the division of labor and processes of social change in Mount Hagen

Abstract

In Mount Hagen, in the western highlands province of Papua New Guinea, alterations in the use of gardens, coupled with the maintenance of certain ideas about work, the division of labor, and rights over crops, have resulted in conflict between wives and husbands. The chief new crop is coffee, which is sold for cash; and while women do much of the work to produce the coffee, control of the money derived therefrom is still claimed by men, who channel it into their own ceremonial exchanges. Further, since coffee trees take up land previously used for subsistence crops, people are nowadays constrained to spend cash partly on foodstuffs for themselves and their pig herds. Cash cropping has brought with it many problems, and conflict is played out in ideological as well as material terms. [Papua New Guinea, Mount Hagen, social change, cash cropping, male‐female relations]