Warrior Women,the Holy Spirit and HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article analyses a group of Gogodala Christian women in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea who are referred to as ‘Warrior women’ and who pray, sing and call upon the Holy Spirit to cleanse their own bodies and ‘turn their eyes’, so that they are able to see those who threaten the health and well‐being of the wider community. These women have focused primarily on bringing male practitioners of magic — iwai dala — shadowy and powerful men who operate covertly and away from the gaze of others, out into the open. Whilst this has been happening for many years, the spread of HIV and AIDS into the area, fuelled by what many in the area believe is the rise of unrestrained female and male sexuality and the waning of Christian practice and principles, has meant that those perceived to bring harm to the community through their sexual behaviour have become recent targets for Warrior women. HIV/AIDS, referred to in Gogodala as melesene bininapa gite tila gi — the ‘sickness without medicine’ — is understood as a hidden sickness, one that makes its way through the community without trace until people become visibly ill. Warrior women seek to make both AIDS and those who, through their behaviour, encourage or enable its spread more visible. In the process, however, a small number of them are overcome by the Holy Spirit, so much so that they become daeledaelenapa — mad ‐ their behaviour increasingly characterised by childishness and uncontrolled sexuality.     

Gogodala Canoe Festivals,Customary Ways and Cultural Tourism in Papua New Guinea

Gogodala Canoe Festivals, held in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea, are important and recurrent regional events that constitute as well as reiterate and reconfigure local relatedness as sites of potential engagement between Gogodala villagers and foreign tourists. Canoe races have been part of Gogodala practice since before the 1900s, when early colonial administrators noted the presence of magnificently painted and carved racing canoes. Since then, racing canoes have been part of local and exogenous discourses about culture and identity in colonial and postcolonial PNG. This paper explores the extent to which Gogodala Canoe Festivals, while primarily regional events concerned with relationships between people, groups and villages, are also designed to attract foreign tourists and as such constitute moments of potential relatedness outside of the region. In a wider sense, the paper explores these festivals as one way in which Gogodala engage global others through the establishment of a network of potential relationships based on ‘customary’ practices and objects.     

‘Turning Sex into a Game’: Gogodala Men's Response to the AIDS Epidemic and Condom Promotion in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Rugby league is the national sport of Papua New Guinea and the game's huge popularity and international profile has been used in recent condom promotion campaigns in the nation's fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I argue that the promotion of condom use through rugby league requires a national campaign strategy that includes understandings of condom use and masculinity at the rural level. I demonstrate this through a study of Gogodala men's understandings of the epidemic and condom use in Western Province. The Gogodala are a Christian‐based society and many blame the national condom promotion strategy for an increase in promiscuity and for ‘turning sex into a game’. Condom availability in this rural area continues to be restricted to a family planning program that promotes Christian values and excludes unmarried men. I explore the male condom dilemma where young men are more concerned with avoiding accusations that their sexual behaviour puts them at risk of contracting HIV despite acknowledging the preventative value of using condoms. In this context young men disassociate themselves from the disease and condom use through a process of calculated risk or risk minimisation.     

Masculinities and geography,moving forward: men’s bodies,emotions and spiritualities

Geographical work on men and masculinities has expanded and diversified since the 1990s. Gender, Place and Culture has been, and continues to be, a significant outlet for this research. Geographies of masculinities now range across diverse sub-fields – social, cultural, economic, health, post-colonial, urban and rural geographies. We provide a brief overview of this scope, including the expansion of geographies of masculinities beyond the Anglo-American sphere. We then focus on two vibrant fields of research on geographies of men and masculinities, which cut across the various sub-fields of the discipline: men’s embodied and emotional geographies, and their experiences in relation to religion, faith and spirituality. We discuss these fields, suggesting further productive developments for geographies of masculinities, which include work on the body and wellbeing, body size, male care giving, men’s experiences in diverse faith communities, and men and alternative spiritualities. Ongoing development of geographical work on men and masculinities is important for helping to contest patriarchal structures and knowledge production.     

