True transgressions: Refusal and recolonization in the narrative of a Papuan migrant "bighead"

Feminist Studies

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 511-534

  Polier, Nicole ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0032165936     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3178577     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 3.
2. For a discussion of different approaches to feminist oral history and difficulties in writing "by," "for," and "about" women, see Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck, introduction to Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1-7. Feminists writing from a variety of disciplines have cautioned against letting experience speak for itself. See, for instance, Patai and Gluck; Joan Scott, "Experience" (21-41), and Christina Crosby, "Dealing with Difference" (136-144), both in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992); Julie Stephens, "Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India," in Subaltern Studies Six, ed. Ranajit Guha (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92-121.
3. For a discussion of different approaches to feminist oral history and difficulties in writing "by," "for," and "about" women, see Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck, introduction to Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1-7. Feminists writing from a variety of disciplines have cautioned against letting experience speak for itself. See, for instance, Patai and Gluck; Joan Scott, "Experience" (21-41), and Christina Crosby, "Dealing with Difference" (136-144), both in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992); Julie Stephens, "Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India," in Subaltern Studies Six, ed. Ranajit Guha (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92-121.
4. For a discussion of different approaches to feminist oral history and difficulties in writing "by," "for," and "about" women, see Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck, introduction to Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1-7. Feminists writing from a variety of disciplines have cautioned against letting experience speak for itself. See, for instance, Patai and Gluck; Joan Scott, "Experience" (21-41), and Christina Crosby, "Dealing with Difference" (136-144), both in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992); Julie Stephens, "Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India," in Subaltern Studies Six, ed. Ranajit Guha (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92-121.
5. For a discussion of different approaches to feminist oral history and difficulties in writing "by," "for," and "about" women, see Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck, introduction to Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1-7. Feminists writing from a variety of disciplines have cautioned against letting experience speak for itself. See, for instance, Patai and Gluck; Joan Scott, "Experience" (21-41), and Christina Crosby, "Dealing with Difference" (136-144), both in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992); Julie Stephens, "Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India," in Subaltern Studies Six, ed. Ranajit Guha (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92-121.
6. For a discussion of different approaches to feminist oral history and difficulties in writing "by," "for," and "about" women, see Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck, introduction to Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1-7. Feminists writing from a variety of disciplines have cautioned against letting experience speak for itself. See, for instance, Patai and Gluck; Joan Scott, "Experience" (21-41), and Christina Crosby, "Dealing with Difference" (136-144), both in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992); Julie Stephens, "Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India," in Subaltern Studies Six, ed. Ranajit Guha (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92-121.
7. Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, "De/Colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women's Autobiographical Practices," in De/Colonizing the Subject, ed. Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xx.
8. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 36.
9. Throughout this text, foreign words appearing in italics are from neo-melanesin tok pisin, or pidgin English, a lingua franca in PNG.
10. This is a census estimate. Papua New Guineans do not generally celebrate birthdays, and Stella does not know the actual year of her birth, although she can identify age-mates born around the time when she was.
11. Haus tambaran is pidgin for men's ritual houses, and I am using it as a convenient gloss. There are, however, a variety of terms in the Faiwol language to describe both the houses themselves and the stages of initiation through which a boy passes en route to adulthood.
12. Ritual knowledge and male initiation among Min groups is well documented in the ethnographic literature. For those groups culturally and linguistically close to the Faiwolmin, see, for instance, Fredrik Barth, Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Dan Jorgensen, Taro and Arrows: Order and Entropy in Telefol Religion (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1981).
13. Ritual knowledge and male initiation among Min groups is well documented in the ethnographic literature. For those groups culturally and linguistically close to the Faiwolmin, see, for instance, Fredrik Barth, Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Dan Jorgensen, Taro and Arrows: Order and Entropy in Telefol Religion (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1981).
14. For a discussion of colonization among the Faiwolmin, see Nicole Polier, "When Australia Was the Big Name for Papua New Guinea: The Colonial Constitution of Faiwolmin Subjects," Journal of Historical Sociology 8 (fall 1995): 257-77.
