Lost boys,invisible girls: stories of Sudanese marriages across borders

Forced migration challenges and changes gender relations. The transnational activities of refugees resettled in the West create gender asymmetries among those who stay behind. This article explores the transnational marriages of young southern Sudanese women (‘invisible girls’), who either stayed in Sudan or remained in refugee camps in Kenya, to Sudanese men who were resettled to America, Canada or Australia (‘lost boys’). Incorporating gender as a relational category into the analysis of transnational practices that migrants and refugees engage in is important. The article argues that there is a need to put feminist analysis at the centre of transnational processes resulting from (forced) migration. It looks at the connections between different geographical locations, the impacts of the migration of young refugee men on bridewealth and marriage negotiations and the gender consequences for young women, men and their families. It is argued that transnational activities, such as marriage, contest, reconfigure and reinforce the culturally inscribed gender norms and practices in and across places. Transnational marriage results in ambiguous benefits for women (and men) in accessing greater freedoms. Anthropological analyses of marriage need a geographical focus on the transnational fields in which they occur. The article seeks to deepen understanding of the nuanced gendered consequences of transnationalism. It shows how gender analysis of actions taken across different locations can contribute to the theorisation of transnational studies of refugees and migrants.     

Christian Marriage,Money Scams,and Melanesian Social Imaginaries

In this paper, we draw on fieldwork with middle‐class investors in ‘fast money schemes’ (Ponzi scams) to consider how Neo‐Pentecostal Christianity may be mediating social and economic change in Papua New Guinea, particularly in relation to gender equality. Ideas of companionate marriage and the cultivation of an affective self imply masculinities that are more sensitive and less domineering. As these images of fulfilled modernity flow out from Pentecostal churches into broader Papua New Guinean society, they corroborate Taylor's theory of how change occurs within the modern social imaginary.     

To Excel at bridewealth,or ceremonies of Office

At a bridewealth payment made at the start of a wedding in Papua New Guinea, the groom diligently kept a note of contributions from relatives and co‐workers. The next day, he used one of his employer's computers to compile an Excel spreadsheet that detailed all the guests, what each one brought, and, in a separate column, its value in money. Turning people's gifts into nominal amounts of money helped register these into an enduring electronic form. The spreadsheet – an all too familiar tool of enumeration – gave the groom a record of transactions going forward. Papua New Guinea is most often known for the widespread emphasis placed on gift‐giving, especially the large prestations that are particularly important in the making of ‘Big Men’ and which are based on the belief in the high status of the giver and the onus of reciprocity. Today, spreadsheets permit transactions to be analyzed in a very different way – namely, in terms of currency‐like properties – allowing Papua New Guineans to understand, tap into and ultimately control the powers of money that echo current debates about the manipulation of big data.     

Narokobi’s Melanesian Philosophy in the Papua New Guinean Legal System

ABSTRACT

Bernard Narokobi dedicated his career as a law reformer, jurist and parliamentarian to making Papua New Guinea’s legal system a catalyst for a distinctively Melanesian philosophy. This philosophy, ‘the Melanesian Way’, emphasized Papua New Guineans’ embeddedness within their local social worlds, including spirits and the natural environment. The legal foundation for the Melanesian Way was set down in the National Goals and Directive Principles and Basic Social Obligations, which are stated in the Preamble to the Constitution of Papua New Guinea. These make the ideals of social justice, participatory democracy, national sovereignty and sustainable development a legal aspiration and an impetus for formally recognizing the social forms that Papua New Guinean people themselves experience as providing order in their lives. Legislation that Narokobi promoted over the course of his career offered practical mechanisms for operationalizing these ideals in accordance with their original constitutional foundation.     

