change, but nothing really changes for long.
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Thank you very much for this answer. I think it's a perfect answer because the whole issue is very complex. And if we consider the local so called cargo cult history, you know, the material and objects from Europe and the US have particularly special meaning to the Melanesian locals. And also think about how this kind of cargo court is connected to the later development project, like professor west shows in her later monographs. So we can think of how complex this issue is. And also I think this powerful phrase, we stay the same, functions at once as a description of perceived material stagnation, like you mentioned since the German colonization, but also as a critique or diagnosis of the structural forces that allow some particular groups to prosper while others remain stuck despite repeated development efforts. So it's a very complex issue. I totally agree with you. And also in the book you show in rich detail how the large scale agroforestry projects of the mid-2000s dramatically transformed local landscapes, land tenure and also social relations. So from the loving perspective, how did these schemes actually unfold on the ground? What kinds of ecological changes did they set in motion? And how did they reconfigure people's relationship to each other and also to the environment in general?
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Another good question. And yeah, I would say just getting back to your previous point for a bit, there is that New Hanover, at least in the anthropological literature, probably still best known for the so called Johnson culture, which came out, you know, going through leading up to national independence and voting for their first independent parliament parliamentary government. And the idea again, and this is based on experiences with missionaries, different colonial forces, World War II, that a lot of people ended up voting off ballot for President Lyndon Johnson, right, with the idea that they didn't want Australia, they didn't want a new Papua New Guinean government, they wanted the United States, felt that the United States would have, would be better equipped to offer them the kind of lives that they wanted in the future. And I think the problem with the cargo cult literature in anthropology, which a lot of other authors do A much better job of explaining this than I do, but it tended to be kind of focused on the exotic elements of these processes that were going on at the time and less so. Kind of the moralistic arguments and kind of the political claims that people were making and looking for these sort of nationalistic movements for self improvement and self reliance and self government and sort of what they wanted to see for their futures. And so that all played into this TIA Farmers Development Cooperative that has remembered quite well among older people on New Hanover as a good example of development. And it's really important to keep in mind because in many ways, the agroforestry development projects that took place on the island are kind of the counter example of what was so great about tia. And of course, what TIA was and was not, you know, at the time is hard to say. Right. These memories tend to change over time. But, yeah, the special agriculture and business leasing process is difficult. As I said, there are a lot of promises made about what people would get in the initial process of getting some people who may or may not have been the proper leaders of the land groups that they were purported to represent to sign off on these development projects. I think the lands investigation process for these development efforts was not great. I don't think, as far as figuring out who owned what and who was responsible for being able to say yes or no to development and to the project and sign off on it. One thing I didn't say in the beginning is that, like throughout Papua New guinea, the lavanganai practice communal land tenure, which means that, you know, there's no private land ownership, it's a group. And there are still 11 clans on the island. And land ownership is typically via the clan and lineage groups associated with the clan. And so mapping that process out, as we know from people like James Scott and others, the idea of legibility, bureaucratic legibility, who owns what, and the idea of making it easier to enter into kind of economic business arrangements by making these sort of more traditional communal and tenure structures easier to understand and navigate. That's long been kind of an effort and a process going on in Papua New guinea since the colonial period, and certainly was part of the issues associated with the SABLs taking place on the island. And I would say, in many ways, not. Not done particularly well. There's a quote in the book where one of the an officer for the government lands office talks about how the company basically lumped everything into three incorporated land groups for the three special agriculture and business lease development projects on the island, which is you know, obviously not accurate for how lands are owned. And these incorporated land groups are long been kind of a