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.     

Knowledge,Morality and ‘Kastom’: SikAIDS among Young Yupno People,Finisterre Range,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the extent of knowledge about HIV/AIDS among young Yupno women and men. Local understanding of sikAIDS is shaped by cultural, moral and religious concepts and processes that are based on social values and practices. Difficulties these young people face in accessing information about HIV/AIDS and using it to implement preventative measures — for example by obtaining condoms — have to be seen in the framework of ‘kastom’ and a moral discourse coined and influenced by the Lutheran Church. As the research shows, there is an urgent need for a broad and contextually sensitive approach to sexual health, including information about conception, family planning methods, and sexually transmitted diseases when planning awareness campaigns for teenagers in rural regions.     

Intimate Consumption and New Sexual Subjects Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea

This article examines the transformation of sexual meanings, attitudes, norms, and practices surrounding depletion and pollution across decades (1974–2010) among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. In the premodern village, all sexual intercourse, whether with boy‐initiates or women, was ritualized and ultimately controlled by the men's secret society. Intimate consumption refers traditionally to a symbolic complex of beliefs, concepts, emotions, and ritual experiences involving sexuality, bodily health, social relationships, and gendered politics. But it also covers sexual anxieties corresponding to the transfer and loss of bodily fluids via the perceived depletion and pollution of self and body. For adult men, the sense of intimate consumption requires repeated substance replenishment and purification. Intimate consumption made oral and vaginal sex highly rule‐bound, taboo laden, and intensely regulated in terms of the meaning, scope, duration, and intended goals of sexual exchange. Pacification, colonization, out‐migration, Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Christianity, and primary schooling in the Sambia Valley over a period of decades instigated social transformations that challenged and wore down this system of sexual regulation. Thus, the transition from ritual to non‐ritual practices, i.e., more individualistic sexual relationships, highlight narratives of change in the Sambia sexuality. With the demise of ritual initiation in the 1980s and 1990s, and the appearance of HIV and SikAids in the Sambia Valley, explicit ritual sexual techniques were no longer socialized. Modernity (in the sense of a set of policies, attitudes, and rules introduced through institutions such as the government community school) and SDA church sociality influenced both the pace and form of this sexual transformation. Among the greatest changes was the expansion of female agency and sexual autonomy, and personal decision‐making vis‐à‐vis especially marriage and also romance, courtship, and sex. Notably, oral sex, once universal and mandatory, largely disappeared from Sambia intimate relations. Today, spousal intimacy reveals a different set of more ‘modern’ meanings and behaviors compared to two generations ago, e.g., more mutualistic and companionate. Intimate consumption remains a worry for certain Sambia young men and women today however, influenced in part by the rise of the HIV pandemic, mobility, and the absence of normative narratives of sexuality in villages and town settlements. This creates public spaces wherein new sexual subjects have emerged in the villages and urban settlements within the Sambia Valley and in settlements throughout PNG.     

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.     

Racial Metaphors: Interpreting Sex and AIDS in Africa

Western preconceptions regarding African sexuality distorted early research on the social context of AIDS in Africa and limited the scope of preventive policies. Key works cited repeatedly in the social science and policy literature constructed a hypersexualized pan–African culture as the main reason for the high prevalence of HIV in sub–Saharan Africa. Africans were portrayed as the social ‘Other’ in works marked by sweeping generalizations and innuendo, rather than useful comparative data on sexual behaviour. Although biomedical studies demonstrate the role of numerous factors that influence HIV transmission among poor people, a narrowly behavioural explanation dominated the AIDS–in–Africa discourse for over a decade and still circumscribes preventive strategies in Africa and elsewhere.     

Taboos and denial in government responses

The most striking fact about HIV/AIDS is that it continues to spread even when the means of prevention are well known and do not demand costly technology to implement. This article argues that the fundamental barriers to effective prevention are social and cultural, and that many authorities place more emphasis on preserving traditional norms and social arrangements than on saving lives. The case is argued with particular reference to the impact of globalization on sexual behaviours, and the attempts by conservatives to deny existing behaviours and vulnerabilities. Current debates around abstinence, homosexuality and harm minimization are discussed to demonstrate the deeply political nature of HIV prevention.     