Marriage Migration,Gender Transformations,and Family Values in the ‘Global Ecumene’

The metaphor of the market is a poor explanatory tool for the growth in international web-brokered marriages, between (mainly) men from rich countries and women from poor countries. States play an important role in regulating particular forms of migration including creating the ‘need’ for spousal migrants, as well as permitting their entry. The characterisation of the men who seek spouses through international agencies as powerful agents in the world system has to be mediated through understandings of the ways in which gender identities are not simple binaries that the contemporary global order is reproducing on an expanded scale. The characterisation of the women obscures the manner in which they are acting out of their own aspirations; and when a marriage is contracted, the man and woman enter into a personal relationship that cannot be reduced to a commodity exchange. These marriages involve people in negotiations about new forms of personal attachment involving intimacy, spousal roles and family relations. They are constitutive of the social networks of the ‘global ecumene’, a new kind of known world whose borders are constantly expanding. Gender relations are not constituted simply in the realm of the economic. We cannot assume family relations are merely expressions of dominant economic forms. The space of international web-brokered marriages is one in which women can be seen as active subjects in a transnational space that allows them to act outside, to certain degrees, of kinship-based power.     

Police and power in the pre‐war Papua New Guinea highlands

Abstract

In public life Europeans are occupation oriented, which has meant that colonial officials then and European researchers since have tended to think of indigenous servants in terms of their occupations — of a catechist as a Christian missionary, for example, or a man in a police uniform as a policeman. Papua New Guineans are clan or village oriented. In taking European jobs, how far did they change worlds? This article argues that indigenous policemen did acquire new allegiances in police service, making the police almost a clan, but that traditional imperatives and objectives remained key motivations. For space reasons the paper focuses on the period of ‘influence’, of early contact and administration, rather than the succeeding period, of ‘control’. For good discussions of both see Kituai, ‘Innovation’, 156–66, and ‘My gun’.     

The family, love, and suicide in early modern Geneva

Analysis of criminal proceedings and death records for early modern Geneva reveals an explosion in suicides after 1750. New attitudes toward courtship, marriage, and the familly contributed to this dramatic increase, as unprecedented numbers of people took their lives because of family concerns, such as marital breakdown, unhapppy love stories, and deaths of family members. Greater interest in the companionate marriage was central to these changes. After 1750, marriage, even more than parenthood, offered immunity to suicide, as married people were underrepresented among those who took their lives. Although men constituted the large majority of suicides, women and men shared the growing emphasis on conjugal sentiment, which cut across class lines.     

Trade's Value: Relational Transactions in the Papua New Guinea Betel Nut Trade

The betel nut trade in Papua New Guinea is big business. Betel nut, a mild indigenous stimulant, is considered the ‘green gold of the grassroots’. It is the country's most significant domestic cash crop and, in terms of rural incomes, a rival to the dominant export cash crops. Its sale is an important livelihood strategy in both rural and urban areas, the most visible manifestation of a flourishing informal economy. In betel nut marketplaces money ‘flows’ and ‘overflows’, traders wield large wads of cash, and vast sums change hands. Whether seeking their fortunes or only tinned fish, people trade betel nut first and foremost to make money, but such interests in trade do not automatically displace other forms of value. This paper is concerned with marketplaces and trade in contemporary Papua New Guinea and what is conveyed in those transactions between buyer and seller. Against the often impersonal and utilitarian rendering of trade, this paper seeks to foreground the sociability of trade and the multiple forms of value that may be simultaneously attached to monetised market transactions. This is not to conceal the discrete, unenduring, and competitive dynamics of trade, which prominently feature in many betel nut transactions, but instead to examine an important dynamic often overlooked. Market transactions, far from being asocial, or even socially destructive, have the capacity to generate and sustain diverse social relations including those of kinship and friendship.     

