Gender Identity, Political Economy and Modernity in Melanesia and Amazonia
Author(s)
Knauft, Bruce M.
Abstract
Classic studies in Melanesian and Amazonian ethnography attempted to link oppositions between men and women to the structural features of collective male bonding and to a psychology of male insecurity and resentment against women. This article juxtaposes such arguments with the contemporary relationship between gendered identity and appropriations of modernity in these world areas. Gendered identities nowadays engage with the importance of acquiring trade goods and money, with the altered significance of female sexual propriety and of restrictions on women’s activities, and with the intrusion of national economic and political agendas. The intertwining of commodity aspirations and idioms of modernity is central to the contemporary construction of masculine prestige and feminine propriety in these regions. The major differences between Amazonian and Melanesian gender relations are connected to contrasts in customary marriage and residence patterns, and to differing histories of colonial domination, geographic intrusion and cultural influence.
