Resistance, Refusal and Global Moralities

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This paper concluded a series of open lectures on Gender and the Developing World. The paper is in two parts. The first makes no distinction between the developing world and anywhere else—an attempt at ‘symmetrical anthropology’. I hope the examples will illuminate one another—they introduce what I mean by resistance and refusal. The second part points to ways in which, with these concepts in mind, we might find ourselves troubled by certain features of globalisation, and here the ‘developing world’ status of the material matters. Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (Penguin Books) London, 2001, page numbers in text. See, for example, Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (Allen & Unwin) St Leonards, NSW, 1996. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (Virago) London, 1986. My thanks to Frances Pine for introducing me to this book. See also Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (Athlone Press) London, 1999, p. 85. From Annette Hamilton, ‘Bond-slaves of Satan: Aboriginal Women and the Missionary Dilemma’ in Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (eds), Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1989. Jeanette Edwards, ‘“Parenting Skills”: Views of Community Health and Social Service Providers about the Needs of their “Clients”’, Journal of Social Policy, no. 24, 1995, pp. 237–59. See also: ‘A Post-modern State of Welfare’, paper given to the Applied Anthropology Workshop, 2nd European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference, Prague, mss. 1992, reporting on an Economic and Social Research Council (UK) funded project, The Management of Personal Welfare. Thanks for permission to quote and cite. Edwards, ‘Parenting Skills’, p. 9. Edwards, ‘Parenting Skills’, p. 14. However, the stress on the individual's self-management in all this is consonant with the withdrawal of the welfare state in another way, as Edwards argues. While poverty is a major factor in what people can do, workers perceive problems to lie in their client's personal histories and disposition. It is not just lack of money which is ‘the problem’ but not knowing how to manage it. Improvement in the 1980s idiom can only be improvement in management skills. One Health Visitor: ‘Poverty, poor housing, lack of education—when I use the word education, I mean in respect to bringing up a family, cooking, budgeting, child development. Lack of knowledge really.’ As Edwards argues, this depoliticises the social conditions in which families find themselves. Edwards, ‘Parenting Skills’, p. 3. The converse of this is ‘protecting the interests of ...’ as in protecting the interests of the child. Peevay's brother is taken off and educated, to be protected from the savagery of his upbringing, one of the impetuses of missions in Australia at the time. In the story that means that on his return he is in turn rejected by his mother, and this (unexpected) rejection leads him to suicide. Edwards, ‘Parenting Skills’, pp. 14–15. Hamilton, ‘Bond-slaves of Satan’, p. 126. As a child, mothered by his grandmother and others, he was ‘dreaming’ of his mother long before she appeared. My extrapolation, not a theme developed in the novel. From Marilyn Strathern, ‘Global and Local Contexts’ in Lawrence Kalinoe and James Leach (eds), Rationales of Ownership: Ethnographic Studies of Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea (UBS Publishers’ Distributors) New Delhi, 2000; also in Marilyn Strathern, ‘Losing (out on) Intellectual Resources’ in Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (eds), Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 2004. Margaret Jolly, ‘Woman ikat raet long human raet o no?’, Feminist Review, no. 52, 1996, pp. 169–90. Tangilka and Konumbuka tribes, in the Minj part of the Wahgi valley, Western Highlands Province. The father, who was killed by police, Koidam Willingal, was a Tangilka man; he was said to have been the bodyguard of a wanted man, a fact disputed by his kin. The aggrieved relatives came from his mother's clan in Konumbuka. See the account in Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington, Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: the Telling of a Difference (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1999. With Peevay's mother's bagged bones in mind (he remarked on how inappropriately light the bag that contained his mother seemed), I note that the practice is called in Minj giving ‘a skull in a netbag’ (Michael O'Hanlon