Gender in a Commodifying World: Recognition, Emotions and Market Women's Agency in the Goroka Marketplace, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This thesis examines how food becomes a tradeable commodity, exchanged for money, in the Goroka marketplace and the effect this has on relations between men and women. Food has long had gendered meanings in Goroka, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea (PNG), a context where anthropologists have considered social relations to be highly gendered with strict divisions of labour, particularly relating to the production and transaction of wealth. Through eleven months ethnographic research I have documented the perspectives of women and men in and around the Goroka marketplace. I demonstrate that much of market women’s lives are dedicated to the care of others and that through this they demonstrate agency and gain recognition. Emotional, affective and material care that they provide for others are valued acts transacted within an economy of recognition, a moral economy that encompasses the marketplace. Women are active and agentive in different spheres of the economy – including ceremonial and market transactions – not merely as producers but also transactors. Recognising the efforts and motivations of market women in a complex world of gifts and commodities demonstrates the important role market women have for food security in a post-colonial and rapidly urbanising context. In Goroka’s economy of recognition, emotions are valued and have an economic and political place in ceremonial exchange. By paying attention to how people explain gift exchange practices themselves, the significance of emotional acts and material objects comes into focus for how market women, and men, gain recognition from others, motivating gendered actions.