Speaking to Power

Gender and Politics in the Western Pacific

Lynn Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000143348
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For nearly fifty years, US government officials have identified Belau, in western Micronesia, as a key strategic site and have implemented administrative policies designed to maintain permanent access to Belau's land, reefs and waters for military purposes. Elder women placed themselves at the forefront of opposition to these policies, and, as part of oppositional efforts, successfully entered international political arenas. Speaking to Power moves beyond examining the impact of militarism and colonial administrative policy in Belau and draws on feminist poststructural analysis to explore the fluidity of contests in constructions of "gender," "politics," and "tradition" during US administration in Belau.

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INTRODUCTION

IN 1987, PEOPLE OF BELAU SUED THEIR president and their government over unconstitutional efforts used to ensure approval of U.S. military plans. The plaintiffs, twenty-eight women, immediately became targets of government-endorsed intimidation and violence. Clan leaders, government officials, relatives, and friends pleaded with the women to end their lawsuit before greater violence erupted. In this extraordinary moment of escalating threats and fears, the plaintiffs decided not to proceed with the lawsuit until the violence subsided.

The women refiled the lawsuit in March 1988, and, in response to these legal challenges, a group of local elected leaders, all men, bought a large advertisement in the Pacific Daily News, an international newspaper based in Guam. Their collective letter stated directly that women in Belau had no right to speak out about politics, no right to participate in political activity, and that for women to enter the political arena was counter to Palauan "tradition."

Reading their letter sparked questions for me: Why does it appear that women in Belau oppose U.S. military proposals while men support them? How are boundaries drawn between "politics" and other activities of daily life concerning family and community? Were the men who wrote the letter acting within "tradition" when they ran for electoral office or when they published this letter in an off-island newspaper? How would women in Belau answer the assertion that they have no right to participate in politics? And, underlying all these, I asked myself the same question that had been foremost in my mind since I started this research—How could I write about gender and politics in the context of Belau's current political relationship with the United States in ways that create alternatives to the objectification of "informants" and "cultures" that so many anthropological representations contain? This ethnography is an attempt to explore these and other questions, not necessarily to answer them. Hopefully, the chapters that follow will capture at least part of the multilayered shifts and movements in my understanding of these questions throughout the six years of planning, fieldwork, and writing required to complete this project and will generate even more questions concerning power and gender relations in this context of research.

Sitting before my computer in the summer of 1992, after completing initial chapter drafts and trying to determine here how to introduce the project and the chapters, I am most fully aware of approaches I want to avoid. Many ethnographers strive to claim as much authority as possible as they give context to their research. Investing themselves in "science," they commonly begin with extensive discussion of the "hard facts" concerning geological and geographical details, cite statistics, or perhaps present an outline of "the past" or "tradition." Recognizing that how ethnographers construct our texts, in introductions and beyond, is just as culture bound as any "tradition" we place at the center of our research, I instead introduce this research by briefly mentioning the broader contexts of Belau's relationship to the United States and discuss the theoretical concerns I bring to the project. I then turn to examine sketches of Palauan culture put forth both by Palauans and by ethnographers from outside Belau to suggest various currents that have given shape to these representations. I detail what I consider to be critical features in the unfolding of my field research that spanned nearly two years and the relationships that shaped it. Finally, I outline my intentions for the chapters that follow.

Placing the Research

The island group of Belau, also known as Palau, sits in the western Pacific, five hundred miles east of Mindanao in the Philippines and just north of the equator. Belau. Palau. Even the name reveals the "always-two, never-one" characteristic I found woven throughout Palauan culture—a characteristic that discourages one "correct," final, or fixed interpretation to anything while at the same time creating as much room for ambiguity as possible. Distinctions between Belau and Palau can be as simple as citing which language is being used: the name in English is "Palau" and in Palauan "Belau." In this text, I have chosen "Belau" in my own writing yet refrain from forcing a consistency because to do so would misrepresent the interchanging of terms I heard in Belau.¹

Perhaps the most significant way to locate Belau for this research is to link geography to the political relationship between Belau and the United States. U.S. officials have long considered Belau to be strategically situated in the intersecting contexts of competition for expanding commercial markets in Asia and of militarization fueled by desires to maintain political superiority in the region. Related to this, Belau has "placed itself on the map" by effectively challenging U.S. military priorities, by denying the U.S. military access to Palauan territory, and, at least until now, by keeping this corner of the Pacific nuclear free.

