Book contents
- Gender, Property and Politics in the Pacific
- Gender, Property and Politics in the Pacific
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- 1 Grounding Debates about Land
- 2 Navigating Custom, Church and State
- 3 Chiefs, Priests and Vuluvulu
- 4 From Taovia to Trustee
- 5 ‘Land Is Our Mother’
- 6 Women Speak for Land
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Chiefs, Priests and Vuluvulu
Selective Recognition and the Simplification of Authority in Marovo Lagoon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2023
- Gender, Property and Politics in the Pacific
- Gender, Property and Politics in the Pacific
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- 1 Grounding Debates about Land
- 2 Navigating Custom, Church and State
- 3 Chiefs, Priests and Vuluvulu
- 4 From Taovia to Trustee
- 5 ‘Land Is Our Mother’
- 6 Women Speak for Land
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter focuses on the reconfiguration of land tenure and authority in Marovo Lagoon, a rural area subject to widespread and destructive industrial logging. Women as a social group are known to be largely excluded from formal negotiations regarding logging, and this chapter considers the extent to which this can be traced to a flawed legislative framework, to patriarchal kastom or the erosion of women’s rights by colonisation. Drawing on archival and ethnographic work, it demonstrates that missionaries and colonial officials recognised some idealisations of masculine authority while disregarding other forms of influence, facilitating a simplification of the land tenure system that has enabled some male leaders to consolidate their control over resources. The reproduction of particular idealisations of masculine authority over land continues today, and simultaneously constitutes land control as a masculine domain. While contemporary inequalities can be partially traced to the structural features of the property system, they also emerge from long-term processes of colonial intrusion, capitalist development and the erosion of important aspects of gendered attachments to land.
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- Gender, Property and Politics in the PacificWho Speaks for Land?, pp. 87 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023