Brothels, Bamu, and Tu Kina Bus in South Coast New Guinea: Human Rights Issues and Global Responsibilities

Abstract

The paper describes the unfolding situation of prostitution on Daru Island, Western Province, Papua New Guinea, a practice that is also growing elsewhere on a worldwide scale. Owing to the seriousness of the problem and to the character of the fieldwork, understudied as it is in anthropology, the author claims that to set the field material merely within the context of the debate between relativism and ethnocentrism will not get us very far. He recommends intervention, holding that intervention in such cases is not ethnocentrism-intolerance of a feature of another culture-but a matter of global responsibility.

Great Ancestral Women: Sexuality, Gendered Mobility, and HIV among the Bamu and Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

“…This third kind of sex was defined as sex in a public place in exchange for money, goods, or services. It included sexual services that the Bamu provided in the early 1990s in Daru and in other areas of the Western Province (Hammar , , ). Only married women, widows or divorced women could participate in mahi gabo and then only if they had been introduced to it by other women.…”

“…A new, specifically Bamu form of prostitution emerged on Daru after their migration to Daru in the early to mid 1960s. Hammar (, ) has detailed the Bamu's involvement in a particularly brutal form of prostitution termed sagapari – a reference to a place in Daru. Over 98% of the Bamu women who participated were married and aged roughly between 18 and 35.…”

Confessions Of A (Somewhat) Reluctant Consultant: Or, What Happens When Academic Dreams Go "Poof"

“…I read assiduously in the methods literature of professional journals. Of course, I wasn't prepared for the reality of ethnographic fieldwork (in my case, on prostitution, STDs, sexual violence, and alcohol consumption--for starters, see Hammar, 1996aHammar, , 1996bHammar, , 1998Hammar, , 1999, but honestly, who is? I had H. Russell Bernard's methods Bible with me, Research Methods in Anthropology: qualitative and quantitative approaches (now in its 3 rd edition-2002), which I used nearly everyday in big and small ways, 2 and which I'm using again in the classroom this term.…”