After experiencing over one hundred years of colonial administration, first by Spain, Germany, and then Japan, Belau along with other island groups in Micronesia became a United Nations trust territory just after World War II. The United States won administration of Micronesia through the UN trusteeship system and promised to develop the islands in ways that eventually would allow Micronesians to return once again to self-government. Examination of U.S. administrative policies and actions, however, exposes sustained efforts by U.S. officials to obstruct self-government in order to maintain permanent access to the islands to satisfy perceived strategic needs.

FIGURE 1.1 Maps Locating Belau

As I began to learn more of the history of U.S. military activities and priorities in Micronesia, my lack of previous knowledge grew conspicuous. My initial awareness of U.S. activities in the region centered almost exclusively on the nuclear-testing program conducted through the 1950s in the Marshall Islands, nearly three thousand miles east of Belau. I have vague childhood memories of hearing the names Bikini and Enewitak while watching media images of nuclear blasts and radioactive clouds mushrooming over the Pacific. In an experience perhaps parallel to that of many in the United States, decades passed without looking beyond those images to expand my knowledge of Micronesia or of U.S. administrative and military policies in the region. Only relatively recently did I learn more about how U.S. nuclear and military priorities have brought dramatic changes to Micronesia while placing the welfare of entire communities and the potential for democracy at risk. These concerns compelled me to direct my research questions toward Micronesia and then to Belau.

I soon understood that Belau's situation differed considerably from that of the Marshall islands. No nuclear testing occurred in Belau, and there has been no extensive U.S. military presence since the years just after World War II. Yet U.S. officials have exerted extreme and constant pressure to maintain permanent access to Belau's land, reefs, and waters for military purposes. In response, voters in Belau overwhelmingly approved the world's first nuclear-free constitution in 1979—a constitution that directly countered ongoing U.S. military objectives—and it has been women who have consistently taken the lead in actively protecting Belau's constitution and self-government in the face of U.S. military proposals. As I began to form my research project for Belau, I focused on three major areas of concerns. I wondered how I, as an anthropologist, could create an ethnography that reflected my commitment to confront the violence of power inequality in the world today by contributing to a clearer understanding of contemporary politics in Belau, of gender and politics as formed within U.S. military priorities, and of the project of anthropology itself.

Anthropological research by U.S. ethnographers in Micronesia is far from a new phenomenon. In the first few years of U.S. administration, the U.S. Department of Navy hired anthropologists to conduct research throughout Micronesia to gain increased insight into local political and social structures (for Belau, see Barnett 1949; Useem 1949; Vidich 1949, 1980). The United States then expanded the role of anthropologists in Micronesia by creating a position for an official anthropologist within the Trust Territory administration to guide research objectives and to aid U.S. officials in implementing policies throughout the island groups (see especially Barnett 1956, also Vidich 1980). My own work more closely parallels that of other anthropologists who have brought a critical eye to evaluate effects of U.S. military and administrative policies (e.g., Alcalay 1987, Kiste 1974, Lutz 1984, Peoples 1985).

My initial reading on Belau revealed that most ethnographers have agreed that Palauan culture emphasizes matrilineal ties of relatedness within a fluid system of ranked clans and villages. Yet as one ethnographer remarked, Belau gained notoriety among anthropologists by possessing "one of the region's most complex and baffling social systems" (D. Smith 1983: 3; see also, D. Smith 1977). In ethnographic attempts to "solve" or "explain" Belau where "descent" and "alliance" have consistently defied anthropologically constructed categories, three central themes emerged. Cast in the vocabulary of conventional anthropology and reflecting the discipline's historical emphasis on the "traditional" or the "local" as removed from global and state processes, these are "kinship," "political structure," and "patterns of exchange."² Although I originally envisioned my research focusing less on these anthropological categories and more extensively on contemporary politics surrounding Belau's relations with the United States, like so many ethnographers throughout the history of anthropology I found that nothing in Belau could be understood apart from kin relations and obligations. Those often made distinctions between "traditional" (as signified by the domain of "kinship") and "modern" (represented by political relations formed within international military policies) crumbled before me. My goal became linking global aspects of U.S. military interests to clan relations and diverse local political activities and to understand the relationship of this larger political context to gender construction in Belau.

