Headless ghosts and roving women: specters of modernity in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

By juxtaposing a contemporary myth with an exegesis of Huli "passenger woman" (physically and sexually mobile women), I address the gendered nature of modernity. Huli women are expected to enact tradition, both through their consumption practices and through participation in the bridewealth system. Passenger women become modern through their repudiation of these roles. An analysis of women's experiences suggests that modern forms of identity can emerge in response to the shifting meanings and practices of social reproduction, [modernity, bridewealth, social reproduction, sexuality, myth] Once there was a Huli woman who had two lawini (boy-or girlfriend, romantic interest), one who lived at home in Tari and another who had a job in Port Moresby, the capital city of Papua New Guinea. She was willing to marry either one of the young men, but the latter's family was able to assemble the necessary bridewealth pigs and money first, and so she married him. Her husband remained in Port Moresby, and she moved in with his mother and sisters, helping them to make gardens until he sent her a plane ticket and asked her to come join him. Wanting to show her husband how happy she was that he-unlike many husbands-desired her company in the city, she decided to bring him some taro, a food symbolic for the Huli of intimacy, rituals remembered if no longer practiced, and the value of hard physical labor. Better than words, a gift of taro would tell him about the kind of wife she would be and would perhaps reassure him that city life would not make her lazy or selfindulgent. So she rushed off to her garden without telling anyone where she was going.Her other lawini had never forgiven her for marrying someone else, and all this time he had been spying on her and plotting how to take his revenge. Seeing his opportunity, he followed her to her garden, attacked her with a bush knife, and chopped her head off. When her body was finally found, a message was sent to her husband in Port Moresby, but-as messages often do-it went astray, and he never received it. So the woman's ghost took her plane ticket, wrapped a scarf around her neck, and got on the plane to Port Moresby as scheduled. When her husband met her at the airport, he thought that her skin looked a little sallow, and it seemed odd that she never removed her scarf, but he was so happy to see her that he insisted on carrying all of her baggage, and he loaded her up with a profusion of gifts-shoes, watches, purses, sunglasses, and radios.After they had lived in Port Moresby for almost a year, they decided together that it was time to make a visit to Tari. When they got off the plane, there was a white fourwheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser waiting for them. The woman jumped into the driver's seat, her husband took his place in the passenger seat, and he was amazed and proud that she was able to drive. She drove him to a permanent fiberboard house Ampriran Ethnologist29H ):5-32.

A Very Modern Ghost: Postcolonialism and the Politics of Enchantment

“…Moreover, ghosts and ghost stories are deeply embedded in the cultural politics of postcolonial modernities. From attempts to reconceptualise freedom and postcolonial nationality through the figure of the spectre (Cheah, 2004), to explorations of the role of sorcery in democracy in Indonesia (Bubandt, 2006), accounts of industrial ghosts in factual and fictional accounts of Malaysian components factories (Ong, 1987;Chua, 1998), invocations of spectres in studies of overseas Filipino migration (Rafael, 1997) and stories of ghosts and spirit possessions from Papua New Guinea to India (for example, Wardlow, 2002;Uchiyamada, 1999) ghosts, it seems, are everywhere in scholarly discourse. It is striking, therefore, that spectres, spirits and the stories told about them appear largely absent from many recent debates about enchantment and modernity (cf.…”

Brideprice and Prejudice: An Audio‐Visual Ethnography on Marriage and Modernity in Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea

“…Such dimensions include that it is seen as a matter of collective agency, rather than a transaction between individuals, and that a good proportion of the payments is actually reciprocated by the bride's group within a couple of weeks of receiving the payment. 5 Yet, some Hagen people are concerned, like many other Papua New Guineans, that local understandings of brideprice transactions are changing under conditions of modernity (see Macintyre 2011; Wardlow 2002Wardlow , 2006.…”

“…Some scholars argue that the opposition of certain women and men to brideprice, and indeed the avoidance of marriage altogether by some individuals, reflects the growth of possessive individualism and desire for money, as much as for a gendered ‘modernity’ that demands disentanglement from customary networks of relatedness and responsibility (Macintyre 2011; Martin 2007; Rosi and Zimmer‐Tamakoshi 1993; Spark 2011; Wardlow 2002). As Macintyre (2011:207) writes, ‘It is the exchanges associated with marriage and bride price, where dramatic changes in attitudes that illuminate ideas about individuality can be observed; and it was about bride price that participants wrote most critically’.…”

Making the Baruya great again: From glorified great men to modern suffering subjects?

“…As much of the research in Melanesia reminds us (e.g . Counts 1990;Eves 2006;Jolly et al 2012;Knauft 1997Knauft , 1999Wardlow 2002bWardlow , 2006, this volume) postcolonial contexts tend to draw women more than men into the 'suffering slot': gendered forms of violence point to 'an important chapter in the "dark anthropology" of Papua New Guinea, a chapter that is still being written' (Wardlow and others, this volume). Among Baruya, however, modernity is marked by a decrease in gender-based forms of asymmetry and violence.…”