Division of Labor and Relations Between the Sexes

Men had two productive responsibilities, fishing and building. They fished individually with hook and line or spear gun and collectively with spear gun or nets. They also made and repaired much of their own fishing equipment. Ideally, men should have provided enough fish to feed their families as well as accumulating a surplus for market, but some left much of the work to their wives. Since women did not make canoes or do heavy construction, men could not ignore these jobs. Ponams said that a man was not an adult and should not marry until he had built a house and made a canoe and a sail, for a household could not survive without these things. A man's family helped him to build his first house during his engagement (only when a woman came to her husband hastily or without ceremony did a married couple begin life without a house of their own). After his marriage the man maintained the house himself. Married couples also needed at least one canoe and should have had two: a large one for sailing to market and a small one for punting inside the reef. A responsible man with a large family could be expected to have many more than this.

Canoes lasted between three and ten years, depending on the type of wood used, and they needed constant repairs; houses needed complete rebuilding every ten or fifteen years and they too needed frequent repair; when a man's family was expanding he needed as well additional buildings to house them. Thus, men were involved continuously in some sort of building project. In addition to these family responsibilities, men were responsible for the maintenance of their own kamal 's men's house. They cleaned it, swept the ground around it, cut firewood to be burnt there, and cooked the fish eaten there, tasks that were done by women for the dwelling houses.

Couples shared the responsibility for tending their land, for planting coconuts and clearing the underbrush. They also shared responsibility for marketing, though in fact women tended to predominate in marketing. Both men and women attended market, taking goods to sell and trade and taking their own money with which to buy food for the family.

Women had a wide range of responsibilities and claimed to work harder than men. They fished with spear gun and occasionally with hook and line and gleaned the reef for shellfish and other creatures. They cut firewood, gathered coconuts, looked after children, cooked, did laundry, sewed, and cleaned; and because most had high standards, large houses, and many children, these tasks were exacting. Also, they made valuable items of traditional dress (woven bags, skirts, armlets, beadwork, and shell money) given in exchange as well as a number of more mundane items.

Overt sanctions supported this division of labor in only a few areas: women could not make canoes, sails, or men's fishing nets, for such objects, if made by them, would not work well; women were not supposed to participate in men's collective net fishing, or the expedition was likely to be unsuccessful, but sometimes they went as canoe handlers if there were not enough men.

Other jobs were assigned by tradition to the different sexes, but only gossip and shame sanctioned the arrangements. Women were supposed to keep house and men to fish and build, and they were criticized if they did not. However, maintaining the household was more important than maintaining the sexual division of labor, and thus when it was necessary, each sex could do the other's jobs without criticism and indeed could be criticized for not doing so.

The building and repair of houses and canoes were burdensome tasks. While they may not have absolutely required the cooperative effort of people outside the immediate family, certainly the heavy work was made much lighter when it was undertaken by groups of men, and in fact any construction or repair of consequence was a cooperative venture. Thus, because these were men's jobs, men were obliged to cooperate with each other. And this involved men in the informal generation of social debt and credit as they cooperated with other men and called on other men to cooperate with them. Men, in other words, were bound to each other as men through their constant need to cooperate with each other. This

male solidarity was enhanced by the fact that collective fishing, which we describe in chapter 3, was almost entirely a male preserve. And, of course, it was enhanced by the male orientation and ideology of the kamal , the most visible and persistent element of Ponam social order.

Women's situation was very different. The nature of the tasks they undertook was not cooperative, and often the tasks were restricted to women's main area of responsibility, the household. While women often did work together in groups, these groups were primarily for companionship, each woman pursuing and responsible for her own task, albeit in the congenial company of others. Similarly, women's fishing was restricted almost entirely to spear fishing and reef gleaning, usually carried out alone or in mother-daughter pairs. And although married women were full jural members of their husbands' kamal , the rules of affinal avoidance meant that the kamal building itself effectively was closed to them. Finally, although totemic, matriarchal matrilineages were important for every individual's health and well-being, these groups were less structured than kamal and lacked the permanence and visibility of the men's house.

Women were not, however, without ways of maintaining their solidarity as women. Perhaps the most important of these was through the system of formal exchange. While the kind relationships that were celebrated in exchange predominantly linked husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, the organization and especially the operation of exchange was largely in the hands of women: preparing the gifts, gathering them together, deciding on their arrangement and distribution, all these were largely the province of women except in the most formal, and hence least common, of exchanges. Because of the frequency and importance of exchange, women regularly worked together in significant communal activities.

Although men asserted that women should be subordinate to them and although women did not take a public role in political life, they had the same legal rights as men, and men openly acknowledged as well that they had a substantial background influence. Women owned and disposed of property in their own names, earned money and spent it at their own discretion, and gave and received in exchange as men did. The place of women in marriage

highlighted their effective power. A married couple formed an independent economic unit in which each partner acted on the other's behalf in his or her absence. Thus, for example, when a man was absent or incapacitated it was his wife who managed his property and gave to and received from others on his behalf in exchange, not the man's brothers.

The influence of women was clearest in exchange, as we have already mentioned, an extremely important aspect of village life. Although corporate property-owning groups in Ponam were patrilineal, the groups that dominated exchange were the cognatic stocks, the ken si , in which women participated fully, equally, and in their own names and with their own resources. In fact, women usually dominated these exchanges. If a woman was a focal party to an exchange or distribution she organized things herself, though always in consultation with knowledgeable members of her group, themselves usually women.

