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Despite the plethora of research on gender and the many projects designed to improve their status in the Pacific region, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalised in social, economic and political spheres. How are we to understand this and what does it mean for researchers, policy-makers and development practitioners? This book examines these questions, partly by looking back but also by continuing the effort to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The contributors discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. Exploring how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped by local contexts and traditions, they focus on how these are remade through interaction with global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and economic transformations. Grounded in recent, original research in both the villages and towns of Melanesia, the collection engages with the study of gender in Melanesia as well as scholarship on global modernities. ‘This collection is a welcome addition to the study of gender in Melanesia … Collectively, the essays present complex, locally contextualised and regionally situated case studies of gender transformation occurring alongside, in many instances, the re-codification of hegemonic gendered norms and practices. Gender is not understood as simply code for women in this volume rather, the majority of chapters incorporate men and masculinities in their analysis of gender relations and dynamics. A highlight of the collection is the attention paid to how “the politics of tradition” (and of modernity) are expressed through morally loaded concepts of the “good” or “bad” woman or man and vice versa.’ — Kalissa Alexeyeff, University of Melbourne
Despite the plethora of research on gender and the many projects designed to improve their status in the Pacific region, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalised in social, economic and political spheres. How are we to understand this and what does it mean for researchers, policy-makers and development practitioners? This book examines these questions, partly by looking back but also by continuing the effort to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The contributors discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. Exploring how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped by local contexts and traditions, they focus on how these are remade through interaction with global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and economic transformations. Grounded in recent, original research in both the villages and towns of Melanesia, the collection engages with the study of gender in Melanesia as well as scholarship on global modernities.
Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations in Melanesia have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness, and with equal good humour, the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life.
Despite the plethora of research on gender and the many projects designed to improve their status in the Pacific region, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalised in social, economic and political spheres. How are we to understand this and what does it mean for researchers, policy-makers and development practitioners? This book examines these questions, partly by looking back but also by continuing the effort to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The contributors discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. Exploring how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped by local contexts and traditions, they focus on how these are remade through interaction with global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and economic transformations. Grounded in recent, original research in both the villages and towns of Melanesia, the collection engages with the study of gender in Melanesia as well as scholarship on global modernities.
Amazonia and Melanesia are half a world in distance, yet their cultures bear similarities in the areas of sex and gender. This work looks at ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized.
Authored by well-established and respected scholars, this work examines the kinds of efforts that have been made to adopt Western modernity in Melanesia and explores the reasons for their varied outcomes. The contributors take the work of Professor Marshall Sahlins as a starting point, assessing his theories of cultural change and of the relationship between cultural intensification and globalizing forces. They acknowledge the importance of Sahlins' ideas, while refining, extending, modifying and critiquing them in light of their own first hand knowledge of Pacific island societies. Also presenting one of Sahlins' less widely available original essays for reference, this book is an exciting contribution to serious anthropological engagement with Papua New Guinea.
Focusing on cultural change and the socio-political movements in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, this book uses both anthropological and historical analysis to examine the way the relationship between gender and Christianity has shaped processes of social change. Based on extensive research conducted over several decades, it is one of the few books available to focus on Vanuatu and on the impact of Christianity in Melanesia more generally – as well as on the significance of gender relations in understanding these developments. Providing a model for understanding and comparing processes of change in small-scale societies, this fascinating book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the ethnography of Melanesia and in issues related to contemporary cultural change and gender more generally.
For the Ankave of Papua New Guinea, men, unlike women, do not reach adulthood and become fathers simply by growing up and reproducing. What fathers--and by extension, men--actually are is a result of a series of relational transformations, operated in and by rituals in which men and women both perform complementary actions in separate spaces. Acting for Others is a tour de force in Melanesian ethnography, gender studies, and theories of ritual. Based on years of fieldwork conducted by the author and her husband and co-ethnographer, this book's "double view" of the Ankave ritual cycle--from women in the village and from the men in the forest--is novel, provocative, and one of the most incisive analyses of the emergence of ideas of gender in Papua New Guinea since Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift. At the heart of Pascale Bonnemère's argument is the idea that it is possible for genders to act for and upon one another, and to do so almost paradoxically, by limiting action through the obeying of taboos and other restrictions. With this first English translation by acclaimed French translator Nora Scott, accompanied by a foreword from Marilyn Strathern, Acting for Others brings the Ankave ritual world to new theoretical life, challenging how we think about mutual action, mutual being, and mutual life.