Margaret Jolly
Biographic Data
| ID | 3597256 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Margaret Jolly |
| GIVEN NAMES | Margaret |
| FAMILY NAME | Jolly |
| SIGNATURE | JOLLY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3454-3436 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 89 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 273 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 9 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Gender and Politics Reimagined
This timely collection reflects a coming together of academics, gender and development practitioners and activists to reflect on the gendering of politics. By centring Asia and Oceania and traversing numerous disciplines, the volume disrupts the illusion of certainty and clarity as to what is known about gender and politics. Individual chapters present specific research projects, while providing epistemological, theoretical and methodological ref…
Gender and Politics Reimagined
Embodied Connections
This review article juxtaposes two books, Placental Politics and Moral Figures, which offer innovative decolonial, feminist approaches to reproductive politics and embodied connections in colonial and contemporary Oceania. They evince an extraordinary empirical and theoretical sophistication that has developed in scholarship over recent decades in analysing the racialised and gendered logics of colonialism, in researching the embodied relations b…
Dreaming Ecology
In the author's own words, Dreaming Ecology 'explores a holistic understanding of the interconnections of people, country, kinship, creation and the living world within a context of mobility. Implicitly it asks how people lived so sustainably for so long'. It offers a telling critique of the loss of Indigenous life, human and non-human, in the wake of white settler colonialism
The Scope of Anthropology
Some of the most prominent social and cultural anthropologists have come together in this volume to discuss Maurice Godelier’s work. They explore and revisit some of the highly complex practices and structures social scientists encounter in their fieldwork. From the nature–culture debate to the fabrication of hereditary political systems, from transforming gender relations to the problems of the Christianization of indigenous peoples, these chapt…
Chapter 5 Material and Immaterial Relations
Home Safe? Porosity Precarity, Borders
The porosity of our bodies and our planet are palpable in the conjoint crises of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Our shared atmosphere is increasingly toxic for all life with greenhouse gas emissions causing global heating, the rising and acidification of the ocean and the increased frequency and severity of what are no longer ‘natural’ disasters. COVID-19, a novel coronavirus which in late 2019 crossed the porous border of non-human an…
Gender and Climate Change
Interrogating the relation between gender and climate change is a burgeoning transdisciplinary field. Although gender and the environment were intrinsically linked in the scholarship and politics of ecofeminism from the 1970s, early research, policy, and practice on climate change were often gender blind. Researchers and activists predominantly from the global South insisted that gender inequalities alongside class and race were crucial in the di…
Intersecting Inequalities, Moving Positionalities
Vale Marshall Sahlins
Bushfires, supercyclones and ‘resilience’
2020 has been a year of cascading crises for us all. The COVID-19 pandemic threatened to eclipse the longer term crisis of global climate change. Australia's Black Summer of unprecedented bushfires in 2019-20 and Vanuatu's experience of Tropical Cyclone Harold in April 2020 were both signs of the increasing severity of ‘natural' disasters due to anthropogenic climate change. Combining personal and political reflections on these two disasters, thi…
Power and the Politics of Anthropology
I. Definition What is political anthropology for you? How do you understand both anthropology and politics (or the political): what is politics (or the political) and what does anthropology mean to you? When I first started studying anthropology at the University of Sydney from the late 1960s, political anthropology was a subfield dominated by a formalistic, classificatory approach to political systems which divided polities into stateless and st…
Ritualized Homosexuality
The concept of ritualized homosexuality was coined by Gilbert Herdt to describe practices of semen ingestion as part of male initiation among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. It depicted nonreciprocal relations as young novices fellated older bachelors and ingested their semen to grow into strong, mature men. Herdt discerned desire and fear, eroticism, and violent masculinist hierarchy in such practices. He compared similar practices among several…
Tanna
De nombreux débats portent sur les représentations de l'exotisme dans le Pacifique, que ce soit dans le domaine de l'anthropologie, des arts ou du cinéma. Le film Tanna, créé et filmé au Vanuatu, sur l’île du même nom, par les réalisateurs australiens Bentley Dean et Martin Butler, a été à la fois applaudi et critiqué pour avoir présenté le Vanuatu et ses habitants comme exotiques. De tels jugements doivent tenir compte de la complexité de cette …
Tanna
There have been protracted debates about exoticism in representations of the Pacific, in anthropology, visual arts and the cinema. The film Tanna, created and filmed in the Vanuatu island of that name by Australian filmmakers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler has been both celebrated and criticised for its representation of the people and place of Vanuatu as exotic. Such adjudications have to confront the complexities of a film that is a co-creation…
Engendering the Anthropocene in Oceania
The concept of the Anthropocene confounds Eurocentric distinctions of natural and human history, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes. But who are 'we' in the Anthropocene, how do notions of our shared humanity contend with the cascading global inequalities of place, race, class and gender. Oceania is often said to have contributed the least and suffered the most from climate change. Pacific women, and especially those living on low lying atolls, have …
Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands
The Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea has been portrayed as a unique and sacred place in the genealogy of the discipline of anthropology, and especially that lineage which reveres Bronislaw Mal
Transforming Place, Time and Person?
