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Australasia and the Pacific Islands, Book Reviews

Volume 94 – No. 3

UNEQUAL LIVES: Gender, Race and Class in the Western Pacific | Edited by Nicholas Bainton, Debra McDougall, Kalissa Alexeyeff, and John Cox

Pacific Series. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2021. xix, 560 pp. (Tables, maps, coloured photos.) US$80.00, paper. ISBN 9781760464103.


This collection of 15 excellent ethnographically grounded essays focuses on the ambiguous and transformative effects of modernities, mainly in Papua New Guinea, but in once case from the Solomon Islands. They were written in honour of Martha Macintyre, whose historically conscious work has led the way in studies of inequalities in gender, race, and class in the post-colonial Pacific Islands.

An introductory chapter by Nicholas Bainton and Debra McDougall locates the collection in terms of intersectionality and Pacific regional and global intensifications of inequality. The following chapters address a number of situations, but hold well to the central focus on the tension between old and new forms of inequality. Five chapters address inequalities which could be said to have in common the production of knowledge and the subsequent responses to it. John Aini and Paige West discuss a characteristic example of the negative impact that well-intended but ignorant foreign engagement can have on an Indigenous NGO. Similar issues arise in Simon Foale’s examination of the problem of reconciliation of technical versus cultural knowledge in environmental research and advocacy.  Susan Hemer critically reviews responses to tuberculosis in public health services and the underlying issues of inequality driving it in Papua New Guinea, with a focus on the Lihir mining area. Melissa Demian considers the positionality of anthropologists and their role as intermediaries and advocates with particular reference to Milne Bay Province.

Five chapters address the social impact of extractive industries and the new inequalities they create. Colin Filer analyzes the inequities within the mining industry workforce and the ways in which expatriate workers are favoured over qualified local men and women working in the industry. Dan Jorgensen traces a history of the changing impacts on the economic situation of the people of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mining region and its hinterland. This arises, among other things, from the company’s changes from providing housing and services for a residential workforce in Kiunga to a workforce fly-in-fly-out policy, most recently in response to COVID-19. Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi describes the histories of generations of Gende people and the changes wrought by the Ramu nickel mine on relations of authority between older and younger men, men and women, and marriage. Nicholas Bainton documents the efforts by local people to represent their interests to the company operating the Lihir gold mine, and the difficulties encountered on both sides. Michael Main considers the impacts of the liquefied natural gas extraction plant in Hela Province and the outcome of changing leadership system among the Huli.

Two chapters consider notions of moral economy and inequality.  Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington describe responses of mutual suspicion and jealousy, or fear of it, resulting from severe economic deprivation among Chambri people in a Madang peri-urban settlement. Gewertz and Errington have worked many years with the Chambri people, both in their Sepik River ancestral lands and lakes and in migrant communities—a people who, as do many in Melanesian cultures, idealize norms of equality and become discombobulated by their absence. From a similar perspective, John Cox examines the problematic development ideology among PNG’s nascent urban middle class in which those less fortunate are considered in need of moral as well as educational improvement.

Most of the chapters address aspects of gender inequality, and John Barker in particular analyzes outcomes of missionary moral values and the efforts to establish monogamous conjugality in Maisin society, a historical trend which has produced neo-traditional ideologies of women’s subordination throughout the Christian Pacific Islands. Gender disparities and tensions are also explicit in Debra McDougall’s chapter on the remarkable vernacular language education movement in Ranongga, Solomon Islands, noting that the Kulu Language Institute has, like other grassroots movements, evoked a response almost comparable to religious revivals, but in its case by re-valuing local ways of life in times of rapid social and economic change. A final chapter by Margaret Jolly reflects on the preceding chapters and the constellation of transformational forces on the intersecting production of economic, social, and gender inequality. Together these chapters provide an outstanding set of anthropological perspectives on the deep misunderstandings that exist between the bien pensant agents of development and the people upon whom their various developments are imposed.

The book contains a preface by the editors and a coda with a biographical interview with Martha Macintyre by Alex Golub, and seven essays written as tributes to her, by Chris Gregory, Bronwen Douglas, Kalissa Alexeyeff, John Cox, Michael Main, Sarah Richards-Hewat, and Dora Kuir-Aylus. The book  includes an impressive list of Macintyre’s work thus far. She is a particular hero of this reviewer as, in addition to her remarkable academic achievements and output, she has done a great deal of work as a consultant, an activity seen by some academic anthropologists as being of suspect probity. Macintyre’s work on mining operations and the police force in PNG, for example, demonstrates the important role an anthropologist can play, despite its frustrations, in development consulting when the work is done with a sharp critical perspective and deep knowledge of the development contexts. In the interview with Alex Golub, he questions the compromise that Macintyre admits with regard to undertaking consulting work,  proposing that “it is better to be an activist, pushing the process from outside” to which she replies: “But then you are outside and don’t have access to what is going on. Your knowledge is partial and skewed … I saw my role as an honest broker, I am deeply suspicious of people who see themselves as anthropological heroes for ‘their people’” (490–491).

The collection offers invaluable insight into the contextual circumstances of the converging inequalities described. It should be read, not only by students and scholars with anthropological interests in contemporary Pacific Island societies, but by economists and others working for mining companies, NGOs, and development agencies.


Penelope Schoeffel

National University of Samoa, Apia  


Last Revised: November 30, 2021
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