Margaret Jolly

Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No? Women's Rights, Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu

There has been much recent debate about womens rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal human rights and cultural relativism. The allegedly western character of human rights which focus on the individual and civil and political rights is often contrasted with the non-western stress on collectivities and the rights to economic development and self-determination. These sorts of ideological oppositions in international politics reverberate in domestic politics as well, and especially in those which situate women and men as subjects in conflict, as they are in many domestic disputes.

Birthing in the Pacific : beyond tradition and modernity?

This collection explores birthing in the Pacific. Case studies from across the region show how simple contrasts between traditional and modern practice, technocratic and organic models of childbirth, indigenous and foreign approaches can be potent but problematic.

Flying with Two Wings?: Justice and Gender in Vanuatu

Miranda Forsyths book offers a lucid account of the relation between state and non-state systems of justice in Vanuatu, as prospectively like a ‘bird that flies with two wings’. It is equally informed by a strong command of the theory and practice of legal pluralism and the history and anthropology of Vanuatu. While acknowledging the complex diversities of the archipelago it affords a national but not a state-centric perspective. But how realistic is this image of the future complementarity and parity between kastom and state justice, and how might the challenges of gender hierarchy and gender violence skew that hope of flying with two wings?

Men of War, Men of Peace: Changing Masculinities in Vanuatu

The first European observers in the archipelago we now call Vanuatu characterised Indigenous men as martial warriors. Such observations occluded the diversity of Indigenous masculinities and the violence inherent in colonial processes of exploration, and later dispossession, ‘pacification’ and the imposition of colonial law. Indigenous relations between men were grounded in ascribed hierarchies of seniority and either achieved or ascribed hierarchies of divine power. Ideally more senior and higher ‘men of peace’ were seen to eclipse younger, lower ‘men of war’, but creative and destructive aspects of masculine power were often co-present in Janus-face formations. In surveying the longue durée of changing masculinities in Vanuatu we can witness complex reconfigurations associated with Christian conversion, the ‘labour trade’, commodity economy and state politics. The American military presence during the Second World War was a pivotal moment in such historical reconfigurations. As against the colonial masculine hierarchy of white mastas and black boes, it generated idioms of racial equality and fraternity between black men and white men and fuelled movements for independence. This is in stark contrast with the historical experience of another Pacific archipelago, Hawai‘i, a state of the United States and a major base for the US military securing what some Kānaka Maoli see as an occupation of their homelands. A comparison of these two Pacific archipelagos highlights how Indigenous masculinities are historically formed and transformed in the context of the race relations of different colonialisms.

Engendering vertigo in time-space travel

Comment on Strathern, Marilyn. 2016. Before and after gender: Sexual mythologies of everyday life. Edited and with an introduction by Sarah Franklin. Afterword by Judith Butler. Chicago: Hau Books.

LOOKING BACK?: Gender, Sexuality and Race in The Piano

In this paper I look back at The Piano in two ways. Firstly, I am ‘looking back’, in that quotidian sense of looking behind, over our shoulders at the past, at a film made 16 years ago and set in the mid-nineteenth century. I suggest that as active subjects viewing and interpreting films, and especially those like The Piano that engage colonial histories, we inhabit not a space securely partitioned between past, present and future but a leaky and interactive co-presence of moments whereby the power of pasts in presents and futures is fluid and contested. Secondly, I consider another kind of ‘looking back’, the ‘looking back’ which has been seen to return, to deflect and disorient the ‘gaze’, that compelling look of power attributed variously to men, to whites and in some earlier feminist theory to mainstream cinema tout court. An oft-quoted essay by Laura Mulvey (1975) imputes a rigid position of spectatorship, a passive female object and an active male subject, who not only looks but gazes and is prone to scopophilia. Such an account of visuality through the eye of the camera and of cinema spectatorship is, in my view, myopic. It occludes diverse viewing positions, based not just on gender but on sexuality, race and class. As Mary Ann Doane (1987), E. Ann Kaplan (1999) and Sue Thornham (1997, 1999) avow, many feminist writers have rather been attesting to the varieties of visual pleasure which narrative cinema elicits. Jane Campion is a self-conscious participant in such debates. The aural and visual pleasures of The Piano, like many of Campion’s films, are intrinsically connected to her reflexive, ironic lens on feminist theories of ‘the gaze’ and the I/eye of the camera.

Bringing Exile Home: Review of Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly (eds) Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual

This recent collection of essays pays tribute to Edward Said, but is no hagiography. It explores the salience of concepts such as the public intellectual, exile and worldliness in his life and work. It considers the strengths and the limits of his vision, his passion for European high culture and classical music and his relative disinterest in popular culture and visual and electronic communication. It connects settler colonialism in Palestine and the US with Australia (where most of the contributors are located), while unsettling notions of ‘exile’ and ‘home’.

Anthropology: Reconfiguring a Janus face in a global epoch

The profound social transformations within Australia and globally in the last decade or so have had enormous effects on how knowledge is produced within and beyond the academy. Although we might be wary of the breathless celebration which accompanies some of the grander narratives of globalisation, there is no doubt that the character and velocity of international connections has changed simultaneously with the greater accumulation of knowledge, wealth and power, and with the heightened potential for the rapid and pervasive circulation of ideas through the electronic technologies of textual and visual media and the internet. This influences researchers in all fields across the sciences, arts and humanities and social sciences, and poses new challenges for all of us as to the purpose of our knowledge creation and how we can best educate others in our chosen fields. This has an effect on all teachers — in schools, colleges and universities — but perhaps most critically in educating graduate scholars who might lead the next generation in the creation of knowledge in the academy, the public sphere and the private sector.

Review article: Foucault Goes Troppo

Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society. By Lamont Lindstrom. Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. xvi, 224 pp, bibliog., maps, index.