Pacific Series. Acton: ANU Press, 2017. xxix, 292 pp. (Table, map, coloured photos.) AUD$58.00, paper. ISBN 9781760461331.
Some forty years ago, Annette Weiner made the audacious claim that the objects made by women in Oceanic cultures symbolized a form of cosmic reproductive power comparable to the political power exercised by men. While lacking the durability and history of valuables exchanged by men in the famed kula network, bundles of dried banana leaves and brightly coloured fibre skirts exchanged in the hundreds at mortuary ceremonies in the Trobriand Islands formed an analogous type of “women’s wealth.” While Weiner’s thesis was soon challenged on both ethnographic and theoretical grounds, it had the merit of drawing attention to the practical and symbolic associations between objects, ordinary and otherwise, and the construction of gender.
Sinuous Objects returns to Weiner’s concern, most directly in two chapters focused on the Trobriand Islands, and more generally in terms of the cultural significance and social impact of women’s products in Pacific societies. The editors clearly establish the key themes in the brief introduction. These themes are reliably picked up by the authors and summed up in Margaret Jolly’s epilogue, providing an unusual degree of thematic coherence for a collection of ethnographic essays. The authors generally agree that women’s products cannot be regarded specifically as “women’s wealth” for a variety of reasons (for instance, the fact that they often are exchanged by and between men, sold as commodities, and so forth). All the same, objects such as tapa cloth, mats, string bags, and clay cooking pots express women’s bodies, labour, relationships, and value in intimate and myriad ways. Moreover, they do so responsively in terms of the changing circumstances women face in the Pacific as elsewhere.
The essays focus on women’s objects in three regions. The first two essays most directly address Weiner’s analysis of Trobriand doba (banana leaf bundles and skirts). Katherine Lepani documents both the durability and flexibility of women’s exchanges in sagali (mortuary ceremonies), focusing upon the use of cheap Chinese-manufactured cloth alongside banana leaf bundles. Rather than a replacement of traditional wealth, she argues that women have adapted the cloth as a complementary exchange item, along with cash. Michelle McCarthy discusses a parallel development: the rejection of mortuary exchanges (and thus doba) by an increasing number of villages. This change corresponds to an increasing acceptance of evangelical Christianity by Trobriand Islanders, and is perhaps the greatest challenge to Weiner’s thesis that the sagali exchanges form the very foundation of the reproduction of Trobriand society. McCarthy suggests that the picture is more complex and better understood as women adjusting their forms of participation in kin networks and obligations over time, a process that has in fact been continuously affecting the nature of sagali and other Trobriand “traditions” since colonial contact.
The second section shifts to nearby Collingwood Bay, located on the New Guinea mainland to the west of the Trobriands. Anna-Karina Hermkens summarizes the central roles painted bark cloth (tapa) plays in the daily, ceremonial, and political lives of the Maisin people. While it is tempting to regard tapa as a type of “women’s wealth,” Hermkens concludes that “Ultimately, it is about the complementarity of Maisin gender relations and the significance of women’s work in the making and wearing of clan tapa” (118), as well as a powerful outlet for women’s creativity that simultaneously nurtures her family and herself. Maisin have long exchanged tapa cloth for objects made by neighbouring Collingwood Bay people, most notably clay cooking pots manufactured by women in Wanigela to the north. Elizabeth Bonshek documents how this regional trading system in general and Wanigela pots in particular have been destabilized over the years, most recently by inflation in the value of Maisin tapa which has proven much easier to sell in the tourist and international art market. And in the 1990s tapa was heavily promoted by international environmental activists supporting the Maisin’s campaign to prevent industrial logging of their lands. Moving to the tip of the Bay, Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone discusses the manufacture and use of more ubiquitous women’s objects—string bags and pandanus mats—among the Korafe people. While “ordinary,” such objects require considerable skill and time to produce. They “embody the values of women’s work and express their intentionality and agency” (175); as with Maisin tapa and Wanigela pots, however, they do not comprise “a separate realm in which women compete among themselves for power and prestige” (175).
The last group of papers concern iconic women’s products in Polynesian communities. Fanny Wonu Veys explores how koloa in Tonga (precious objects, notably tapa and mats) have been defined over time. Echoing Lepani’s essay, she notes that the definition of koloa has been elastic, encompassing new women’s arts associated with Christianity, such as quilts. She concludes that koloa “indexes the mana of Tongan women by virtue of the work and love … they have put into it” (203). Ping-Ann Addo also focuses on koloa by examining the life course of a distinguished Tongan elder. Deeply devoted to the church, Kalo created and gifted wealth “to respond to, but also to redirect, the life course of others in her kin group based on their shared cultural values” (215). As Kalo transitioned into an ancestor herself, her koloa passed on elements of her knowledge and her mana to her daughters and their descendants in turn. From this perspective, koloa looks very much like “women’s wealth” in Weiner’s sense. In the final essay, Jane Horan provides an account of a male rite of passage conducted by Cook Island residents in Auckland. Unlike other life-passage events, the haircutting ceremony involves large displays and gifts of finely stitched quilts, considered the most prestigious valuables made by women. Horan traces the origins of the quilts in the early nineteenth century conversion of both the faith and fabrics used by Cook Islanders. As in the past, such tivivai express femaleness in the course of confirming relationships.
Sinuous Objects is beautifully adorned with full-colour photographs as well as poems composed by local artists. The volume will appeal not just to regional specialists but also undergraduate students in courses on the Pacific, arts, and women. Like other recent publications from ANU Press, this wonderful book is available as a free download from the Press’s website (press.anu.edu.au).
John Barker
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada