Greeting the state: entanglements of custom and modernity on Papua New Guinea’s Rai Coast

In May 2010, a delegation of Papua New Guinean politicians travelled to a remote village on the country’s north coast to receive a petition against proposed mine activity. The encounter between the politicians and the villagers who had invited them involved two very different articulations of power and authority, and two competing cartographies of centrality and marginality. The encounter speaks to the need to approach the concepts of custom and modernity not only as powerful discourses which are taken up and performed in local places, but also as analytical descriptors of actually existing patterns of practice and meaning which are structurally and ontological distinct. At the same time, however, analysis of the encounter between villagers and politicians makes clear that this structural difference cannot be written straightforwardly onto the social bodies of opposing collectivities. Rather, customary and modern forms of social relations exist in dynamic and ambivalent entanglements, pulled into contingent and differently weighted configurations by actors in local places.