Haivaro Fasu modernity: embodying, disembodying and re-embodying relationships

Abstract

Completed under a Cotutelle arrangement between the University of Melbourne and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales© 2017 Dr. Sandrine LefortIn this thesis, I analyse ways in which relations that build the lifeworld of Fasu people of Haivaro, in the northwest lowlands of the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea, have been and continue to be renegotiated and reconfigured in the context of their engagement with multiple expressions of modernity, in particular with a logging company operating on their land. I show how these transformations entail processes of embodiment, disembodiment and re-embodiment of those relations. The relationships that people develop with the human and non-human beings that populate their environment are diverse and context-dependent. They emerge and consolidate as people engage with that environment and where the latter changes – either abruptly or gradually – so too the relations that built their lifeworld also change. In the years before 1996, several logging and oil companies operated in the Haivaro region. Fasu people engaged with these only sporadically. In 1996, however, a logging company established a base camp 3km northeast of Haivaro and remained there until 2016. This company was operated by the Malaysian Rimbunan Hijau group (RH). Timber extraction began on the land of Haivaro people and they engaged with this company more intensely than with any other. Two kinds of influence were significant. On the one hand, Haivaro people became connected to the outside world in ways they had never previously experienced or contemplated and, on the other, their immediate physical environment underwent substantial transformations such that, in some ways, it became foreign to them. These changes have had – and continue to have – impacts on the ways Haivaro people understand their relationships to the land, to their human and non-human neighbours and to the wider world. These relationships are integral to the ways in which Haivaro Fasu construct their identity and, as these relationships are renegotiated, so too identity is reconfigured. The relationships of fatherhood, brotherhood, conjugality, gender and otherness that are the focus of this study were deeply associated with the representations people at Haivaro had of bodily substances. In that sense, they were deeply embodied. In the modern context, a greater emphasis has been put on the performance of specific forms of reciprocity in creating and maintaining these relations. In some ways, they have been partly dis-embodied. Concurrently, new or modified forms of relations appeared that people at Haivaro attempted to integrate – to tame – by re-embodying them. In this thesis, I discuss such processes and their implications for ways in which Haivaro people now engage with the world