Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables, figures, and maps
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Mendi coming into view
- 2 Sem relations: solidarity and its limits
- 3 Twem: personal exchange partnerships
- 4 Gender ideology and the politics of exchange
- 5 Twem and sem in context
- 6 Sai le at Senkere: the politics of a Pig Festival
- 7 “Development” in Mendi
- Appendix A The research community
- Appendix B The “accounts sample” and some comments on research methodology
- Notes
- Glossary
- References
- Index
4 - Gender ideology and the politics of exchange
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables, figures, and maps
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Mendi coming into view
- 2 Sem relations: solidarity and its limits
- 3 Twem: personal exchange partnerships
- 4 Gender ideology and the politics of exchange
- 5 Twem and sem in context
- 6 Sai le at Senkere: the politics of a Pig Festival
- 7 “Development” in Mendi
- Appendix A The research community
- Appendix B The “accounts sample” and some comments on research methodology
- Notes
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Summary
While we were talking with a Senkere big-man, Walipa, in our house about details of the community's history, Walo (one of his wives) and Nande (a good friend of ours, on whose husband's land our house was built) arrived. The women called out to us, so we opened our door. “Why are you letting them in?” Walipa asked, as the women entered the house. “Women aren't allowed here!” he asserted (ignoring the sex of the anthropologist). Walo and Nande seated themselves just inside the door, smiling all the while, and Walo asked her husband, “What is it you want to say now, that we cannot hear? Something about sorcery, perhaps?”
Introduction
Antagonism between the sexes, and a separation of their respective domains of activity, are pervasive facts of life in Highland societies. Many ethnographers have noted the importance of gender symbolism in Highland ideology; as I indicated in Chapter 2, Mendi idioms concerning social solidarity and continuity emphasize the male role. Men are the predominant actors in rituals and public political meetings in Mendi, as elsewhere in the Highlands. According to available accounts, Highland men are predominant in exchange as well.
In the most thorough analysis of Highland women's social role, Marilyn Strathern (1972) argued that women in the Hagen area are primarily producers and that men are transactors in a system in which men devalue production in relation to exchange. Women argue that their work raising pigs ought to give them the right to a say in the disposition of the animals. But men deny that women's work gives them this right.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- What Gifts EngenderSocial Relations and Politics in Mendi, Highland Papua New Guinea, pp. 117 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986