way to try to make development more legible in Papua New guinea for outside interest. And so with the idea that the owners, the communal owners of a particular area kind of sign off on this incorporated land group, sign off on who is authorized to be their leaders and make decisions regarding development projects. But you know, prior to a recent, somewhat recent change in the Lands act, it wasn't particularly hard to certify an ilg, which meant that there could be some issues going on with who was allowed to represent the group and how these were developed. And so that all played into the agroforestry process and how things were developed and how these projects were agreed to and came about. And so, you know, in talking to people on the island, there was a lot of that, well, yeah, this person agreed to the project and maybe wasn't, shouldn't have been the one who signed off on it, or we should have also received some benefit from these, these projects, but we're not because often the local level incorporated land group leaders, they're both functioning as the people who the companies come and talk to, who sign off on allowing the businesses to come in. And they're also used by businesses as the hub for benefits distribution, which can be obviously kind of problematic for an area that's communally owned. But money is going through one person or a couple people. And so that is just kind of, I guess a bit of the background on how the projects came about. The big ecological and social changes, as you might imagine, are, especially in the area where they were doing clear cut logging, pretty, pretty substantial, particularly with the background of tropical forest ecology and the impact on soils from this type of broad scale change, cutting off the entire overstory. And yeah, there wasn't a lot of follow up kind of agricultural development going on. Things just kind of allowed to naturally regenerate. And you know, what I think wasn't really a concern of the company was that all of these forest areas, these are potential gardening areas. And so once the overstory gets removed, the soil becomes pretty crappy pretty fast and dries out. And so you had a lot of problems with that in the areas of the heaviest development, loss of ability to cultivate the foods that you traditionally cultivate and relying on, you know, the hardiest of foods, right, cassava, things like this, sago, kind of traditional fallback foods because the other foods aren't growing well anymore as a result of these issues with the soil. And so that's part of what's going on with the ecological changes. You're getting also waterways kind of drying up because the land's been cleared. And so the sun's hitting it even more so than it would have. You're getting a lot of erosion into waterways because of clearing the lands, this sort of thing. And a lot of social conflict again, surrounding, you know, who, who gets to say, who gets to sign off on these development projects and who gets to distribute the benefits and who should be getting the benefits. These sorts of issues and that seem to take place throughout the history of development efforts on the island, just with distribution not being what it should be, and also the benefits in general not being what they should be, not being what was agreed to flowing through one or two people. And so you kind of see things getting out of sorts all throughout the process. And in a way that kind of, I guess, makes it more likely that sort of social norms of reciprocity might be transgressed in an effort to claim some benefit from the project. Right. And getting kind of tiddly royalty fees and things like this. And so, yeah, it's hard to distribute that throughout your social network equally in a way that really would amount to much benefit for everyone involved. And so that's kind of the situation on the ground that paints a pretty grim picture. But in the process you see, you know, people surviving and adapting and very resilient group of people living their life and making the best of what is often for a lot of the folks involved, a pretty bad situation.
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Exactly, exactly. Thank you for sharing all this very valuable information. I think you perfectly shows how global development and extractive capitalism are not simply imposed from osi as you mentioned. They are also locally facilitated through existing power dynamics and, you know, indigenous actors. So I want to go back to the topic of hope and aspirations, talk a little bit further. So a key argument in your book is that global development processes are built on producing and maintaining what you call precarious hope. So hope is not a simple reaction of the locals to the global forces, but internal and even embedded in global development processes. So how do Lobenguy hopes for true development for easier, more modern leaves, better services and recognition both enable and constrain their responses to extracted projects. In other words, how do these hopes make people willing to take risks on logging and other large scale projects, but also make it hard for them to say no, even when past experiences suggest that promises of development may be not fulfilled?