'We've Paid your Vagina to Make Children!ʼ: Bridewealth and Women's Marital and Reproductive Autonomy in Port-Vila,Vanuatu

In Vanuatu, the practice of bridewealth is widespread. However, according to international and national development organizations based in the capital Port-Vila, this practice impedes women's freedom, including women's reproductive autonomy. In this paper, using data gathered in Port-Vila between 2009 and 2018, I examine the practice of marriage in Port-Vila and argue against this development discourse. I analyse the transformations of marriage showing the increasing autonomy of young people in the selection of marriage partners and the links between marriage, bridewealth and reproductive autonomy. I emphasize the changes in the nature of bridewealth marriage in a contemporary urban context and its implications for female fertility control. I conclude that bridewealth is only one among several factors that influence women's reproductive autonomy in Port-Vila.     

Bridewealth1 and the Autonomy of Women in Melanesia

Considering bridewealth in Melanesia from the angle of women's autonomy, in this introduction we review and analyse the various elements of this marriage practice that reveal its place in the symbolic, social and economic worlds of women. With an accent on social transformation, we discuss women's autonomy and agency in relation to the constraints that bridewealth puts on their lives, and on how they engage with it. Knowing what bridewealth is, and how the rules of reciprocity that it indexes obligate married women, the focus is on women's ability to act within these constraints or to redefine their contours, particularly with regards to economic and reproductive agency. The article, which serves also as the introduction for the special issue on bridewealth in the journal Oceania, discusses themes analysed in the collection, such as the moral prospects of bridewealth today, its relation to ‘capital’ in twenty-first century Oceania, the triad value/valuables/valuers, and the empowerment of women. It concludes with thoughts on gender inequality.     

Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea: Place,Personhood and Exchange

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on ‘Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea’ reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces.     

The Last Big Man: Development and Men's Discontents in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Big Men achieve that status by making good things happen for others as well as for themselves. In the minds of many Papua New Guineans development promises a direct route to becoming Super Big Men and Women. Mostly, however, it produces inequality and conflict. This is striking in places peripheral to major developments and in situations where not everyone benefits (e.g. compensation to ‘local landowners' - narrowly defined by mining companies - and lucrative urban employment - enjoyed only by the few, mostly male elite). Uneven development pits men and women, parents and children, and whole communities against one another as those less fortunate fail to match the generosities or competition of more prosperous exchange partners. In this article, I look at development through the eyes of one self-proclaimed ‘last Big Man’. As a youth, Ruge participated in male initiation and worked for the colonial outsiders, hoping to manipulate both old and new systems. He married several wives in the tradition of past Gende leaders but chose one because she had been to school, knew the ways of Europeans and had a keen business sense. In spite of what looked like the right moves and a sincere concern for his followers, Ruge could not prevent his society from being ravaged by inequality or help a growing number of bachelors afford expensive brideprices as more and more village girls married wealthy strangers from other parts of Papua New Guinea. In the end, a clan brother killed Ruge in an argument over land, making Ruge a victim to capitalist development's indifference to local traditions of family, reputation, and leadership.     

‘Smoke in the Hills,Gunfire in the Valley’: War and Peace in Western Highlands,Papua New Guinea

The paper discusses accounts of recent tribal fighting and peacemaking processes in the Nebilyer Valley, Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea. My analysis is based on interviews conducted in January 2000 with Ganiga, and other peoples, who featured in Connolly and Anderson's film ‘Black Harvest’. I examine different strategies of peacemaking and peacekeeping employed in relation to the Nebilyer war, particularly the efforts of local Christian church representatives. I also explore how people in the Nebilyer Valley, construct particular events as significant, and the relevance of these constructions in processes of peace making.     

Bridewealth a Pardon: New Relationships and Restoration of Good Daughters

Bridewealth is recognized as vital in the reproduction and reconfiguration of Pacific environments and women play an integral role in this process. In contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG), bridewealth is reconfigured by kin to acknowledge the considered actions of women as they enter into relationships with men. This paper will explore how women's choices impact and influence their experience of these exchanges and determine the role of women and their kin as they undertake these practices. Here I aim to understand how the social relatedness that frames bridewealth exchanges enables the practices of bridewealth to be used as a tool for recognition of women's choices, autonomy and personhood. Although women enter into relationships without initial kin approval, bridewealth practices converge ultimately with a women's autonomous choice of husband. Wardlow suggests (2006:86) 'bridewealth confers value and dignity on female gender', and going beyond her observation, I show that bridewealth has been useful in achieving this in regard to managing and supporting social, kin and affinal relationships. This article will explore two cases, to identify what each tells us about women's ability to act in ways that are beneficial to them and important to kin. I show how moral evaluations frame (pasin) and recognize (luksave) kin and social relationships that ultimately constitute their personhood.     

