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.     

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.     

Acts of Faith: Muscular Christianity and Masculinity among the Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

This article examines the way Gogodala men in Western Province experienced colonialism and change not simply in terms of alienation or emasculation but as a dynamic process that reinforced many aspects of their work ethic, bodily capacities and lifestyle. Through an analysis of local narratives and colonial reports encompassing the way Sosola, a Gogodala leader, instigated and negotiated European contact, I discuss how, despite colonial changes, he continues to embody the male way of life or dala ela gi. As the only ‘faith’ based mission to enter Papua prior to World War II, I propose that the Unevangelized Fields Mission's muscular approach to evangelism enabled Gogodala men to determine their own response to Christianity. The early evangelical missionary disposition of demonstrating faith through action, through a reliance on the virtues of physical strength, work and tenacity rather than theological knowledge, resonated strongly with a Gogodala masculinity that was epitomised by displays of strength through work. Rather than rendered powerless by colonial authority, I discuss some of the ways men have experienced and interpret the colonial past in ways that assert the continuing dynamics of dala ela gi.     

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.     

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.     

Two Indigenous Evangelists: Moses Tjalkabota and Arthur Wellington Clah

Arthur Wellington Clah was a Tsimshian man on the Pacific north-west coast of Canada, who encountered the missionary, William Duncan, as a young adult at the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Simpson in the 1850s. Moses Tjalkabota was an Arrernte man in central Australia. He was a young boy when he first came into contact with Lutheran missionaries at Hermannsburg mission in the 1880s, and was baptized in 1890. Both these men became Christian evangelists, both preached to their own people, and further afield among neighbouring groups. But here the similarities between them seem to stop. Clah was never part of a mission settlement, maintaining his independence from any established church; while Moses, who became blind as a young man, spent most of his life at Hermannsburg.
  This article examines these two evangelists' understandings of Christianity and how they communicated these understandings to their own and neighbouring peoples. Clah encouraged good behaviour, which conformed with his understanding of Christian precepts; Moses tried to communicate a more abstract form of belief through which happiness and eternal life could be attained.     

Physical activity and rural young people's sense of place

This paper explores rural young people's perceptions of their local environments in relation to their experiences with physical activities through the use of visual methodologies. The main findings from map, photo and interview data from 13 rural young Australians included the importance of friends, family, and gender structures which are discussed in relation to developing a sense of place and how this shapes their experience in physical activities. The findings highlight the importance of sociocultural issues and raises questions regarding measuring physical activity prompting further qualitative research to inform sustainable and equitable physical activity promotion initiatives for rural young people.     

Tales from the Other Side of the Bridge: YMCA Manhood,Social Class and Social Reform in Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐Century Philadelphia

This article examines the interplay of gender and class ideologies at University House, a settlement house run by University of Pennsylvania Christian Association students in Philadelphia. University House exemplified a pioneering national movement to inculcate social responsibility in college youth. As an initiative sponsored by a campus Christian Association that joined a national YMCA movement to evangelise college campuses, the settlement had a unique agenda. The settlement's advocates intended to reform the neighbourhood's working‐class Irish Catholic boys, but also to forge character and manhood in the students who worked there. Moreover, settlement leaders and volunteers preached a brand of manhood steeped in the rhetoric of evangelical Protestantism, an ideal that guided their actions among city boys. Though their publicly stated mission was to make men of city youths, they turned manhood into a tool for preserving class distinctions and cementing their own place among the country's educated élite. Meanwhile, they modified their own definitions of manhood through the practice of social reform.     

Gender,Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand

The 1929 New Zealand Committee of Inquiry into the Employment of Maori on Market Gardens affords insight into the ways in which masculine fears of racial degradation through miscegenation – of a ‘hybrid’ Chinese/Maori race – operated within a hierarchy of race, gender and Iwi (tribal) interests. The participation of Maori men in national politics contributed to a new articulation of ‘National Manhood’, in which Maori men and white men combined to express fears about women's work and sexuality and young women's potential to undermine a fragile and contested hierarchy of racial purity. Maori women, silenced in the cacophony of voices lamenting their plight, were at the centre of debates between Maori men, Pakeha (white New Zealander) employers, Chinese market gardeners, Anglican and Methodist interests and Pakeha women's groups. I argue that the Inquiry was about commerce, both in a business and a sexual sense. As a historical episode, it also serves to complicate the picture of New Zealand as a historically bicultural society, made up only of Maori and Pakeha, by signalling the importance of the Chinese in debates about national belonging.     

