Fencing in AIDS: Gender, Vulnerability, and Care in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Acknowled gments This book is based on research carried out over almost ten years, and there are consequently many, many individuals and organizations to thank for their assistance, friendship, and support. As always, my deepest thanks go to Mary Tamia and June Pogaya, my beloved besties in Tari, who have shared everything with me-stories, food, families, insights, laughter, tears, fear, and, fury. I am also deeply thankful for Jacinta Hayabe's friendship since 1996. During our many long, cigarette-filled, latenight conversations, she proved an invaluable interlocutor and especially helped me understand the complex political field of women's groups in the region. I am grateful to Michael Parali, Luke Magala, Ken Angobe, and Thomas Mindibi, the four wonderful men who worked as my field assistants in 2004, were brave enough to pose forthright questions about love, sex, marriage, extramarital relationships, and HIV to their peers, and had no compunction about telling me when interview questions were problematic. My deepest condolences go to the family of Joseph Warai, who directed the Community Based Health Care (CBHC) NGO in the mid 2000s and was very supportive of my 2004 research project. Joseph and the whole CBHC team persevered in delivering health promotion and income-generating projects to people in the Tari area during a desperate and precarious period, and they were a source of hope and inspiration for many. I was also sad to learn that Sister Pauline Agilo had died. She was a comfort to many people living with HIV and AIDS, and especially helped people as best she could in the pre-antiretroviral era. During my research stints in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, a number of health workers assisted me by telling patients about my research and asking them if they were interested in being interviewed. They also, with the permission of patients, x Acknowledgments allowed me to observe some of their counselling sessions, and they shared with me their concerns about patients' living situations and about the sometimes unreliable availability of antiretrovirals and other essential medicines in Tari. I am especially grateful for Margaret Parale's friendship and assistance during this research. Employees of the Oil Search Health Foundation also assisted in recruiting participants for me, and provided me with useful data about Tari's HIV prevalence. Jethiro Harrison and Ruben Enoch were University of Papua New Guinea student interns with me in Tari for a few weeks in 2013. Among other things, they helped me to understand the powerful allure of Port Moresby that can attach itself to those who have lived there and attract other people when they return to rural areas. I am also grateful to the staff of Médecins sans frontières in Tari who were so generous to me, especially when my guesthouse did not have water or electricity. I feel profoundly lucky to belong to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where I have wonderful and brilliant colleagues, whose ideas have influenced mine. I am also grateful to ...

‘Two different worlds’: Papua New Guinean women working in development in Port Moresby

“…There are signs it is timely to do so. In her keynote address at the 2018 European Society for Oceanists conference in London, Wardlow (Wardlow, ) argued that while ‘one might have qualms about transporting the intersectionality paradigm to the Pacific … there are important reasons to give it a try’. She elaborated:

I think an intersectional framework can be productive for thinking about gender inequality in the Pacific because ethnographic scholarship about women there has often implicitly assumed a coherent and fairly homogenous category … [T]here hasn't been sufficient explicit attention … to the ways in which things like class or region of origin … intersect with gender to create unique positions of inequality, discrimination, or vulnerability (Wardlow, ).

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“…I think an intersectional framework can be productive for thinking about gender inequality in the Pacific because ethnographic scholarship about women there has often implicitly assumed a coherent and fairly homogenous category … [T]here hasn't been sufficient explicit attention … to the ways in which things like class or region of origin … intersect with gender to create unique positions of inequality, discrimination, or vulnerability (Wardlow, ).…”

“…Citing some of the scholars whom she considers to have taken an intersectional approach to understanding life in the urban Pacific (including, for example, (Spark, ; Cummings, ; Anderson, ; Demian, ; Spark, ; Spark, ), Wardlow notes that ‘all of these scholars trace some of these gendered urban dynamics back to the colonial history of urban space in Pacific towns and cities – specifically, the history of urban space as white and male’ (Wardlow, ). This is true and there have been some attempts to account for colonialism, race, class and gender (see for example, Inglis, ; Johnson, ; Gewertz and Errington, ; Demian, ).…”

“I am a dead woman”

“…Tari, Hela province, the site of my research, is near some of the nation's most valuable resource extraction sites, such as Barrick's Porgera Joint Venture gold mine and the Papua New Guinea Liquid Natural Gas project, jointly operated by Exxon-Mobil, Oil Search Ltd., and a few smaller companies. Proximity to resource extraction sites produces greater HIV vulnerability (Hammar 2010;Shih et al 2017;Wardlow 2020), and typically, HIV prevalence is higher in these areas.…”

“…I suggest that in the case I am analyzing here, widowed or divorced women living with HIV ask to be incorporated into the households of kin as adult female persons who have typically fulfi lled their obligations by bringing in bridewealth for their natal families, producing children for their husbands' families, and caring for pigs and sweet potato fi elds. However, the moral suspicion attached to their HIVpositive status (Wardlow 2017(Wardlow , 2020; see also Hammar 2010 andLepani 2008) oft en overwhelms other aspects of their personhood, and they are instead ascribed the more precarious position of a dependent whose ability to remain in the household is contingent on her behavior.…”