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As we move further into the twenty-first century, we are witnessing both the global extensification and local intensification of inequality. Unequal Lives deals with the particular dilemmas of inequality in the Western Pacific. The authors focus on four dimensions of inequality: the familiar triad of gender, race and class, and the often-neglected dimension of generation. Grounded in meticulous long-term ethnographic enquiry and deep awareness of the historical contingency of these configurations of inequality, this volume illustrates the multidimensional, multiscale and epistemic nature of contemporary inequality. This collection is a major contribution to academic and political debates abo...
A 1989 examination of the effect of mission evangelism and colonial intervention on the family life of Pacific peoples.
Contrary to their masculine portrayal, mines have always employed women in valuable and productive roles. Yet, pit life continues to be represented as a masculine world of work, legitimizing men as the only mineworkers and large, mechanized, and capitalized operations as the only form of mining. Bringing together a range of case studies of women miners from past and present in Asia, the Pacific region, Latin America and Africa, this book makes visible the roles and contributions of women as miners. It also highlights the importance of engendering small and informal mining in the developing world as compared to the early European and American mines. The book shows that women are engaged in various kinds of mining and illustrates how gender and inequality are constructed and sustained in the mines, and also how ethnic identities intersect with those gendered identities.
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...
Legal scholars, economists, and international development practitioners often assume that the state is capable of 'securing' rights to land and addressing gender inequality in land tenure. In this innovative study of land tenure in Solomon Islands, Rebecca Monson challenges these assumptions. Monson demonstrates that territorial disputes have given rise to a legal system characterised by state law, custom, and Christianity, and that the legal construction and regulation of property has, in fact, deepened gender inequalities and other forms of social difference. These processes have concentrated formal land control in the hands of a small number of men leaders, and reproduced the state as a hypermasculine domain, with significant implications for public authority, political participation, and state formation. Drawing insights from legal scholarship and political ecology in particular, this book offers a significant study of gender and legal pluralism in the Pacific, illuminating ongoing global debates about gender inequality, land tenure, ethnoterritorial struggles and the post colonial state.
Catholicism, like most world religions, is patriarchal, and its official hierarchies and sacred works too often neglect the lived experiences of women. Looking beyond these texts, Juliana Flinn reveals how women practice, interpret, and shape their own Catholicism on Pollap Atoll, part of Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia. She focuses in particular on how the Pollapese shaping of Mary places value on indigenous notions of mothering that connote strength, active participation in food production, and the ability to provide for one’s family. Flinn begins with an overview of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on Pollap and an introduction to Mary, who is celebrated by islan...
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...
Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific fills a huge lacuna in the scholarly literature on missionaries in Asia/Pacific and is transnational history at its finest. Co-edited by two eminent scholars, this multidisciplinary volume, an outgrowth of several conferences/seminars, critically examines various encounters between western missionaries and indigenous women in the Pacific/Asia … Taken as a whole, this is a thought-provoking and an indispensable reference, not only for students of colonialism/imperialism but also for those of us who have an interest in transnational and gender history in general. The chapters are very clearly written, engaging, and remarkably ...
This book charts the previously untold story of the mobility of Indigenous peoples across vast distances, vividly reshaping what is known about decolonisation.
In the years Bbetween the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the beginning of the war mobilization boom in 1930, collieries in Europe and America embraced new technologies and had long since been excluded women from working underground. In Japan, however, mining women witnessed no significant changes in working practices over this period. The availability of the cheap and abundant labor of these women allowed the captains of the coal industry in Japan to avoid expensive investments in new machinery and sophisticated mining methods;, instead, they continued to intensely exploit workers and markets intensively, making substantial profits without the burdens of extensive mechanization. This unique b...