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182 The Nature of Gender If one were to examine the indices of ethnographies written before 1970 or so, there would probably be no entry for “gender.” There might be one for “women” or “the sexes,” but these entries would almost certainly not encompass what is meant today by “gender.” All human groups recognize that people come in two basic models, male and female; gender, however, refers not to these specifically biological differences and capabilities but to what human creativity makes of them: cultures define and construct female and male beyond these observable biological contrasts. A sexual division of labor seems to be a genuine human universal, but there are few hard-and-fast rules as to which gender performs which tasks. Although it is true that women tend to be responsible for the domestic realm and men the public, there are almost always exceptions . What scholars designate as gender is a social construction through which people view the world and in terms of which they behave and interpret the behavior of others. Notions of gender permeate most aspects of any human life. Gender is intimately associated with concepts of person, and it is the basis for both the sexual division of labor and marriage and thus critical to both production and reproduction. As the foundation for the family and marriage, gender contrasts constitute the core upon which not only the next generation is built, but also the heart of extensive kinship systems, structures, and networks. In some places, everything—plants, animals , gods—have gender as well, and the entire cosmos is predicated on this distinction constructed by culture. These concepts are not necessarily immutable but can be fluid and change over time, as is apparent in Pacific history. Because it is impossible to cover the nature of gender in the entire Pacific through time, our initial focus is on traditional notions and the early colonial period; more contemporary concerns are described in the latter half of this chapter as well as in other chapters of this volume. Anthropological Perspectives Early Seminal Work The study of gender as gender is relatively recent in anthropology, probably originating in the 1970s. Until then, most ethnographers pretty much ignored what women did beyond their economic tasks and occasionally their roles in the family and child rearing, and they certainly did not often seriously investigate what constituted the nature of female and male in conceptual systems. What men did—public ritual, economic exchange, and political activities —was described as “the culture” (see especially Ardener 1982; Strathern 1988; Strathern 1987). There were, however, a few critical exceptions to this tendency, and some of the most significant early work on gender was conducted in the Pacific region. Mead’s studies on Samoa (1928, 1930) and Papua New Guinea (PNG) (especially 1935) are pioneering works on the subject. Her first ethnographic work in the Pacific was in Samoa in 1925–1926, where she investigated the nature of adolescence. Her focus was on young girls and their experiences, and her conclusion was that adolescence need not be the period of rebellion and angst that it was in many if not most Western cultures.1 In the process of doing this study, she noted significant amounts of information about gender and male-female relations (see Mead 1928, 1930). It was a later work of Mead’s, however, that became canonical in the field: in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), she reported the results of field investigations in three lowland societies in Papua New Guinea. Gender notions contrasted dramatically in these three places: among the Arapesh, both men and women were nurturing and mild, while among the Mundugumor both women and men were aggressive and assertive. The third society, the Tchambuli (today the Chambri), seemed to reverse 1930s middle-class American assumptions in that men, for example , were engaged in ritual and artistic production while women completed important economic transactions at the market. Mead and other early investigators began with a focus on children and socialization—the provenience of women—but attention began to shift during the 1970s partly as a result of the feminist movement, and again the Pacific region played an important role. Marilyn Strathern’s seminal work Women in Between, published in 1972, is among the first full-length treatments of women and their roles in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Strathern focuses on the nature of women and their value among the people of Mount Hagen and stresses the distinction between “producers” and...

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