Introduction- Engendering Violence in Papua New Guinea: Persons, Power and Perilous Transformations (original) (raw)

Gender violence is not a new problem. It takes place in virtually all societies around the world, but only in the last thirty years has it become visible as a social issue. Understanding gender violence requires looking both at the intimate details of family life and at geopolitical considerations of power and warfare. In order to understand gender violence it is necessary to understand the world (Merry 2009: 1, 19). Violence: Acts and states, facts and values Gender violence poses a classic anthropological dilemma apropos human universals versus culturally relative concepts and values. But, both in research and in policy and associated programs of prevention and intervention, we need to try to move beyond this impasse, looking at the interaction and translation of local and global meanings in the transnational relations of our world and at the dynamic and complex historical processes which ground how gender violence has been named as a problem by national and international agencies and social movements (see Merry 2006, 2009). Naming is not just a matter of dry scholarly definition and debate but of vigorous and sometimes heated political contest. In many recent conceptions (e.g. in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals), violence refers not only to violent physical acts against persons-beating, wounding, torturing, killing-but also to emotional violence, psychological harassment, sexual abuse, financial violence, neglect and coercion. It embraces acts between intimate partners, known kin or acquaintances and strangers; it can occur in contexts which stretch from households, through public locations to the physical, and even the virtual, battlefields of war. Increasingly, it also Engendering Violence in Papua New Guinea 2 refers to 'structures' or 'states' of violence, routine forms of coercion or threats of violence inherent in systems of deprivation, exploitation, slavery or oppression (see Chs 1, 2, 4 and 8 this volume; Merry 2009: 4-5). 1 This is a very expansive definition, but it must be stretched yet further to accommodate some cultural practices and beliefs whose reality is contested or which entail hidden or invisible agencies, such as those of witchcraft and sorcery, pervasive in Papua New Guinea (PNG) (see Chs 1, 2 and 3). As Philip Gibbs shows (Ch. 3), the violence recognised by Papua New Guineans (and in his case, Simbu) 2 is not just the violence involved in the torture and killing of witches and sorcerers (which foreigners likely privilege) but the violence of the original act imputed to the witch or the sorcerer: the ruining of bodies through sickness and death, the destruction of crops and pigs, misfortunes which are imputed to be caused by the witch. In Gibbs' view there are, thus, 'divergent opinions as to just who are the "victims" … those who suffered the direct effect of acts of witchcraft … [or] those who have been accused of being witches.' As his case studies show, the first are predominantly male, the second, those accused, are predominantly female, or men who are connected to the women accused and/or elderly or marginalised. Women accused are more likely to be tortured and killed than men who are usually only ostracised. But women also provoke harm to other women by accusing them of being witches. Gibbs suggests that accusations of witchcraft or sorcery are often deployed in situations of conflict to legitimate violent assaults, torture and even murder of the accused. Killing witches is thus seen as meritorious and protective of the community: '[t] he apparent moral propriety of the act would lead many to consider it acceptable and legitimate' (Ch. 3; cf. Haley 2010; see Zorn 2006). 3 Zimmer-Tamakoshi (Ch. 2) also highlights the way in which witchcraft and sorcery accusations figure in violence between men, as younger men accuse their fathers and uncles for instance. The violence of witchcraft thus poses both an epistemological and an ethical challenge for us. 4 1 Sally Engle Merry powerfully plots the difficulties of definition: Violence, like gender, is a deceivingly simple concept. Although it seems to be a straightforward category of injury, pain and death, it is very much shaped by cultural meanings. Some forms of pain are erotic, some heroic, and some abusive, depending on the social and cultural context of the event. Cultural meanings and context differentiate consensual or playful eroticized forms of pain from those of a manhood ritual and those from a cigarette burn on a disobedient wife (2009: 4). 2 These people were previously called Chimbu. However, Philip Gibbs notes that 'the Provincial Government now uses the term Simbu, which is becoming the accepted form' (Ch. 3). 3 Nicole Haley suggests the horrific recent torture and killing of witches among the Duna is not seen as continuous with past practices and is far more contested. These acts, typically by young men fuelled both by marijuana and guns, are expressly deplored by many older male community leaders who say neither they nor state forces can control them (2010: 230). 4 These epistemological and ethical challenges were vigorously debated by the contributors to this volume at discussions at ASAO panel sessions and subsequently on email. Gibbs notes the view of a PNG Justice George Manuhu that the time has come to regard 'murder as murder' and the establishment in April 2009 of a