The only exchange activity closed to women was the public announcement of the distribution of exchange goods, the job of a sohou , a public speaker, though this restriction was absolute only at the main accumulation, prestation, and distribution at exchanges. Lesser accumulations and distributions could be announced by women, as these were much less formal. The sohou , however, had no power of his own, unless the exchange leader was a man who elected to be his own sohou , which happened often enough. When this was not the case, there would be someone, usually a woman, telling the sohou what to say and chiding him when he made a mistake, even in the largest and most formal affinal exchanges.

Even in prestations where a man was the focal party, women were most important, though their position was only advisory. Ponams, both men and women, said that this importance derived from the fact that women spent much more of their time around their households than did men, and so were more likely to observe and participate in the small givings and gettings that renewed the web of kin relationships tying islanders to each other and that influenced how people participated in most formal exchanges. Equally, Ponams said that in many cases the person most knowledgeable about a kamal 's or a ken si 's genealogy was an older woman, and genealogical knowledge was indispensable in formal exchange.

In addition to this informal influence, women had more secure bases of authority. One of them was their role as asi to ego. "Asi " referred to what is most easily, albeit imperfectly, thought of as classificatory FZ and their daughters. More specifically, it referred to ego's FZ, FZD, FZDD, and so forth, FFBD, FFBDD, and so forth, FFFBSD, FFFBSDD, and so forth, FM, FMZD, FMZDD, and so forth, and others^[3] (as this may indicate, and as we mentioned in passing already, Ponam used a Crow kinship terminology). In fact, with the exception of ego's FM, an asi was any person who was called "sister" (naropisok ) by anyone ego called "father" (tama ). Asi had the important power to bless, and somewhat more narrowly to curse, the people who called them asi . This power they shared with their male counterparts, tama. Asi had a protective role, overseeing, albeit in no very formal or rigorous way, their narohamerok (if male) and natuek (if female), those who called them asi . In return, these people were obliged to respect their asi and accede to their requests, both to secure the asi 's blessing and to avoid the curse; asi could curse to make one sterile, promiscuous, or grossly irresponsible, or bless to make one "strong": brave, powerful, clear-headed.

Asi and tama had another important role, but here it was the females who were most in evidence. On the completion of a kamal 's new men's house there was a feast, nominally for those who helped with the construction though in fact for everyone. At this feast, the asi of the members of the kamal put on traditional dress and danced around the men's house, an activity that strengthened their narohamerok in the kamal and the enterprise of which they were a part, the kamal as a whole. While it was most unlikely that all of a kamal 's asi would refuse to dance, individual asi could decline, and a thin and dispirited turnout would be a source of shame to the kamal and a cause of acrimony for months and even years to come.

The other notable source of women's power was the totemic clans, which were matriarchal as well as matrilineal, and particularly the cleansing of the pollution caused by eating a totem, most commonly a totemic fish, handling it, breathing the steam from the pot in which it was cooking or the smoke from the fire over which it was being cured, or eating from a dish or with utensils that had recently been in contact with it. Although the consequences of pollution were mild at first, if untreated it could cause

degeneration—blindness, deafness, baldness, or loss of teeth, depending upon the way the pollution occurred—and ultimately death by premature old age. Cleansing consisted of locating a senior female of the matriclan, preferably the senior female of one's own matrilineage, and having her pray to the ancestral spirits of the matriclan to undo the damage.

The powers of asi and women in the matriclans provided women with real authority, but in a sense these were just embellishments of the fundamental place of women in Ponam society at the time of fieldwork. In terms of kamal women were marginal. They were unstable creatures: born into a kamal , they were likely to marry and hence move out. But on marriage they joined a kamal alien to them, most of whose members, moreover, were forbidden to them by the rules of affinal avoidance. In this sense, then, Ponam women resembled women in many societies in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (e.g., Josephides 1985; M. Strathern 1972), never fully a member of the kamal in which they were born or of the kamal in which they died; though because Ponam was endogamous, women did not suffer because of isolation from their kin, as many Highlands women did.

However, as we have been at pains to point out, kamal were not clans in the sense that the term commonly is applied to kinship or quasi-kinship groups in Papua New Guinea. That is, while kamal were property-owning agnatic groups, they were not the only significant kinship groups in the society, as clans appear to have been the only significant kinship groups in many Highlands societies.^[4] Thus, women's marginal position in kamal did not mean they were marginal to the only important groups in Ponam life. Aside from the totemic matriclans, which women dominated, they also were fully equal members of enduring, named cognatic stocks, the ken si that were the significant groups in ceremonial exchange at the time of fieldwork and that seem to have been so as well in early Manus, but that seem absent from much of the Highlands.

We suggest that it is useful to think of Ponam as a society that at the time of fieldwork had a system not of dual descent, but of trial descent. The three elements were the kamal , in which men dominated, the totemic clans, in which women dominated, and the ken si , in which the two were equal. Women's overall position in the society, then, would depend on the state of play of these

three groups and the social and material resources and processes with which they were associated. If pollution and personal substance became less important, the totemic groups would lose some of their significance and women would, presumably, suffer. If property gained in importance relative to exchange, then kamal would overshadow ken si and men would gain.

If, on the other hand, property declined in importance relative to exchange, if, that is, the economic significance of the property that kamal owned declined relative to the economic significance of wealth circulating in and acquired through exchange, then the relations of gender equality in the ken si would be more important than the male orientation of the kamal . This is what happened on Ponam Island.