The chapters in this volume traverse the countries of Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu and relate questions about the political economy and regulatory regimes of companies like Digicel and Vodafone in these three states to the embodied experiences of consumers: young and old, rural and urban, female and male. They are consummately connected (excuse the bad pun). I will focus on three dimensions of this connection by \nlooking at the way in whic…
Contested Paradise
Perhaps of all the archipelagos of the Pacific imagined by Euro-Americans as "paradisiacal," Hawai'i has been the most "possessed" by an unusually harmonious combination of Christian, capitalist, and imperial agents of the United States. The notion of paradise, rooted in Zoroastrian and Judeo-Christian imaginaries, projected ideas of the harmony and beauty of a primordial state. But just as Christians saw darkness harbored in the Garden of Eden, …
Gender Violence
Gender violence, though longstanding and almost ubiquitous, has become visible as a social issue only recently. It presents a classical anthropological problem in the relation between human universals and cultural diversities in practices and values. There have been extensive debates about how to name gender violence and how to estimate and enumerate its prevalence in both domestic and public locales. Women and girls are overwhelmingly the victim…
Gender Trouble
Judith Butler's iconic work Gender Trouble (1990) has profoundly shaped critical inquiry across many fields. In anthropology, the impact was considerable, especially for those analyzing gender and sexuality. Butler's interrogation of the sex/gender distinction found fertile ground in conjunction with challenges anthropologists were already making to the European origins of the nature/culture opposition. Her view that bodies materialize within the…
Dowry
Dowry refers to the movement of goods from the bride and her family to that of the groom and his family. It is often contrasted with bridewealth or bride‐price where goods move from the groom and his family to that of the bride and her family. But this simple definitional contrast is misleading and occludes the way in which these practices are embedded in deeper, divergent configurations of kinship, property, and inheritance and in different form…
Pacific Futures
Transpacific Aspiration toward Modern Domesticity in Japanese Colonial-Era Korea
Modern domesticity in colonial-era Korea has generally been understood using the twin parameters of nationalism and colonialism. Much less attention has been paid to the impact of a transpacific network—mainly between the United States and Korea through Christian missionary societies—on the formation of modern domesticity before, during, and after Japanese colonial rule. This article examines the ways in which Korea's modern domesticity was shape…
Gender in Modern East Asia
Gender in Modern East Asia explores the history of women and gender in China, Korea, and Japan from the seventeenth century to the present. This unique volume treats the three countries separately within each time period while also placing them in global and regional contexts. Its transnational and integrated approach connects the cultural, economic, and social developments in East Asia to what is happening across the wider world. The text focuse…
Sites of desire, economies of pleasure
To save the girls for brighter and better lives’
(1991). ‘To save the girls for brighter and better lives’: Presbyterian Missions and Women in the South of Vanuatu: 1848–1870. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 27-48
The Chimera of Equality in Melanesia
Gender Violence & Human Rights
The postcolonial states of Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu operate today in a global arena in which human rights are widely accepted. As ratifiers of UN treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Pacific Island countries have committed to promoting women's and girls
Women's Rights, Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu
There has been much recent debate about women's rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal huma…
Hierarchy and encompassment
The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones
The moral economy of mobile phones implies a field of shifting relations among consumers, companies and state actors, all of whom have their own ideas about what is good, fair and just. These ideas inform the ways in which, for example, consumers acquire and use mobile phones; companies promote and sell voice, SMS and data subscriptions; and state actors regulate both everyday
Beyond the Horizon? Nationalisms, Feminisms, and Globalization in the Pacific
This paper situates the fraught relation of nationalisms and feminisms in the context of wider debates about globalization in the Pacific. Through a reading of the poetry and prose of the late Grace Mera Molisa of Vanuatu and Haunani-Kay Trask of Hawai`i, it raises questions about what might be considered "indigenous" and "foreign" in their different locations. Over several decades of intensive and reflective political practice, their respective …
Ill‐natured comparisons
Gifts, commodities and corporeality
Birds and Kastom Banyans of South Pentecost