Endangered Youth? Youth,gender and sexualities in urban Botswana

Age is now recognised as a significant social cleavage in research on youth in the South. Using participatory urban appraisal methodologies, this article explores constructions of sexualities among urban youth in Botswana, a country that is currently experiencing an HIV/AIDS epidemic and high levels of teenage pregnancy. We argue that not only are young people sophisticated sexual beings, but that there is a need to adopt more holistic approaches to examining sexualities among them so as to appreciate that constructions of sexualities are multi‐faceted, highly diverse and heavily gendered. This appreciation must then be integrated into a multi‐sectoral policy approach that moves beyond information provision towards one that addresses changes in gender, cultural and sexual identities.     

An Archive of Difference: Syrian Women,the Peddling Economy and US Social Welfare, 1880–1935

Historians have scrutinised the racial classifications of Arab immigrants in the census, in immigration documents and in early‐twentieth‐century naturalisation cases. However, recent scholarship has shown that other archives – ones that do not focus on interactions with the law – reveal a different process of Arab‐American racialisation. This article contends that looking in other archival spaces, specifically the US social welfare archive, shows how ideas about gender, sexual and class difference constituted early Arab‐American racialisation. Social welfare reformers in institutional settings, including the International Institute of Boston, the National Conference of Social Work and the pages of the social work periodical The Survey, systematically linked Syrian labouring practices with notions of dependency, sexual and gender deviance, and Orientalist difference. Syrian women were racialised through their participation in the peddling economy – a network of peddlers, suppliers and domestic labourers that sustained a widespread profession of the early Syrian American community. Syrian women's labouring practices conflicted with white middle‐class femininity and posed a threat to Syrian claims of whiteness. This analysis demonstrates the centrality of gender, sexuality and class to studies of early Arab America and demonstrates how Arab migrant women's labouring practices affected their communities’ standing in the American context.     

“Northern Girls”: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the cultural politics of agency, and explores the relationship between cultural form, migrant experience and social change. It traces the emergence of a range of literary forms in south China and how these new cultural forms provide hitherto unavailable space to contest the state- and market-driven narratives, which tend to link dagongmei’s (rural migrant women’s) sexuality with inexperience and vulnerability on the one hand, and criminality, immorality and incivility on the other. The paper suggests that these newly emerging cultural forms present alternative perspectives on the practical circumstances, moral rationalities and emotional consequences that condition and shape migrant women’s sexual experience, and for this reason, they constitute important points of intervention.     

Sex, politics, and social change in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: evidence from the Swiss Alps

The eighteenth-century "sexual revolution" cannot simply be explained as a consequence of economic or institutional factors -- industrialization, agricultural revolution, secularization, or legal hindrances to marriages. The example of western Valais (Switzerland) shows that we have to deal with a complex configuration of factors. The micro-historical approach reveals that in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sexuality -- and above all illicit sexuality -- was a highly subversive force that was considerably linked to political innovation and probably more generally to historical change. Nonmarital sexuality was clearly tied to political dissent and to innovative ways of behavior, both among the social elites and the common people. This behavior patterns influenced crucial evolutions in the social, cultural, and economic history of the region.     

Is there a distinct African sexuality? A critical response to Caldwell

The author challenges the hypothesis developed by Caldwell and others that sexuality in Africa is inherently permissive, and that prevailing attitudes and behavior are primary reasons for the relative failure of family planning programs to reduce fertility, and thereby will be major factors hindering efforts to control the spread of HIV infections and AIDS. The article is in three parts. "The first is a summary of the thesis as presented by Caldwell et al., including their location of African sexuality and their conceptualisation of change. The second offers a critical response, focusing mainly on the problems of research into sexual behaviour and the christianisation process, with special reference to the case of the Kikuyu people, among whom, recent studies suggest, even where sexual activity may have appeared largely free of moral restraint, there was indeed a moral order.... Part three offers a new way forward." (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL METABOLISM

