Paper short abstract:

The relationality of "ownership" or "value" of land has already been shown for some areas of PNG. This paper pays particular attention to activities that connect land and people and thus mediate between the land and its capacity to create relations. But that is not the only mediation to consider.

Paper long abstract:

For the Gawigl of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, land is not valued separately from the people living and working there. Rather, a particular piece of land tells something about the people (and spirits) occupying and attending to it - it reflects the relational state of a person or a group. The backbone of relationships lies in exchange feasts where pigs (and money) are given, principally to affines and maternal kin. These prestations can be understood as another expression of land, if we see pigs as land in another form. They are the only "storehouse" people have to stock the continuous harvest of sweet potatoes coming out of the large gardens. Exchange feasts thus make land appear as a mediator for relations between residential groups. Affinal and maternal relationships, cared for by working the land and giving away pigs, were in turn crucial to the performance of a major ritual (at present abandoned). Once every generation, it put a halt to the atrophy affecting the land and reinstated fertility. Relationships with affines and maternal kin act here as mediators between land and people.

So, for the Gawigl land takes many forms: extracting crops from gardens, tending to pigs to be given away in exchange, organising feasts that fill up ceremonial grounds, performing rituals that regenerate the soil for the next generation. If land is nothing without these activities, how does one frame the question of entitlement and thus of property and ownership?