I am delighted to have just recently discovered that the Australian National University’s “Resource Management in the Asia Pacific”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/rmap/ program has started a new “RMAP blog”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap. I have tremendous respect for the people at RMAP — and their research is absolutely central to my own project. Most particularly, their post on “social mapping and Human Terrain Systems”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/20/social-mapping-and-human-terrain-systems/ points out something I have long thought (and worried) about but have not said explicitly: that social mapping projects that grow up around mining projects are similar to the programs now being developed by the military in Afghanistan.

In both cases large bureaucratically organized institutions plant themselves in fluid contexts, which often results in a solidification of previous kinships practices. Thus, for instance, the “Culture and Conflict Studies”:http://www.nps.edu/Programs/CCS/index.html department at the “Naval Postgraduate School”:http://www.nps.edu/Home.aspx. And sure enough, the CCS has “tribal genealogies”:http://www.nps.edu/Programs/CCS/FamilyTrees.html that look remarkably similar to the genealogical reports that are often created in the wake of mining and hydrocarbon projects in Papua New Guinea.

We also have sites like “Iraqht”:http://iraqht.blogspot.com/ which posts links to “articles on tribal warfare”:http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/coinandiwinatribalsociety.pdf (hosted by Small Wars Journal, the site on track to become the ‘Gene Expression’ of 2008!) which are similar in genre to the social mapping reports that deal with all the time in my research.

In my dissertation I focused on company-community relations. For the books I am expanding to a trichotomy of state, community, and company. Perhaps I should rebrand myself to include the military as well?