UNEQUAL LIVES GENDER, RACE AND CLASS IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC UNEQUAL LIVES GENDER, RACE AND CLASS IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC EDITED BY NICHOLAS BAINTON, DEBRA MCDOUGALL, KALISSA ALEXEYEFF AND JOHN COX PACIFIC SERIES Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760464103 ISBN (online): 9781760464110 WorldCat (print): 1231438133 WorldCat (online): 1231438255 DOI: 10.22459/UE.2020 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press Cover artwork: John Siune, Papua New Guinea, 1965–2016. Boi pren na girl Pren Tupela I stap long Port Morsbi city. Tupela lusim pasin bilong ples na kisim pasin bilong wait man (Boyfriend and girlfriend live in Port Moresby city. They leave traditional ways behind and take on whiteman style) 1999. Synthetic polymer paint on yellow medium weight cardboard, 90 x 65cm. Purchased 2017, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. © Estate of John Siune Photograph: Natasha Harth, QAGOMA This edition © 2021 ANU Press Contents Preface: Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, Friend: Essays in Honour of Martha Macintyre . vii Prologue: Pragmatism, Prescience and Principle . xi Neil Maclean 1 . Unequal Lives in the Western Pacific . 1 Nicholas Bainton and Debra McDougall 2 . ‘I Will Be Travelling to Kavieng!’: Work, Labour and Inequality in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea . 47 Paige West and John Aini 3 . The Unequal Place of Anthropology in Cross‑Disciplinary Research on Environmental Management in the Pacific and What to Do About It . 77 Simon Foale 4 . The Problem of the Semi‑Alienable Anthropologist . 109 Melissa Demian 5 . Global Health, Tuberculosis and Local Health Campaigns: Reinforcing and Reshaping Health and Gender Inequalities in Lihir, Papua New Guinea . 131. Susan R . Hemer 6 . The Missionary’s Dilemma: A Short History of Christian Marriage and its Impact upon Gender Equality in Maisin Society . .. 157 John Barker 7 . Gendered Ambition and Disappointment: Women and Men in a Vernacular Language Education Movement in Melanesia . 183 Debra McDougall 8 . Stingy Egalitarianism: Precarity and Jealousy at the Sisiak Settlement, Madang, Papua New Guinea . 213 Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington 9 . Inequalities of Aspiration: Class, Cargo and the Moral Economy of Development in Papua New Guinea . 237 John Cox 10 . Exiles and Empty Houses: Contingent Events and Their Aftermath in the Ok Tedi Hinterland . 267 Dan Jorgensen 11 . Transforming Inequalities and Uncertainty: Gender, Generational and Class Dimensions in the Gende’s Longue Durée . 305 Laura Zimmer‑Tamakoshi 12 . From Donation to Handout: Resource Wealth and Transformations of Leadership in Huli Politics . 335 Michael Main 13 . Measuring Mobilities and Inequalities in Papua New Guinea’s Mining Workforce . 359 Colin Filer 14 . Menacing the Mine: Double Asymmetry and Mutual Incomprehension in Lihir . 401. Nicholas Bainton 15 . Intersecting Inequalities, Moving Positionalities: An Interlude . 439 Margaret Jolly Coda: A Legacy of Engaged Anthropology Encountering Anthropology: An Interview with Martha Macintyre . 471 Martha Macintyre and Alex Golub Personal Reflections and Tributes to Martha Macintyre First Contact with Martha . 505 Chris Gregory Martha and Me in the 1990s . 509 Bronwen Douglas Humour, Homes and Gardens: Martha, Feminism and Anthropology . 521 Kalissa Alexeyeff I First Met Martha Macintyre Twice: Or How I Became an Anthropologist . 527 John Cox What Would Martha Do? Confessions of a Hypochondriac in the Field . 531 Michael Main Martha, My Mentor . 537 Sarah Richards‑Hewat Martha: My Friend, My Role Model . 541 Dora Kuir‑Ayius The Work of Martha Macintyre, So Far . 545 Contributors . 555 Preface: Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, Friend: Essays in Honour of Martha Macintyre This volume emerges from a two-day gathering in February 2019 at the University of Melbourne to celebrate the work of Martha Macintyre, whose four decades of groundbreaking scholarship exemplify the contributions that anthropologists make to grappling with the challenges of inequality. The first day involved the presentation of tributes and celebratory papers by close colleagues, friends and former students, some of which can be found at the end of this volume. The day concluded with a celebratory dinner that featured somewhat raucous (and largely unpublishable) informal speeches by Colin Filer, Margaret Jolly, Mary Patterson and Deborah Gewertz. The second day comprised a scholarly workshop titled ‘The persistence of inequality in the Pacific’, in reference to Martha’s seminal 1998 paper on the