Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea

Social analysis in anthropology today “oscillates uneasily” between a concern with Foucauldian global regimes of governance on the one hand and Deleuzian assemblages of agentive actors on the other. In Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea, Alex Golub asks if there is “a better way to do justice to a contemporary scene characterized by both spontaneity and regime” (2). Golub’s book seeks to find this middle road through the analysis of the development of a world-class gold mine on the homelands of a group of indigenous people—the Ipili— living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Golub’s book offers a refreshing panacea to the tired argument of “global” impacts on “local” people by focusing on the agency of Ipili actors who actively courted mining development on their lands in order to improve their socioeconomic statuses