Making Women in the City: Notes from a Port Moresby Boarding House

Abstract

Boystown, mi hamamas tru long em Boystown, mi save laikim yu tumas Boystown, yu save givim mi olgeta Boystown, mi save laikim yu tumas -A lyric about Port Moresby by George Telek ( 2000) 1 [Boystown, I really enjoy it Boystown, I know I like you far too much Boystown, you give me everything Boystown, I know I like you far too much]I n an accidental city, accidental social forms manifest, including forms that may have no discernible historical precedent. In this article, I seek to triangulate between Doreen Massey's (2005) sociotemporality of space, Henri Lefebvre's (1996, 158) concept of the "right to the city," and the uneven crystallization of gender and class in a women's boarding house in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Haus Ruth, as this respected institution is known, generates a dynamic relation between the colonial history of the city in which it has developed and the aspirational futures of the women who live there. I argue that while the par- 1 The verse is in Tok Pisin, and the translation is by the author. Tok Pisin is the Melanesian creole that serves as Papua New Guinea's primary lingua franca; the country boasts some 800 vernacular languages. Tok Pisin is now the first language of many people brought up in Port Moresby and other towns, along with English, which is still the language of education, government, and commerce.My residence in Haus Ruth for three months was made possible by British Academy grant no. SRG-49399. Earlier versions of this article benefited from feedback at the 2010 European Society of Oceanists conference in St. Andrews and also from John Cox, Timothy Sharp, and Ilana Gershon. I am grateful also for the recommendations of the anonymous reviewers for Signs, which helped to make this a much stronger article. I wish finally to acknowledge the staff and volunteers of Haus Ruth, who made my stay there so congenial and who, far more importantly, work tirelessly to look after women in Port Moresby whose relations have failed them.

Porous social orders

“…It can involve consciously trying to turn away from what everyone in that context sees as the predictable or culturally appropriate way to act, and instead seeking alternative and sustainable relationships. For example, in a female boarding house in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, women struggle to create a respectable and modern middle‐class femininity that will permit them to reject a social order enacted through village customs and kinship ties, as described by Melissa Demian () . The women aim to create a new social order almost whole cloth, one that results in companionate marriage and accumulated wealth, neither of which is possible under other social orders available to them.…”

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

“…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, ). For the most part, however, I would argue that the lives of urban, educated professionals in Papua New Guineans towns have not been analysed in relation to race and colonialism.…”

Bridewealth1and the Autonomy of Women in Melanesia

“…Corporations also note that they employ a growing number of women who are heads of their households, as well as single female employees who live in the city. Melissa Damian (2017) shows that young, unmarried women view their lives in urban Melanesia much differently now than in previous generations when they were part of more traditional households there. We see the emergence of a new social category, that of the young urban woman for whom the good life involves being financially and personally autonomous and being able to move about cities.…”