Longing for Completion: toward an Aesthetics of Work in Suau

Aesthetics is a relatively recent ‘discovery’ for anthropologists, and on the whole has been limited to analyses of art and other forms of material culture. This article asks whether aesthetics might not also be applied to ‘cultural images’, or the forms in which people imagine their relationships to be made manifest. I take as my example gendered working relationships in the Suau region of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. In Suau the work of men and women is contingent upon, and assessed according to, values which appear at the juncture of particular relational configurations. Work is in fact the medium through which these relationships are made visible and ‘real’ to those who witness it. The forms taken by work refer to a morally freighted domain of values and interpretations, and the appropriate performance of work thus maintains an image of sociality as it is ideally conceived.     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

The Legacy of Bernard Narokobi and the Melanesian Way

ABSTRACT

This special issue on the life and legacy of Bernard Narokobi documents and contextualizes Narokobi's life and thought. A central figure in Papua New Guinea's transition from Australian territory to independent nation, Narokobi was a jurist, philosopher, and poet who is best remembered for making ‘the Melanesian Way’ an important theme – if not the guiding ideological principle – in the discourse of independence in Papua New Guinea. In looking closely at Narokobi's biography, the collection also contributes to a growing body of work on political life writing in the Pacific. The collection speaks to Narokobi's role as a theorist of Oceanic modernity more broadly, one who deserves a place alongside two other important philosophers of Pacific independence, Epeli Hau‘ofa and Jean-Marie Tjibaou, as one of the main visionaries of Pacific decolonization and Oceanic modernity of the post-war period.     

‘On a nos mots à dire’: Kanak Women's Experience of Bridewealth in Lifou

Bridewealth in Lifou cannot be discussed on its own; rather it should be considered within the plurality of ceremonial acts which are needed to legitimize a marriage as customary. What do these transactions mean? Where does women's agency lie? Through a longitudinal analysis of ethnographic materials from my fieldwork in Lifou, Loyalty Islands, I consider how Kanak women are engaged in and perceive these ceremonial and cultural processes through a declared women's perspective that highlights their ability to make autonomous choices in an open ended historical context. I argue that it is a case of ‘positive agency’. I emphasize that local categories (june hmala and wenehleng) which define specific moments in this process can be subsumed under the anthropological term ‘bridewealth’. Further, I examine the meaning of money in bridewealth and the fact that the monetary contribution keeps increasing, raising local concerns about the need to regulate the amount circulating in marriage exchanges and its dispersion. Furthermore in Lifou there is no indication that the assembling of the bridewealth by the grooms implies a commoditization and (later) exploitation of women.     

‘The One and the Two’: Mainlanders and Saltwater People in Buka,Bougainville

ABSTRACT The paper explores the socially salient contrast between ‘mainlanders' and ‘saltwater people’ in the Buka area in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, as observed during ethnographic fieldwork in 2004–05. Buka people themselves articulate three at first sight disparate points of contrast between mainlanders and saltwater people. These concern settlement patterns, predominant subsistence activities and different degrees of ancestral knowledge. This paper explores these points and aims to specify their interconnection from the perspective provided by a fourth contrast established ethnographically, that between different modes of objectifying relations on the mainland and ‘at sea’. With a detailed investigation of the ethnographic ‘surface’ of the phenomenon, the paper aims to provide a basis for future in‐depth analyses of various aspects of the mainland‐saltwater contrast in the context of Bougainvillean politics and the sustainability of livelihoods in the area.