The emergence of culture and cultural evolution is the result of an evolutionary process, evident also in non‐human species. What is specifically human is the dominance of cultural evolution. This does not mean that cultural evolution has replaced organic evolution, but rather that both have merged into one coevolutionary complex. Through niche construction, organic modern humans are the product of cultural evolution. This cannot be explained by adaptation to natural environment or by sexual selection. Cultural evolution with its coevolved organic traits did not so much enhance competence towards the natural environment as it did competence to develop and maintain cooperation. In the process, culture became a “system” with its own imperatives and integrating forces, differentiating into several autopoietic subsystems: the symbolic‐cognitive subsystem, the economic subsystem and the political subsystem. There are however social‐metabolic constraints that put limits on their evolutionary degrees of freedom. Culture's autopoietic reach has adaptive boundaries. The concept of social metabolism attempts to capture the unity of “persons” in a physical‐biological sense and “culture” in a symbolic sense, the decisive point being that culture must be understood as an autopoietic system sui generis. The social‐metabolic system of relations and interactions between nature, human population and culture is inherently coevolutionary. The history of social metabolism is the history of the coevolution of two autopoietic systems – an open and blind non‐orthogenetic evolutionary process.     

A Clan‐Based Society of South Greece and its Militarization After the Second World War: Some Characteristics of Violence and the Construction of Habitus in the South Peloponnese

This paper presents some basic characteristics of the subculture of local society in the southern Peloponnese in Greece during the twentieth century. In particular, it examines the basic anthropological and social elements that formed the character of the members of the local society in Mani during the early part of the century, by emphasizing (i) the clan structure of the particular society, and (ii) the militarization of Mani as a strategy for mediation in local social relations.

The paper then analyses the way in which these basic social characteristics were interwoven with the dynamics of the political situation during the twentieth century (the Second World War, the occupation of Greece by Italian and German forces, and the Greek Civil War) by exploring the cultural habitus of the left‐wing and the right‐wing political networks in the region. Finally, it refers to the dialectics of the dynamic relationship between a clan‐based local society and the political events of the late 1940s, by means of some observations on the local social institution of the vendetta.     

Riding the Dialectical Waves of Gay Political Economy: A Story from Birmingham's Commercial Gay Scene

In this paper I aim to contribute to work addressing the relationship between dissident sexuality and gay political economy by providing a reconfigured Marxist exploration into the ambivalence of commercial gay space. Through the application of a central theme from Marx's Grundrisse—the civilising influence of capital—I propose a means to move beyond an Althusserian view of commercial gay space as a contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony, to that of a capitalist embodiment of constraints and radical possibilities. Focusing on the commercial gay scene of the UK's second largest city, Birmingham, and the survival of a monthly British Asian gay club night therein, I explore the dialectical waves of capitalism. These waves drive conditions which both differentiate identity‐based production/consumption to the assimilative relations of exchange value, and accommodate moments of cultural creativity that feed off this continual differentiation and escape its economic relations in the formation of radically new use‐values.     

AIDS Activism in Pakistan: Diminishing Funds,Evasive State

This article draws on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the HIV/AIDS sector of Pakistan at the moment of rolling back a World Bank‐financed programme. Classified by UN agencies as at ‘high risk’ of a generalized HIV epidemic, Pakistan has an epidemiology driven by injecting drug use, and a Penal Code and Islamist legislation which criminalize non‐therapeutic drug use and extra‐marital sex. In recent years, a sharp increase in the numbers of registered HIV‐positive people has necessitated a shift from HIV prevention among ‘high risk groups’ to the provision of care to those living with HIV/AIDS. The rolling back of external funding, which was further compounded by the effects of devolution on the Ministry of Health, created challenges for AIDS activism in Pakistan, as reflected in the everyday lives — and deaths — of the patient‐activists and their community‐based organizations. This article recounts the story of one such aspiring AIDS activist caught in multiple dilemmas emanating from these macro‐processes. This story throws light on the limitations of the complex agency of actors in development, and shows how the shifting loci of power from the state to non‐state entities in the global neoliberal order impacts the provision of vital services like HIV prevention and AIDS control.     

