GENDER VIOLENCE & HUMAN RIGHTS: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. Edited by Aletta Biersack, Margaret Jolly, Martha Macintyre. Canberra: ANU Press, 2016. xiii, 384 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) Free, eBook: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/gender-violence-human-rights. ISBN 978-1-760460-71-6.
TRANSFORMATIONS OF GENDER IN MELANESIA. Pacific Series. Edited by Martha Macintyre, Ceridwen Spark. Acton, ACT: ANU Press, 2017. xii, 189 pp. Free, eBook: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/pacific-series/transformations-gender-melanesia. ISBN 978-1-760460-89-1.
These two edited volumes share a publisher, a co-editor, and many theoretical and political concerns. Both include some excellent contributions. However, the first, Gender Violence & Human Rights: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, stands out: tightly and brilliantly organized around Sally Engel Merry’s “vernacularization” thesis, it engages deeply with the question of how “global” human rights discourses are translated and incorporated into “local” contexts. The second, Transformations of Gender in Melanesia, is less cohesive as a volume, but can be productively viewed as an exploration of how gender norms intersect with class, regional, and racial identities in PNG, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Vanuatu, and West Papua. I will discuss each book in turn.
Merry’s thesis, advanced most prominently in her 2006 book Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice, is that because the institutions and discourses of human rights are culturally grounded in Euro-American secular liberalism, they must be “translated” into local cultural frameworks to make them “intelligible and palatable to those living outside a Euro-American cultural and historical milieu” (33). Central to Merry’s vision of how this happens is the role of “middle figures”—those who live between worlds and can help do the difficult work of vernacularization. In Melanesia, these individuals are often—though not always, as the volume shows—cosmopolitan elites who have been educated overseas and have a personal interest in allying themselves with global institutions. One problem with this arrangement is, of course, that as the cultural divide between elites and the “grassroots” grows, so too does the salience of the argument that concepts of human rights and gender violence are foreign, neocolonial impositions that insult indigenous cultural values and threaten male leaders’ control over community justice.
Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and Fiji are culturally diverse independent nations whose constitutions guarantee gender equality. All three countries have ratified the UN Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Violence Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Despite formal equality, these countries (most notoriously, Papua New Guinea) have high rates of gendered violence, including wife-beating, sexual assault, and child abuse. The gap between formal equality of the genders and people’s actual experiences has long been attributed to the persistence of “traditional culture” (kastom in Vanuatu and PNG) and its reification through institutions such as village courts. While they are not supposed to hear cases involving rape, assault, and child abuse, in practice they frequently do. Gender-based violence, because it is so often linked to marriage, bridewealth, and relations between families or clans, may be treated as a private or local matter that should be dealt with through community structures and in a customary idiom. Thus the involvement of “outside” institutions, discourses, and actors may be seen as an imposition and a denial of local (male) authority. This is a key dynamic that recurs throughout the book.
Linda Newland’s chapter argues that in iTaukei (indigenous Fijian) villages, both customary and church-based forms of mediation endanger women and girls because their objective is to preserve relations between men and to buttress chiefly authority—not to provide justice for individuals. The bulubulu (whale’s tooth) reconciliation ceremony was one of Merry’s primary examples of how an indigenous social practice can be used to smuggle in concepts of human rights and social justice. Newland strongly disputes this, arguing that village and family “harmony” are seen as dependent on male authority.
The legitimacy of certain forms of male violence within Melanesian communities is a second theme that runs through many of the chapters. Men’s discipline of women and children is seen, by perpetrators and often by the wider community, as a moral imperative—a way of preserving a social and symbolic order being ripped apart by change. Recasting male violence as deviant and antisocial can be difficult. Contemporary political and economic realities must be understood as well. Nicole George’s chapter describes how, in post-coup Fiji, “the lines that define military and civilian aspects of social and cultural life become more comprehensively blurred [and] violent expressions of masculine authority have become normalized with devastating effects” (208). The apparent increase in violence against women must be understood in the context of women’s diminished economic capacity. Increased military spending and structural adjustment diverted public funds from social welfare institutions, and political instability discouraged international investment in manufacturing and tourism.
The book includes two chapters examining changing masculine identities. The first, by Phillip Gibbs, discusses church-run men’s groups in Western Province, PNG, and how many men see their roles as leaders, protectors, and peacemakers slipping away. Growing inequality between men is discussed by John Taylor and Natalie Arujo in their chapter on sorcery in Vanuatu. As sorcery techniques become “democratized”—decoupled from chiefly power and secret societies, and available on a more or less open market—disempowered young men use sorcery to gain sexual access to women, subvert the powers of the state and chiefly authority, and compete with other men for status.
