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Ethnography of how a sex-positive culture responds to HIV/AIDS
In Melanesia, rates of HIV infection are among the highest in the Pacific and increasing rapidly, with grave humanitarian, development, and political implications. There is a great need for social research on HIV/AIDS in the region to provide better insights into the sensitive issues surrounding HIV transmission. This collection, the first book on HIV and AIDS in the Pacific region, gathers together stunning and original accounts of the often surprising ways that people make sense of the AIDS epidemic in various parts of Melanesia. The volume addresses substantive issues concerning AIDS and contemporary sexualities, relations of power, and moralities—themes that provide a powerful backdrop for twenty-first century understandings of the tensions between sexuality, religion, and politics in many parts of the world.
The postcolonial states of Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu operate today in a global arena in which human rights are widely accepted. As ratifiers of UN treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Pacific Island countries have committed to promoting women’s and girls’ rights, including the right to a life free of violence. Yet local, national and regional gender values are not always consistent with the principles of gender equality and women’s rights that undergird these globalising conventions. This volume critically interrogates the relation between gender violence and human r...
Sorcery and witchcraft practices and beliefs are pervasive across Melanesia. They are in part created by, and give rise to, a wide variety of poor social and developmental outcomes. These include uneven economic development, low public health, lack of social cohesion, crime, fear and insecurity. A further very visible problem is the attacks on men and women who are accused of being practitioners of witchcraft or sorcery, which can lead to serious bodily harm, banishment and sometimes death. Today, many communities, individuals, church organisations and policymakers in Melanesia and internationally are exploring ways to overcome the negative social outcomes associated with witchcraft and sorcery practices and beliefs. This book brings together a collection of chapters written by a diverse range of authors, both Melanesian and non-Melanesian, providing crucial insights both into how these practices and beliefs are playing out in contemporary Melanesia, and also the types of interventions that are being trialled or debated to address the problems associated with them.
When we think of kinship, we usually think of ties between people based upon blood or marriage. But we also have other ways—nowadays called ‘performative’—of establishing kinship, or hinting at kinship: many Christians have, in addition to parents, godparents; members of a trade union may refer to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Similar performative ties are even more common among the so-called ‘tribal’ peoples that anthropologists have studied and, especially in recent years, they have received considerable attention from scholars in this field. However, these scholars tend to argue that performative kinship in the Tribal World is semantically on a par with kinship ...
This collection builds on previous works on gender violence in the Pacific, but goes beyond some previous approaches to ‘domestic violence’ or ‘violence against women’ in analysing the dynamic processes of ‘engendering’ violence in PNG. ‘Engendering’ refers not just to the sex of individual actors, but to gender as a crucial relation in collective life and the massive social transformations ongoing in PNG: conversion to Christianity, the development of extractive industries, the implanting of introduced models of justice and the law and the spread of HIV. Hence the collection examines issues of ‘troubled masculinities’ as much as ‘battered women’ and tries to move bey...
This book is a new and exciting resource for teachers, students, and activists who aim to critically examine contemporary sexuality through the lens of sexual literacy and situated social analysis. This original anthology provides shorter cutting-edge essays on theory, method, and activism, including the nature of globalization and local sexuality discovered in ‘glocal’ topics, processes and contexts.Within the anthology, students, educators, practitioners, and policy makers will find critical conversations regarding a wide array of sexual topics that impact our world currently. These cutting-edge essays inform readers of key moments in sexual history, including areas relating to research, practice and social policy, and provide a platform from which to engage in rich discussion and forecast the development of sexual literacy in our world within multiple contexts.
Despite the plethora of research on gender and the many projects designed to improve their status in the Pacific region, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalised in social, economic and political spheres. How are we to understand this and what does it mean for researchers, policy-makers and development practitioners? This book examines these questions, partly by looking back but also by continuing the effort to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The contributors discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. Exploring how c...
Bronislaw Malinowski’s path-breaking research in the Trobriand Islands shaped much of modern anthropology’s disciplinary paradigm. Yet many conundrums remain. For example, Malinowski asserted that baloma spirits of the dead were responsible for procreation but had limited influence on their living descendants in magic and other matters, claims largely unchallenged by subsequent field investigators, until now. Based on extended fieldwork at Omarakana village—home of the Tabalu “Paramount Chief”—Mark S. Mosko argues instead that these and virtually all contexts of indigenous sociality are conceived as sacrificial reciprocities between the mirror worlds that baloma and humans inhabi...
This is a fascinating account of traditional socialisation and Indigenous forms of learning in Australia and Melanesia. It draws from rich ethnographic, historical and educational material. There has never been a greater need for a socially and historically informed, yet critical account, of the mismatch between traditional ways, realities of life in Indigenous communities, villages and enclaves, and the forms of education provided in schools. Raymond Nichol, a specialist in Indigenous education and pedagogy, surveys the links, too often disparities, between ethnographic detail of life ‘on the ground’ and the schooling provided by nation states in this vast region. Most importantly, he explores and suggests ways community developers and educators, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, may work to bridge the gaps in social rights, educational and economic development. This is relevant for all Indigenous communities, their survival and development. Many vexed issues are discussed, such as race, ethnicity, identity, discrimination, self-determination, development, and relevant, effective pedagogical, learning and schooling strategies.