Gender and inequality in a postcolonial context of large‐scale capitalist projects in the Markham Valley, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This article historicises gender relations among Wampar speakers in New Guinea (PNG). It analyses three interconnected female biographies to show how historical background interacts with current large-scale capitalist projects to exacerbate social inequalities. One biography exemplifies linkages between Christianisation, education and political representation; the second focuses on inheritance, access to land, and dogmas about patriliny; the third describes a woman's unfavourable position within a sibling set and her access to benefits from land leases. Support by their social network, sibling relations, birth order and, today, marital alliances, are key factors in women's success in the running of businesses, negotiating land disputes, and obtaining representation in political fora set up to deal with social problems. I demonstrate how older differentiations are reproduced as novel inequalities in political representation and in access to land and wealth. These result in new forms of exclusion that differentiate men and women, but which also differentiate life-chances among women.

Unequal Lives in the Western Pacific

“…As Macintyre has shown in her work on gender and mining in Melanesia, the rise of extractive economies has routinely excluded women from the benefits of extraction in a more thoroughgoing and distinctly non-traditional way. Across Melanesia and beyond, men gain more jobs than women and have greater access to project-related wealth (Beer, 2018;Lahiri-Dutt & Macintyre, 2006). Despite recent attempts to address the role of 'women in mining' and related industries, their employers often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) reinforce values of male economic privilege that affect familial relations and marginalise women (Macintyre, 2017, p. 11).…”

Roads to Inequality: Infrastructure and Historically Grown Regional Differences in the Markham Valley, Papua New Guinea

“…The Highlands Highway continuously extended and intensified rural–urban networks (Beer ). Many Wampar, then, have produced for the local markets and the main market in Lae for decades.…”

“…Gabsongkeg village has the largest public market (Nadzab Maket) in the Wampar area. It is a bus stop for drivers going along the highway to the Highlands and also a waiting area for passengers and their family and friends waiting at Nadzab airport—Lae's official airport located at a walking distance from the market since 1977 (Beer ). Communal ‘village markets’ are controlled by respected and influential village elders, often with senior positions in the church, but this control is sometimes contested.…”

The influence of emergency food aid on the causal disaster vulnerability of remote Indigenous food systems: a case study of the Bedamuni of Western Province, Papua New Guinea

“…For example, increased small holder cash cropping, new agricultural techniques, increased population consolidation and sedentism, and a hard (e.g., gold, gas, oil) and soft (e.g., copra, coffee, palm oil) commodity-based national economy emerged (Hess 1983, MacWilliam 2013. While many peripheral food systems remain subsistence dominated, the introduction individualistic concepts such as private as opposed to collective wealth has resulted in a breakdown of traditional social relations of production (Beer 2018, Zimmer-Tamakoshi 1997. For example, the weakening of traditional governance systems and authority, increased temporary and permanent migration to urban centres, and growing frustration with the promises of a market economy have reshaped rural areas.…”

“…Today, even in remote areas it is now typically the nuclear family, clan, then village in descending order of economic, social, cultural, and political importance (Shaw 2010). This is not to say there is no longer communalism, just that it has been reported as declining in many sites (Beer 2018, Zimmer-Tamakoshi 1997, especially in more economically connected towns or villages (Martin 2018). Insofar as informal social protection (i.e., sharing resources, labour, defence, skills) was one of the key risk reduction measures in the past throughout Melanesia (see Ratuva 2014), a decline in such mechanisms may have increased vulnerability for those without resources and/or extensive kinship networks.…”