Abstract:
Anthropologists and scholars working in the Pacific have long highlighted the importance of social and especially family relationships in Pacific Island communities, such as Rarotonga/ Cook Islands. This is mirrored in local ideas of moralities. Rarotongan understandings of moralities incorporate the local importance attributed to context, social practice, and relationality. To convey this ethnographically, I examine four of the most basic dimensions of moral life from young Rarotongan women’s perspective: the constitution of a family, pregnancy before and at the age of 21, infidelity in intimate partner relationships, and motherhood. I ask: How do contemporary young Rarotongan women strive for a moral life?
I approach this question through seven and a half months of fieldwork in Rarotonga which included 22 semi-structured interviews with women between 18 and 34 years of age, and countless informal chats including deep hanging out with Rarotongan women of all age groups. I reflect on local moral “principles and challenges as they emerge in practice” (Lambek, 2015, p. xvi). In this sense, this thesis follows young Rarotongan women as they address contingencies, face challenges and obstacles, and reflect on their actions and decisions as they strive for a moral life while knowing that societal ideals and rules are difficult if not impossible to meet completely or consistently at any time within all aspects and contexts of their lives and to elucidate what happens to young women when such events are folded into young women’s
interpersonal relationships. Drawing on Mattingly, Das and Mahmood’s work on how women deal with socio-historical-cultural rules, norms and expectations within daily life, I argue that young Rarotongan women’s moral striving is revealed in young women’s work and actions out of aro‘a for their interpersonal relationships, particularly with their family members, even in situations and contexts where these relationships are challenged and scrutinized by the involved parties. I suggest that through their actions within particular contexts, circumstances, and relationships -- their acts out of aro‘a for others and themselves -- young women in relation to and with others enact, transform, create and negotiate local moralities.