North Africa's Spain: peripheral national identities and the nation‐state as neo‐empire

When ethno‐cultural heterogeneity exists and thrives within a nation‐state, social tension and ethno‐nationalist sentiments are not considered surprising. Yet in many nation‐states, various native‐born communities have diverse and potentially contradictory national identities without the desire for self‐determination. In this paper, I explore the circumstances in which ethno‐culturally distinct, peripheral communities may develop variants of the dominant national identity – ensuring that they remain excluded from the national narrative – yet remain part of the nation‐state. To do so, I conduct a comparative analysis of the native‐born Muslim communities in Spain's two North African exclaves. I find that most Muslims are Spanish citizens yet understandings of ‘Spanish‐ness’ appear to vary between the exclaves. I use these findings to propose further steps for refining current conceptualisations of the nation‐state, in an effort to better understand cases in which variations in the dominant national identity exist, but without ethno‐nationalist sentiments.     

Epilogue: Homegrown in PNG — Rural Responses to HIV and AIDS

ABSTRACT A three‐years‐long, multi‐sited, multi‐method study conducted throughout Papua New Guinea by the Institute of Medical Research revealed a staggering prevalence of sexually transmitted disease (STD) that threatens an already fragile political‐economy and health services delivery system. Logistics, methodological complexities, and political and especially religious sensitivities hampered conduct of such research. Extremely little HIV social research has been allowed to inform interventions or serosurveillance protocols. Well‐ intended but ill‐conceived international initiatives have promoted a normative AIDS paradigm that misconstrues HIV transmission risk, incites greater fear, increases stigma, and promotes anti‐condom rhetoric. This collection ‘HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea’ presents a sustained series of ethnographically based accounts of rural responses. In this epilogue I situate the importance of those responses in a discussion of the great divide between the lived realities of HIV infection and AIDS related suffering on the one hand, and the discursive practices and policies of media, public health, international donors and NGOs on the other.     

Parental death as a vital conjuncture? Intergenerational care and responsibility following bereavement in Senegal

This article explores the ways that parental death represents a ‘vital conjuncture’ for Serer young people that reconfigures and potentially transforms intergenerational caring responsibilities in different spatial and temporal contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people (aged 15–27 years), family members, religious and community leaders and professionals in rural and urban Senegal, I explore young people's responses to parental death. ‘Continuing bonds’ with the deceased were expressed through memories evoked in homespace, shared family practices and gendered responsibilities to ‘take care of’ bereaved family members, to cultivate inherited farmland and to fulfil the wishes of the deceased. Parental death could reconfigure intergenerational care and lead to shifts in power dynamics, as eldest sons asserted their position of authority. While care-giving roles were associated with agency, the low social status accorded to young women's paid and unpaid domestic work undermined their efforts. The research contributes to understandings of gendered nuances in the experience of bereavement and continuing bonds and provides insight into intra-household decision-making processes, ownership and control of assets. Analysis of the culturally specific meanings of relationships and a young person's social location within hierarchies of gender, age, sibling birth order and wider socio-cultural norms and practices is needed.     

The Pen and the Plough: Balanta Young Men in Guinea‐Bissau

Up until the late 1990s, the Balanta of Guinea‐Bissau constituted what could be described as a ‘deep rural society’, whose central identity was linked with rice production and cattle accumulation. At the same time, it could be argued that even in the early days after Independence in 1974, the social aspirations of Balanta young men matched those of other Guinean youths in their shared desire to get away from the strictures of gerontocracy and of rural life. Surprisingly, however, this study documents the agency of many rural Balanta young men in changing oppressive social rules, and in using agriculture as a means to fund their education, to feed their families and as a route to prosperity. The authors conclude that the persistent political instability in the country (most acutely felt in the capital city) and the national and global economic crises, together with the Balanta agricultural ethos and the softening of gerontocratic power, are at the root of this revaluing of rural livelihoods. This article challenges current dominant narratives about the crisis of young men in contemporary Africa and highlights the need to study the aspirations and achievements of youth in their rural–urban nexus from a historical and holistic perspective.     

Poland in the ‘Paris system’: self‐determination,stereotypes, and decisions in 1919

One of the most important questions at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was what to do about the newly re‐created state of Poland. The Paris peacemakers realised the importance of the settlement, thanks in part to dire warnings about Poland's future, and the leaders spent much time discussing the territorial settlement. Yet discussions of this important question regularly strayed from debates about policy to incorporate understandings of Polish national character. In particular, the leaders of the so‐called Big Three, Britain, France, and the United States, connected expert opinion and the broader political landscape to stereotyped understandings of national character, among other factors. With reference to scholarship on stereotyping, this article analyses how developing attitudes on Polish national character became integrated into the complex settlement of Poland's borders. The peacemakers' decisions, which were a compromise between different points of view, reflected interconnected understandings of the Polish settlement.     

