Presentations:

Female subjects in Highlands anthropology: from 'sexual antagonism' to 'violence against Women'

Martha Macintyre, University of Melbourne

When anthropologists from the Australian National University first studied the lives of people in Melanesia, the political context was that of a parochial colonialism. For administrators and the people of Papua New Guinea, it was a form of domination quite different from that experienced in Africa, or the New World. In the words of Mervyn Meggitt '... they tried with some success to regulate the actives of European missionaries, miners, planters and traders in order to minimize or at least delay their disturbance of the indigenous highlands cultures.' He and other anthropologists were '... on hand to exploit the situation and study these tribal societies while they remained in something like their pristine state.' (Meggitt 1969:1) The pervasive scientism, and the emphasis on social organisation and cultural norms as the appropriate subjects for anthropological inquiry, produced ethnographies that had enormous influence on the discipline more broadly. In these, women's lives and experiences were often subsumed in generalisations about roles, status, normative cultural constraints and the institutions of men. From the 1970s, feminist critiques, new theoretical directions and dramatic political and economic changes within Papua New Guinea transformed the scope of anthropology – its interests, subject matter and the circumstances of research. Women first emerged as subjects and increasingly their subjectivity has come under ethnographic scrutiny. Papua New Guinea is part of a globalising world and the illusion of a dyadic colonial/colonised divide has been shattered. The global concern with female disadvantage, manifest in numerous United Nations conventions, has generated new concerns about women's human rights, violence against women and discrimination against them in specific countries. Papua New Guinea's women are now anthropological subjects in quite different contexts – politically and academically. I shall present some thoughts on the changing views of women and the ways that human rights discourses have shaped contemporary research.

Plotting Genealogies of Gender in the Pacific: A View from ANU

Margaret Jolly, The Australian National University

In this presentation I will consider changing approaches to gender in the Pacific evinced in anthropological scholarship from the ANU from the 1980s to the present. In the wake of the tumultuous wave of the feminist movement coursing through scholarship across several disciplines, Roger Keesing, then Head of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific Studies, together with Michael Young and Marie Reay, instigated a major research project from 1983-4, entitled Gender Relations in the Southwest Pacific: Ideology, Politics and Production. This engaged several Australian and international scholars. Many important publications emerged from that including Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift (1988) which proved enormously influential within anthropology and beyond in fields such as of philosophy, law and sociology. Through a magisterial review of ethnographic materials from Papua New Guinea and beyond, Strathern plotted a world of Melanesia in which Western capitalist binaries of nature and culture, subjects and objects, persons and things did not prevail. It challenged dominant Western models of gender as a cultural layer on sexed bodies and individuated persons, insisting rather on the irreducible character of the relation and a model of the 'dividual', persons who were rather permeable and partible, 'multiply constituted', composed and decomposed in event cycles, incorporating aspects of other persons and personified objects. That book generated much debate then and since, and continues to be a foundational text.

A vigorous research program on gender in the Pacific (and Asia) was reanimated at the Australian National University from the 1990s to 2010, primarily but not exclusively through the Gender Relations Centre in the then Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Over these two decades anthropological scholarship on gender in the Pacific at ANU has been characterized by three related developments (a) a growing stress on gender as a relation, embracing men and transgendered persons as well as women and interrogating the link between gender and sexuality (b) an emphasis on dynamic transformations of gender relations in both past and present (c) more reflexive, dialogical and collaborative research practices. These trends will be illustrated through specific examples of publications by staff and graduate scholars over the last two decades and situated in the broader context of global trends.

Masculinity, Sacred Power and Modernity in Vanuatu: The Melanesian Brotherhood

John P. Taylor, La Trobe University

This paper explores masculinity, sacred power and modernity in Vanuatu through an ethnography of the Melanesian Brotherhood. Established in 1925, the Melanesian Brotherhood is an evangelical sect of the Anglican Melanesian Mission. In present day Vanuatu, Melanesian Brothers (or Tasiu) are believed to wield and control considerable and sometimes terrifying sacred powers, and in particular are able to directly channel the power of God in effecting conversions, exorcisms, clearances, healings, and numerous other miraculous acts directed against 'dark powers'. Sequestered away from the general population in 'households', and adhering to strict rules of sexual abstinence, poverty and obedience, the efficacy of this sacred power is clearly linked to indigenous understandings relating to ancestral reproduction, and particularly to previous spatial concerns and practices associated with the sacred fires of 'graded societies' and of 'men's houses.' It is also connected to contemporary concerns by which ideas about 'loose' sexuality and increasing inequalities of wealth are linked to sorcery accusations.