Giving Birth to Gonolia: "Culture" and Sexually Transmitted Disease among the Huli of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

The "culture concept" has been challenged on a number of fronts, both by medical anthropologists researching AIDS and in the discipline of cultural anthropology more generally. Medical anthropologists have argued against the "etiologization" of culture, and cultural anthropologists have taken issue with the tendency to treat beliefs and practices as static and seamlessly shared. Using the narrative of one Huli woman's shifting explanation of a diagnosis of syphilis, this article argues that, rather than avoid the notion of culture, we should strive for representations that demonstrate how individuals use discourses in expedient, ad hoc, and yet deeply felt ways. This article also argues for the importance of a sociology of knowledge approach to understanding local notions of etiology. The woman's understanding of her situation was strongly influenced by her entry into a new "community" of women who had similarly been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.

Gendered talk about sex, sexual relationships and HIV among young people in Papua New Guinea

“…it's a special thing that, I think the Creator has put in for the marriage to produce children but nowadays, I think people, many young people, are misusing [sex], I mean they treat sex as fun or something like for pleasure. (Wesley, male) That these students saw sex as something sacred and associated with marriage is supported by other recent research in PNG (Jenkins and Aruwafu 2007;Wardlow 2002;Wilde 2007).…”

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

“…His work, like others in medical anthropology, highlights poverty, patriarchy, and structural violence as crucial factors in explanatory frameworks for HIV/AIDS. Hammar writes in response to the tendency in public health to privilege individual choice, to record and aggregate individual interpretations of behavioural information and thereby understand behavioural change as a consequence of cognitive and motivational factors in ways that are typically analytically and descriptively isolated from any consideration of actual lived worlds and their structural features (Wardlow :154). Ancestral narratives and illness representations often play little role in the analytical configurations he deploys in reference to gender as, at times, such reliance on representations and their often ambivalent symbolism are understood to be not only empirically irrelevant but might be seen to justify the sexual practices and behaviours he so vividly describes.…”

“…In this paper, however, we have assumed that people deploy different cultural frameworks when interpreting disease and disease causality, and these logics influence health‐related activities and behaviours to varying degrees. Like Farmer (:20,22) and others (Lepani , ; Wardlow ) we examined the ‘adoption’ of a new illness, HIV/AIDS, into existing interpretive frameworks around sickness, well‐being, gendered mobility, and sexuality. In this paper we have explored the extent to which, in two neighbouring communities in Western Province, narratives about female ancestors provide some ‘organising principles’ and ‘meaning structures’ for people's shifting understandings and experience of HIV/AIDS.…”

“…These understandings of HIV/AIDS have been configured in reference to a variety of other sources that do not relate to Sawiya and Sagalu. Such sources include those drawn from public health programs, from Christian practices and discourses, and those that are innovative, expedient, and creative (Wardlow :155). For Gogodala, there has been a recent discursive turn to conservative evangelical Christian narratives about the level of trust and security assumed (or at least imagined) in ‘Christian marriages’, based as they are said to be on an intimate relationship between ‘one man [and] one woman’.…”

Eating Coffee Candy

“…For a young man to have sex without knowing and practicing the protective rituals used by married men would be to risk illness and even death. The verb "to eat" takes particular social significance when, as Wardlow notes, accepting money for sex, and the women are sometimes said to "eat their own bridewealth" or even to "eat their own vaginas" [29]. Young men apply the expression to the risk in having sex when there is the chance of being infected by the HIV virus, which, prior to the availability of antiretroviral therapy, was thought to mean a sure death.…”