Paper short abstract:

In post-conflict Bougainville, relational processes and outcomes have often been re-apprehended as locally owned resources for peace. The paper explores ethnographically how reliance upon this dominant register of value has expanded but also reduced Bougainvilleans’ relational possibilities, and will point to less reductive alternatives.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological research on cultural property shows that the language of property can more adequately register some relational processes and their outcomes than others. Reliance on this particular register of value can therefore intervene in relational processes in ways that alter the relational capacities of participants significantly. This paper offers an ethnographic investigation of such an intervention by discussing two cultural performances staged in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, as part of the ongoing peace process in 2005.

The participants and audience' commentaries on the first performance, the installation of "traditional chief" during the regional election campaign, suggest that some Bougainvillean relational processes and their outcomes were being re-evaluated here as locally owned and transactable resources for promoting peace. I argue that this particular register of value was integral to specific trans-Pacific circulations of persons, things and knowledge, which Bougainvilleans re-entered during the peace process and valued highly. Regional relations were increasingly re-conceptualized in their terms.

However, certain Bougainvillean relational processes refused such re-apprehension. In a second cultural performance in 2005, a group of people attempted to draw attention to these. But the audience reduced the event to just another demonstration of locally owned resources for peace. The increasing dominance of a specific register of value, then, rendered ineffective other possibilities of making value apparent, and correspondingly reduced the relational capacities of those who insisted on them. The paper aims to suggest how the register of culture as a resource for peace could be modified so as to avoid its reductive effects in Bougainville.