Explaining Belau

While in Belau, I was struck by how often Palauans were called on to describe their culture and society to various kinds of visitors, especially when I compared it to my own experience of growing up in the U.S. Midwest, where I rarely had to draw out pictures of my government or family for anyone. There seemed to be a steady stream of chad er ngebard, translated literally as "people from the West," traveling through.³ These chad er ngebard, or "outsiders," comprised not only anthropologists like myself (one from Germany, one from the Netherlands, and two others from the United States) but also journalists, filmmakers, tourists, skin divers and snorkelers, visiting officials, administrators, government consultants, political scientists, war historians, marine researchers, and commercial investors. I found that almost every Palauan I met was ready to offer some sort of shorthand description of Palauan culture, and, as I listened to how people represented Belau's history and culture, I recognized that these brief sketches grew out of a long history of confrontations with various outsiders.

The many tellings I heard, although they varied enormously, generally emphasized what outsiders might consider unique—what people in Belau referred to as "Palauan tradition." In listening to descriptions of Palauan culture as it occurred in a time identified as "before," the line between "before" and "now" never appeared clear to me. It seemed to constantly shift depending on the topic and the immediate context.

Summaries I heard from various people tended to emphasize that Belau's society has been and still is comprised of matrilineal clans. People would say they are related to the clans of both parents but then add they are "more" related to their mother's. Each clan has a male and female chief, generally related to the clan through their "mother's side," and I heard consistently that it is the tradition of Belau that elder women of a clan select the chiefs. Each village comprises ten ranked clans, and it is the male chiefs who represent their clans in the village chiefly councils.

"Before," as I heard over and over again, everyone in a community became a member of a women's or men's club, which enabled clan heads to mobilize collective work through a combination of competition and cooperation. Men lived communally in large buildings, while women and children lived in houses belonging to the husband's family. Men and women generally lived and worked in separate spheres. Men fished, built houses, carved canoes, and fought wars, while women grew food and raised children. Like today, events where clans exchanged large amounts of food and money claimed a central place in communities' attention, activities, and "news." Addressing a conference of anthropologists, one Palauan woman offered this succinct summary of her culture: "Before foreigners ruled Palau, Palauans were educated in clubs (cheldebechel), they gave their allegiance to their villages, their districts, and their families and clans without having any concern for Palau as a whole, and they passed their time in fishing, farming, paying homage to ancestral deities, and acquiring Palauan money" (Kesolei 1977: 3).

It was clear to me that this process of constantly explaining Belau's culture involved more than offering a simple outline while visitors quietly listened. It required responding to uninformed and perhaps insensitive questions—questions that people in Belau might categorize as "hard to hear." Reading through my field notes, I found three questions I actually heard visitors ask: "Do people still live in huts?" The question was directed to someone else, but I recall my own silent response of being unsure if anything in Belau's tradition of building could be considered a "hut" as opposed to a "house." I imagined the inquirer asked the question hopefully, as if "huts" meant that Belau represented the quintessential "third world" or proof that he had reached the ultimate vacation "paradise." Another vaguely more informed visitor asked, "Is there still that brother-sister avoidance thing?" He perhaps was unconscious that the question revealed his assumption of a "norm" defined by his own cultural practices, but all of us standing there understood clearly that an answer of "yes" would have carried with it an implicit judgement of "backward." I heard one visitor ask, with an eager glint in his eye, "Are there still people here who don't wear clothes?" Guessing he probably meant, "Are there still women here who wear only grass skirts?" I realized he was unaware that Palauans, like most Micronesians, consider a woman's thighs to be more sensual than breasts and that tourists wearing swimsuits while walking along the streets of Koror reveal more "skin" than women wearing grass skirts while dancing or performing chants.

