Pomio is a large, sparsely populated and remote rural district of East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Large parts of the district are not connected to the provincial road network and accessible only by ships or speedboats. Roads have thus been a central concern of local politicians and ordinary inhabitants alike, and both have entered into deal with logging and plantation companies in the hope of getting roads, while the national government has recently started road projects in the area. In this paper, I will discuss my ongoing research project in which I study the relationship between state-formation, natural resource extraction, and the spatialization of different forms of governance by examining roads and road building in PNG. In the project, I examine both state-led road building projects and privately built road infrastructure related to natural resource extraction, especially logging and oil palm agriculture as well as how inhabitants of Pomio both use roads for their own needs and develop local forms transport logistics the absence of roads. I examine road building as a site, both abstract and very concrete, where different actors from extractive companies, international consultants, various state officials and locals engage in state formation, by producing what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called "state effects". In the project, I ask how these various actors engage in and influence state formation and territorialization in PNG through the building of roads and alternate forms of transport infrastructure.

Speaker:

Tuomas Tammisto is a socio-cultural anthropologist specialising in environmental anthropology and political ecology. Tammisto focuses on human-environmental relations, land use, and the politics of natural resources. Tammisto has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Pomio, Papua New Guinea, and is interested especially in tropical horticulture, agrarian change, space and place, territorialisation, state formation and the articulation of different value systems. Tammisto is the author of the open access volume Hard Work: Producing places, relations and value on a Papua New Guinea resource frontier (2024) and he is the co-editor-in-chief of Suomen antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. He currently works as an Academy Research Fellow in Social Anthropology, Tampere University (Finland).

In-person: H.C Coombs Building, H.C Coombs Building, Seminar Room C, Ground floor (near Coombs Lecture theatre)

ZOOM: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1#success