15. The imposition of colonial rule met with mixed results and reviews from indigenous subjects. For a discussion, see ibid.
16. The educational system in PNG is the product of Australian colonialism and European missionaries. The access of girls to primary education has historically been an issue in mostly rural PNG, divided along fault lines of gender and generation. Parents concerned that too much formal education promotes bikhet ideas and behavior in girls past primary school also fear that schooling will distance girls from the subsistence sector, where they are badly needed. For a discussion, see Eileen Wormald, "Rhetoric Reality and a Dilemma: Women and Politics in Papua New Guinea," in Women and Politics Worldwide, ed. Barbara J. Nelson and Najma Chowdhury (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 560-75.
17. Georges Delbos, The Mustard Seed: From a French Mission to a Papuan Church, 1885-1985 (Port Moresby, PNG: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1985); Nicole Polier, The Mines of Min: History, Gender, and Social Transformation among the Faiwolmin of Papua New Guinea (Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 1992).
18. Georges Delbos, The Mustard Seed: From a French Mission to a Papuan Church, 1885-1985 (Port Moresby, PNG: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1985); Nicole Polier, The Mines of Min: History, Gender, and Social Transformation among the Faiwolmin of Papua New Guinea (Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 1992).
19. Richard Jackson, Ok Tedi: The Pot of Gold (Port Moresby, PNG: University of Papua New Guinea, 1982), 44-45.
20. As a village elder in Golgobip expressed it to me gently but emphatically, if a local woman left the village to satisfy her curiosity about a wider world, as I was doing, she would be rounded up and met with sudden and severe punishment. He was articulating a mature cultural relativism about that wider world, on one hand, and naturalizing the local legitimacy of male dominance over kinswomen, on the other. I did not fully grasp the dimensions of that dominance until I met Stella, however.
21. Barbara Jones, Consuming Society: Food and Illness among the Faiwol (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1980).
22. Australian Baptist Missionary Society, "Responsibility in New Guinea" (unpublished report, 1965). For a discussion of the cultural consequences of Rebaibal, or religious revival, for Telefolmin, see David Hyndman, Ancestral Rain Forests and the Mountain of Gold (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 134-36; Dan Jorgensen, "Life on the Fringe: History and Society in Telefolmin," in The Plight of Peripheral Peoples, ed. Robert Gordon (Cambridge, Mass.: Cultural Survival, 1981), 59-80.
23. Australian Baptist Missionary Society, "Responsibility in New Guinea" (unpublished report, 1965). For a discussion of the cultural consequences of Rebaibal, or religious revival, for Telefolmin, see David Hyndman, Ancestral Rain Forests and the Mountain of Gold (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 134-36; Dan Jorgensen, "Life on the Fringe: History and Society in Telefolmin," in The Plight of Peripheral Peoples, ed. Robert Gordon (Cambridge, Mass.: Cultural Survival, 1981), 59-80.
24. Australian Baptist Missionary Society, "Responsibility in New Guinea" (unpublished report, 1965). For a discussion of the cultural consequences of Rebaibal, or religious revival, for Telefolmin, see David Hyndman, Ancestral Rain Forests and the Mountain of Gold (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 134-36; Dan Jorgensen, "Life on the Fringe: History and Society in Telefolmin," in The Plight of Peripheral Peoples, ed. Robert Gordon (Cambridge, Mass.: Cultural Survival, 1981), 59-80.
