Contested masculinities in the exploration phase of the Lihir gold mine, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

The large gold deposit that is now being mined on the island of Lihir in Papua New Guinea was first discovered in 1982, but the development agreements were not signed until 1995. Between 1985 and 1994, I made several trips to the island in order to assess the future social impacts of the mine and provide advice to various actors on the question of how these impacts could be mitigated. The question of what should be done to mitigate the impact on Lihirian women, or on gender relations in Lihirian society, was one of the questions that had to be addressed. It was already evident that this question was difficult to answer because there was a sort of power struggle going on between the small group of European men who were in charge of the exploration work and a somewhat larger group of Lihirian men who had positioned themselves as representatives of the local community. The first question addressed in this paper is whether this was not just a power struggle between a group of white men and a group of black men in a post-colonial or neocolonial political context, but also a contest between different conceptions of masculinity that were themselves being transformed by the imminent prospect of a large-scale gold mine. The second question is how the evolution of this contest over the course of a decade either broadened or narrowed the scope for Lihirian women to escape the subordinate position that they occupied when the contest began.