Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how Pacific islanders are confronted with capitalism without giving up other ways of conceiving relations, economy and society. Specifically, how Kanak society organises the problematic coexistence of moral economies and capitalism in a period marked by decolonisation process.

Paper long abstract:

The power of globalisation seems to have colonised, in different ways, the "political imaginations" (Gibson-Graham, 2002) of both realists and decostructionists. Focusing the ethnographic lens only on the human action of resource-extraction there is a risk of "extrahĕre" (from Latin 'draw out') even those margins and residues where capitalism and culture come into relation and contribute to create the "locality". Paradoxically, the land that is not removed is precisely the place where a culture hides and at the same time it loves to represent itself. New Caledonia appears as an interesting realm to look at the mining politics both of corporations and independent indigenous leaders. The Société minière du Sud Pacifique (SMSP), a local mining company whose major shareholder is the Northern Province under the control of Kanak separatist parties, owns 51% of one on-shore nickel project in New Caledonia and two more off-shore in South Korea and China. Building on ten months of fieldwork in the northern region of New Caledonia this paper seeks to explore the various forms through which the capitalist-mining economic system is articulated in a specific local context, focusing on the different ways in which social actors resist, transform and domesticate the hegemonic elements coming from outside. Analysing mining activity from the lens of kanak metaphysic - as a co-habitation of spaces in which visible and invisible, endogenous and exogenous forces are constantly negotiated and balanced - the aim is to identify an alternative space to the rigid dichotomy between subjection and resistance.