25. Stella's choice was a compromise and a standoff with kinsmen; but for her, the choice was not a satisfactory one.
26. As Susan Gal, in "Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender," in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 175-204, has argued, gender relations are partly constructed through culturally legitimated expressions for women and men. Among the Faiwolmin, men take the floor publicly and exercise a monopoly on certain forms of knowledge and its transmission. Women and men compose song, women express themselves privately through the exchange of anecdotes and compose mourning narratives in public performances of weeping. The past is not inert in Stella's stori but is actively reworked in the present, and the listeners can momentarily imagine how things might have happened differently for Stella. She uses her scriptural knowledge to stori about her own life and create it as a narrative, in the context of a multi-ethnic born-again diaspora of migrants who stori as part of Christian practice. For a discussion of the connections between gender, speech, and power, see Gal. Writing of the Solomon Islands, Roger Keesing argued that Kwaio women's apparent "muteness" is constituted in a political context that includes both Kwaio men's linguistic dominance and the gender bias of the ethnographic encounter itself. Kwaio women found a voice in private visits with a female ethnographer, in which they felt free to express themselves in sympathetic, same-sex company. Faiwolmin men's sexual and linguistic dominance has subdued but not silenced Stella; the liberated zone of our semiprivate encounters enabled her to speak. What women subjects say about themselves, as well as what they do not, needs to be understood in the context of an internally differentiated social landscape. See Roger Keesing, "Kwaio Women Speak: The Micropolitics of Autobiography in a Solomon Islands Society," American Anthropologist 87 (March 1985): 27-39.
27. As Susan Gal, in "Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender," in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 175-204, has argued, gender relations are partly constructed through culturally legitimated expressions for women and men. Among the Faiwolmin, men take the floor publicly and exercise a monopoly on certain forms of knowledge and its transmission. Women and men compose song, women express themselves privately through the exchange of anecdotes and compose mourning narratives in public performances of weeping. The past is not inert in Stella's stori but is actively reworked in the present, and the listeners can momentarily imagine how things might have happened differently for Stella. She uses her scriptural knowledge to stori about her own life and create it as a narrative, in the context of a multi-ethnic born-again diaspora of migrants who stori as part of Christian practice. For a discussion of the connections between gender, speech, and power, see Gal. Writing of the Solomon Islands, Roger Keesing argued that Kwaio women's apparent "muteness" is constituted in a political context that includes both Kwaio men's linguistic dominance and the gender bias of the ethnographic encounter itself. Kwaio women found a voice in private visits with a female ethnographer, in which they felt free to express themselves in sympathetic, same-sex company. Faiwolmin men's sexual and linguistic dominance has subdued but not silenced Stella; the liberated zone of our semiprivate encounters enabled her to speak. What women subjects say about themselves, as well as what they do not, needs to be understood in the context of an internally differentiated social landscape. See Roger Keesing, "Kwaio Women Speak: The Micropolitics of Autobiography in a Solomon Islands Society," American Anthropologist 87 (March 1985): 27-39.
28. Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 14.
29. For a contrasting view, see Behar, 331.
30. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966); cf. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 68-90.
31. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966); cf. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 68-90.
32. Cf. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
33. Thompson, 382.
34. Scott, 77; see also Taussig.
35. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
36. Mohanty, 33.
37. See, for instance, Sistren with Honor Ford-Smith and Gloria Anzaldua, cited in Mohanty, 35; and Rigoberta Menchu, I, Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso Press, 1984).
38. Mohanty, 38.
39. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands, La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).
40. Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies 22, (February 1991): 189-224, cited in Mohanty, 38.
41. Mohanty, 35.
42. Watson and Smith.
43. The opposition between consent and coercion is especially facile, and false, as Bourdieu has argued, with respect to women's experience of what he calls "symbolic" violence-that is, the internalization and legitimation of precisely those forms and relations of dominance. For discussion, see Bourdieu, 171-72.
44. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation)," in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 180.
45. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Verso, 1987), 22.
46. Stephens, 100-5.
47. For a similar point about the need for specifying resistance culturally and historically, see Lila Abu-Lughod, "The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women," American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 41-56.
48. See Menchu.
49. Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Let Me Speak! A Testimony of a Woman of the Bolivian Tin Mines (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
50. Sidney Mintz, Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 210-53.
51. June Nash, I Spent My Life in the Mines (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).