Twentysomethings and twentagers: subjectivities,spaces and young men at home

This article examines young men's (aged 18–25 years) meanings of home and practices of homemaking, comprising material and social relations. The discussion contributes to three areas of geographical interest: home, masculinities and youth. Both geographies of home and masculinities have begun to consider men's experiences and meanings of home, but young men's domestic practices remain largely unexamined. Geographical work on youth has examined housing transitions, but the gendered experiences of young men need further interrogation. To provide insight into young men's homemaking, this article presents qualitative case studies drawn from fieldwork that investigated relations between masculinities and domesticities in Sydney, Australia. Young men are arguably out-of-place at home in conventional discourses of gender and space, but homes are nevertheless crucial sites for shaping masculine subjectivities. Masculinities and homes are co-constituted through domestic practices, generating diverse intersectional subjectivities and spaces. In this article, three subjectivity-space, or masculine-domestic, relations are discussed, which also counter the centring of heterosexual couple family homes in domestic imaginaries: young men in parental homes, share-housing and ‘alternative’ family homes. I examine similarities and differences across and within these masculine domesticities. This multiplicity of ‘youthful masculine domesticities’ offers a set of qualitative examples for use in public rhetoric that seeks to redress uneven gender dynamics in contemporary domestic life.     

“The Dirty Scruff”: Relief and the Production of the Unemployed in Depression‐era British Columbia

Abstract: In this article, I examine this nexus between the social and political meaning of unemployment and the political responses that follow. I focus on Depression‐era Vancouver and investigate the broad ideologies, representations and practices that contributed to the derision of the unemployed, which in turn, informed the establishment of rural relief camps that aimed to address the unemployment crisis of the 1930s. The social and political meaning of unemployment shaped the contours of the Federal Unemployment Relief Scheme, which housed men in work camps and aimed to both discipline and rehabilitate the unemployed. However, the relief camps were plagued by several contradictions exploited by the Relief Camp Workers Union, which constructed oppositional understandings of unemployment. In discussing the relationship between unemployment and relief I attend to questions of space, highlighting the urbanisation of unemployment and the ideological distinctions between the city and the country.     

‘In summer we go and drink at the lake’: young men and the geographies of alcohol and drinking in rural Estonia

In this paper, we explore the role of place in drinking practices of young people in the context of rural Estonia. We draw on a participatory research project carried out during seven months with a group of eight young men (15–18 years of age). We focus on three locations identified as the most popular drinking places by the young men in our research – familial homes, a local hamburger kiosk and the outdoors. The findings indicate that youth drinking practices as well as the drunkenness-related risks are spatially contingent. Characteristics of individual drinking locations influence the negotiation of local and national opportunities, restrictions and attitudes toward drinking, and the associated risks. We argue that, when developing public health tools, it is fruitful to pay attention to the local context and specific places in which young people's drinking practices are negotiated.     

Time‐Dependent Functions for Avoidance Behaviors Made in Response to the Circulation of HIV and AIDS

Interventions aimed at preventing HIV transmission include avoidance behaviors like condom use and reduced partner acquisition. In turn., engagement in such activities might also entail changed patterns of travel to evade contact with infected individuals. One method of estimating the effects of these actions on the observed distribution of HIV/AIDS involves the specification of space‐time models that imitate the epidemic process. This paper presents an application of this procedure where prevention is construed as a continuous population response to the evolving distribution of HIV and AIDS. This task entails the construction of models with time‐dependent parameters adapted to predicted prevalence or incidence measures to represent the effects of specific avoidance behaviors. In this respect, a multiregion model is described that serves as a baseline for analyzing the impact of preventative actions on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Western Europe. A series of adaptation functions are derived within this system for imitating both changed rates of partner acquisition and altered travel behaviors. The results elicit modifications to the behavior of the baseline epidemic that are generated by each of these functions. Then, the conditions supporting space‐time variations in rates of survival between core countries (relatively low) and those in the periphery (relatively high) are investigated. The discussion considers the implications of these results for health policies that promote avoidance behaviors.     

Fellowship and Citizenship as Models of National Community: United Church Women's Fellowship in Ranongga,Solomon Islands

From humble beginnings in the 1960s, the United Church Women's Fellowship (UCWF) is now viewed as one of the most effective organizations on the island of Ranongga (Western Province, Solomon Islands). This essay considers reasons for the success of women's fellowship in Ranongga, focusing on the distinctive position of women in gendered local and translocal forms of social organization. Far from being isolated from the outside world, Ranonggan women have long been engaged in drawing outsiders into local communities. I explore this theme in narratives of Christian conversion and of the beginning of women's fellowship; I also consider the practices of local and national women's fellowship groups that work to constitute unified communities out of diverse groups of people. My discussion of Ranonggan women's fellowship illustrates local dynamics of community‐making that do not map easily on to dominant models of nation‐states and ethnic groups. I ask whether the UCWF provides an alternative model for thinking about larger‐scale political formations, particularly in the Solomons. This question is especially relevant considering the significant contribution that women's Christian organizations have made in efforts to reconstitute a national community in the context of the ongoing political crisis in Solomon Islands.