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Logging, Violence and Pleasure: Neoliberalism, Civil Society and Corporate Governance in West New Britain
Author(s) -
Lattas Andrew
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
oceania
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.356
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1834-4461
pISSN - 0029-8077
DOI - 10.1002/j.1834-4461.2011.tb00095.x
Subject(s) - unrest , context (archaeology) , neoliberalism (international relations) , state (computer science) , corporate governance , logging , land tenure , economy , general partnership , renting , political economy , market economy , sociology , economics , political science , law , history , politics , finance , agriculture , archaeology , geography , algorithm , forestry , computer science
The postcolonial world of Melanesia is made up of diverse experiments, which combine modern and customary technologies of power into new hybrid assemblages. In the 1990s, there occurred a proliferation of landowner companies in rural New Britain. This happened in a context of neoliberalism where the state divested itself of many functions and services by allocating these to a supposedly more efficient private sector. In the Kaliai area, this new economic partnership between state and capital gave rise to more militarised forms of policing, which sought to protect logging by a large Malaysian company from growing local unrest. Supplementing these coercive state actions were private strategies, which used sorcery to intimidate opponents to logging as well as rivals within the landowner company. Opponents were bought off and alliances created through using customary exchange relations as well as through modern gifts of money, western goods and commoditised pleasures.