Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how notions of visibility and invisibility, and ‘covering’ among the Baining people of Papua New Guinea were essential in developing tactics to take back their customary land and draw wealth to the clan.

Paper long abstract:

Over the years numerous missionaries, researchers, and tourists have visited the Baining people of Papua New Guinea to take a glimpse of their breath taking fire dances and mysterious culture. And while their elaborate bark cloth masks made their way into countless museums, magazines, tourism brochures, and Air Niugini commercials, the Baining people continued to live on the margins of development, neglected by state and local governments.

In this paper I discuss the tactics developed by the Baining to take control over their land and draw wealth to the clan, by transforming themselves from cocoa growers to oil palm businessmen, and making themselves seen by the state (Street 2012). I argue that notions of visibility/invisibility among the Baining play significant role in these tactics and peoples’ understandings of development and wealth. First, I explore how making things ‘not-seen’ to become ‘seen’ and vice versa, occur in spaces that confer the boundaries between visibility and invisibility (e.g. bush, trap, creek, house), whereby various beings transform from one thing to another, and become manifest at a sensorial level. Second, I discuss the notion of ‘covering’ (karamapim) as a strategy of revelation and access to power, to show what it means to “cover the land with oil palm” and how by creating such space the Baining reveal and remove “illegal settlers,” draw wealth, and make themselves visible. By exploring various “tactics of visibility” and their role in making and cutting social relationships this paper offers insight into Melanesian strategies of (re)presentation and self-presentation.