Abstract
Historically, Papua New Guineans of diverse ethnic origins have been seen as belonging in and to their villages, rather than urban areas. Postcolonial administrators constructed urban migrants as temporary and threatening and represented their ‘rightful place’ as the village. Within this schema , women in particular have been construed as ‘matter out of place’. Consequently, if Papua New Guinean men’s presence in urban areas was meant to be temporary and contained, Papua New Guinean women were not supposed to be there at all. In this chapter, I challenge the view of Port Moresby, the capital city of Papua New Guinea as a place that is only and always dangerous for women. To do so, I explore how three women are constructing home in this maligned city . Demonstrating the complexities and contradictions of this denigrated town, I challenge the singularly derogatory themes evident in local and international representations of Port Moresby and affirm the importance of exploring and representing this place from a variety of perspectives. The chapter is situated within a developing body of work that reflects the increasing ethnographic interest in Melanesian urbanity and informed by feminist theories about the relationship between bodies and places.
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Notes
- 1.
Betel nut (buai) is a mild stimulant chewed throughout PNG. As Tim Sharp (2013) notes: ‘[i]ts consumption produces the voluminous amounts of red saliva splattered across the country’s roads, walls, posts, bins, offices, and buses, and [it] has deleterious health consequences, not dissimilar to smoking tobacco’. While, as he writes, this mess ‘has been the justification for recent attempts by National Capital District (NCD) Governor Powes Parkop to ban the sale and consumption of betel nut in Port Moresby’, Sharp argues that for various reasons, including the role betel nut plays in the local economy, ‘[p]rohibition is unlikely to succeed in the long term’.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Papua New Guinean women who have spoken with me about their lives, including the challenges of accommodation in Port Moresby. The research was made possible by the provision of a grant from the Vice Chancellor’s Fellowship Program at RMIT University.
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Spark, C. (2019). At Home in the City. In: Pinto, S., Hannigan, S., Walker-Gibbs, B., Charlton, E. (eds) Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6729-8_12
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