Paper short abstract:

Febi people dream of building a city on their land in a remote part of PNG. In thinking through what they imagine this city would be and would bring, we explore connections between new collective identities and the central places that may come to embody these as a locus for aspirational futures.

Paper long 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. 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 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".

Recent calls for residents of towns like Kiunga to return to their ‘own’ place (in other provinces, or in other regions of the same province), and resistance to those calls through assertions of a ‘right’ to remain, replicate discourses we have seen at smaller scales. They strategically play with relational and categorical logics, in ways that render the idea of custom as a distinct form of governance problematic.