Indigenous movements and the risks of counterglobalization: Tracking the campaign against Papua New Guinea's Ok Tedi mine

Many contemporary indigenous movements deploy strategies of counterglobalization that make innovative use of the architecture of globalization. This article examines an indigenous political movement that took legal action to gain compensation and limit the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Even though the campaign sought to balance the desire for economic benefits with the protection of local subsistence practices, its objectives were frequently misinterpreted. Indigenous movements that deviate from an antidevelopment position run the risk of being seen as greedy rather than green. Instead of reproducing allegories about the successful exercise of veto power over development projects, anthropologists need ethnographic accounts that analyze the complex ambitions of indigenous movements and the risks of particular strategies of counterglobalization. [corporations, environmentalism, globalization, law, mining, NGOs, Papua New Guinea] M any contemporary indigenous movements deploy strategies of counterglobalization that make innovative use of the architecture of globalization in challenging the “logic embedded in the new global order” (Castells 1997:96). Also known as “globalization from below” (Brecher et al. 2000; Falk 1993) or “grassroots globalization” (Appadurai 2000), these social movements bridge the gap between the local and the global as international campaigns piggyback on specific struggles and local protests hitchhike on global initiatives. The resulting forms of political mobilization have been described as enacting a “politics of scale” (Escobar 2001:166). Although recent scholarship has emphasized the political efficacy of counterglobalization (Appadurai 2000, 2002; Brecher et al. 2000; Escobar 2001; Keck and Sikkink 1998), this article examines the risks posed to indigenous politics and political movements by strategies of counterglobalization.1 Counterglobalization operates through transnational action networks that make international resources available to new categories of actors (Keck and Sikkink 1998), allowing them to leapfrog politics that have stalemated at the local or national level. The emergence of the “indigenous” as a legal category (Anaya 1996; Barsh 1994; Kymlicka 1995) and social movement is a prime example of this process, opening up new politics and debates about alternative forms of sovereignty (Brysk 2000; Niezen 2003; Sawyer 2004; Warren 1998), and stimulating new rights-based claims to culture (Brown 2003; Hirsch and Strathern 2004).2 Paradoxically, however, the pursuit of autonomy and indigenous rights requires increasing movement and translation across cultural, political, and geographic boundaries.3 Anthropologists have been attentive to the ways in which these political engagements have resulted in the “generification of culture” (Errington and Gewertz 2001) evident in essentialized representations of indigenous peoples. Solidarity among the indigenous participants in these movements is often based on rhetorical claims to underlying similarities as well as the “inversion of tradition” (Thomas 1992) through which they define themselves in opposition to the industrialized West.4 For example, indigenous property regimes are usually described as collective or communal in contrast to the AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 303–321, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.2.303. American Ethnologist Volume 34 Number 2 May 2007 centrality of private property in Western political and legal traditions, even though anthropologists since Malinowski (1935:280) have pointed out the reductive nature of this opposition. The specific objectives of indigenous movements may also be recast in universal terms when they are incorporated into counterglobalization movements that seek to promote “the common values of democracy, environmental protection, community, economic justice, quality, and human solidarity” (Brecher et al. 2000:15). Anthropologists have also been critical of the ways in which contemporary social movements share ideas with, borrow from, or otherwise come to resemble the organizations they purport to critique. J. Peter Brosius (1997) shows how forest campaigns in Borneo made use of metropolitan discourses of identity and the environment. Paul Rabinow (2002:14) argues that despite the claims of NGOs and multinational corporations to occupy opposing positions on the political spectrum, they operate in terms of the same fundamental understandings of the person, life, and ownership. I have argued that debates about the spread of Euro-American property regimes reproduce Euro-American conceptions of the body, nature, and culture (Kirsch 2004c). Annelise Riles (2000) shows how the knowledge practices of NGOs depend on the same legal and bureaucratic forms of documentation as the organizations they critique. Like these scholars, I am interested in how the practices of translation, accommodation, and opposition may impose constraints on indigenous movements. In this article, however, I argue that anthropologists also need to pay greater attention to how the other parties to these engagements— including states and their legal systems, corporations, the media, and members of the academy—actively shape these discursive practices. As Brosius has noted, “National elites and transnational corporate interests . . . are engaged in attempts to displace the moral/political imperatives that galvanize movements with a conspicuously institutional apparatus that is by turns legal, financial, bureaucratic, and technoscientific” (1999:278). He suggests that anthropologists have the responsibility to “bring a critical perspective to bear on the discursive foundations of such efforts and show how, in the process, various structures of domination are constituted and perpetuated” (Brosius 1999:278). The strategy of counterglobalization has both advantages and disadvantages. Effective political mobilization of indigenous movements often requires collaboration with a range of NGOs. In campaigns against transnational corporations, these alliances can replicate the geographic distribution of capital by putting pressure on the corporation wherever it operates. Although the participants in these campaigns may be relatively few and far between, their cumulative influence may nonetheless be significant. Whereas operating in remote locations once afforded corporations freedom from scrutiny, activists harnessing new communications technologies ranging from the Internet and cell phones to satellite imaging are now able to track and monitor corporate activity in approximately real time wherever it occurs. However, strategic alliances with NGOs, which possess their own political agendas and constituencies, may result in significant compromises for indigenous movements. In particular, the need to communicate in the discourses of their partners can be a liability (Conklin 1997; Conklin and Graham 1995). For example, indigenous activists risk having their testimony dismissed as inauthentic when they use scientific terminology to express environmental concerns (Innes 2001; Strathern 2003:269–270), much like Laura Graham (2002) observes for indigenous leaders in Latin America when they express their political views in the language of the dominant group.5 Pursuit of social justice claims through the legal system is also fraught with problems of translation, as I describe below (see also Povinelli 2002). Another challenge faced by indigenous activists is the speed with which capital now appropriates the terms of its critique (Latour 2004) and the strategies of its critics.6 Corporations have co-opted the discourse of sustainability to promote their contributions to economic development (Crook 2004), the language of accountability and transparency is used by conservative organizations like the American Enterprise Institute to police NGOs (Kirsch 2004a), and social responsibility is cited as a premise of corporate audit culture (Welker 2006). A recent satirical film about environmental activism received corporate sponsorship (Sydney Morning Herald 2006), turning the tables on liberal exposés of corporate behavior, and corporations regularly establish faux grassroots organizations to respond to their critics and facilitate negotiations with landowners (Sawyer 2004), a process known as “astroturfing” (New York Times 2007: A22).7 The vulnerability of indigenous movements to external criticism often takes the form of limited choices, including pressure to position themselves as antidevelopment. This problem is also reproduced in the anthropological literature on indigenous movements, including Anna Tsing’s (2005:205–228) recent description of a forest movement in Indonesia. She finds that the different groups involved in a forest campaign in South Kalimantan, whom she identifies as village leaders, nature lovers, and national activists, attributed their success in stopping a logging project to completely unrelated events. Tsing argues that the movement was effective not because the parties shared a common agenda but, instead, because of the value added by their differences to the movement’s division of labor. However, Tsing did not directly observe the forest campaign and chose not to conduct further research to determine how the logging project was stopped. Rather, she elected to treat these events allegorically.8 Her choice of examples reflects the tendency among NGOs and anthropologists alike to focus on movements that seek to block development.9 The problem with concentrating on the successful veto of development