In the traditionalist villages of south Pentecost, kastom has long been a bulwark against European influences, both Christian and secular. However, their retention of the famous gol land dive ritual has brought the south Pentecost people under pressure from tourism, whose great allure masks the risks of a rise of kastom as commodity, packaged for sale, and of the erosion of kasfom's centrality as living practice. Pressures to conform to a pure ka…
Engendering Violence in Papua New Guinea
This collection builds on previous works on gender violence in the Pacific, but goes beyond some previous approaches to 'domestic violence' or 'violence against women' in analysing the dynamic processes of 'engendering' violence in PNG. 'Engendering' refers not just to the sex of individual actors, but to gender as a crucial relation in collective life and the massive social
The anatomy of pig love
Analyse de la place fondamentale occupee par le dans la societe a Vanuatu et en Melanesie en general, visant a definir les bases de l'amour du cochon qu'ont les Melanesiens. Apres avoir decrit les methodes d'elevage, la vie quotidienne des cochons, leur place dans les echanges rituels, l'A. envisage plusieurs types d'explications de l'amour du cochon: ecologique, religieux et psychologique
Men of War, Men of Peace
The first European observers in the archipelago we now call Vanuatu characterised Indigenous men as martial warriors. Such observations occluded the diversity of Indigenous masculinities and the violence inherent in colonial processes of exploration, and later dispossession, ‘pacification’ and the imposition of colonial law. Indigenous relations between men were grounded in ascribed hierarchies of seniority and either achieved or ascribed hierarc…
Prologue
Engendering the Anthropocene in Oceania
The concept of the Anthropocene confounds Eurocentric distinctions of natural and human history, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes. But who are 'we' in the Anthropocene, how do notions of our shared humanity contend with the cascading global inequalities of place, race, class and gender. Oceania is often said to have contributed the least and suffered the most from climate change. Pacific women, and especially those living on low lying atolls, have …
Antipodean Audits
This article explores neoliberalism in Australian universities, in the context of the politics of a higher education 'reform package' introduced by the Liberal-National Party Coalition presently in power in federal government. I focus attention on the relationship between the broader national environment and the local university configuration at the Australian National University and the dialectic between university academics and students as obje…
Dreaming Ecology
In the author's own words, Dreaming Ecology 'explores a holistic understanding of the interconnections of people, country, kinship, creation and the living world within a context of mobility. Implicitly it asks how people lived so sustainably for so long'. It offers a telling critique of the loss of Indigenous life, human and non-human, in the wake of white settler colonialism
Oceanic Hauntings
This paper considers how far past ideologies of race and of racial and cultural mixing are haunting the present in Oceania. It compares colonial histories and contemporary politics in two Pacific archipelagoes, Vanuatu, an independent state since 1980 and Hawai'i, a state of the US since 1959. In Vanuatu indigenous people are a dominant majority and land is still held primarily through customary custodianship (despite pressure for privatisation) …
Epilogue
Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands
The Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea has been portrayed as a unique and sacred place in the genealogy of the discipline of anthropology, and especially that lineage which reveres Bronislaw Mal
Debating the Korean New Woman
Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House caused a global sensation when first performed in the nineteenth century. Nora, the play's protagonist, became an icon for women, an emblematic figure representing the pursuit of selfhood. This article aims to historicise the figure of Nora in Korean gender politics as a representation of both the quintessence of modernity and the antithesis of “womanly virtue”. It specifically examines the tensions in the Korea…
Anthropology
"Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No?" Women's Rights, Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu
Margaret Jolly, "Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No?" Women's Rights, Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu, Feminist Review, No. 52, The World Upside Down: Feminisms in the Antipodes (Spring, 1996), pp. 169-190
Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings
This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. In a series of inspiring essays, noted scholars of the region examine these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis.The collection marks a turning point in the debate on the conceptualization of traditio…
The anatomy of pig love