Citing these extraordinary examples of cultural insensitivity creates an easy target, I realize, and might possibly obscure less blatant questions from outsiders or even provide a way for me to distance my own process of questioning from such intrusion or difficult moments. Rather than offering these questions in contrast to my own research. I recount them to call various modes of objectification into question. Recognizing that in the process of both fieldwork and writing, any ethnographic effort represents a "family resemblance" to the interactions above, I use them here as a reminder of my own challenge throughout the course of this project: Can anyone conduct research in ways that avoid these intrusions and insensitivies?

Most general descriptions of Palauan culture I heard, packaged for outsiders, tended not to mention more recent political transformations related to the electoral system of government introduced by the United States over forty years ago. I attended one meeting, though, where a locally recognized historian addressed a group of people—a meeting of visitors traveling from other Pacific island nations—and, through a younger person who translated into English, outlined Belau's "traditions" and then contrasted them to more recent political changes. He said that Belau had a "matrilineal emphasis" where the child belongs to the mother's clan and explained, "That means the chiefly titles and land are passed down through the mother's family, not the father's, and that women control the money of a family." He said, "Women are the farmers, and men fish, hunt, tell stories, and build buildings," then added, "Women are the most powerful in Palauan society." He and the translator continued: "One sad thing we see is the decrease in power and authority of traditional leadership in villages because it has been overshadowed by a new system of government. Each state has a council of ten chiefs who make decisions for the community. And when the United States introduced this democratic system, it brought confusion because we have two systems now and two different sets of leaders, and the problem is magnified because the elected officials began to receive large salaries." He mentioned that, although he did not blame the United States for this, he regretted these changes because they have "created problems." He said that if the U.S. government had utilized the "traditional power structure of clan chiefs" instead of introducing electoral politics, "Palau would be a different place today."

People I talked with generally characterized "before" as an unspecified time preceding the various colonial administrations of Belau; yet a simple dichotomy between "before" and "now" was sometimes broadened into a sequence of "eras." In this "era" approach, "before" was followed by the "Spanish time," the "German time," the "Japanese time," the "American time," and then, sometimes, by the period of Belau's constitutional government as differentiated from the "American time." Schools and government offices commonly used these "eras" to describe and celebrate Palauan history.

At one point, I attended a day of special activities at a high school where students played out brief skits representing each of these various eras, and the "American period" included the years since the formation of Belau's constitutional government. The skit opened with two "instructors," standing side by side at a blackboard, who proceeded to give lectures on what are generally perceived to be the two separate political spheres operating in Belau. On the left, one wrote the word "tradition" at the top of the board and beneath it drew a diagram explaining that there were ten clans in a village, that these clans were ranked one through ten, and that the ten village chiefs worked together in a village council. The second student, positioned on the right, announced he would talk about "democracy" and proceeded to outline Belau's constitutional government modeled largely after the structure of government provided for in the U.S. constitution.

Generally, descriptions of political activities offered by teachers, historians, and elders clearly indicated that historically Belau's culture depended on women and men working together in clan and community affairs. Yet these representations differed from much of the anthropological writing on Belau, which, like the students above, focused primarily on men's political activities—male chiefly councils and electoral politics. Reading through ethnographies written since World War II, I found very little attention given to the interrelationship of women and men, and mention of women rarely occurred outside compartmentalized discussions on marriage, childbearing, and child rearing (for an exception to this and for the most extensive discussion concerning women in Belau to date, see D. Smith 1977, 1983). Recognizing that women had generally been left out of the ethnographic "picture" in Belau d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• FIGURES
• PREFACE
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. LOCATING BELAU
• 3. NOTIONS OF POWER
• 4. FAMILY AND CLAN
• 5. FOOD AND MONEY
• 6. CLUBS, ELECTIONS, AND COMPACTS
• 7. POSTPONING CONCLUSION
• Appendix A: Palauan Pronunciation
• Appendix Β: Glossary of Palauan Terms
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX