Power Theory and the Rise and Reproduction of Patriarchy in Contact-Era New Guinea

Abstract

This chapter applies a power-theory perspective to data from New Guinea to examine: (a) how patriarchy was reproduced in contact-era New Guinea; and (b) how it may have arisen. Because patriarchy is at base an asymmetry in gendered power, power theory argues that, to understand it, we must focus on the nature of power, its properties, and factors that constrain or enable its construction. In the case of New Guinea patriarchy, the most important of those factors was the portion of an agent’s time budget that he or she could devote to political interaction and hence to building power. Male agents in New Guinea were able to reproduce patriarchy because the sexual division of labor afforded them more time and opportunity than it did women to interact with others and hence build power. Extrapolating this argument, the chapter proposes that the necessary condition for New Guinea patriarchy lay in the sexual division of military labor, which in turn ordained the broader division of labor in New Guinea—the condition that allowed men to reproduce an asymmetric power over women.