The Virtue of Democratic Faith: A Recovery for Difficult Times

Democratic faith may seem like an ill-advised concept when the ills of democratic life are so glaring. This article claims that it is possible, even necessary, to recover and reinvigorate a notion of democratic faith that grapples with the flaws and intractabilities of the democratic condition. Conceived of as a virtue that inhabits uncertainty, I argue that democratic faith is well-tailored for democratic exchanges — particularly those involved in the risky business of building trust among citizens. Democratic faith's temporal orientation in the present girds the activist for the spade-work of democratic life, where future success often seems unlikely. On these terms, democratic faith can be distinguished from democratic hope. Jeffrey Stout's recent work exemplifies both hope and faith as democratic virtues, however Stout neglects the language of faith in favor of hope. I argue that Stout and other activists should consider the ways that democratic faith speaks to the dogged persistence required to face the dispiriting conditions of democratic life.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

Dancing around Development: Crisis in Christian Country in Western Province,Papua New Guinea

This article explores the conjuncture of Christianity and development in light of the establishment of a new Gogodala church in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. In the paper, I examine the ways in which members of this new church, the Congregation of Evangelical Fellowship (CEF), are utilising the concept of dance to comment on the failure of both expatriate missionaries and the dominant Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea (ECPNG) to prepare the Gogodala community for development. I trace how mission-instigated abstention from dance became emblematic of a Christian lifestyle, and remains central to the constitution and articulation of ‘Christian country’ in this part of PNG. The incorporation of dance into CEF services and conferences, then, posits a challenge to the expatriate mission and ECPNG. In the process, dance has become a metaphor for a communal search for development as well as a reinterpretation of the Christian and pre-contact past.     

Not told by victims: genocide-as-story in Aboriginal prison writings in Canada, 1980–96

When criminalized Aboriginal peoples serving time in Canadian prisons wrote in penal presses, they often used genocide as a framework to discuss both their personal life histories and the colonial history that led to overrepresentation of Aboriginal peoples in prisons. Genocide, though, is not a straightforward idea, and the ways that Aboriginal prisoners wrote about genocide differed significantly from how scholars or politicians used the term. By interpreting these writings within Aboriginal storytelling traditions, this article illuminates the lived experience of genocide, how those experiencing incarceration viewed genocide within their belief structures, the ways that genocide became a critique against the Canadian government, and the spiritual basis for discussion of genocide. By reading Aboriginal prison writings as valuable intellectual pursuits, we can begin to interpret genocide within frameworks that differed from the insights from academia. First, genocide was experienced as part of both colonial and personal processes, meaning it was experienced at the community level and in personal violence in pre-carceral lives. Second, by telling stories of genocide, prisoners asserted their own survival, which reflected the goals of their organizations and functioned as a political critique against the Canadian government. Third, genocide became an identity-shaping force in the lives of criminalized Aboriginal peoples, which in turn shaped their experience of incarceration. Finally, genocide was not uniformly experienced, as it had important gendered differences. This article shows the nuance in prisoners' discussions of genocide by proposing a new way of interpreting genocide within Aboriginal history in Canada by analysing penal publications as part of Aboriginal storytelling traditions, what the author refers to as ‘genocide-as-story’.     

Negotiating gender,power, and spaces in masquerade performances in Nigeria

Egungun is a Yoruba ancestral masquerade ritual that has been practiced for centuries. Shifting coalitions of individuals and factions have vied for social and political influence through this practice. In the nineteenth century, when western missionaries, explorers, and colonial officials first documented this phenomenon, any individual who could sponsor an Egungun performance was a force to be reckoned with in Yoruba society. To this day, Egungun masquerades are understood as vehicles through which individuals and groups can assert influence in their communities. Western scholars have portrayed Egungun as a hegemonic masculine performance space through which men assert their dominance over women. In privileging the writings of English missionaries, explorers, and colonial officials, we have tended to neglect the oral traditions and histories of specific Egungun masquerades in which women feature prominently. I argue that scholars have oversimplified and misrepresented the complex ways in which these performances are gendered as well as the ways in which they offer women opportunities to shape the identities of the places they inhabit.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

Tea and Tinned Fish: Christianity,Consumption and the Nation in Papua New Guinea

This paper explores the intersection of consumption, Christianity and the nation in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. It examines the significance of the adoption of European‐introduced clothing and the consumption of trade store foods like tea, tinned fish, rice, sugar and tinned milk for Gogodala communities of PNG. Although initially disgusted by the idea of consuming substances that seemed reminiscent of mother's milk, Gogodala now embrace trade store foods with enthusiasm. The paper traces the transformation of Gogodala attitudes to such products in terms of the development of a ‘national culture’ as well as a more globalising Christianity. It suggests that, for the Gogodala, consumption is an arena for what Foster has termed ‘everyday nation making’. Yet, in this case, ‘the nation’ is understood and realised through a metaphoric association with Christian others, particularly Europeans. The basis of national subjectivity for the Gogodala, then, is an enduring relationship between Gogodala and expatriate Europeans.     