Analyse de la place fondamentale occupee par le dans la societe a Vanuatu et en Melanesie en general, visant a definir les bases de l'amour du cochon qu'ont les Melanesiens. Apres avoir decrit les methodes d'elevage, la vie quotidienne des cochons, leur place dans les echanges rituels, l'A. envisage plusieurs types d'explications de l'amour du cochon: ecologique, religieux et psychologique
The Forgotten Women
Writing on the labour trade focuses on the question of whether Melanesian labourers recruited to work in Australia and Fiji were kidnapped slaves, or willing volunteers. This debate about victims versus actors tends however to be constructed from the viewpoint of the male recruit. The small minority of Melanesian women who were recruited are typically seen as motivated to go because of love or sexual relations with men, and are sometimes portraye…
Family and Gender in the Pacific
The combined forces of mission evangelism and colonial intervention have transformed the everyday family life of Pacific peoples. The dramatic changes that affected the political and economic autonomy of indigenous people in the region also had significant effects on domestic life. This book, originally published in 1989, examines the ways in which this happened. Using the insights of history and anthropology, chapters cover a wide range of geogr…
General/Theoretical Anthropology
To save the girls for brighter and better lives’
(1991). ‘To save the girls for brighter and better lives’: Presbyterian Missions and Women in the South of Vanuatu: 1848–1870. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 27-48
Gifts, commodities and corporeality
Family and Gender in the Pacific
The Politics of Tradition in the Pacific
Custom and the Way of the Land
Ill‐natured comparisons
Family and Gender in the Pacific
Roger Martin Keesing 1935–1993
Motherlands? Some Notes on Women and Nationalism in India and Africa
The relation of women to nationalism is problematic, both in political adjudications of nationalism and in women's status both as subjects and as objects of signification, in narrating the nation. This is nowhere more poignantly patent than in the relation of motherhood and nationalism. This paper compares some recent approaches to representations of ‘mothers of the nation’ in India and South Africa. Three aspects of the problem are highlighted. …
Epilogue
Hierarchy and encompassment
Prologue
"Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No?" Women's Rights, Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu
Margaret Jolly, "Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No?" Women's Rights, Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu, Feminist Review, No. 52, The World Upside Down: Feminisms in the Antipodes (Spring, 1996), pp. 169-190
Women's Rights, Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu
There has been much recent debate about women's rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal huma…
The Tree and the Canoe
Sites of desire, economies of pleasure
Maternities and Modernities
Feminist theories have focused on contemporary, Western, middle-class experiences of maternity. This 1998 volume brings other mothers, from Asia and the Pacific, into scholarly view, aiming to show that birthing and mothering can be a very different experience for women in other parts of the world. The contributors document a wide variety of conceptions of motherhood, and drawing on ethnographic and historical research, they explore the relations…
Aerial roots
Another Time, Another Place
This paper explores the way in which the languages of space and time condense and how the values of spatiotemporal fluidity and fixity are gendered. It considers several narratives from South Pentecost, Vanuatu, stories of primordial beings and of more proximate ancestors which alike stress women's association with flight and flood. Such narratives are situated in the context of labour migration in colonial history and more recent patterns of mig…
Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure
This is an examination of erotic encounters between European, Asian and Pacific people. These essays explore how sexual practice and sexual meanings have been constructed across cultural borders in Thailand, the Philippines, Burma/Myanmar, Japan, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Polynesian islands. Regarding sexuality as embedded in a complex social and political world structured and saturated by gender, race and class relations, these scholars cha…
Damming the Rivers of Milk? Fertility, Sexuality, and Modernity in Melanesia and Amazonia
In both Melanesia and Amazonia, cultures vary in the extent to which they bring men and women together in creative relationships or separate them as antithetical and opposed. Cultures of the northwest Amazon find striking resemblances to Melanesia in the stress of life and growth, which is punctuated and perpetuated by periods of sexual separation and continence, and in the specific connections between foodstuffs and the human body. This chapter …
Sociology (63 works) · History (47 works) · Political science (44 works) · Gender Studies (41 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (32 works) · Law (32 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Politics (22 works) · Geography (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works)