AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 40, no. 3 (Summer 2001)

PIG MEN AND WOMEN, BIG MEN AND WOMEN: GENDER AND PRODUCTION IN THE NEW GUINEA HIGHLANDS

Paul Sillitoe
University of Durham

The work of herding pigs falls mainly to women in the New Guinea Highlands. Yet men control the disposal of animals, commonly in sociopolitical exchange events that earn them prestige. Some commentators regard these pig management arrangements as an aspect of exploitative gender relations, men appropriating the labor of women to bolster their reputations. But this interpretation is contrary to the constitution of an acephalous social order, which esteems equality and affords both women and men political freedom. An investigation of pig ownership and production challenges the exploitation hypothesis. Both women and men have rights in animals which all recognize. And the labor and energy put into pig herding do not suggest exploitation. Indeed, labor arrangements and expenditure cast production in an intriguing light. In some critical senses they obfuscate its existence, not to hide exploitation from the hapless exploited but to nullify the possibility as pertinent to an acephalous polity. The production of gifts in this tribal context is radically different from the production of commodities for a market where notions of exploitation may apply. (Papua New Guinea, pigs, gender, labor, property)

SHARING, HOARDING, AND THEFT: EXCHANGE AND RESISTANCE IN FORAGER-FARMER RELATIONS

Jana Fortier
Dartmouth College/Southwest State University

South Asian foragers (a.k.a. scheduled tribes and ādivāsi) have been depicted as passive, primitive, and naive in their relations with surrounding sedentary populations of agriculturalists. Researchers' accounts can inadvertently promote such tribal essentialism when they focus on simple reciprocity and sharing behavior and neglect the range of other strategies that enable foragers to resist assimilation into the underclasses of Hindu society. Recent ethnographic research about exchange patterns among the nomadic Rāuté of western Nepal indicates that their productive strategy combines spread-net and ax hunting of monkeys, collection of forest vegetables, and barter for grain and other products. Although their internal social relations stress egalitarian sharing, Rāuté emphasize asymmetrical exchange strategies such as patronage, fictive kinship, and begging from surrounding Hindu agropastoralists. These flexible strategies of interethnic exchange enable the Rāuté to maintain a degree of ethnic autonomy that has been lost by other South Asian foragers. (Hunter-gatherers, South Asia, exchange theory, forager economics, cultural survival)

CHANGES IN FAMILY AND MARRIAGE IN A YANGZI DELTA FARMING COMMUNITY, 1930-1990

Eugene T. Murphy
Fairfield University

This article explores how marriage patterns and practices changed over the course of 60 years in Willow Pond Village (a pseudonym), a rice-farming community on the Yangzi Delta, 50 km west of Shanghai. Data gathered during eight months of fieldwork in 1990 reveal the intimate relationship between marriage and changes in the local political climate and illustrate the ways in which marriage reflects and reproduces the local social hierarchy. (Marriage, family, kinship, social stratification, China)

PERCEPTIONS OF NATURE AND RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION IN NEW CALEDONIA

Leah Sophie Horowitz
Australian National University

The history of the Kanak is inscribed in their landscape's features, which commemorate the passage and adventures of human and spiritual ancestors. Kanak speak of their natural surroundings as forming an essential part of their cultural heritage. Some young Kanak blame Western economic activities for environmental degradation, which they link to the loss of their culture. Kanak statements and actions concerning nature and the environment relate to their own definitions of those terms and the role of such concepts in defining their cultural identity. (Nature, environment, cultural identity, New Caledonia)

CREATING THE MORAL BODY: MISSIONARIES AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF POWER IN EARLY PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Wayne Fife
Memorial University of Newfoundland

British missionaries went to Papua New Guinea in order to create a new moral body: a Christian character that would fit into Great Britain's colonial world. Education by missionaries became, in an interpretation paralleling the theories of Michel Foucault, technologies of power for imposing particular forms of social discipline upon individuals so that they might want to become part of the institutional relationships that favored Christianity and colonialism at the expense of local forms of life. These technologies of power were established during the early stages of missionary education. (Missionaries, technologies of power, the moral body, colonialism, Papua New Guinea)