Hobbes on the supernatural from The Elements of Law to Leviathan

Hobbes's unusual religious views in his classical work, Leviathan, are often seen as a product of his attempt to reconcile Christianity with his philosophical materialism. Yet given Hobbes's materialistic view in his earlier works too, this explanatory framework alone is not sufficient for grasping distinctive features of Leviathan. This article remedies this lacuna by paying close attention to an understudied aspect of the development of Hobbes's religious theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan: his treatment of the supernatural and, particularly, of matters of faith known by supernatural revelation as opposed to natural reason. I argue that over time Hobbes developed an epistemological analysis of supernatural revelation and refined his argument about the sense in which matters of faith are supernatural and about the extent to which they are found in the Bible. It was not materialism per se but the more sophisticated analysis of the supernatural in Leviathan that enabled Hobbes to admit the sphere of the supernatural to a much smaller extent than in De Cive and to discuss in detail what he sees as a matter of faith and beyond the scope of philosophy in De Cive.     

Great Ancestral Women: Sexuality,Gendered Mobility,and HIV among the Bamu and Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

Faced with a potentially devastating epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Papua New Guinea (PNG), sexuality and mobility have become a focus of national research and prevention programs. In Gogodala and Bamu communities in the Western Province, gendered mobility and sexuality intersect with ancestral narratives that form part of a wider series of Hero Tales found in the southern regions of PNG and Irian Jaya. In this paper we highlight the way these stories detail the travels and activities of female ancestors – known as Sagalu among the Bamui and Sawiya among the Gogodala. We outline the way such ancestral figures are now linked to understandings of contemporary STIs such HIV/AIDS as well as gendered mobility and sexuality more generally. Among the Bamu such links are sometimes directly asserted, with Sagalu represented as the origin if not cause of a uniquely defined variant of HIV/AIDS. Among the Gogodala, however, HIV/AIDS is predominantly understood as something external to the Gogodala and unrelated to ancestors like Sawiya. To explain this difference we note that, historically, Gogodala women have been less mobile and less transactable than their Bamu counterparts who have continued to enact unique understandings of the intersection of heterosexual marriage, gendered mobility, and illness. We argue that the mobility and sexuality of gendered ancestors is salient to understanding these contemporary enactments and their potential implications in light of the HIV epidemic in PNG.     

“Refusing to be a victim,refusing to be an enemy”. Form-of-life as resistance in the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism

This paper focuses on practices of non-violent resistance as they are played out in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. By looking at the resistance of expanding settlements, demolition and land confiscation orders, and livelihood destruction in two Palestinian sites, the paper shows how Israeli settler colonial apparatuses, and the variety of techniques and practices of erasure they mobilize, can be fruitfully studied through site-specific ways of Palestinian resistance. In order to do so, the paper turns to discuss a peculiar form of non-violent resistance grounded in what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘destituent power’. It shows how the acts of destituent resistance in the two sites under study function by playing with the apparatuses of control in creative but non-violent ways; namely, by using the potentialities of that form-of-life that the settler colonial apparatuses try to cancel, overrule, control, weaken, criminalize, and erase. The idea of ‘destituent play’ is hence elaborated, and special attention paid to its ability to slow down and hamper the repressive functions of the settler colonial apparatuses through the creative use of the potentialities of Palestinian everyday life.     

The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia

This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settler colonial society. This is argued as alternative with recourse to ethnographic examples that highlight the way in which ‘consent’ operates as a technique of recognition and simultaneous dispossession in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia. Attention is paid to the ways in which Indigenous life in these cases refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonising and settler colonial narratives of acceptance, and in this, a governmental fait accompli. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorise and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.     

Alice through the looking glass: emotion,personal connection,and reading colonial archives along the grain

This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival research, a relationship and set of connections that I suggest open new spaces to (re)consider present-day colonial power in British Columbia. Specifically, I propose that ‘against the grain’ archival readings of BC’s past, with an emphasis on finding evidence of resistance to colonial power, can serve to distance the present from the past, thus positioning both contemporary geographies and researchers at work in the province today as existing in a different time and place than those of Alice Ravenhill and other colonial subjects. If, by reading ‘along the archival grain’ as I attempt to do in this paper, we (particularly those of us who live and work in BC today) instead understand ourselves as deeply and emotionally connected to colonial settlers like Alice Ravenhill, and if we understand their lives and work as similar to our own, there is a chance we might avoid some of their more egregious undertakings.     