While community-based justice, indigenous values, and customary practices are often cast as “part of the problem,” Katherine Lepani’s chapter on HIV and gender violence argues that connections to place and indigenous social forms do not necessarily reinforce male dominance and female disempowerment. Discussing the matrilineal Trobriand Islands, Lepani provides an important rebuttal to discourses that equate the local with patriarchy and violence against women.
While the first five chapters present case studies grounded in individual countries, the contributions by Jean Zorn and Aletta Biersack take a comparative perspective. Zorn’s chapter describes how judges throughout the Pacific have translated and integrated CEDAW (the UN Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination against Women) into domestic law. She identifies specific ways that judges employ CEDAW in their decisions—as precedent, as authority to change common law, and as if it were domestic statute. While the cases she cites are inspiring, she notes that “[t]he effect of judicial decisions implementing CEDAW has not gone much beyond the legal system itself” (523). Biersack’s chapter also looks at the limits of legislative remedies, arguing that legal recognition of human rights and sanction of violence against women are ineffectual without institution building and transformation of norms.
Margaret Jolly’s concluding essay is thoughtful, and includes some important criticisms of the vernacularization thesis. The absence from the volume of a comment from Merry herself is disappointing, since the authors’ and editors’ engagement with her work is so thorough.
Transformations of Gender in Melanesia is more eclectic. Its focus is more on cultural constructions of gender and how modernity and development do—or do not—create new forms of masculinity and femininity. The book starts promisingly with an excellent chapter by Stephanie Lusby analyzing how securitization and security discourse work to legitimate violence against the socially marginal in Papua New Guinea. This chapter, in and of itself, is worth the price of the book: drawing on interviews with low-paid guards in the private security industry, Lusby explores how the imperative of “maintaining law and order” is used to justify everything from punitive rape and wife-beating to abuse of asylum seekers in the Manus detention center. Lusby shows how porous the boundaries are between domestic, political, state, and communal violence, and reminds us that men in PNG, too, are victims of violence. Poor and working-class men in PNG are, like women, presented with diverse options for constructing a masculine identity, but are seriously constrained in their ability to live up to social ideals.
Jenny Munro presents the case of educated Dani men in Papua, Indonesia and their struggles to embody a more positive, nonviolent form of masculinity. Despite their intellectual commitment to more egalitarian marital relationships, these men struggle to put their values into practice due to the structural violence they face as racialized subjects in a politically repressive settler colony. John Cox discusses education as a force for gendered transformation through discussion of a grassroots kindergarten in the rural Solomon Islands. Based on a very brief period of fieldwork, this chapter presents largely speculative musings on social change, but includes some interesting thoughts on the (over-?) valuation of formal education in Melanesia. He also critiques the common assumption that progressive transformation must be mediated by urban elites.
Several contributions share a concern with “exceptional” women and the structural barriers they face due to gender: female political candidates (Soaki); educated urban women (Spark); young women leaders and activists (Brimacombe). All capture important contemporary trends toward greater independence for women in the region, mapping some of the opportunities for and barriers to solidarity between women.
The volume concludes with “Lewa Was Mama (Beloved Guardian Mother),” a beautiful auto-ethnographic poem in Tok Pisin (with English translation) by Michelle Nayahamui Rooney. Written in the aftermath of the public lynching of Kepari Leniata, a PNG woman accused of sorcery, the poem’s protagonist is offered love magic by an old woman who sees she is being mistreated by her partner. The poem describes magical transactions between women as a form of female relationality and care, and women’s indigenous spirituality as a shield against male domination.
The figure of the downtrodden, self-sacrificing “mama” is ubiquitous in PNG fiction, song, poetry, and journalism. Upwardly mobile women often seek to distinguish themselves from their grandmothers who, while they may be loved and appreciated, are also frequently cast as backward and oppressed. In her commentary on the poem, Rooney notes “how narratives of ‘women’s empowerment’ potentially can work to diminish the relationships that women draw on for mutual support” (183). In discourse, the “modern woman” is contrasted with the “rural mama.” In reality, Rooney suggests, they work to constitute one another.
Put together, these two volumes evince a tempered optimism about the struggle to create a more equal future in Melanesia. As Jean Zorn writes in her chapter, “One wishes that the future would not take so long to arrive” (263).
Barbara Andersen
Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
pp. 204-208