persistence of gender inequality in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and her enduring ethnographic attention to the issue of inequality in its many guises. Crossing the boundaries between academic and applied work, Martha’s research has focused on some of the most pressing problems that have been faced by Papua New Guineans: poverty, ill health, criminal violence and police violence, environmental destruction and the impacts of resource extraction. Throughout her corpus, she has tracked the effects of unequal power relationships between men and women. Whether writing of classic anthropological subjects such as Massim exchange and mortuary ritual or gender relations, masculinity, health and medicine, human rights, law and order, mining and development or political ecology, Martha has investigated the ways that unequal social relationships within and beyond indigenous societies generate physical, structural and symbolic vii UNEQUAL LIVES violence. Her work highlights distinctively Melanesian understandings of personhood but also always analyses cultural difference as emerging within a broader context of historical change. In an era when anthropology, generally, and Melanesian anthropology, in particular, has tended towards abstractions—grand theorisations of the nature of the person, the cosmos or social relations—and where ethnographic detail is sometimes valued only for the ways it serves theory, Martha has given primacy to these wicked real-world problems of unequal social relations. She cuts through assumptions that are often taken for granted and prevailing ideologies to grasp better the experiences, frustrations and perspectives of those people that she writes about and collaborates with. Indeed, the force of her writing often comes from her indignation at the injustice of a world in which some lives are valued more than others, and access to resources and opportunities flow from these valuations. Martha has continued to return to PNG, which is by no means an easy place to conduct research. Her sustained on-the-ground engagement with her ethnographic interlocutors, Papua New Guinean colleagues and co-researchers is evident in her writing, which is incisive and sophisticated but always written with a broader audience in mind. Martha is a former president of the Australian Anthropological Society, and she was editor of its flagship journal, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, from 2008 to 2015. In 2012, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and she is a Life Fellow of the Australian Anthropological Society and the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania. She has inspired several generations of anthropologists with a remarkable legacy of teaching and mentoring. Moreover, she has been instrumental in laying down the foundations for a future generation of anthropologists to find new ways of making anthropology relevant and useful in the lives of others. Here, we have merely sketched the contours of this remarkable career— we can do no better than to point readers to Neil Maclean’s perceptive Prologue to discover Martha’s multifaceted scholarship. The first chapter of this collection then orientates readers to the question of inequality in the Western Pacific, past and present, to situate the substance of this volume and the focus of Martha’s research. The longer chapters that comprise this book take issues that have been at the core of her work as a starting point for exploring multiple dynamics and scales of inequality as we enter the viii Preface third decade of the twenty-first century. Margaret Jolly’s characteristically cogent Interlude provides a moment to reflect upon the connecting themes throughout the volume, followed by a coda comprising an edited interview with Martha that charts her experiences and encounters with anthropology and a bibliography of her work to date. This provides the setting—or the mise en scène—for a series of personal tributes to Martha as scholar, teacher, mentor and friend. Nick Bainton, Debra McDougall, Kalissa Alexeyeff, and John Cox December 2020 Note: January 2021 It is with deep sorrow we acknowledge one of our contributors who died in the days before this volume went to press. Fred Errington was a great friend to all of us and, together with the love of his life Deborah Gewertz, produced foundational studies of class and social change in Melanesia. Fred was a towering figure in anthropology and worked to encourage others and nurture their ideas. This volume carries the imprint of his collegiality and scholarship. ix Prologue: Pragmatism, Prescience and Principle Neil Maclean The advantage of reflecting on a good career