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That's a great question. And you know, it comes down to, gosh, a really long history of various development interventions that have taken place over the years here. First in the context of kind of colonial regimes, German colonial regimes, and followed by the Australian protectorate that was in place for a long time. And generally smaller scale projects that were started by, you could argue, well, meaning kind of state actors, state colonial patrol kind of state level actors trying to provide a way for local people to earn some cash income through commercial cropping on their own often. But the problem that people keep running into is there's often no previously developed market for these products. Products like coffee, you know, rubber vanilla have been tried kind of over and over again and. But there's no kind of setup way or kind of demand for these products coming out of New Hanover and you run into kind of problems of productions and scale and you have to produce a lot of it, which requires a lot of people to do the same thing and to develop sufficient supply for the demand for these products. But as I said, it's a remote, fairly remote area and so it's expensive to get there. And so how do we create a product that people want enough to come out here to get and a big enough supply to make them want to come get it? And so that's been going on forever it seems. And yeah, and it constrains what people can do and they're constrained by the options that they have that they're getting from the companies that are interested in coming there to do larger scale development projects. And so I think I talk about in the book quite a bit. Well, what does it mean if we say no to this particular project? When are we going to get another option, another opportunity to develop? It may not be in my lifetime. And you know, you see this across the world, so why not give this a shot, right? If we. It's not likely that I'm going to get another opportunity to fulfill this kind of desire. And maybe this company will be a good company. Right. And. And so there's that kind of aspect playing into it too, but kind of. And you see companies coming in obviously taking advantage of that longing for something that people have gone without for a long time. But they know that others throughout the world, they just have this, they just have this style of life and how did they get it and how do we get it? And that's kind of just over and over again throughout the generations that seems to be happening sort of angling for this, this thing that you've been told is kind of great and certainly looks desirable, but how do you get it given your sort of options? That are potentially available to you, which historically have not been great. And so that's what I'm talking about, I guess, hopefully far more fluently than in the book than I am right now. But yeah, just the idea that you're playing on other people's desires for something that they see as good. But also in the process, it's sort of these other discourses that have been going around about, you know, what is good, what is desirable for people living in this day and age, and who has the power to say what that is, and why do some kind of discourses about the good life seem to have sort of greater power than others? And so you certainly see that taking place on New Hanover, like many places, and development companies can come in and hold out this dream that a lot of people have had and take advantage of people based on this dream. And then local leaders also, unfortunately, some of them can be taken in by this. Maybe others know it's not going to work out well, but they're going to benefit from it. Yeah, it becomes kind of an easy currency of exchange in those situations. What do you want? Well, we can give it to you. And you don't have any competing offers, so of course you take it. And you know, you see that going on across the world in the United States right now. Right. In many rural areas. Right. Well, this is the company that's going to give us the jobs. Right. And we need this company kind of thing. We don't care about the other potential consequences as much. Right. Because we need this now. And so. Yeah. And that way there's. I just found a lot of things to relate to on New Hanover during the course of the study and talking to people and thinking about how things work around the world.
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Perfect. Thank you very much for all this information. Also your reflections, you know, from Papua New guinea to the current United States. And also your ethnography pays close attention to the materialities of subsistence from gardens and forest, seasonal hungers experienced by the local, their illness and disease, and also their food security, especially in places like Naram Village. So what did you learn by focusing so carefully on this everyday labors of getting by?
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A
Well, you just learn quite a lot about first kind of the amazing ingenuity of the Labengay people as far as the way in which they cultivate their gardens, the techniques they've developed over the generations, the way in which they build their houses and really kind of take advantage of any opportunity they can to improve things, make things last longer, make things work for them. And that was certainly super helpful. But you also see some of kind of the difficulties associated with that way of life. It's both kind of predictable and unpredictable at the same time. Because we've been gardening for generations, we know how this is supposed to work. But you don't always know what the weather's going to do. You don't always know are things going to grow. I can put this much effort into it, but maybe this isn't going to work out. And saw that quite clearly during the course of my study, which unfortunately overlapped with an El Nino period, a drought period, which was pretty severe at the second community that I, I worked in. And so that kind of combined with the issues they were experiencing from logging made cultivation very difficult. And so what people do in these difficult circumstances while they have these long term practices, fallback foods, particularly sago, we say if everything kind of goes to hell, well, we'll still live on sago. But sago isn't very nutritious. It's just kind of carbohydrates. And so yeah, you see kind of, you know, both the beauty and the struggle of that type of lifestyle. And it's, it's something I wish I had teased out a bit more. I guess theoretically this idea of subsistence and maybe used a different term particularly after my, my work in my current position as being not necessarily just, you know, it's more than the minimum required to make a life. But it's not, you know, it's not like living like a western kind of global power, living in a city, having a house with tv, running water, things like this, it's not the same. And a lot of people on new hamper want to experience, you know, that other side of things. And it's certainly, at least in terms of physical labor, more labor intensive. The environment is not terribly forgiving. Things tend to break down. It's the tropical forest. People build their own houses, but those houses don't last very long. So they're constantly, you know, every couple of years having to redo this. Making sago leaf roofs takes for a very long time. And you know, the metal tin roofs is a lot of people would call them, were particularly desirable for this reason. And so it's just kind of the realities of everyday life that you really get into by looking closely at subsistence practices in this sort of political ecology framework. And bringing in the ecological survey methods also helps you kind of quantify the amount of work that people are doing, the amount of crops that people are producing, and how things change throughout the course of the year. And particularly in sort of difficult circumstances like droughts, like, you know, clear cut, loss of fertility associated with clear cuts, things like this.