Of Fictional Cities and "Diasporic" Aesthetics

This essay considers the work of social reproduction as it unfolds within the cultural realm in both national and diasporic contexts. Beginning with a discussion of the creation of Malgudi—the quintessential Indian hometown created in the 1930s by one of India's most venerated writers, R K Narayan—I go on to argue that in the preindependence days, this Indian small town was created from an aesthetic position not unlike that of present-day diasporic artists. I then look at the novels of South Asian-American writer Indira Ganesan and the paintings by South Asian-American artist Arijit Sen to document the ways in which the works attempt to map alternative articulations of the space of home and community in a diasporic context. Together, these imaginary hometowns do the work of reproducing a viable social sphere through creative work that overcomes the constraints of colonial rule (in Narayan's case) and immigration (in Ganesan's and Sen's work).     

Aqui Lourenço Marques!! Radio colonization and cultural identity in colonial Mozambique, 1932–74

The Portuguese empire in Africa was one of the last to collapse amidst the waves of decolonization that swept the continent in the 1950s and 1960s. The astonishing endurance of Portuguese colonialisms until the mid-1970s can be viewed partly in relation to the communication technologies that underscored the Lusophone imperial presence in Africa in important cultural and political ways. This paper explores the historical geography of radio-broadcasting in colonial Mozambique and examines the importance of colonial anthropological knowledges in the formation of radio programming. Colonial broadcasters represented their work as «radio-colonization» and frequently stressed the links between their activities and the development of imperial and colonial modernity. From the very beginning of radio-broadcasting in Mozambique, broadcasters sought to harmonize their contribution to colonial culture and society with the objectives of the colonial state, and broadcasting became central to the capitalist development of the colony. In the dying days of Portuguese colonialism broadcasters belatedly began to attempt to assimilate non-white subjects into the perceived order of colonial modernization. Radio programming was differentiated in important ways according to ethnicity and gender and this paper seeks to discuss some of the complex relationships between colonial subjectivities and the search for the colonial modernization of Mozambique.     

Hiriira Spatiotemporalities: Mapping Oromo Women’s Liberation in Post-Imperial Berlin

In September 2020, Oromo women marched through the streets of Berlin, Germany, demanding recognition for their struggle. This protest march, called a Hiriira in the Oromo language, offers a case study into the entanglements between settler colonial Ethiopia, Germany’s post-empire, and the forces of oppression which link them. This paper uses the spatiotemporal reckonings generated from the Hiriira perspective to understand violence and elucidate the practices of resistance that have emerged despite it. These contrasting ways of viewing space and time are expressed through the tension between imperial spatialising, a way of knowing the world that is imperial and oppressive in nature, and geography guraacha, a Black and Blackened way of knowing space with a particularly Oromo perspective. The result is a type of mapping, tracing the Hiriira route across Berlin while describing the histories that shadow these streets, and the pathways towards liberation that Oromo women are organising.     

APHASIA,HISTORY, AND DURESS

This essay celebrates the publication of Duress, explores its concepts and themes, focuses on the way Ann Stoler rejects the notion of historical forgetting and develops a heuristic of “colonial aphasia” in an ethnographic chapter on the emergence of France's Far Right near Marseille in the 1990s. The essay also tracks how postcolonial scholars are using the notion of aphasia, drawing on Stoler's colonial usages in contexts like the Netherlands and Britain as well as using the notion to periodize. Those who came to aphasia before and without Stoler are also present here, and their contributions suggest a range of ways to think through radical, countercultural, and philosophical thought. That Gilles Deleuze and Paolo Virno use aphasia in contrary ways suggests that once aphasia departs from clinical settings, its poetics are rather up for grabs even if contained within activist gestures; both rethink matters of politics, dissent, and language. The example of Kurt Goldstein is also imported to show that clinical aphasia may go with the “detours” of patients, those stricken by war, catastrophe, and these peculiar speech disorders. That “detour” is also a Deleuzian word opens wide a “minor” register to history, speech, and forms of oppression. The semantic spectrum for aphasia in histories of politics and language is wide, from Stoler's colonial version that applies most to the privileged, to Deleuze's poetic transpositions that propose aphasia as an accomplishment, a rebellious refusal of communication. Aphasia has much promise as a historical category in and outside of colonial forms of duress.