Of Sodomy and Cannibalism: Dehumanisation,Embodiment and the Rhetorics of Same‐Sex and Cross‐Species Contagion

This article explores ideas of the ‘human’ in discourses surrounding the AIDS epidemic, from the 1980s to the present. It compares two sequential lines of thought: first, the notion of AIDS as the result of ‘unnatural’ gender behaviours and queer sexualities; and second, the notion of AIDS and other zoonotics (cross‐species diseases) as the result of non‐western dietary practices and social mores. In the first case, the early years of the AIDS crisis are traced through the languages of sexual perversity utilised by the popular press and the Christian right. In the second case, the later years of the epidemic are traced, once the ‘roots’ of the virus became tied to Africa, and carriers became bestialised in narratives that located HIV as a consequence of unnatural, or inhuman, interactions with the animal world. The article argues that we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the didactics of the epidemic, from a narrative of sexual impropriety to one that also includes a narrative of dietary impropriety, each of which consistently relies upon a clear dichotomy between the human and the inhuman.     

Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I argue that transnational ways of seeing help us apprehend the histories of globalization, immigration and imperialism that frame and make legible cultural productions. Focusing on John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has been almost universally received as being about transsexuality, this essay argues that the film is equally about transnationality and specifically about how queer identifications and identities are produced in relation to the nation-state. Hedwig explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of US popular culture through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of the Hedwig's body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. The film identifies and critiques the violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet by reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal histories that make its narrative legible, it becomes apparent that the film's popular reception frequently erases the transnational and imperial histories that undergird and produce sexual identities and identification. I argue that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer identifications but also produce them. The fissures between the cultural work of the film itself and of its circulation illustrate how despite the mutual imbrication of sexuality and nationality, transsexuality is sometimes more readily apprehended than is transnationality.     

AIDS as Occupational Hazard: Racial Mixing and Historical Space in Malaysia's Multinationals

In Malaysia, bangsa, a term blending race and ethnicity, structures modes of social and political‐economic organization that reflexively challenge and reinforce the significance of race, not just to the country's three main groups but to the construction of risk as well. Tracing this reflexivity, the author bridges a historical rendering of Malaysia's colonial‐capitalist incorporation with an ethnographic unpacking of its social artifacts: notions of space, place and race that confer on factories a high‐risk label for HIV/AIDS. It traces how multinational corporations, as landscapes of multiracial modernity, are both the quixotic trophies of Malaysia's global integration and a source of social dread. Risk is ethnographically shown to be more a sociohistoric dynamic than a statistical probability, reflecting ideas of racial individuation and ideals of social stability and cultural immiscibility anchored in colonial governance structures of nineteenth‐century Malaya and operative in contemporary Malaysia.     

Feminizing risk at a distance: critical observations on the constitution of a preventive technology for HIV/AIDS

Distance is a key idea in contemporary literatures on geography and the government of risk, and it is central to the work presented in this paper, which focuses on Western media representations of an innovative ‘first-generation’ non-contraceptive microbicide, Carraguard. A preventive technology that has been developed under the auspices of the US Population Council and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carraguard is represented in the media in ways that produce certain noteworthy cultural geographies of HIV/AIDS. Via an analysis of a selection of such media representations of Carraguard, and focusing on sexual citizenship, political subjectivity and three socio-spatial orderings of risk (displacement, replacement and reorientation), we posit that Carraguard has effected a feminization of the government of risk at a distance. Specifically, we contend that HIV/AIDS has been displaced from the marginalized spaces of metropolitan centres of the West and replaced at the world's under-developed margins, being reoriented from dangerousness/deviance and the masculine to risk and the feminine in that process. In this work, we have taken up Dean's (1999) call to use an analytics of government to highlight the effects of certain ways of thinking and acting, and have also sought to respond to observations by Craddock (2000) that the silences in geography about HIV/AIDS and the regional coordinates of risk and vulnerability need to be addressed. In the final analysis, it appears that media representations of Carraguard reproduce and intensify much older geopolitical and socio-spatial orderings and relations of power that give effect to conceptions and practices of political obligation and sexual citizenship.