- [53:10]
B
Thank you. Thank you very much for this answer. And also I think this length of subsistence definitely helped me to see how loving guide people balance their enduring hopes for development with their immediate need to sustain livable life in the present. And what is amazing is to see how the two are actually each other's background, context. And also to close this interview, I'd like to ask about what you hope different listeners, different readers will take from we stay the same for scholars working in the Pacific, for development practitioners, and also for a graduate student like me just beginning to work on environment or development issues. What are the main lessons or cautions you will highlight based on your book? And are there particular insights about international development, good change and the rule of hope that you think travel well beyond this one island and case?
- [54:08]
A
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I. I wrote the book kind of for a variety of audiences, which was tough and maybe not too advisable strategy, but I wanted people who were not necessarily anthropology grad students or something like that to be able to read and understand what I was talking about. Which I think sometimes in anthropology we don't do a great job of trying to reach a broader audience. And part of that is related to the La Lingaya Pico that I worked with. They wanted to make connections outside of New Hanover with people from other places and things like that. And so the initial kind of most basic thing is to learn about the Lavangai, about their lives, what they do, who they are, how they live, what they believe, like most ethnographies, but then kind of, I guess, getting a bit more theoretical or more applied just thinking about lessons that can be learned from this particular project and can be applied to hopefully New Hanover in the future. And, you know, similar, similarly situated areas, you know, unfortunately a lot of them are pretty obvious. Certainly the land's investigation process and development process as far as getting agreements and getting the right people signing off on allowing the development project to come in and doing that by understanding how the land rights work is certainly an important, crucial piece of the puzzle that doesn't seem to have happened in the way that it should have in this context. Also thinking about what kind of benefits are promised to people, because I think certainly in this context people were promised the moon stars when what they were really getting were logging royalties, which is kind of the same thing that had happened before multiple times. And the logging royalties weren't really they weren't fair, they were well below market value, what was agreed to and then what people got was even less than that. And so thinking about ways to improve and you know, that gets into all kinds of theoretical arguments about whether legibility is good or not, but improve the way in which land ownership is determined and projects are signed off on, like I said before, but also some kind of oversight about how project benefits are distributed. Are these benefits being distributed the way in which they were agreed to and the amounts that they are agreed to and what are you promising people and are you being honest with them? And so unfortunately a lot of these kind of take home points are thinking about things from an ideal world perspective, believing that people are meeting on grounds of honesty, what we want and what we're going to do. And so yeah, I don't know how effective that would be given the current state of the world, but certainly there needed to be more oversight on these projects and the way in which they were developed, the way in which they were implemented, all of the above, because people didn't get what they thought they were getting. And that kind of keeps getting repeated over and over again in this area of the world. And again that kind of brings back to this idea of hope and continuing to hope for things that are likely to happen. And thinking about the ways in which development benefits from that and these kind of very structurally constrained situations, It's a tough thing to think about and give applied recommendations in a way, a realistic way that you think might actually be used going forward. I would certainly hope that some of the ideas and the lessons that were in the book would make their way into future development efforts in the area.
- [59:51]
B
But yeah, it's also also a hope from an astronaut. Thank you very much, Dr. Roberts. Thank you very much for sharing your work and also your insights with us today. It has been a real pleasure for me chatting with you. So in today's episode, I've been speaking with Dr. Jason S. Roberts about his book We Stay the Same Subsistence Logging and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New guinea, published by the University of Arizona in 2024. For listeners interested in political ecology, Pacific studies, development studies, and the entanglement of subsistence and global capitalism, this book offers a vivid and deeply grounded ethnography. I'm Yadong Li and you've been listening to the New Books Network. We hope to see you next.