and Linda Frankland, ‘With a Skull in the Netbag: Prescriptive Marriage and Matrilateral Relations in the New Guinea Highlands’, Oceania, no. 56, 1986, pp. 181–98), a reference to the male strength (bones) that the mother carries within her. When a clan sends out its women in marriage, it contributes to the prosperity of other clans; through these offshoots, maternal kin expand their own spheres of influence. Injury to these progeny is injury to something of theirs. In local idiom, the deceased's ‘bones’ or ‘head’, male wealth as appropriately given by the patriclan, should be sent back by the paternal clan to the maternal clan which had in its lifetime overseen his or her welfare (Dr John Muke, ‘In the matter of an application under Section 57 of the Constitution: application by Individual and Community Rights Forum Inc. (ICRAF) in re: Miriam Willingal’, National Court of Justice, Papua New Guinea Law Reports, Port Moresby, 1997, p. 132). When kin seek, as they sometimes did, an alternative to or augmentation of other forms of payment by requesting that a granddaughter of the woman be returned, they talked of returning the ‘head’ or ‘skull’ in a ‘netbag’, that is, in the form of a woman. The metaphors that Wahgi (Minj) people use of body payments draw these various aspects together into one context. This referred to the strength or wealth (bones) of a woman's progeny in and within the form of another woman (the netbag), as Muke, Papua New Guinea Law Reports, p. 132, and O'Hanlon and Frankland, ‘With a Skull in the Netbag’, describe. The bones and the bag are reversed: here it is the mother who envelops the past and future strength of the males she will bear, the bones at once signifying male strength and the wealth that flows against it. People's ‘bones’ (omblom) strengthen their paternal kin, and these payments are offered in return for that strength. In the past, making such payments was once a regular part of clan intermarriage but did not necessarily accompany death compensation. ‘Head pay’ was the general name given to gifts that went to the mother's kin at death.. It is worth noting that the Papua New Guinea constitution provides for the recognition of customary law (which is what these compensation practices would have been perceived as) to the extent that it conflicts neither with constitutional law nor with general principles of humanity. Indeed, the judge paid considerable attention to unravelling the intricate background to the compensation settlement, and warned about quick judgements from outside bodies—including the ‘modern courts’. Papua New Guinea Law Reports, p. 130, see also National, 12 February 1997. Papua New Guinea Law Reports, p. 151. Gewertz and Errington, Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea, pp. 125–6. She then went on to state that she felt pressured into probably having to make a quick match, and that the payment process left her feeling lost, humiliated in the eyes of others, ‘ashamed at being used as a form of payment’, Papua New Guinea Law Reports, p. 141. One reading of her affidavit (Papua New Guinea Law Reports, p. 141) is that it was the very fact that no one had been named as her future spouse, which made her feel she was being ‘used’ simply as a form of payment. But are ‘marriageable men’ the social analogue of ‘marriageable women’? In the past, the circumstances of ‘initiable men’ afforded a closer parallel. (It should be noted that her kin claimed that the obligation to provide a spouse for a particular clan was different from forcing a girl onto a marriage partner, and that if she did not care for anyone, then a later marriage by someone else could always be counted retrospectively in lieu.) See M. Jolly's ‘Woman ikat raet long human raet o no?’ for discussion on this point for Vanuatu. Post Courier, 20 February 1997. The self-named civilisers in Australia were as appalled as anyone at the trafficking between white men and Aboriginal women, and was one of the targets of their reforms; see Hamilton, ‘Bond-slaves of Satan’. Stephanie James and S. Palmer (eds), Visible Women: Essays on Feminist Legal Theory and Political Philosophy (Hart) Oxford, 2002. Stephanie Palmer, ‘Feminism and the Promise of Human Rights: Possibilities and Paradoxes’ in James and Palmer, Visible Women, p. 92. Nicola Lacey, ‘Violence, Ethics and Law: Feminist Reflections on a Familiar Dilemma’ in James and Palmer, Visible Women, p. 127

Colonialism · Dilemma · Globalization · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Law · Philosophy

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