European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

“Weapons of the weak”: gender, power and women’s agency in the Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Priya Chattier

Session presentation

Women from the Pacific Islands are often perceived by Europeans as passive beauties dancing the hula with a flower in their hair, as docile companions of European or local men or as naïve personalities surrounded by an endangered environment. The mass media report often show the idealised picture created by Europeans as lovely “inventory” in stereotypical illustrations and the Pacific women are rarely shown as being self-confident agents. Women’s world in which they live, their daily struggles, problems and their defeats and successes remain hidden through the ostensible clichés portrayed in mass media.

Many social and cultural anthropology of the Pacific have also reported on a model where gender was always explained by dividing the society in binary categories as those between nature/cultural and domestic/public. Women were said to belong to the domestic/natural sphere were production was directed towards consumption and reproduction while men performed their work in the public/cultural sphere. European missionaries in the Pacific often had the preconceived idea that local women were not free agents but chattels of the men’s sexual urges, interests and strategies and they tried to bring about a form of women’s liberation through conversion to Christianity. But far from that male Western conception of women’s status, which can be found in documentaries, motion pictures as well as travel and adventure literature, women are active and resolute agents who self-confidently shape their societies through their courageous and determined acting in public as well as in their communities.

This panel on gender is aimed to provide insights into the lives of women from the Pacific Islands and show how they deal with shifting gender relations in changing Pacific societies. It is hoped that contemporary gender relations and changing gender roles in the Pacific will be studied as a backdrop to changes brought to societies in the Pacific through the processes of European colonisation, globalisation as well as economic and social influences of present day. At the same time, this panel aims to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The papers in the session will discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. To do this, it is necessary to consider how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped not only by local contexts or tradition but are being remade in interaction with flows of global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and structural economic transformations.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Inciters of Violence, Stone Cold Candidates and the Women who Prevailed: Women’s involvement in the 2007 and 2012 PNG National Elections

Nicole Haley (Australian National University)

Kerry Zubrinich (Australian National University)

To date women in Papua New Guinea have had little success in gaining representation within the national legislature. Nonetheless women are engaged in the whole of the political life of that country. They contest elections as well as campaigning for and supporting male candidates with a view to improving their lot at a personal or community level. Detailed observations over two national elections have shown that women are simultaneously integrated into the national political landscape at the same time as they are largely excluded from the institutions of government.
The women who are at the core of this study were candidates and voters in the 2007 and 2012 national elections. Currently Papua New Guinea has three female MPs in a 111 seat parliament and while in the course of this paper we will discuss the strategies these women used to get elected we are also going to explore the means by which women throughout the 2007 and 2012 national election campaigns associated themselves with male candidates. In either case it is the association with/support of men that allow women to participate as either voters or candidates in the electoral processes of PNG.
By examining aspects of women’s participation in the election processes of PNG which is currently a liberal democracy the extent of change needed to approach gender parity in the legislature of that country becomes obvious. Perhaps even daunting, but not impossible.

Gender in the Electoral Cycle in Papua New Guinea

Diane Zetlin (University of Queensland)

Mactil Bais

The small numbers of women in parliaments in the Pacific Island States is cause for concern. Under the right circumstances and with the weight of numbers women parliamentarians can be a positive weapon advocating for women. Thus how to get women from their marginal position in political leadership in the Pacific is an important policy question. In this paper we want to examine how the ‘rules of the game’ restrict women’s entry into politics in Papua New Guinea and how successful women candidates develop their own ‘weapons of the weak’ to combat these obstacles.
We focus on two domains of gendered political discourse. The first is through an evaluation of attempts to establish formal institutional guarantees to assist women’s representation through quotas or affirmative action support both through the failed quota proposals before the 2012 national Papua New Guinea election and the experience of quotas in Bougainville.
The second is through considering the domain of the more ‘informal’ processes of political campaigning in Papua New Guinea. Factors such as the instability of political parties; vote bargaining, which can include explicit sexual exchange; and clan influences have long been commented on as detrimental to the success of women candidates. While our paper examines these, our focus is on how the three women candidates elected in 2012 were able to develop their own campaign strategies. We argue that their ‘weapons of the weak’ engaged the concepts of maternalism, partnerships between men and women and the support of clan and family networks.

