Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. x, 212 pp. (Maps, figures, coloured photos) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 9780520355514.
In writing both eloquent and meticulous, Holly Wardlow probes the effects of HIV on the Huli of Papua New Guinea’s Hela Province. Based upon periodic research from 2004 to 2013, she focusses on “women’s encounters with HIV—as a pathogen, site of family and government discipline, and affective and moral experience” (3).
Wardlow had worked among the Huli in the 1990s. When she returned in 2004 after an absence of seven years, she found much to be awry: elections were corrupt; government services, absent; centres and schools, closed and ransacked; armed holdups, frequent (and characterized by rape and HIV infection); home invasions, recurrent. That said, matters greatly improved with the assignment of a police mobile squad. Widely welcomed, the enhanced police presence was attendant on the construction of a vast liquified natural gas project. Moreover, this project and two other nearby resource extraction sites, though not on Huli land, provided the Huli with a measure of prosperity. Significantly, these projects also supported regional health services, including provision of the antiretroviral drugs (ARV) that have made HIV manageable.
Wardlow provides richly detailed case studies, based on semi-structured interviews, of Huli engagements with HIV. Indeed, by documenting the vulnerability of women to this infection, she provides witness to their lives—their afflictions and their copings. Affecting these lives were structural factors: “women’s early marriage, their lower educational and employment levels, their economic dependency and lesser control over land and other assets, and their inability to control when and how sex takes place all contribute to their greater vulnerability, as do masculine prestige structures that reward men for acquiring many sexual partners” (102–103). Certainly, these factors might concatenate in different ways, yet the outcomes frequently converged.
One set of cases reflected the recognition of an emerging hierarchy: that the resource extractions sites have created a class of wealthy non-Huli landowners. Drawn to these as dependents, Huli men sought to oblige their patrons. Prompted by their patrons and by the promise of collecting high bride prices, these Huli dependents pressured and inveigled a succession of their young Huli female kin to marry polygamous—and promiscuous—landowners. As a result of this traffic, young Huli women were often infected by HIV-positive husbands. And, despite promises of a life of affluence, the young women might be put to hard work raising their husbands’ sweet potatoes and contributing further to their wealth.
Another set of cases reflected the desire for a relatively egalitarian and companionable relationship. In one instance, a woman had been introduced into mutual oral sex by her husband. That this was both unconventional and pleasurable contributed to their sense that “they had achieved a special and rare degree of intimacy, shared understanding, and trust in their marriage that other couples didn’t have” (80). Correspondingly, he put her in charge of a small trade store while he travelled as a coffee buyer. This helped create a sense that they “were striving as a team for upward mobility” (80). However, she was subsequently shocked when, without warning or discussion, he took a second wife. Although this accorded with his success as a coffee buyer, she sought revenge. To get back at him, she had an affair that resulted in the demise of her marriage; subsequently, she had numerous affairs and contracted HIV—whether from her husband or from her partners wasn’t clear.
Tellingly, in these cases, women did not feel that they had been properly looked after—cared for— whether by kin or by husband. Their sense of grievance related to a central concept in Huli life. As Wardlow compellingly demonstrates in an earlier book (Wayward Women, University of California Press, 2006), the idiom of the “fence” was essential to Huli ethical conduct: it was “at once disciplinary, protective, nurturing, and generative of proper purpose” (3). More specifically, for women there was a felt need that they be “‘fenced in’ by specific rules and by the disciplinary practices of others (especially brothers and husbands) in order to behave morally” (159).
These ideas were also applied by HIV-positive women to their ARV treatments. They believed “their ARVs would work best, and that the virus would remain ‘asleep’ or ‘fenced in by the medicine’ if they could keep themselves from feeling ‘bad’ emotions” (124). Hence, they should avoid upsetting thoughts like the anger that might erupt when others disparaged them for their infected status. And, since Huli women took pride in a forceful response to affronts, to walk away from insult meant that anger augmented by humiliation was especially difficult to control.
This was hardly the only difficulty HIV-positive Huli women faced. For some—those whose kin regarded them as to blame for their condition—physical survival became a struggle and a daily concern. For most, the easy sociability with friends expressed through small gifts became difficult to afford. Even those doing well on the ARVs might be charged with trying to pass as normal. Unfortunately, there was little opportunity for Huli women living with HIV to find solidarity or collective experience with each other. In these circumstances, phone friends—often people one had not met directly—were important for companionship and for avoiding worry and other troubling feelings. (We learn of the sad case of the woman who lost her cell phone and with it the numbers of her phone friends whom she could no longer contact.) As Wardlow grimly notes: “The one benefit of HIV stigma, such as it was, was that many people viewed the HIV-positive as unmarriageable” (145).
Throughout, Wardlow skillfully weaves in relevant comparison and theory. Thus, there is a discussion of the gender implications of resource extraction in Papua New Guinea and in Africa; of anger as considered in feminist writings; of types of ethics; of sanitary citizens.
Wardlow’s intent is to highlight “women’s resilience, resolve, and humor in the face of vulnerability and violence” (26). In this moving, culturally subtle, and sophisticated account, she clearly meets this admirable objective.
Deborah Gewertz
Amherst College, Amherst
Frederick Errington
Trinity College, Hartford