Rethinking Women's Roles : Perspectives from the Pacific

Rethinking Women’s Roles: Perspectives from the Pacific, edited by Denise O’Brien and Sharon W. Tiffany, compiles feminist anthropological and historical studies that reassess how women’s lives in Oceania—especially Melanesia—have been represented, lived, and transformed. Originating in ASAO symposia, the volume centers three linked themes: cultural models/images of women, women and power, and historical change. Although conceived for all Oceania, most chapters draw on Melanesian fieldwork and archives (notably Papua New Guinea), with comparative glances to Polynesia and Micronesia.

Across the book, contributors critique androcentric classics that muted or omitted women, interrogate dichotomies like public/domestic and nature/culture (e.g., Strathern), and foreground reflexive method: how researchers’ gendered assumptions shape “what the people say.” Ethnographic chapters track women’s strategies and solidarities—Lusi women’s recourse to redress including suicide as social leverage (Counts); Nagovisi women’s gardening, marriage, and matriliny amid cash-cropping (Nash); and Eastern Highlands Wok Meri savings/exchange networks (Sexton). Other essays examine complementarity (McDowell), the making of anthropological knowledge about women (O’Brien), and the pivotal roles of missionary and expatriate women in church-building and colonial frontiers (Forman; Boutilier on the Solomon Islands). Collectively, the volume replaces generic “types” with situated accounts of agency, labor, ritual, and change, arguing for feminist, reflexive anthropology that treats Pacific women as central actors in social, economic, political, and historical processes.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.