Sinuous Objects

Revaluing Women's Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific

Anna-Karina Hermkens, Katherine Lepani, Anna-Karina Hermkens, Katherine Lepani

• Publisher: ANU Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781760461331
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781760461348
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Some 40 years ago, Pacific anthropology was dominated by debates about 'women's wealth'. These exchanges were generated by Annette's Weiner's (1976) critical reappraisal of Bronis?aw Malinowski's classic work on the Trobriand Islands, and her observations that women's production of 'wealth' (banana leaf bundles and skirts) for elaborate transactions in mortuary rituals occupied a central role in Trobriand matrilineal cosmology and social organisation. This volume brings the debates about women's wealth back to the fore by critically revisiting and engaging with ideas about gender and materiality, value, relationality, and the social life and agency of things. The chapters, interspersed by three poems, evoke the sinuous materiality of the different objects made by women across the Pacific, and the intimate relationship between these objects of value and sensuous, gendered bodies. In the Epilogue, Professor Margaret Jolly observes how the volume also 'trace[s] a more abstract sinuosity in the movement of these things through time and place, as they coil through different regimes of value … The eight chapters … trace winding paths across the contemporary Pacific, from the Trobriands in Milne Bay, to Maisin, Wanigela and Korafe in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, through the islands of Tonga to diasporic Tongan and Cook Islander communities in New Zealand'. This comparative perspective elucidates how women's wealth is defined, valued and contested in current exchanges, bride-price debates, church settings, development projects and the challenges of living in diaspora. Importantly, this reveals how women themselves preserve the different values and meanings in gift-giving and exchanges, despite processes of commodification that have resulted in the decline or replacement of 'women's wealth'.

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Glossary
• Contributors
• Introduction: Revaluing women’s wealth in the contemporary Pacific
• 1. Doba and Ephemeral Durability: The Enduring Material Value of Women’s Work in the Trobriand Regenerative Economy
• 2. Doing away with Doba? Women’s Wealth and Shifting Values in Trobriand Mortuary Distributions
• Poem: Doba—Trobriand Skirts
• 3. Women’s Wealth and Moral Economies among the Maisin in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea
• 4. Revaluing Pots: Wanigela Women and Regional Exchange
• 5. The Extraordinary Values of Ordinary Objects: String Bags and Pandanus Mats as Korafe Women’s Wealth?
• Poem: Making the Mark
• 6. Capturing the ‘Female Essence’? Textile Wealth in Tonga
• 7. Passing on, and Passing on Wealth: Compelling Values in Tongan Exchange
• 8. Cook Islands Tivaivai and the Haircutting Ceremony in Auckland: Ritual Action, Money and the Parameters of Value
• Poem: urohs language
• Epilogue: Sinuous Objects, Sensuous Bodies: Revaluing ‘Women’s Wealth’ Across Time and Place