Pacific women’s agency in the diaspora OR, ‘How come there are two elected female Tongan MPs in New Zealand and none in the Kingdom of Tonga?’

Tagaloatele Peggy Fairbairn Dunlop (Auckland University of Technology)

Pacific women display individual and collective agency (Chattier) through a range of activities such as the Regional Pacific Platform for Action for Sustainable Development (1996) However Pacific women in the homelands especially have been challenged in achieving the goals they set (Fairbairn-Dunlop 1991; World Development Report 2012) This research explored how Pacific women in the diaspora are defining their roles and place within a regime of power impacted by an increasingly global political economy. National data is set alongside the narratives of six Pacific women who reflect on their pre- migration experiences, the provisionality of their diasporic identities and their concerns for the future. Drawing on Ahearn (2001) that agency is socio-culturally mediated, findings highlight that Pacific women in the diaspora are negotiating agency through ideas and social realities that are not locally bounded (Barber 2000) This decentralised transnational vantage points captures the shifting terrain of class processes, cultural politics and personal agency of Pacific women who migrate.

Tai’mua Samoa: Women and Leadership in Samoa

Roannie Ng Shiu (Australian National University)

Low female representation in national politics is an important gender equity issue in the Pacific and is a growing area of scholarly research. In Samoa, outside of national politics, women demonstrate strong leadership in other sectors such as civil service, non-governmental organisations and in business. For example women feature prominently in the public sector with 52% of women in senior leadership roles within government and 38% of women as CEOs (Leadership Samoa, 2015). Women have also been at the forefront of developing sustainable economic businesses as demonstrated by the Women in Business and Development (WIBD) organisation. WIBD works at the local, regional and international level and have grown to not only being a supplier to large multinationals like the Body Shop but also to provide business training services in micro financing in Samoa.
The high representation of women in leadership roles outside of national politics has largely been attributed to women’s access to education and training opportunities (Martire 2014). Leadership Samoa is a non-government organisation that provides leadership training for emerging and future leaders to address the leadership and development needs of Samoa. Established in 2010 the programme has a high number of women alumni in all sectors of society. This paper will draw on a tracer study developed in partnership with Leadership Samoa that was conducted in February 2015 with the alumni of the Leadership Samoa program. Drawing on this survey data and the stories of women who have been part of the program we will firstly examine the key enablers and barriers for Samoan women progressing into leadership roles. Second, we will discuss the key issues for Samoan women in leadership roles and finally we will present their perceptions on women in politics.

Gendered perspectives on the migration-development nexus in the South Pacific

Andreea Raluca Torre (University of the South Pacific)

Alessio Cangiano (University of the South Pacific)

Analysis of the migration and development nexus has moved beyond the economic impact of labour mobility and remittances, considering the broader social implications of migratory processes and recognising gender as one of their key organising principles. Research has illuminated the need to incorporate in any analysis of migration processes and experiences the gender roles in migration decision-making within the household, the gender division of labour, the different social spaces and networks women and men embody while migrating, as well as the implications of migration for family and care responsibilities at both ends of the migratory chain. While some case-study research on the South Pacific pointed out the role of women in work-related movements of skilled professionals, significant knowledge gaps on the gender implications of Pacific migratory movements are persisting. The proposed paper focuses on some of the critical aspects that emerged from a Special Issue edited by the authors on Gender, Migration and Development in the South Pacific. Issues surrounding the intersections of internal/international mobility and shifting gender norms and relations and their impact on rural and urban contexts are scrutinised. Building on the evidence generated by the articles this paper takes stock of gendered analyses of migration in the South Pacific and reflects on the conceptual underpinning of using a gender lens to enhance our understanding of mobility in the region. Our final discussion proposes further lines of inquiry and sets a new gender-sensitive research agenda recognising the respective roles of migrant men and women as agents of development.

Narrating violence in the court: gendered experiences in the colonial Supreme Court of Fiji

Kate Stevens (University of Otago)

Court depositions represent one of the few places in the colonial archive where the voices of Fijian and Indian women are recorded. This paper examines the statements provided by victims, defendants and witnesses of sexual crimes (such as rape, indecent assault and carnal knowledge) in the Fiji Supreme Court from its opening in 1875 through to 1920. Though translated and transcribed by colonial officials, this archive provides insight into how Fijian and Indian women and men engaged with the colonial legal system, often articulating their own understanding of crime and guilt at odds with British legal concepts. For women in particular, I argue this provided an alternative opportunity to highlight violent and traumatic experiences outside of ‘traditional’ social structures and hierarchies. Exploring the stories narrated in this courtroom, I will examine the possibilities and limits in policing and punishing inter-personal violence that the early colonial justice system offered Islanders and indentured labourers, and how these were structured by race and gender.

Revisiting the Baruya and the concept of “male domination”

Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke (EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

Like many documented populations of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Baruya have seen the relationship between men and women transform under the influence of Western pressure – be it Christianity, capitalism, the presence of law and order, schools, etc. A strong gender-based antagonism was deemed structural to this society in the olden days (Godelier 1986), the time of male initiations and sister-exchange; is it still the case? Has the exchange of money for wives reshaped gender relations, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a wife in this context? I will argue, against other trends, that the brideprice system is liberating for Baruya women, and does not result in their commodification or appropriation by men. I will show that changes in the matrimonial sphere go together with a reshaping of discourses pertaining to the body and its substances: semen is no longer seen as a source of life, but carries the stigma of sexually transmitted disease; meanwhile, it is through the idiom of blood that people now express a shared identity, far from the connotation of “female pollution” that this substance used to bear. In this respect, the male hegemony is tackled on a symbolic level; it is questioned on an economic one too, as women play a larger role than before through the control of money acquired by selling coffee. At the same time, traditional expectations projected on women have been reinforced in the face of new forms of agency and independence. As prostitution emerged in village life, ideas of what a “good woman” should be and do were reinforced, thus (re)defining the limits of spheres (domestic and public) that were otherwise blurred. Politically, the place given to women is ambivalent, and shows a double standard beneficial to men. Masculinity is otherwise harder than before to establish, with the absence of war, the progressive disappearing of initiations and with very few economic opportunities presenting themselves. All these simultaneous changes provide some answers to a question, raised by Godelier two decades ago (1992), about the relationship between kinship systems, representations of the body and the roles allocated to both sexes in a society.

Moving up or down the “ladder of freedom and power” in Fiji & Papua New Guinea

Priya Chattier (Australian National University)

This paper will identify the main pathways or factors that lead to increased senses of power and freedom for men and women in the sample communities of Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PNG). Fiji and PNG were part of the World Bank’s qualitative study informing the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development where local researchers organised focus groups to systematically record the factors that women and men in the study saw as helping increase their feelings of empowerment. In the broader gender and development literature, Naila Kabeer’s (1999: 436) conceptualisation of empowerment is noted as the “expansion in people’s ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied to them.” The aim of this paper is to move beyond such academic concepts and instead explore local understandings and common terms for power and freedom. This qualitative study comprised of 132 focus group discussions in sixteen communities in PNG and six in Fiji. A participatory tool called fictional “Ladder of Power and Freedom” was used to explore the concept of empowerment. The identified pathways presented do not represent a complete picture, but are a starting point to understanding local perceptions of empowerment and whether or not inequalities inherent in gender norms can create different sets of opportunities for women and men in Melanesian societies. Understanding transitions in gender norms (Chattier 2014) is critical for making sense of why women and men have different pathways to power and freedom.