Falling Through the Net? Gender and Social Protection in the Pacific

This paper examines the gender dimensions and implications of social protection in relation to rapid transformations in the globalizing economies in the Pacific region. The paper analyzes the dynamics of gender and social protection in three countries of the region -- Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Vanuatu -- and explores how best to approach social protection so as to promote gender equality rather than risk reinscribing prevailing gender inequalities. The paper emphasizes the need to move beyond bipolar divisions of customary and commodity economies or informal and formal economies to consider the everyday realities of making a living. Women will 'fall through the net' if social protection is unduly yoked to the public sphere of the state and the formal commodity economy in which women are marginalised. Women's own perceptions of their contemporary situation and their agency as both individuals and collectivities should be carefully heeded in finding creative solutions for gender equality in social protection for sustainable Pacific futures. The paper concludes by suggestion that efforts to ensure women's social protection in the Pacific need to be alert to the risks that women might 'fall through the net.' This paper was produced for UN Women's flagship report Progress of the World's Women 2015-2016 to be released as part of the UN Women discussion paper series

Responding to Crisis: Evaluation of the Australian Aid Program's Contribution to the National HIV Response in Papua New Guinea, 2006-2010

The Australian aid program has played a prominent role in responding to HIV in Papua New Guinea (PNG) since 1995. The evaluation focused on AusAID’s contribution to the response and its HIV program activities from 2006, led by the PNG-Australia HIV and AIDS Program, in the broader historical context. The evaluation found that AusAID was a major driver of the national HIV response in PNG. However, the relevance and effectiveness of Australia’s interventions was mixed. For this reason, the evaluation recommended that AusAID move to an integrated health approach to HIV in PNG; step back from a dominant role in shaping and implementing the response and intensify support for PNG champions of the HIV response; and retain the leadership of the in-house senior technical expert but contract out grant management and capacity building functionsThis report was commisioned by Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID

Steady with custom: Mediating HIV prevention in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea

Biomedicine and epidemiology have made possible an understanding of HIV pathology and the way the virus damages the human immune system to the extent that infected bodies eventually die from the complications of AIDS. But these specialized fields of knowledge have been unable to prevent the persistent spread of HIV throughout the world. Three decades since the virus was first isolated and named, the magnitude of HIV represents the most serious public health issue confronting the world today. In 2007 there were an estimated 2.7 million new cases of HIV infection, 33 million people living with the virus, and 2 million AIDS deaths (UNAIDS 2008: 16). As the epigraph to this chapter suggests, the pandemic is modeled statistically like a ticking time bomb threatening to decimate even out-of-the-way places such as the Trobriand Islands, a group of small coral atolls in the Solomon Sea off the east coast of mainland Papua New Guinea (PNG), with a population of thirty thousand people

Sovasova and the problem of sameness: Converging interpretive frameworks for making sense of HIV and AIDS in the Trobriand Islands.

This article considers how different models of sexuality and disease converge and interact to co-produce understandings of HIV and AIDS, and the implications of inter-cultural communication for effective HIV prevention in diverse settings. In the Trobriands Islands of Papua New Guinea, the phenomenon of sovasova, or chronic illness that manifests when members of the same matrilineal clan have sexual relations, is a persuasive and problematic form of cultural knowledge that directly influences comprehensions of HIV and AIDS. As a social proscription, sovasova underscores cultural ideations about the importance of social exchange and the corporeal mixing of difference in sexual relationships. Trobrianders recognize clear signs and symptoms that herald the onset of sovasova, which are similar to descriptions of AIDS-related illness - weight loss, nausea, and malaise. Affected people use various herbal and magical treatments to effectively manage sovasova, and people can avoid the sickness altogether by simply not having sex with a fellow clan member. The cultural resources available for treatment allow people to regard transgression as a safe possibility, albeit socially undesirable. The broad comparisons that Trobrianders draw between sovasova and AIDS create tensions as people contemplate HIV prevention based on the cultural model of sexual disorder and the valued capacity and efficacy of sexuality in maintaining relations of difference

Book Review: The Meaning of Whitemen: race and modernity in the Orokaiva cultural world

In this vivid and theoretically important ethnography, Ira Bashkow explores the legacy of white racial privilege and power from the perspective of the Orokaiva people of Oro Province in mainland Papua New Guinea. ‘Whitemen’ is the distinctly masculine racial gloss that Orokaiva (and Bashkow) use to substantiate objects, activities, places, and institutions associated with the attributes of western modernity in the postcolonial landscape. Bashkow adeptly examines how Orokaiva selectively appropriate stereotypical qualities and values of whitemen, at once desired and disdained, and appraise them within their own moral economy as a cultural self-critiqu

I am still a young girl if i want': Relational personhood and individual autonomy in the trobriand islands

In the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, sexuality is valued as a positive expression of relational personhood, registering the efficacy of consensual and pleasurable practice in producing and maintaining social relations. The power of sexuality to demonstrate individual and collective capacity and potential holds particular salience for unmarried young people. This paper draws on my ethnographic research on culture and HIV in the Trobriands to address perduring questions about the locus of individual autonomy in Melanesian sociality, where relational personhood shapes identity and modes of exchange in the moral economy. I focus on the gendered agency of youth sexuality, including the use of kwaiwaga, or love magic, in exercising and controlling desire. The narrative identities of two young women provide the lens through which questions of agency are explored, revealing how the autonomous mind, nanola, is central to understanding the embodiment of social relations, how the power of love magic transfers agency from one individual to another, and how individual assertions and acts are ultimately expressions of situated relationality

Fitting condoms on culture: rethinking approaches to HIV prevention in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea

In tandem with the relentless spread of HIV infection throughout the world is a proliferation of ways of comprehending the virus and its effects, as different knowledge and belief systems converge and interact to produce meaning. Responding effectively to the challenges of the pandemic in diverse cultural settings involves an obligation to "continually reevaluate the concepts through which we understand HIV, looking closely at how the multiple levels of experience and the multiple forms of knowledge interrelate and change over time" (Patton 2002, xxiv). Yet communication about HIV and AIDS is based persistently on biomedical and epidemiological constructions of meaning, with little consideration for how such information interacts dynamically with diverse and changing cultural beliefs and practices. These models infuse the language of HIV prevention with predominantly Western assumptions and moralities about human sexuality, gender relations, and individual behavior (Brummelhuis and Herdt 1995; Herdt and Lindenbaum 1992). The global migration of this "discursive epidemiology" potentially inhibits the capacity for clarifying local understandings of sexuality and making meaningful connections between local knowledge and new information about HIV prevention (Jolly and Manderson 1997, 19)