For the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea, ‘hard work’ does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, it involves creating and recreating social relations through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together. ‘Work’ as the Mengen see it, produces value understood as meaningful social relations. This differs significantly from the way colonial officials, loggers, and planters perceived value.

Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen. It delves into how the Mengen engage with their land and outside actors like companies, NGOs, and the state through agriculture, logging, plantation labour, and environmental conservation. These practices have shaped the Mengen’s lived environment, while also sparking debates on what is considered valuable and how value is created.

Tammisto’s monograph explores the complexities of natural resource extraction, looking at both large-scale processes and personal human-environment interactions. It combines a political ecology focus on the connection between environmental issues and power relations with a focus on how value is produced, represented, and materialized.

Tuomas Tammisto is a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in political ecology. He currently works as an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampere University.

This book has received support from the Kone Foundation.

“The fate of tropical rainforests is a paramount global concern, and this is one of the best books yet written about how indigenous people themselves think about logging, plantations, and conservation as possibilities for their environment. Tammisto is uniquely skilled at synthesizing the anthropological tradition of meaning-focused analysis of space and landscape with scholarship on the political economy and ecology of resource extraction. Above all, he has done hard, valuable work of listening to Mengen people’s own accounts of their lives, and he describes with dignity and richness the varied approaches different community members take to futures of land and livelihood currently open to them.”

- Rupert Stasch, Professor, Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

*****

“Meticulously researched and lucidly written, Hard Work uncovers the multiplicitous meanings and manifestations of work among the Mengen of Papua New Guinea. The book offers an innovative and timely theory of value understood through the lens of production, demonstrating through thick ethnography how work generates people, places, and relations that encompass yet also vastly transcend human worlds. At the same time, Hard Work usefully situates its findings against the growing encroachments of capitalist projects – agriculture, logging, and plantation labor–to identify how value itself becomes a site of struggle across differently positioned subjects on an extractive frontier. A true labor of care and creativity, this ethnography promises to become a landmark work in environmental anthropology, political ecology, and Pacific studies. It is also a powerful invitation for those both within and beyond academia to take seriously the value of hard work in making more livable, shared, and more-than-human futures possible.”

- Dr Sophie Chao, University of Sydney