Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2017. x, 168 pp. US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-78694-2.
This edited collection, published online in 2016 and released as a hardback book by Routledge in 2017, makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning studies of masculinity in the Pacific and Oceania, and can be a useful text for teaching about gender in a way that grounds identities and constructions of gender in geo-political and historical contexts. Aletta Biersack and Martha Macintyre, both long-term researchers of gender in the Pacific, open the book by placing it in dialogue with other recent examinations of masculinity, introducing themes of colonial influence, Christianity, sports, violence, and labour. The chapters bring together themes of continuity and change across the Pacific Islands, with many chapters examining the impact of colonial interventions on forms of masculinity in contemporary Pacific contexts, including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa, Micronesia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Unmoored masculinities, with men caught between different value systems, and the impacts this has on relationality and sense of identity, is a significant theme across a number of chapters and has been a focus of much anthropological investigation into masculinity in recent years. Temporality is another significant axis of analysis, showing how ruptures caused by major economic interests in the region can be harmful but also lead to creative local responses.
The introduction reviews other recent studies into gender and masculinity, as well as concepts used in a number of chapters such as hegemonic masculinity, and introduces the question this book grapples with: “Do emergent masculinities signal a rupture or some continuity with past masculinities?” The temptation is to conclude that of course, there is a complex combination of both in many cases; however, each chapter unpicks the nuances of this with historical detail and ethnographic context, raising issues of race, national identity, export industries, urbanization, and globalized sporting practices showing how Pacific masculinities must be located according to the time and place in question whilst taking into account broader changes in political economy and the particular legacies of colonial ideologies.
Chapters by Henning Presterudstuen and Schieder (chapter 1), Calabro (chapter 2), and Raucholz (chapter 8) all examine how the embodied aspect of masculinity—as the body holds contested gendered positions—is used to manipulate and challenge dominant gender norms, and is the carrier of symbolic meanings. Chapters by Zimmer-Tamakoshi (chapter 3), Kocsberski and Curry (chapter 4), Jolly (chapter 6), and Gibbs (chapter 7) focus more on the longevity and displacement of particular values accorded to masculinity and how the values that different masculine practices take on shift in dynamic tension with capitalism and colonialism.
For example, Zimmer-Tamakoshi’s chapter offers a highly detailed ethnographic account of various kinds of masculinity amongst Gende migrants in Urban Highlands Papua New Guinea, demonstrating the cross-cutting issues of class, money, and migration in how younger generations establish their prestige and status. She strikes a careful balance between looking at the nuances amongst men and emerging power relations in relation to land associations and mining companies, whilst not overemphasizing their patriarchal positioning. Instead, Zimmer-Tamakoshi positions masculinity directly in relationship to women’s power. She exemplifies the ways men must respond to Gende women’s power, including their own bride price transactions tupoi (67). Zimmer-Tamakoshi’s overarching point that Gende men require women’s assistance in order to enact their masculinity, and not necessarily in a way that positions women as subordinate and secondary, is a novel one and offers a portrayal of masculinity as relational and not necessarily dominant over women in PNG.
Intergenerational comparison is a means of tracking how differences in men’s values have changed over time, particularly between generations in the Pacific that have seen significant change in the last hundred years. How younger men fare in comparison to their elders in light of the values that come with modernity is considered by George Curry and Gina Kocsberski. Through analyzing labour relations around a palm oil plantation in Papua New Guinea, their chapter hones in on different senses of obligation that young men feel towards others, and the extent to which older men incorporate younger men into existing structures of wealth circulation. They provide a sense of the anguish that some young men experience as a result of being caught between overlapping value systems of individualism versus reciprocity and the status derived from it, which features in a number of the PNG-focused chapters.
Like the first chapter’s focus on indigenized sports and bati ideology of men as protectors of tradition in Fiji (Henning Presterudstuen and Schieder), and the second chapter’s examination of the ambivalent relationship between rugby and Maori masculinity (Calabrò), chapter 5 brings together political nuances of temporal change with spatial locations as Johanna Schmidt analyzes notions of “maleness” or “femaleness” in the experiences of fa’afāfine both in Western Samoa and as diaspora to Aotearoa/New Zealand. As self-described by one of her interlocutors, fa’afāfine is “a Samoan person who’s physically male with a woman’s spirit.” The fa’afāfine identity manifested in Western Samoa involves males being “not-men” or “not-women” but is not strictly a third gender, nor equivalent directly to any Western identity. She suggests their gender identity is a combination of identifications with and negations of social norms, including manner of wearing clothes, performance of traditionally female tasks, but also preference for female company and enacting ways of being and thinking associated with women. Sexual desire for men is not a necessary aspect of being fa’afāfine and thus Schmidt discounts the Western homosexual example as a way of making sense of fa’afāfine. However, in the process of migration to Aotearoa/New Zealand, she tracks how fa’afāfine are forced to conform to more binary and dualist forms of gender, and heteronormative femininity is adopted by some, whilst others take on a dual positioning as “masculine men” while remaining fa’afāfine. The period of Schmidt’s research (2000–2002) means some contemporary creative expressions of fa’afāfine identity and community are not explored, such as the active voguing scene in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Nonetheless the chapter provides a thorough introduction to this identity, and a sympathetic portrayal of the diverse and fluid ways people inhabit their bodies in relationship to the normative context in which they exist.
Each chapter of this edited collection contains nuanced analysis of the contradictions and tensions at play with varying forms of masculinity responding to history and globalization whilst maintaining specific indigenous manifestations of gender. The poetics of relationships and lived experience for men across social and cultural contexts in the Pacific and the examination of economies and values that have affected Pacific countries in similar ways means this book is rich in comparative historical and ethnographic analysis. Successfully unravelling the impacts of colonialism, Christianity, and shifting political economies through indigenous iterations of masculinity, the chapters neither over emphasize external structural influences, nor suggest a complete eradication of indigenous social norms and practices with modernity.
Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh
The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand