Paper short abstract:

The Kokoda war tourism industry brings Papua New Guineans into complex tourist encounters with Australians. These can yield material benefits for locals, but also compel recognisable performances of deference by those whose livelihoods hinge on the tourist value that is ascribed (or denied) them.

Paper long abstract:

In Papua New Guinea's Oro Province, a war tourism centered on the Kokoda Track brings local Papua New Guineans into encounters with Australians, including with the trekkers who come to 'do' Kokoda, the operators who run the treks, and representatives from various governmental and non-governmental agencies. These encounters unfold against the context of Australia's colonial history in PNG, and are invariably structured by the sharp inequalities of power and economy that endure in the post-Independence era. They both invoke and transform value, as history becomes a resource to be mobilized in the pursuit of development, and as the desires of tourists and trekking companies compel recognizable performances by the Papua New Guineans whose livelihoods hinge on the tourist value that is ascribed (or denied) them. For example, locals working as porters on the trek are frequently valued—within advertising for the industry as well by the individual trekkers whose bags they carry—as the "new generation of Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels", in reference to the Papuans and New Guineans who served as carriers for the Australian army during WWII. Maintaining these positive valuations can yield material benefit—employment, cash tips, other gifts—but also fixes Papua New Guineans in a deferential and radicalised relation to Australians. In this paper, I offer an ethnographic reflection on the making and refiguring of value within Kokoda tourist encounters, opening out from this to think more broadly about the possibilities and limits of recognition, and its enmeshing with redistribution in postcolonial contexts.